The Study Qur'an: Enhancing Qur'anic Literacy - Dr. Joseph Lumbard

Thank You rasayan thank you when you're both of you Thank You fisica Institute and and buying in Claremont for having me out here thank you all for coming this evening should begin actually I should have said Salam alaikum first dispel our mother in a hundred Bernard amin salatu salam wa sahbihi ala allah so allah salallahu alayhi wasalam while he was happy he was one helio mateen sha allah well so so I'm here just talk about the study Quran it's been a very long journey I've been working on the study Quran for 10 years and its really been it's really been an honor to work on on this text one of the there are a lot of questions that come up with the study Quran and since it came out which is just in November some people have asked us why did you do this and really the answer is is because no one else was doing it in a sense it actually wasn't our idea this is one of the misunderstandings that has come out about the study Quran some people have thought that we had an idea that we were going to do this and it was proposed to a publisher and we started working on it actually what happened is that the publisher HarperCollins are actually Harper one the religious division the editors from HarperCollins had the idea and they first came to say to Saint Nasser and they asked him if he would do it and Santa say NASA shrank from the task he said I don't want to do this in fact I was recently reminded that when I was an undergraduate one time I was sitting with dr. Nasir and one of his graduate students asked him said why don't you teach a core on the Koran and he said it's too much to teach a course on God's Word is too much there was really kind of reverence that he had for the Koran that prevented him from going in and teaching a course so he kept it morning since to his own private devotional life and I in a sense you might say as I first started my Islamic studies with him you could say I must followed his Sunna in that and I was actively involved in certain dimensions of of Quranic studies but I never wrote on it I never made it part of my academic work and again really is also the field of Quranic studies is very contentious in the Academy and it's not something that I wanted to really be a part of but then dr. Nasir was asked to do this and at first he didn't want to do it but then he thought you know if I don't do this they said I'll have to answer to a loss of a non-solid for this on the day of judgment and you also thought you know Harper could now go and they could they could Choo's he would have no control over who would be the next person that they would ask to do it and so they could go and they could ask a group of Orientalists now for the Muslim community this would be something that would not be that would not be very welcome for us to have the very first study Quran be written by let's say well not necessarily enter lists an oriental this is technically somebody studying the Orient but a group of of revisionist scholars or something who want to talk about the Quran having come from XYZ source or something or another and so he really felt a responsibility to do it and then in a sense you could say that it was viewed as a fart Akif ayah that it was something that somebody had to do and since he was the one who was asked to do it he decided to do it and the first person that he asked to come and join the project was myself and in a sense I saw it the same way and Jenna said you know what would do this and some people have asked me what is it that made you qualified to work on the study Quran and I think I finally come up with an answer at least for now is that we didn't feel qualified ultimately nobody's qualified to translate the Quran ultimately nobody's qualified to write a commentary on the Quran at the end of the day and I think if you if you look every Quranic commentator you can find times when you see in their Tufts ear that they felt this weight of the word on themselves for having taken on taking on this task and so it is really on the one hand it's really kind of you might see was a great honor in a sense to have this this task but on the other hand it was also a great challenge and I hope that that a loss of a note Allah will forgive us for any mistakes that we that we made in this in this project and purify our intentions now another one of the things that distinguishes this project in dr. nasir writes about this in his introduction is that everybody who participated in this study Quran was an American Muslim of some kind dr. nasir himself was born in Iran but then he was educated in the United States from the age of 12 he was actually educated in the United States and then went back to Iran and was then forced here by the Iranian Revolution so as a result he has spent probably almost as much of his life living in the United States as he has in Iran the other editors in the project and here's the people genera Dali is is a Turk who was born in the United States I often joke with him that the funny thing is is that you know I'm this kind of white guy going back many generations he's first generation and he's like from New Jersey he's kind of more American than me and some of his mannerisms and then and then Maria Maria de cake is like myself a white convert to Islam and then the other editor Muhammad Rustom is a is a Canadian so so we've taken over Kenda we're calling him an American technically North America but all from all from different backgrounds and and people have asked us you know for example like why didn't you have more people