Prof. Oliver Leaman - Recent Developments in the Study of the Qur’an

all right good evening ladies and gentlemen I doubt whether I will live up to that wonderful introduction I'm going to talk for about 40 minutes and then I look forward to hearing what remarks questions or points of view you have and I'm being interested in the last few years in ah I need this my notes yes I've been interested in the last few years about the contribution that philosophy can make to the understanding of religion and so I've been writing I brought out this year of this book on the Koran a philosophical perspective just to see what philosophers have said about the Quran and how useful what they've said is and one of the areas that that sort of naturally leads you into is looking at how the different ways of approaching the Quran in the scholarly and the religious community and trying to work out which ways of doing it and would likely to be more successful than which other ways can we even say that can we even you know pick winners and losers when it comes to ways of looking at the corner so I'm just going to go through in quite general terms some of the different approaches that exist today have existed in the past however actually those that have existed in the past continue in a very healthy way today and we might be able to look at some you know approaches that are likely to be more helpful than others or you may disagree that you may think that it's not possible to say which approaches might be better than others one should just look at all the different approaches and I think that's a you know that's a reasonable view but the traditional view traditional tough seer traditional commentary is very interested in grammar in syntax in as babble Azul in the occasions of the revelations putting things within there context and the word you're going to hear from me many times this evening is the word context putting an ayah a verse from the Quran as surah the chapter in which it occurs within their particular context was it revealed in Mecca or Medina what were the circumstances what did God have in mind in revealing it at that time in that place who was the audience who was the particular audience of the ayah or surah and who's the general audience of the Quran that is a remarkably controversial issue in Quranic scholarship as we shall see so traditional tough sear traditional commentary it continues today in is I would say it is the major form of Quranic commentary today it continues in justing the same way as it did in the past there's been no changes at all really of course modern commentators consider the older commentators and discuss their work but the emphasis is very much on grammar on looking at the language and looking at the occasions on which the texts were were revealed now of course there are problems here one problem is familiar to people who are interested in any sacred text that the stories around the text what theologians call the sacred history is not necessarily history I mean sacred history and history are two rather different things perhaps we don't really know in many cases what the us bubble is all were what the the what the context is when the the texts were revealed we have to work it out and help us we have what Islamic scholars called the hadith collection as the collections of sayings of the Prophet and there's close to the Prophet and for the shia of also of the imams and you know this is also very useful additional material but again there's a whole debate about how genuine it is it can't all be genuine because it's all genuine then the Prophet could have done nothing but produce these sayings so a lot of it must be a bit dubious and within the tradition itself a lot of it is regarded as dubious I mean there are different classifications for the strength of the sayings of the Prophet and the Companions say we have all this material which is there to help us understand the Quran and the traditional way of doing it is to look at the text and use what we know what we think we know of the history of the prophet of the sayings of the Prophet and those close to him are the political circumstances at the time and of course our knowledge of these things is not that secure and then we form some sort of narrative which which makes sense and we know at least for Muslims that the text is the direct Word of God and so there's no question about it being true or not but there's sometimes difficulties in understanding precisely how it's true and that really is the job of theology is to work out and to explain how things in religion can be regarded as true or indeed as false I suppose silly these traditional commentators met in the 20th century at least perhaps also in the 19th century in the Islamic world a lot of people who stopped regarding the Quran as being relevant because they became wedded to the ideology of what they saw as modernity and westernization and the country in which this was miss the case was of course turkey and the Kemalist regime with his aggressive pursuit of secular policies turkish theologians like side nor see for example produce traditional commentary but within the context for the first time in the islamic world of trying to persuade people that the corrals remains relevant and important in the direct Word of God this is not just stuff from the past but this is this is what people need today if they are to lead authentic and valuable lives so a lot of more modern commentators like side nursing injects in their commentary they have as their enemy secularism what they see as a destructive form of modernity not science these commentators have nothing at all against science they think science is a very good thing and that indeed if you look at the Quran you can see many hints at why science is important but they they they were arguing against the view that you don't need religion anymore or that religion is sort of superfluous or it's been replaced by modernity and of course as we know from the history of modern Turkey you know very in the major efforts were made to