Keynote address at New Approaches to Qur'an , Seyyed Hossein Nasr

similar Ahana rahim first of all my experience that this happen improves how horrible computers are because we were guided here by computer which took us through all the planets and finally we ended up here you'll forgive me if I'm a few minutes late I hate to be late specially I'm supposed to speak I heard about the wonderful lectures that were given today and we're actually extremely happy let me begin with a story from the Islamic intellectual tradition the great philosopher is fahan merde Ahmad one of the greatest philosophers of Islamic world once went on a trip and he asked all his students to write a treatise in his absence and when he came back the students handed in the treatise one boy was was back malasadas I didn't Shirazi madama looked at that tears came into his eyes is that I'm so happy that I'll have a student of this rank and of this quality but once your writings become known I'm going to be forgotten I'm very proud of many people here who lectured today who are my former students and Friends and inshallah together they and other young scholars throughout American Europe will start a new chapter in the study of the Quran and of Islam which we had the greatest benefit both the Western world and Islamic world and the relation between the two which is perhaps the most crucial issue of our day I first of all want to make an apology why I'm speaking before you I'm not a piranha caller I'm just a student of the Quran and we spend a lifetime lecturing all over the world and various aspects of things only once before have I ever given a lecture on the Quran I might find myself too small to speak about the Quran but the reason I accepted to do this was because said the circumstances the hands of destiny has made me or have made me chief editor of the new study of Quran which is to come out inshallah with a very big inshallah next year if God gives us help and succor and time and patience and the knowledge to finish this offenders task and when dr. decay he asked me if I would speak because this conference was really organized in relation to that very important project I accepted gladly especially since parallel with that another major endeavor is being made to have a study of the Quran in the English language but from the perspective of the Islamic tradition itself and that is integrated in security of the Quran which is being edited by my dear friend dr. Mustapha Ravel who's sitting here and that should make a very big change these two works together inshaallah in the study of islam and at the bar are not only for Muslims in the West but also for Westerners were earnestly interested in the understanding of the Quran let me begin by being honest and saying that I do not accept with a new interpretation of the Quran what does the word mean here those of you who read my works know that I always prefer all this to newness and almost everything and certainly the Quran comes from God for us and has a long tradition of its study and therefore what do you mean by new I shall come back to this issue a moment later but I have to clear the field a little bit by saying a few words about how the Muslim intelligentsia special traditional Muslim world views the Orientalist study of the Quran in all honesty one has to do that I used the word Orientalist here of course carefully because since the Second World War this word has been used less in Western centers of Islamic studies but it's really as far as the piranhas concerned especially a continuation of what had gone on before started by note they can go see her and other Fame orientalists and slaw missus of the late 19th century they're really two very different I don't like to do tradition by currants of the city of the Quran which manifests themselves in many of the Orientalists studies of the Quran one is as is a thousand years old it goes back to the time a piece of the venerable who ordered the poor on to be translated for the first time into Latin in the 11th century and the purpose of it was not to understand up around Vitara but to be able to find the weapon against Islam and that has not changed the Quran burning of last month is just a epsilon of an episode of a very very long historical current the second was the rise in the 18th century of what is called of clearing or live the Lumiere age of enlightenment understanding of Reason which because of the military and political and economic superiority of the West where this was developed was considered by Western scholars to be not only a Western development but something of universal application consider that to be the only way to study sacred things including the Quran and from that grew the historicist of the 19th century and now of course the deconstructionism and post-modernism which negates that very process of reasoning which the 18th century considered to be the only criterion for the study of anything including the quran and the reason that the Muslims do not accept this has a very logical and philosophical reason it's not only the question of fanaticism or lack of insight or narrowness at all let me take give you an example most of these studies of the Quran have tried that come out of Western sources not all but most of them try very hard to find a single word that is not of Arabic origin like Allah humma which comes from older Semitic languages or some other constructions or the word firdaus which from the middle persian parties which identity to arabic to prove that there's something non authentic about the arabic of the quran which is the embodiment of the word of god for us supposedly had a theoretical situation in which the islamic world had bigger guns than the western world and much more powerful economically and establish the center for the study of the eucharist and in that center studies were carried out about the molecular structure of bread the viscosity of wine and somebody would come up with the idea that the in fact