of other you know why isn't there more women why didn't you have people of other backgrounds etc etc there were a lot of people who we invited to work on this project at various steps along the way who who couldn't for various reasons at one time or another and so this is it and this is you know the kind of the final team that by God's will we ended up with this also this bus Mela is done by mohammad zakhur you you know he's a great American Quaker for who of course because all of the great calligraphers are trained where in Turkey no mohammad zakhur because actually he was trained elsewhere and then he went to Turkey and because he was told this is where you really learn calligraphy and they said we'll take you a student but you have to forget everything that you've learned about calligraphy and he looked at their calligraphy and he said well their calligraphy is the best so well I'm gonna do that and so I mean he literally completely stripped himself down and started over again and so and so this is the Bussmann that was done by him so in a lot of ways there's a you might say a very American aspect to it there's something very significant to think about in this context which is we live in a very interesting time right now as regards the development of Islam in the world which is that historically Islamic intellectual discourse has had two major international languages they are Arabic and Persian my apologies since I know we have a large Turkish audience here but Turkish in terms of other people's outside of Turkey other scholars outside of Turkey did not adopt Turkish for their intellectual discourse maybe for their administrative discourse you know in places it's why in Egypt is so yeah Bosch Mohandas and things like this but in in in other places you know it was it was always Arabic or Persian that were the great international languages of intellectual discourse we have now come up we're now at this interesting point where English is becoming an international language of Islamic intellectual discourse and this is very important this is something that for those of us who are native English speakers this is a responsibility that we have with this happening and there is a responsibility that we have to bring out quality literature in English regarding the Islamic the Islamic tradition I hope that the study Quran will be a major advancement in this trend and that is why one of the things that we try to do with the study Quran is the first thing is that we wanted to have as good a translation as we could get now people have asked us a lot about the translation for the study Quran asked us about why for example did we use the and vow you know the second person singular from early modern English it could happen to experience and why did we use some of what you might call the inverted word order that you have why do they not or you know why do they not believe and things or they believe not and things along these lines or some person one person accused us of having what she called me Yoda speak but but I don't that I mean if you go back it really has this kind of echo now there's a very simple answer which is one thing is that the idiom of any language has about a ten year period so to translate into what is the current idiom it's always going to be something that is fleeting and now in the technological age the idiom is getting even shorter and so you really want to catch or something that retains a timeless sense you want to have something of the English that has lasted for hundreds of years and also if you go and you talk to people there's actually been a study that's done of this of what is the translation of the Bible that is the most widely read it's the King James the King James with all of these other translations that are out there of those people who read the Bible regularly at least in the United States of America over 40% of them read the King James the next highest is the NIV translation at nineteen percent there's a staying power to this translation and also you know there are people who if you really were to ask them and I asked dozens of people over the ten years that we were doing this project said when you think of scripture what do you think of what language do you think with English they would always say either Shakespeare or King James now a few people said something else maybe somebody said Milton or something along those lines but usually it was some something that was of the period of early modern English when English was actually coming into shape as as a language and so we wanted to capture something of that now let me go to the translation and look at this for a minute and you can see what I'm talking about and I'm gonna go back to some of the main features for those of you who haven't looked at the project yet all right this is our translation of sort the Fosse everybody always asks you well how did you translate the Fatiha and this is this is our translation of it in the name of God the compassionate the merciful praise be to God Lord of the Worlds the compassionate the merciful master of the day of judgment the we worship and from the we seek help so here we have this early early modern the second person all right guide us upon the straight path the path of those whom thou hast blessed not of those who incur wrath nor of those who are astray if you are actually to go through the history of Bible translation and you were to find what English is closest to this the actual English that would be closest to this of all the Bible translations would probably be the revised standard because that what