restrict Islam to you know a very unimportant I mean I even I I'm older than one of them one of the advantages of being old is that you see everything change and you realize that I remember in the in the seventh early 70s people in Islamic studies said oh the Shia the Shia their quietest they're not involved in politics you know you know it's you'll never get any political revolutions in the Shia countries suddenly there's a ceramic revolution in 1979 and that the story went the other way completely you know I remember in Turkey 20 years ago also you know in if you visited a middle-class family the at the time of prayer the servants prayed but everybody else just sat around the table drinking whiskey and laughing at them now everybody prays and in fact the wealthy people pray in some ways even are even more enthusiastic about religion in some ways or some of them are then people lower down the economic scale so things things change a lot and this is an important point I think in theology we need to look at who our theologians trying to counter what views are they trying to challenge and in the nineteenth twentieth now 21st century a lot of the more traditional theologians are trying to challenge the view that you don't really need religion or religion is just a private thing is not really an important thing it's just a matter of taste is just a matter of of what people do they argue in their work on the Koran no this is the word of God it remains as relevant today as it was in the past because it is the eternal unchanging final message and you can't you know pigeonhole it and put it in a little compartment and just take it out when you see it has to be there as part of your life you know in a long-term way and their their argument suggests that so tradition continues but it finds a new way of expressing itself in modern times that in many ways is what most quranic commentary argues today I would argue then there are people who are much more radical and who I've tended to call in my my writing that the modernizers people based around thinkers like fazlullah Rahman and these are people again who take the idea of context very seriously they say they ask what is the context of the original message how far can we generalize from that context to today now the more traditional commentators don't ask that question they say of course we can generalize from that context to today it's this true then and it's true now and it will always be true but Rahman argues and his followers and they are an important intellectual group in the Islamic world he argues that not necessarily I mean perhaps there were things that were true then of course this they are true now but they're true in a different way because the context has changed I mean one of the things we know is that context is very important don't we I mean context is a very important part of meaning I was only thinking about this a few days ago because I I have a friend from from Germany who sometimes stays with me in America and he's convinced that the Americans are very nice friendly people because everybody asks him how he is and he's somebody he was quite interested in his health so you need often when he was staying with me in America you would often find him having long conversations with the mailman for example you just said how you're doing today you know that's what the mailman said but in America when you say how y'all doing today at least think sake you don't mean how are you doing today you mean hello it doesn't mean anything at all it means hello that's the context context and if you get the context wrong I mean we're used for this when we go overseas I in some countries where we know the expression but we can't quite produce it in the right way not not that there's anything wrong with how we are producing it but the context is wrong we don't know and in that sense the meaning is missing we have some of the meaning but not all of the meaning so the modernizers argue that you know the Koran of course is the eternal Word of God and it was true then and it's true now but it can be true now in different ways and we have to work out what that those ways are I mean God would expect us to do that intellectual work because otherwise the Quran is just a dry text to be followed unquestioningly and probably wrongly i mean unless you're capable of working with the text rahman argues you don't really have it you merely have it as something that is an unthinking receptacle of information that you don't really understand that's not satisfactory so the modernizes but then of course the difficult thing aspect of the modernizers is what do we call the right context I mean what is the right context and does that suggest that you can things change I mean let's give an example here a big discussion recently by Rothman supporters about the who dude punishments the punishments which involve lopping off people's hair and poking out eyes and things like that I mean they're there in the core arm I mean there's hardly any discussion of them so they're there in a very small way but there's some Muslims say well if God said if you're a thief you should have your hand chopped off you know that's good enough for me I mean if God says it you do it you know I mean it's not he doesn't God doesn't say well sometimes you do it or sometimes you know he says if that's what you do then that's what you do and it's very difficult to know what to how to make sense of that sort of saying today when we regard chopping people's hands offers well in some of us regard chopping people's hands off is a bit problematic whether God said it or not now what what the modernizes argue is that you have to look at the original context how would that the rule have been expected to change and develop for the tradition this this sound was very wrong because they might say well what do you mean how would it change and develop because surely God's Word doesn't change and develop I mean God's specifies laws and rules I mean could we argue that you know stealing was fine all that skidding somebody