the bread that christ at 8 in nazareth some of it was important from syria and therefore the early the bread is not authentic Christian bread or something like that this will appear very absurd to Western followers of Christianity or Christian and where else but that's exactly what the study of the Quran appears to us by people who reject what is most fundamental in the Quran namely its sacred structure in fact I would go so far to say that from a philosophical point of view after Rama philosopher I have to have recourse to that perspective once a while to study something objectively if that object is being studied irrespective of the meaning of the sacred that it might have in irrespective of the element of faith in the study of that subject that is no longer objective that itself is no longer objective it's like studying music without paying attention to the music but only to the sound system and acoustics that's fine but that's not the music and so the very reality which we call the Quran is not the same as what has been the object of so many studies in the West a lot of historical and photological studies have been made I accept that and some of them are very interesting but they don't deal the same reality as all of you know the Quran is for Muslims the Living Word of God it is not only a historical text Sheridan horribly the famous Andalusian sage of the 13th century once said I read the Quran in such a way as if he were being revealed to you and people are real faith when they read the Quran the direct link with descent of the boron itself in a spiritual sense we should all become the little other when we read the Quran of course it's a very difficult thing to realize but that's the ultimate ideal that that is the night of the descent of the divine word according to the Quran itself in Nan's Allah feel a little body and when that is neglected that reality by worship of Muslims live with which they are born with which they get married with which they live their days and whose verses they repeat five times a day in the daily prayers and which accompanies them in the departure from the world that reality is lost if it's considered to be simply a historical assemblage of facts by this very clever person living in Arabia who changed the whole history of the world by just hearing a few stories and putting them together I'm calling it the Quran obviously we're dealing with two different realities and I believe that for the West also it is important to understand how the Muslims look at the Quran on what they see how they experience it and what it means to them irrespective of whether Western scholarship accepts that worldview or not you must understand I think this is one element that dick from Foucault on all these modern post modernist thinkers have made clear the reading of any text presumes a worldview the ring of any text there's no such thing that I'm an objective German scholar and this person sitting at a Lhasa University doesn't really understand I am the one who determined but the meaning of the text is because that German scholar whoever it is I mentioned German because the Germans have produced so many great scholars in this field going back to gold Saharan himself cornered the curve wrote in German what is important to realize is that the text of the Quran cannot be simply abrogated by a particular view of it thing in other universe which is very different from the universe at the Quran the Quran was revealed in a world in which the levels of reality in which not only God is the transcendent but there's a spiritual world there's an angelic world the psychic world of the jinn and these are not simply a psychological or metaphorical elements they are parts of the universe in which the inner meaning of the Quran reveals itself and how we look at the nature of reality determines how we read the text it let me give you a simple example the word Latif in Arabic keyboard Latif from the world what comes this divine quality if one is not accustomed to that universe much of which has been destroyed by the modern scientist ik and rationalistic and secularizing worldview if one doesn't understand that worldview the very world Latif will only remind you of some silk that you might buy for your wife its whole spiritual and cosmological and metaphysical content is simply removed because it does not correspond to anything we all suffer sometimes consciously sometime unconsciously from this depleting of reality of all of his higher levels the reduction of reality to a single level of the psychophysical world and even some modern muslims are affected by it there are in fact since the 19th century many many Muslim writers who for whom unconsciously perhaps modern science had become God not the slum not the God of Islam and they will try to in a sense affirm the importance of the Quran by showing that it was scientific this is a major disease worse than cholera that intended the Islamic world of the night century my friend dr. Mazar about has been some very important words about it going back to a tough serial army which began in Egypt with Allison Durrani and the commentaries written in India at alagar or Salem upon later onward by the salmon or sea in Egypt in Turkey excuse me and many many others which now read two centuries later are like a joke because no scientists would be convinced of the truth of the or on by reading an eighteenth century science which now has completely rejected and so also other kinds of modernistic writings which have tried to introduce into the study of Iran by Muslims a worldview which is totally alien to the Islamic world view and what can be new and the title of this discourse of these two days is precisely new visa vie this kind of misunderstanding either among modern Aaronic interpreters or among of course Orientalists for whom the spiritual world is reduced and sometime this even combined with great scholarship and great faith the late Muhammad Assad was a very good friend of mine