the Revised Standard tried to do was to make the kind of King James a little bit more accessible but to retain that language and so we wanted to do this so somebody really an English reader a native English reader could pick this up and say that's Scripture one of the things that we want okay this is something that we as a community I think Muslims as a community we've not been smart about this when you go and you look I mean people will go and they'll give a paper back of a translation to somebody you have to think about the overall impression that it is going to make on somebody when you give them a copy of the Koran this particular book in hope I can borrow a copy of it from you all right so this book one of the things in addition to this and by the way the design was done by it by Gennaro Dahle it really didn't I mean an amazing job himself and then there's this the cover design that he did as well and every aspect of this was put down so that one could actually take this and one could actually just give this to another to a pastor say this is our book all right something that you could actually sit there as a Muslim say yes this represents our book no it's not our book it's not the Quran the Quran is only that which is translated in which is sorry which is not translated it is only the actual Arabic recitation all right that's the only thing that's the Quran now maintain that of the day that I died however this is something that is that one can at least say for those who don't have access to that Arabic this represents our book this is the closest that you can get to it and this is one of the things that we wanted to have now here's a few other translation principles one of the things is if you go through a lot of Quran translations the amount of times that you're gonna find insertions in brackets is it's painful and one of the things that's really painful about it is that sometimes it takes away what is the natural poly semi of the Koran that is the natural way in which the Koran opens in each word to multiple levels of meaning sometimes the very absence of a pronoun or of a direct object in a sentence leads to so many different interpretations that you just see they're right on the immediate level of the Arabic that a loss of Anna Tala is just saying that this is something that speaks to every individual in a sense in its own way now let's go into our translations here I could go into lots of verses here but here we've got an example on the board alright so for some of our translation principles look at verse 5 the we worship and from the we seek help now this is again an issue where Arabic is doing the same thing that we can do in English which is that if you put the direct object at the beginning of the sentence you put the emphasis on the direct object a lot of translators about half the translators into English try to compensate and put V alone we worship from the alone we seek help or if that's already in the England that's already in English like this once you've put the word or in this way that's already an implication in English just as it is an implication in the Arabic now then guide us upon the straight path the path of those whom thou has blessed not of those who incur wrath nor of those who are astray now here again those who incur wrath I can't remember which translation it is but I think I've only seen about two or three translations in which there's no kind of interpretation put into this later than mcadoo viale usually people attempt to say those with whom thou art roth are those whom God is angry those who have the anger of God upon them where's God thou hast blessed nor of those who incur wrath there's an incredibly deep theological point being made right here the when it comes to blessing God wants to be directly involved God is the one who does the busing God wants to bless human beings God doesn't want to be angry with you it beings God doesn't want his wrath to come down on people therefore there's no subject mentioned here who is the one who's doing it and also go into the Koran who wrongs human beings in the Koran themselves while they can can no unfulfilled ethanol all right it is human beings who actually bring that Roth upon themselves for that wrath sorry upon themselves and it really God's ekkada God's anger is mentioned very little in the court hand and so there's a deep kind of theological point that's being made just by that being being translated in that way I think a lot of the translations of the Quran that we look at miss this point so this is something that we have tried to effect throughout the translation there's another very important point which is that the Quran when you read through it constantly and you're reading it all of the time there are verses of the Koran that twenty surahs later you hear an echo of another verse and that's how you make the connection sometimes and that's how some of the classical commentators made the connections so what happens the a very good example is the word Islam all right what happens when we take a verse like WOM am taki middle islami dinan phileo cobalamin and we translated as whosoever seeks a religion other than is mom it will not be accepted from him all right but then in another verse we have women Islamic what Rahul Allah wha-hoo a Morrison ballet I mean Aslam our watcher who Leela wha-hoo a Muslim Vala who a general in the Rabi he while a khawfun alayhim wala whom yes I know nay those who submit their faces which is kind of a metaphor for that acids the true essence of the human being those who submit their faces to God and