was okay because that's how God's laws and principles might be seen the developing surely we couldn't do that that would be wrong so I mean isn't that true of everything once you change one thing and there is a an ayah which makes precisely this point that it's the devil who leads you to start to change things in the Koran you know once you start to change something why not change everything so the traditionalists tend to think that like conservatives with a small say that you know the Koran is like a spider's web and it all hangs together in a way and with a spider's web if you poke a hole in one bit the whole thing starts to collapse because it's the structure of the whole web which gives its its strength and and its role the modernizers argue where you know you can replace bits of the structure because it's not that the context is different now so it doesn't mean the same thing now you know God expects us to look at the Koran dynamically and not limit it to previous understandings of the text of course this debate is in no way specifically limited to Islam but it exists in all religions I mean all religions have this debate and I mean we see it in in the Anglican Church in recent years over where the women can be priests everywhere the women can be bishops the role of gay people in the church and so on and so forth I mean should just because it says something in the Bible does that mean that that has to remain the clear authority to treat people in the certain way which today we find rather problematic we may find rather problematic so that's the big problem that exists within all religions and it certainly exists in this farm and you know the modernizers and the traditionalists are constantly arguing with each other about how you should interpret the Quran based on these very different principles are you going to take a literal approach that the truth is unchanging and so must never be reinterpreted what are you going to say well the cut the truth depends on the context and if the context changes then the truth has to be reinterpret it's very difficult to get the balance right because you don't want to go so far to reinterpret texts that anything goes because if anything goes why even bother to pretend that you have any sort of adherence or respect for a particular text because isn't it just then decoration it doesn't actually do anything in your reasoning if anything goes when you look at a religious text on the other hand if you are so rigid and unchanging in your view of a text that suggests that you're not really making that text part of your approach to your own changing life and community you know you have to do that religions many religions have disappeared religions which were enormous in the past no longer exist today in the sense that they don't even have one member why have they disappeared and why have some religions continued presumably the tradition asad argue it's because people have maintained their acceptance of certain basic beliefs which they weren't prepared to change but the modernizers say no no it's because certain people some people many people have been prepared to see religion as something which does change and you have to allow it to change you have to guide the change in a way which makes sense of its basic truths there's a third group of commentators who I tend to call in my writing the scientists which isn't a critic term in English but in German there's feel that most most theology is actually German in Christian and Jewish and Islamic thought and in German academic life there are a very important group of people today as surrounds around angle and no Viet who run a project called the corpus Quranic oh and the corporate America is a reinvention of a very long-standing German project from a hundred to hundred years ago which is to collect every scrap of early Quranic material and try to establish an or text of the Quran a basic text which is based on the most scientifically assessed material which can be linked to a particular time and place because these researchers although we are told by Muslims that the Quran is the direct Word of God and that this is the final version the version we have the canonical version the corpus quranic um is very dubious about that you know many there are many different theories about whether the Quran is really not nearly as old as people think it is the corpus quranic and Project think it's a multi authored work they don't think it's by I mean they're scientists so all there's some of them are Muslims perhaps I don't think any of them were Muslims actually but maybe some of them are Muslims but the the scientific approach is that like the Bible like the the Jewish Bible and the Christian Bible it's a multi authored work is a work which was developed over time and at one point in history it became canonical it became people wrote it down they agreed on the particular version and they said right this is the Quran for the corpus quranic own people are very dubious about that and there's an another approach which is very important in what i call the scientific approach to the quran which is based on not true dame university in the united states and is run by gabriel side reynolds and this argues that traditional commentary on the quran is a complete waste of time maybe we should spend any time looking at the traditional commentators because they were so distant from the quran itself to understand the quran you need to know the Jewish and the Christian Bibles everything in the Quran refers to the Jewish and Christian Bibles more or less and unless you understand the Jewish and Christian Bibles and the access to those books held by people in the raper at the time then you won't understand the Quran and again this is a very critical attitude towards a traditional understanding of the book because the traditional understanding of the book is that this is the Word of God and you know it wasn't written down by it wasn't created by any human beings certainly not by a bunch of human beings like an editorial committee you know there