a great deal of respect for him on many many levels we all had long discourses together when I was younger but ironic commentary presumes a kind of rationalistic universe which is not the universe in which the Muslims are breathed for centuries there's some very good translation some good notes I'm not denying that so one of the important translations of the Quran in the English language but this interpretation of the jinn of angels of this supernatural events of Shalamar the cleaving of the moon and all of these things what he says is not what Muslims have lived by for thirteen fourteen centuries and what could be new an intervention Quran is to rien what world within which all the quranic commentaries were written let me turn a moment to commentaries there is a tendency among Muslims today especially those who are from their own intellectual tradition and who have faith on the one hand and between the two ears already ideas which I'm going to do with the Islamic view of reality and who all go back to the or on and interpreted as they will with total disregard for 14th centuries of Quranic commentary the very first comedy when the Quran is the hadith of the Prophet we must understand that the hadith is not only the second source of Islamic law and of Islamic ideas it's also the first comma driven around obviously otherwise within know how to pray when the Quran says suddenly how do we pray comes from the Sunnah of the Prophet Sunnah means both the doings and the sayings of the Prophet so it's more general than the word hadith but sticking to the hadith because it's the written material which we have access to on which we read and in so many of modern studies of the Quran this whole tradition is neglected as if it did not exist and there is a myopia which is quite incredible in this domain I have had in my personal life the fortune of studying for 20 years with a lama Tabata body perhaps the author of the greatest comment original 20th century tafseer El Meson in 27 volumes in Arabic and later on came out in Persia and has gone into many printings on all the scholars in this room know it and those who are not scholars are probes have heard of it now I was there when a Lama used to produce volume after volume of this commentary we often time just discuss it together now my view a person who has met I studied for years were sir Hamilton give the greatest Arabists at the english-speaking world I think ever produced new machine you know personally for a long long time no Corbin no Louie got a new spoiler almost all the great oriental is from guru Obama was a very good friend of mine was a young scholar I think that the knowledge that Allah meter with Hawaii had of Islam and of the commuters upon it this one person was greater than all of these scholars were together and his great scholar some are like my senior or give would accept that except that and you simply disregard this tremendous treasury of knowledge simply going back to the text of the Quran who are we Who am I I said who sent us to interpret the Quran simply on the information I have a few words of Arabic that I've learned the Quran is the word of God for us and this long tradition our different keys given in every day and age to different circumstances different situations different intellectual and spiritual and religious and legal needs of this Lama community all of which we must consider if you're going to write a series or run a commentary which would be applicable to our age and which would do for our age what the rosies and robberies and auto B's and so forth and so on all the great commentators had done during Islamic history I think we miss Lama community's whole really should be ashamed of yourselves in certain sense of not being able to continue this tradition except for a few exceptions along those lines because so much that is being written not only by Western Orientalism but by by Muslim writers who are modernizing one way or another or fundamentalist at the other end of the spectrum if I'd leave out this long tradition I will give you one more example the late singer put the very very famous Egyptian figure whom all of you know considered to be sort of the grand papa of modern fundamentalism in the Arab world he was invited by US government here when I was a PhD student Harvard that was ahead of the hardest local society so they called be offered the State Department that this man is coming and you should be his host we spent several days together in Cambridge for mourning tonight with a very nice man my mana was so sad when he was murdered by jamal abdul nasir i he was a good muslim but his intellectual vision was completely truncated and he could not understand the intellectual challenges that the modern world presents to islam he was very critical of the way girls dressed in Harvard Square things like that but the deeper issues that were involved he was not aware of and so we produced during the last century to a lot of broader commentaries which are either modernistic and disregard the Islamic tradition and traditional commentaries on one side or so-called Salafi Wahabi types who again their whole thesis is going back to the Salaf and therefore disregarding all that came in between and this is really a kind of hubris of the worst kind how could we claim to know more about the Quran and factored in drazi why is it we do not study him and then add something or even criticize but to disregard this as as if it were not there is a very very dangerous thing for the future of Islam as a religion and as a religious community and then there comes of course the inner meaning of the Quran the remaining of the Quran does not reveal itself so easily to everyone you have to be able to go with it yourself in order to understand the inner being of the Quran jalaluddin rumi Mawlana says in his book fihi mathy which has been trusted twice now into the English language some of you may have seen it he says the poor on is like a beautiful bride you cannot