they are moss and there are ones who do that which is beautiful they have their reward with God they shall not fear nor shall they sorrow now it has this issue they submit so now if we take whosoever seeks may obtain he Nevada islami dinan fillet uke but I mean if we take that and we put that as a capital I Islam this is the religion of Islam BAM you've lost the relationship between the two verses you've lost the fact that the reference that is being made in one verse is to that overall virtue of submitting your entire face your entire being to God in some way and so this is one of the things that we've also tried to do you cannot translate every word of the Quran exactly the same in every instance that it occurs but you can try to be as consistent as possible and so this is one of the other things that we try to effect with this translation now the heart of the study Quran is the commentary I've to go back to this it's everything that's here that's underneath for every word of translation we've got about five and a half words of commentary on average so close to a million words overall of commentary this commentary is something that it was really in many ways the most grueling part to to write for the study Quran there are some sentences of commentary in there that really are the results of boiling down a hundred pages of different tough sea air works and say okay this is a good way to summarize this in some ways for this we took from some 40 commentaries of the tradition this is what we have at the beginning is a commentator key which says which Tufts ear so you have an ax in brackets so if something comes in parentheses it says BQ that means that it came from the tafseer of and Buckley and if you have for example you know by DA we a Luci and things along these lines okay even kefir and so this is the the key that we used in order to make these identifications so that anybody who wanted to could kind of go back and look to where we got this now this doesn't mean that what you have here is the actual opinion so if it says Z doesn't mean it sucks it's a much Therese opinion it means that zoom actually transmits that opinion in his Tufts ear and the classical Mufasa aroun some of them would actually give you a lot of positions with which they disagreed so sometimes they'll actually be transmitting a position that we found in some instant where actually they were arguing against that particular position so we're not saying that those are their particular opinions at all times now here you can see how it works and so we end up with having SUNY toughs here so for example here you have Rosie very much assuming top at the body as she and so top of the body is actually the last in the order top at the body died in the year 1981 and so in his is probably the last and of classical Tufts ear that we have although right now one of his students is writing a tough sear called tough sear test NIEM and so I'm told that that is being transcribed into into Persian and his students are translating it into Arabic so when that is done then we will have yet another classical tough sear now any questions thus far about the translation or anything that I've said was in charge no oh he read the million words yes so Nasser did not write the commentary the commentary was written by myself Maria de cake genera Dali and Mohammed Rustom but Nasser edited all of the commentary but he did not write it he's a he is a polymath he is he is I mean dr. nasir is one of these people who you know I mean he you know he graduated from the top of his class at MIT when as an undergraduate and so he's done work in many different fields he's a philosopher he's a trained scientist he is he's written many books in Sufism he's written many books on science in Islam yeah he's many different things yes yes yeah French German yeah it doesn't speak German but yes you have to you have to be honest with yourself that when you're selecting if you're if you've got 40 different tough SEO that you're looking at I mean you have to be honest that you're making a choice you know and so you know you have to seek I mean you know with humility you have to admit that even even if all I'm doing is putting down that this is what quarter to be said still I've made a choice that that was the particular position within a classical commentary to put here yeah yes there are definitely places where we did and there are also places where we pointed out inconsistencies that do sometimes occur within the classical tradition and and there are I mean there are certain positions when you're reading you know classical Tufts here there's some things you have to be honest with yourself about how how much they're ingrained in certain schools of thought I mean like for example you could go through I think actually a fascinating PhD dissertation would be the historical development of the verses that refer to Sidney abu bakr radiallahu that you can really see that within the Sunni tradition they started like over time more and more verses come to be said to refer to it like to the point where you get like two hundred verses that are said to refer to you know to a Sidney Abu Bakar in one way or another I don't want to take well I don't want to take anything away from him at all stuck for Allah and there certainly are verses in the Quran that pertain directly to at a cinema background however two hundred I don't think so and some of the verses that you come in you say wait a minute I think that could actually have a broader implication than that jihad Wow so can we do that one at the end you you you you hit