wasn't there weren't a bunch of guys who sat down in Arabia and said let's let's put all this stuff down I mean we know that happened with the Jewish Bible we know that people got together at one point and said let us determine what is going to be in the Canon and what's going to be out of it this was done by human beings I mean that is the Jewish story and we know that the Christian story is that there are these Gospels by these different people but the Islamic story is very different this is the Word of God God revealed it to the Prophet over a period of time and in different places and eventually these the Prophet was for me he was illiterate he didn't write it down himself he couldn't write but he remembered what he was told he transmitted it to others it was written down eventually and what we have now is a reliable version of the message that the Prophet received not according to the scientists I mean this story and here here we have again a big contrast between Islam and many other religions is to put something in the context to demythologize it I mean the scientists are putting the Quran in a particular context who was the author who of the authors where do these different bits come from is this surah this I I even plausible I mean was this just a mistake I mean who knows a scientists argue but they're talking about a book which Muslims regards as the perfect unchangeable immaculate miraculous Word of God so they're taking a very different approach to it I mean it's a bit like you know when I go through when we go through we wake up one day and if you hear the birds singing and they're so beautiful and we see how the birds sound lovely today but if you're unfortunate enough to have somebody in your family who's a natural scientist then he or she may say to you oh well yeah but you know really what the birds are doing is this saying to the other birds if you come to my bushel I'm going to pick your eyes out and 1000 they're getting the thing I'm the best bird in the in the area come and meet with me and that rather that scientific approach to something which other people find authentic beautiful meaningful seems to go in a different direction and the scientists are definitely going in a different direction when they look they did this with the bible's of the jews and the christians and now they're doing it to the corral that they're taking this approach that it can't be entirely as the sacred history thinks it is that doesn't make scientific sense they argue and this is a very long project which has been taking place in Europe for literally for hundreds of years and it's seen by the many Muslims as being very threatening because once you start to play around with the origins of your sacred book you know it may it may well seem that anything goes I mean if there is evidence that the Koran was the product of a group of people who sort of put it together from here and there and wherever you know why should we treat it with such respect I mean what's the basis of it at all except as the product of a group of people commit II and we we know what committees are like don't we I mean any issue any decision which is achieved by committee is usually quite always often quite garbled and incoherent and can be interpreted in the whole variety of ways so this is a very threatening approach to traditional to drift to drift to drift to traditional ways understanding the Koran and it's very difficult to see how that could be incorporated in any normal interpretation of the Koran which is familiar to us from the last the last few centuries both these research projects especially the German one which has been enormous ly well funded and I think the research funds doesn't end until 2025 have had been very careful to not frighten the local Muslim communities by saying that this is not the traditional evil old Orientalism you know this is showing that Islam is a European religion and and so and so forth but really that's very difficult to make sense of and it does bring up the issue which again I mentioned several times before context if if you look very seriously at context does this weaken the force of the text does the text sort of disappear into the context and is that problematic to Islam has it maybe has been to other religions you know if we start constantly saying well why was that revealed in that way at that place you know because a lot of the the modernizers say well you know the poor when they're criticizing people who regard themselves as traditionalists they say quite rightly in the Koran itself God criticizes the traditionalists he constantly says to the Muslims well to everybody don't believe things just because your father stole told you they were true you know will you do any with you will you follow the guidance of those you don't know it says that in the Koran a lot it criticizes local customs of the time you know it criticizes what people did it doesn't glorify you know what it regards as the lifestyle of the jaha Lea their period of ignorance in the Arab world so trying to live like Arabs of the seventh century Christian era is not what the Koran is at all in favor of but today some traditionalists in inverted commas think that this is what we ought to do you ought to get back as far as we can to those early times when everything was hunky-dory and perfect and we ought to you know resume that way of life that God was so much in favor of apparently but he wasn't and just because the Prophet the Prophet of course was an Arab but the Prophet wasn't advocating traditional Arab ways of doing things the Quran in his fadeev I mean the Quran is all about how everybody is supposed to live at all times and you know say the modernizers criticize people who dress up and you know use the sort of what what the modernizes regard as antique Arab ways of doing things which really don't make sense nowadays now I'm going to f----- going to finish on like there's one more group I should say something about quickly of Quran interpreters who are important and these are people who one might call the