cast her veil aside and see the beauty of her face without intimacy without knowing her well not just anyone can pull that veil aside and so the idea that existed throughout Islamic history that the Quran has this outward aspect the language the grabber the semantics the shannon Raziel the condition that which they ought to revealed the history and so forth contains a real meaning and that inner meaning is a temporal is beyond the confines of a particular moment of history and for that very reason to get access to it is absolutely essential so the poor on would speak to us the Quran is for all ages is for all generations and wood is the ultimate sense of pride to think that some scholar was taking a couple years of intermediate or advanced Arabic is able to open up the Quran and gain access to all of its meanings you have to live a whole lifetime with the inner realities which we could take within our soul in order to be able to gain access to the inner meaning of the Quran but meanwhile you have the credible commentaries by men and a few cases women who had in fact travelled this path but realized their meaning of the text now to turn my attention to this very important question how can the Quran be new its interpretation isn't of our own self as we have as the title of this lecture let me mention what can be new at the same time authentic I'm completely opposed to the idea that everything new is good if I believe that in Asian which most things new or bad spiritually and intellectually speaking but there are also some good things God never leaves his creation without government of the good the lot lol our land ho jet Allah the earth is never empty of the witness of God God's witness is always there otherwise the world wouldn't exist but we have the occasion is opportunity and also to challenge a very very important challenge which Islamic world has to face and the new interpretation in the authentic and positive sense must address itself to that situation first of all in traditional Islamic society the whole ambience was one in which you breathed in the Islamic reality the sacred was everywhere we had no word for the secular I always say there's no word in Arabic or Persian for secular visibly the sacred profane visibly the sacred and that is for a reason in a sense the sacred permeated everything within that context different commentators took it upon themselves to express different aspects of the Quran we have commentaries which are primarily low we are grammatical the clear-up many grammatical difficulties of sacred texts we have commentaries which one who called karaoke which are historical data berries commentary and several others which give us an including into Islamic secular history and also into early Islamic history following the advent of the Quran we have commentaries which are theologically sis of Kalani as the science of Kalam developed in the Slavic world and the most famous among those of course is that of a Phrygian Razi the Quraysh are right at the 12th century embroidered right the most monumental commentary have returned on that of Cyril Kabir the great commentary which is essentially theological but Rossi being a great philosophers scientists at the same time there are also many non Kalani issues in it we have quranic commentaries with social effect which have to do with Islamic law the Quran is the fundamental source of the Sharia and there operons defer deal with those chapters the Sirhan's Lazaretto desai sorta Toba parts of al bara other places which deal ultimately with Islamic law and not the spirituality or psychology or metaphysics or eschatology or anything like that then we have the Sufi commentaries that's a long tradition going back to mom Java asada all of his comedy has not survived on your small part of it has survived but that's the written the first written Sufi commentary we have at the end of the first Islamic century and this tradition continues over the ages of monumental commentaries but people are poor Sharia mom partially was behind badly whose 12:20 volume comes has never been published only one or two volumes have come out by Mabley in Persia and the beautiful cash where are our witches were in the masterpieces of the Persian language my own mother tongue by Mara be the tabular Barnabas on your car shortly I'm coming right up practically to modern times we have not had any major Sufi apirana comedies of the last century of the whole of the hora but we have had a parts of the Barone but Cheryl Allah we buy certain Indian sufis by persians and others and then we have the philosophical copies of an operon very Islamic philosophers did not write commonly for Nora but two of the greatest did started with the Vezina greatest scientists philosophers scientists of early Islamic history who began to write quranic commentaries which are of which these modern scientific commentaries are really caricature a caricature really because he being the greatest scientists of the day was dealing with scientific and medical ideas of his times it was the authority on it but it's not saying oh this verse corresponds to Louis Pasteur this verse correspond to Newton's Principia and like Josiah had early scientific training like has dr. ball because it is to be absurd but it's a really an affront to both science and to the Quran it wasn't like that but it's very very telling to look to read these commentaries that is what would if you had a major Islamic scientist today was a Nobel Prize winning physicist or chemist have had a couple of these people none of them had rest of our own or in a commentary most people have written song quranic commentaries no nothing I thought about science that's why was one of the paradoxes but what would they write the senile still is a model for that and then we have several centuries later the person who more than any other devoted his time and attention to or on the commentary was one of the major philosophers of Islamic history studies in Shirazi was