like the doozy question right in the middle I'd have nothing else to say if I went off on that I don't so tree did you want to say something right now regarding this or if it created inconsistencies in our interpretation then it created inconsistency in other people's interpretations because if you go through I mean like let's say for example you look at along the top of the body he's using all kinds of different materials I mean he's using lots of different Sufi tough seers he uses a lot of dinner Ozzy you know he looks at some actually he looks at it looks at many different toughest here and incorporates them so yes in some ways you could say that it did but the commentary is not to say this verse means this so say these are some of the interpretations that there have been of this first but also it provides the s Pavano zoo where they where they fit I mean there are places where the s babblin Azul are just you know they don't make a lot of sense and they're not considered to really even be very strong hadith sand reports in some instances but in other instances they're considered to be safe and you can find them in Muslim and Bacardi and stuff like that so those instances we tried to put the s Babineaux Zul in so for example surah 9:5 the famous word verse you really want the Espada's all the discussion of that of that particular verse and of course erotica I mean this really contextualizes the whole story so you want the of the s bamboozled there and and we also would get into issues of philology in the meanings of particular words for that we use both the classical tradition and some of the observations etymological observations that you have in modern scholarship as well but then also to go back to its owner's question that yes there are definitely places where it was like you you really one of the things that I think actually I personally gradually became a little bit more comfortable with this as time went on because you learn the methodologies you figure out okay this might not be something that I find but it is methodological II consistent with the manner in which the classical with us oonh approached the text to say a very good example is actually our commentary on on sort of the Fatiha verse 7 what I actually did there was you know uh Loretta naka do be a lay him on a boar lien brought up looked at every instance of a reference to God's a condom in the Koran and every instance of a reference to people being doline and compared what it is that people incur wrath for and what it is that is being astray and being astray is basically not living in a court with revelation from anything from all the way from a prophet before revelation has come to him to you know human beings that are just kind of going willy-nilly they don't have bad will towards others but they're just their lives just aren't kind if they don't have an access to their life so they're not living in accord with divine revelation in some way whereas with other now it's really bad things that people have done you're talking about murder and fornication and things like this and there has to almost be some intentionality behind it and so but then to take that that really takes it much deeper and that is in accord with classical Quranic methodology and I think takes the understanding of the verse deeper than a lot of tefa seer half and how they've approached the particular verse so yes we did it another thing that had to happen is that sometimes you have to kind of do a malakas I kind of summary of what a lot of different commentators have said and this is something that I personally really struggled with because it's like well I should put poets to be a rosy cupboard a year it mean kathira because actually what I did was I really kind of jammed together all of the observations that they were making in something that would be coherent for today's reader however I can't put in their initials because none of them actually said exactly that um so there are places where that is like okay there's no attribution that's directly given there however what it is is it's a kind of you know really boiling down of what you got from five or six to fussier on a particular on a particular verse and there are times when just like the relationships between particular verses just all of a sudden you're like wait wait a minute wait a minute oh that's wild they're like for example the fact that that all of the references to Mercy in the Koran are to wind in the plural it's always mercy it's always something good wind in the singing there's always something bad in the Koran and so these are the kind of things that you pick up on I actually also started to see that person that one of the things that I didn't include but circularly sees I mean the way that the four elements play out in the Koran is fascinating you know air earth water and fire I mean it's really fascinating the way that they're that they're referred to in different places in the Quran but these are things that you know we didn't get to include all of it yes now aside for one thing one thing I said is is there's a lot of aspects of us that that are very much you might say his modern motor has a light perspective and it's not a full commentary it's not a verse-by-verse commentary it doesn't run the whole thing it's occasional notes use of Ali it's also none of them was doing what we were doing in terms of trying to bring out the classical tradition and tried to make it like be an extension it's almost a direct extension of that of that classical tradition and this combines with with your question and and with