Islamophobes and these are people who hate the Quran and of the often they're Muslims have had a bad time and they're very very critical of the Quran and they've been a number of books recently by former Muslims it's often who won't reveal their real names see did actually know if they are former Muslims but certainly there are plenty of Muslims who are no longer Muslims or we no longer regard themselves as Muslims and you have a very negative view of the Quran and you know what they tend to do is they issue a very angry books in which they look at the text and just take it at face value without any nuances or explanation and say look how terrible the Quran is it just says kill them all or or do this or do that you know it's obviously a terrible book and we shouldn't have anything to do with it I mean that form of Quran commentary is really not not very helpful to put it mildly because again there's no notion of context there I mean you can criticize any book I mean my students in Kentucky who tend to be very religious they often hold up a Bible in class and they say it says in the Bible and I think they have difficulty distinguishing between God and King James because they like the King James Version but it says in the Bible this so of course we then say well it also says that and you know how we gain to reconcile these two things and they sort out huh you know because the people who take a very straightforward view of religion are just not really in the process of being able to critically examine and the views that they hold and the quran itself constantly argues people constantly advocates looking critically at your beliefs included including the beliefs in the Quran it constantly says consider think discuss debate reason it produces arguments that produces parables it produces analogies it doesn't say believe this it says look it says why you should believe it that what we think of those arguments is one thing but it does proceed in that sort of way so I would argue that we ought to look at an ayah in the Quran which refers to the community of Muslims as a community which it calls why's that which means moderate it says in the Quran was that was earth was it here was that was that you know moderate in the middle you should be a community in the middle it says what has been the middle name it means don't go to extremes and I think this is a very useful idea for commentary how to understand the Quran indeed any religious texts don't say it's all rubbish and you know we should just get rid of it all then say it's incompatible with modernity then say is totally compatible with modernity don't say it's scientifically very different from how people think it is don't say scientific approaches to the Quran have no role at all I mean these are all reactions which ignore was it here the idea of moderation the idea of trying to and the Quran is our because it's full of arguments does encourage people you know consider a whole variety of views consider what the Christians do what the Jews do can see that what people do what the G Holly Arabs did you know let's try and work out from what we we know of what people do and what God tells us what the the way for this because that is an important thing in religion religions don't tell you what to do well they sometimes try to tell you what to do for what religions tend to do is they give you in a fairly general advice suggestions stories and we've got to use what we are told in you know intelligent and creative ways to work out in a moderate sort of way you know in appropriate direction in which we should take our lives say religions don't tend to be just a set of blank instructions you know there again a guy I mean as I I often think of trying to understand the religious text is like being lost you know when you're lost you know you look for clues as to find the place that you're looking for and some of those clues will be misleading and some of them will be helpful and you've got to work out yourself I remember walking down blackness Road only an hour or so ago and I saw a big sign to this College which was pointing in the direction which has nothing at all to do with where the college's but perhaps if you're in a car that tells you how to drive around and find the carpark but I I wasn't fooled by it I thought no I'm sure it's not up that side road which has that arrow pointing to it and I kept on down blackness road and then I saw the college but of course I then stumbled into the carpark from which there is no entrance into the college so I thought okay I'll get out and so this is how we do religion this is how people use religion to make sense of their lives you try out different things you're open to changing your ideas of what you want to do you rely on your experience you have some basic information which guides you it's a sort of a dialogue it's dynamic it's diachronic and moderation in approaches to religion are just as important I would argue as moderation in religion so I've looked at we've looked at some of the major ways of understanding the Koran today and how valuable they are what problems they may may erase may arise with them I've argued that I mean these are all well most of them are interesting and useful ways of looking at the text but anybody beware of anybody who says he or she knows what it means because religion although does say in the Quran that this is a clear book it says this is a clear book written in Arabic but it's not that clear always what its implications are for our lives this is where we need moderation to try and link what we read with what other people say with what people do and with our own experiences and I'm arguing that this principle of moderation is definitely the way forward in Quranic studies and in the understanding of the Quran and on that point I'm going to finish and I don't pay much look forward to hearing what your views on this topic thank you very much you

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Length: 42min 13sec (2533 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 03 2016