commentaries on have been assembled published recently Tehran in a seven-volume philosophical comedy upon the Quran which is just deliberating if one is interested in the philosophical metaphysical ideas along with books like the throttle IR the secret of the verse of the Quran and other works of will not burden you with titles and so we have this philosophical tradition and then of course with the very beginning of Islam we had both certainly and Shiite commentaries commentaries which were confessional and these names are damned almost all certainly commentators may have shared commented like a bar see like mullah Mohsen Fez Kashani many many others that are not as well known in the West as the Sony commentators but many of them are confessional and they did not present the total Islamic spiritual universe because they didn't have to father then Rosie lived in a political situation in which she could not have spoken about shiism and vice versa Bellomo self-assertion a living in the south avid period could not have done it either from the other side but they're both extremely precious is very interesting that allah mohamet hawaii a la vita with hawaii composing is tafseer El Meson always studied fulfilling Rosie and other major certainly commentators upon the Quran he did not limit himself only to shared commentators so we have this vast collection of commentary literature from different perspectives with different angles what are the things that could be in you and the most important thing that can be new it interprets of the Quran is to be able to have a total Universal Quranic perspective which cuts across both these disciplinary divisions and confessional divisions and presents various views on the various I add from different sources now not all of the parada commentators would agree because some of them were Shafi that you'll agree with some Hanafi or humble commentaries of the same verse we have many instances of that special we came to Islamic law Mancha fear disagreed with some of the other great Sony fokaha there's no doubt about that but for our day and age at a time where thanks to international politics more Sunnis and Shiites had killed each other in Pakistan and the whole history of count of India since Islam into India in the last 10 years when we were faced with such a situation I believe the service Deepika render is to show the universality of the understanding of the Quran over the ages how much have it in fact is commonly to Sonia shared commentator and it's not something to draw your sword and get into the field and fight against each other like the Ottomans and the Soviets would do or other people did I think this is one thing which is very very important this newness of the interpretation secondly secondly this is quite important the Quran always spoke in the language of those who made addressed just assisted by words carefully always spoke with the language of those whom it addressed it wasn't that everybody walk in the bazaar of her art at the zoo but after dinner they were saying obviously it was always an intellectual spiritual elite in the corrections of the sermon economic and political elite who understood him at this percolator down into the common people through sermons he himself what would give sermons the mosque and Hirata was a thousand people come some would comment on the verses of the Quran but always the language was one which the Islamic intelligentsia at that time understood now we have a very important problem we have two types of both of intelligentsia put aside the West for the moment I'll go to the non-muslims in the West for a moment the two types of us have a television those who still are products of the old bad versus no matter how these buttresses were weakened by the British taking over all of the woth of all the mattresses in India in the 19th century and other things on my Muslim governments themselves not only by colonial governments who were the frenched in Algeria anyway never does it survived we have people who are intellectuals in the real sense of the term but they're still products of what remained of the medusa system it's the remains of the Maratha system I've been one of those pills were blessed by having studied in both educational systems for many many years both of Harvard under the greatest traditional masters in Iran in Tehran on home so I know that still alive but the majority of people were called the boss of intelligence our people who are either trained in the West or trade in Western institutions Islamic world which happened to have a Muslim name but it's curricula whose division of the sciences whose efforts the biologists thought - the students worldview is totally non Islamic and many of these people are very pious people but intellectually they don't function within the Islamic universe the result of that is something very subtle and that is a habit of mind the habit of mind habit of thinking that we can say goes back to the meditations of the car is to go horizontally from one concept to another not to train the mind to sink vertically deeply in the vertical dimension and the Quran is precisely that of a large number of educated busloads whose mental training prevents them from really understanding the Quran as has been understood over the ages and the question of language is secondary yes 20% of my service only are Arabic speaking but does it mean someone is a graduate of URIs of Cairo was bought as long as Arabic is not included in the group that I'm mentioning is the that's a spin theory matter even the Middle Ages was the Europeans called the Middle Ages it Islamic world the majority of Muslims were not Arabs but those who were writing in Lahore Isfahan or Delhi commented upon the Quran explaining the Quran there were enough great Arabic scholars so the question of language was not an impediment I was targeted octopus offer about this morning I had an interview with him I mention look he mentioned this point I said look a villager in Sumatra when she or he listens to the Quran today they cry you don't understand the worded Arabic but I come that's secondary it's not the question of language is the question of something else I often explain to my students I shall give you an example from music you could know nothing at all about the construction of the few but listening to be modern Massa ba you really appreciated tears come into your eyes or said Matthew special you have no knowledge of the science of music of harmonics that is involved but that doesn't prevent that work from touching your heart so it's a language in the ordinary sense that I have in mind it is something else that the quran was able to preserve even among non Arabic speaking Muslims for 1400 years yes there were translations the first translation of the Quran ever made was been into Persian and thus according to go jarate as far as I know are then into other Indian languages and the later on of course Turkish Malay and so forth the Quran is a very good example there probably about a hundred million Muslims in China they say 25 million but that's just political fiction they're about 100 million Muslims in China the Quran they did not permit to be translated Chinese until the 19th century Islamic community in China survived for twelve thirteen hundred years is the first mosque was built in the first century of the Hydra by sailors coming from Hydra not up the China Sea into China how did he do it they thought the question of language therefore it is a question of something else and so the second very important element in new interpreters of the quran is to be able to present the Quran and its meaning true not only ad on December the Muslim audience whose habits of mind whose way of thinking have been changed completely from the language which was used by the commentators over the centuries because they spoke to a people to humanity to collectivity it was his problem did not exist so this is a very very important challenge for us and I really want to applaud here the young editors who are working with me on this project three of whom are here dr. Jared are you sitting here unfortunately directly lombard shows the flow bard had family problem he had to leave his dog here dr. decay he was sitting here and dr. Russell mu somewhere who are you somewhere there were helping me fortunately they're all young Muslim scholars born in this country brought up in this country completely aware of the intellectual ambience of this country whose mother tongue is English in all cases I mean dr. Caleb's occasion origin but and his of in the Pakistani origin but ever doesn't born and brought up in this country who understand how to carry this task about and this is a very difficult very very difficult task how to be authentic untimely how to speak to humanity used to this kind of shallow and you dimensional thinking which moves I said horizontally but not vertically and to present the vertical dimension of reality of the truth which the Quran contains within itself funny is a third important element to this newness as I said a running scholarship with the West is a thousand years old during those thousand years there were very few scholars who dealt with the Quran in the West I shall not speak about non-muslim non West the China and Japan and Korean so we will leave that world aside for the moment I don't have time but just talk about Don Muslim Westerners a very very few who really appreciated the sacred nature of the world there were exceptions I will give you two stories which should be part of the history of modern scholarship of Islam once I asked her Hamilton Gibb sir Hamilton house returned to the field of Islamic studies you were a lawyer in London we were a barrister he said you don't say I got tired of all these courts in England delaying cases from year to year like we do here somebody commits murder fifteen years later he is or something like that and the whole psychological spiritual moral effect of this is destroyed completely for society and for the person himself has gone through a purgatory for 15 years and should not be put to death even it is committed murder he said I got tired of it I decided to go to study Slavic law but the real reason was that when I was child my father was stationed in Alexandria with a British official and every day I heard the chanting of the Quran and I know this came from God sir Hamilton Gibb was a Protestant who died as a Protestant was bare as a Protestant a scholar of the rank he and he appreciated the Quran as the Word of God the other case is that of Lima senior incredible scholar exceptional Western scholar was always Corbin but Macedon dealt more with the Quran and the sacred dish of the Arabic language he always called talked about the Pahlavi Devine Divine Word and a whole power of parole in French which means word both the divine and human can have Parliament but a divine word that Co was mesmerized with us and he and she said the Arabic language is a sacred language a language which is used by God to speak he was not a Muslim was Catholic Cardinal and died as a Catholic Cardinal but he was so close to the Islamic perspective that he always spoke about it in this way I'd had special permission from the Pope to always go to church to church a Catholic Church in Arabic he never went to the Latin Mass he will always go to the Arabic Mass whenever there was a church in which these Eastern Rites joined to the Vatican and the Catholicism were there and you clearly had a choice and so you have had exceptions but now we're dealing with another situation I don't understand the situation and why it is that the non-muslims studying the Quran also are now in a new situation let me just recount for you the following put experience of Spain aside remember that when Napoleon's there for you to become the king of Spain he said when you cross superiors your art in Africa don't forget that so we'll put Spain aside in the rest of Europe for 600 years you have had Islamic communities 600 years twice a bush is the life of white man in North America in places like Albania Kosovo Bosnia Macedonia all these places the dealer in your communities very very old communities but they existed as if they did not exist for Western European worldview you do not find a single history of Western missus ism which includes all the sufis records writing and Tirana or some other place sorry EV or places like that never there never there and so although they existed they were not relevant as for an interaction with Western society was concerned since the Second World War you have had of course a migration of millions of people into Europe and they were brought there in order to internalize of course colonialism that cheap labor inside once the colonies were no longer there so the British opened the door told his Bengalis and indians and pakistanis and thank god they changed the british cuisine so you can eat something in London now I said they said in London before that you know what I mean that's why there's no city of the world says that English restaurant you have Italian French Chinese ocl as an English restaurant so they did something positive besides of course I'm joking at a church were brought to Germany and Moroccans Algerians a Tunisian in the France and so forth and so on I will not get into that process but this group although most of them were workers as simple people and they have not been accepted into Western society very easily in Europe 90% of all Moroccan living ghettos outside of French cities and that's where you have these rights all the time it's incredible the situation but nevertheless some of them some of them studied universities they developed an intellectual perspective that could address the West and gradually another reality of Islam became evident in Europe and this is much more so in the United States where the Muslims have migrated years is the 1960s I don't mean the early Muslims of Albania and Mongolia who came in the late 19th century to Michigan and from Lebanon I mean during the last 34 years since the 1960's they're just a reverse of Europe they are the cream of the crop you might say they're highly educated people Muslims except for the Jewish minority is the most educated by Nora T in the United States by far we have no political power that's besides the point but intellectually there are people who were educated of course at first most of them turned to the field of medicine engineering I so jokingly because especially subcontinent mothers and fathers commit suicide if the Sun doesn't become a doctor but even that is changing to a large extent and many of them I've turned to the field of Islamic studies and there's now not 2.3 million as the Pew Charitable Trusts has said I don't where got his figure but something around 7 million of these Muslims in your Isis in Canada many of whom are scholars or philosophers are thinkers and therefore the challenge of the presence of Islam is no longer the same as it was in the 19th century and for non-muslims therefore the understanding of the Quran takes on a new light there always be the bigots who think they can destroy God's Word by throwing a sacred scripture to the fire Bible burning also took place in certain places in Russia and among the Communists and other places and you know all about that that's that's irrelevant totally irrelevant to the relative situation a new interpretation of the Quran can also provide a means for those elites of good intention who are not Muslims to first of all understand who the bus already are so all the others you know thy enemy even if one is an enemy when does it has to know and all of this really disinformation and ignorance that parades us knowledge of Islam that fills the airwaves and the television in this country is really a great tragedy for the United States because it's not speaking about reality is speaking about anger or opposition or fanaticism whatever it is so a new interpretation of the Quran can also play a very very important role for the community of non-muslims in the West whether the Christians Jewish or secular but interested in the phenomenon of religion and many of them can even rediscover their own religion which they might have left through the Baraka of the Quran I've had many students like that I had students at Temple here George Washington before one Institute Harvard the old days who were very secular Jews who never went to the synagogue who never prayed and after the course was over they all went back to Judaism unless a board is going to govern Muslim know that's God's will and what happens on that level but it can be a very very important authentic spiritual and religious presence as well as providing authentic knowledge of why is it that the Muslims are angry what is it that they want why are we all opposed to Muslims and not to Hindus what is the cause for that it isn't that the Muslims are more aggressive than the Hindus what happened in Gujarat a few years ago is unparalleled when 3,000 Muslims is burned to death in a train by the BJP and the very so called fundamentalist Hindus but why is it that Islam is in this particular situation I think a so-called new interpretation of the Quran can play a very very important role in this domain let me then conclude by saying that it is really the intellectual and religious responsibility of bosom's themselves to be able to explain of course the religion either in an apologetic way authentic manner especially that which is central to that religion the Quran to explain to Westerners why is it that every letter of the heart and only every word is sacred to them why it is that the Quran is like a person who's the sacred person why it is that the Muslims lived with a piranha as they do what is in that text that attracts human beings of all ages different races different genders the parts of the world or Muslims to Islam and if we can achieve that love will be the greatest service that Islamic community in America can render to the Serbs in the West as well as to Muslims back home and the relationship between two civilizations so in conclusion first of all new interpretation for me means the revival of the old the traditional not something new out of the Hat and certainly I would be no part of anything about current whatsoever secondly new renewed emphasis on certain themes which were not necessary to accentuate in days of old there are many themes like that I'll just give you one example of it there's no sacred scripture that is as Universalist in his religious perspective as the Quran not even the opener shot the no sacred scripture where God continues to refer to a deem as embracing religion in general where the plural of prophet or messenger Russell is used all the time we're different sacred books are mentioned at Khattab a torrid Alagille and so far the Swan but that could have in this context is use in different contexts in the Quran this element was not amplified by many traditional commentators and there was really no need for it at that time before modern times each religious community lived as if it were the whole of humanity it even you were an Armenian living in Isfahan with hundreds of thousands of Muslims across designed a root River and you had Muslim friends with whom you traded and you ate lunch you were not interested in what Isaiah had to say it's not the same as the interest of a young student that a good university takes in other religions as soon as it takes religion one that is believed in a different ambience in which the necessity of the reformulation and expansion of the Universalist message of the Quran is extremely important a central and so in this sense it's new because the Quran speaks to every generation to every age and our age in principles identical to every other age is live we are born we live and die we have to think of our soul of our life of question of good and evil those are universal but the actual ideas challenges that come up are not the same and one of the greatest challenges that modern humanity faces it's precisely to be able to accept the multiplicity of the voices of God without losing one's faith in one's own religion that is the one new thing I always accept what Aristotle said there's nothing new Under the Sun but this is the only exception really and there are other elements of the Quran where there's greater need for elucidation now certain cosmological ideas and so forth which have to recast a challenge to modern cosmology which is really simply an extrapolation of terrestrial physics but new ideas coming out all the time one day somebody says God could created a Big Bang then three days later now there's no need for God the Big Bang to take place by itself and all of these things that go on we need to have an Islamic response to that the roots of which are in the world and we must avoid all of the shallow scientific and modernistic a depression of the Iran which are weakened the whole Islamic intellectual life during the past century we must be able to be non confessional it's not easy I'm a Persian the descent the family of the Prophet and born has shirked but after speaking such a way that the Sunnis were also listen to me and you see how difficult the situation is when I wrote my ideas are of Islam the famous Indian Muslim scholar Maulana advic was still alive what has sanad we of lockdown and many very pious Muslims went to him I said this book has come out do we have a right to read this book or that's written by Persian Shiite and here it will read the book I wrote you a beautiful letter which unfortunately like everything else I had in Iran was lost during the revolution but he said not only that I'll be glad to give a fatwa you should all read it now this is a duty of your Islamic thinkers today - not to follow the trap of tribalism confessionalism nationalism F this ISM and all of these things which unfortunately divide human beings not only Muslims but Christians Chinese Indians that we were all the world is part of you the human predicament in our world today and finally we must be able to address the contemporary mind in order to do that we must know the contemporary mind the time when people especially Muslims write comedies and Iran as if they were addressing the people at us at university but publishing in a second-rate English are over they're useless we must be able to convey this message in a language that's understandable this is precisely what the Muslim scholars did when they went to Persia it's exactly what they did and the great translation which is anonymous the first translation of the Quran a beautiful Persian who did that somebody facilitated that and fifty years later came out in Gujarati a very difficult Indian language because this transmission was there now of course Persian is still there I think it's the most beautiful language of the world but I'm prejudiced but the language of hatha society and Gujarat is there and this is there but now the English language must be treated actually as an Islamic language in the same way that Bengali which was there for Islam kv2 in as a Hindu language it was Islam aside to the extent that is one of the major Islamic languages and the comedy window Quran discussion of the quran translation iran in the english language must be done in such a way that we can forge out of the english language a language that can express things islamic in the same way that the christians forged the latin language which was a roman language completely so-called pagan into becoming the liturgical language the catholic church those are very very difficult task to achieve but with the help of God all things are possible thank you

Channel: GigaKooloo

Views: 25,095

Rating: 4.7732792 out of 5

Keywords: Keynote, address, at, New, Approaches, to, Quran, Seyyed, Hossein, Nasr, سید, حسین, نصر, قرآن

Id: hkodXRnouLc

Length: 55min 39sec (3339 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 19 2012