our question which is other places in which we did our own perspectives sometimes like we also would bring in something from even Harvey or even bring in Jalal add-in Rumi or bring in you know kazowie but again in doing that we're using a methodology that was employed by later commentators for example a la Lucy will do that and even though Hodge Eva will do things like that so we would also bring in you know at times works from outside the quote tough seal tradition I think that you know I mean because people said you know from the from the as in the recent book that came out but she have off met you know what is Islam is that from the Balkans to Bengal complex you know Rumi was how people first kind of engaged the Koran people would actually you know and for them this was tough seer for a lot of people and so to really bring some of that out as part of what what we would try to do at times only when we could really directly relate it I mean there's so many places what I would have loved to have put in like a little bit more roomy stuff are the things along those lines in fact I was saying to one friend I'd really like to do this Sufi study Quran now and sha Allah all right now let me just get back to discussing it for a minute and the parameters of the project cuz some of you have seen parts of it and others of you have not another feature of this study Quran that I think really does set separate apart and this also would answer part of your question of how its set apart from Yusuf Ali or I said is these surah introductions now we tried to do comprehensive surah introductions to each surah and these surah introductions are try to give you what might be pertinent ass bobbing Azul occasions of Revelation or actually I think the best thing to call the now is historical contexts of verses and then what ways in which they may have been the prayers in which they may have been said by the prophet and if there are so he a hadith sahih sayings of the Prophet regarding the Fadel particular soror particular verses that is the virtues because there are a lot of ones when you want to get in to weak hadith virtues of the Quran is a great field to go into it's like it's like you know read this sort of the Quran and you'll be happy for the next ten days so it's tough for one you know an exaggeration but you know and it's like like you know one of the people who has them all the time is imaginary has has them all the time at the end of some of his commentaries Tabata see also commonly has them and it's like because what's wrong with giving somebody ahead deed that's kind of you know encourage them to read a surah of the Quran nothing so you know you just put it in there that's a nice it's a nice thing that makes it might make somebody want to read it but there are ones I can definitely be traced back to the Prophet and so we tried to put those in as well you know for example sort of tada I mean it's basically it's basically the words aware that he would recite this in the in the juma prayers and at the end at the Eid prayers as well and so we've put that in there and then a discussion of the basic themes that you would have in surahs and also in the surah introduction sometimes there's some Sora's that you see a relationship that some sort us have to one another and sometimes it's with the one joining like for example oh we're not pairing this ever iPad it was that was trying to pair with my computer it's not happening I guess your computer actually all right so um where was I then before that yeah some of the some of the themes you see there are actually in the later commentary tradition they start to get a little bit more interested in the actual reasons for the ordering of the quarter Hannah it actually it happens a little bit early as well I've been bearish on who stuffs here has just come out in a published form edited by Yousuf case with and and my old teacher Cara Bovary he's also interested in this issue issue of needle that is the ordering of certain verses or what some also called the moon asset-backed what is the why are these verses here and these verses there why is this story following that story and things along these lines we've tried to talk about that in some of the Sora introductions and also at times within the context of the of the discussion now another feature that we have is that we employ the different readings of the Koran that is the seven known readings that is the seven ones that are considered more - wiser or well well attested and there are three that are considered much more and so we try to use those readings and bring them up in the commentary at times when they actually make a difference of some kind some of them don't make a difference or when they pertain to a very well-known verse such as in the Fatiha medica you Medina or Maddie Kiyomi Deen most commentators say it really doesn't make much of a theological difference but yeah it's just something that since it's so widely read we know it and here's a little example of this where it says you know and Pharaoh and those before him and those subjugated so I don't have the whole thing there and those subjugated other sorry those subverted brought iniquity they disobeyed the messenger of their Lord and he seized them with a devastating blow now here you see it says these verses mark a shift from the discussion of the afflictions that befell the disbelievers from pre-islamic Arabia the previous verses were about ad and Thamud to those who disbelieved in the prophets of the judeo-christian tradition those before him indicates the generations before Pharaoh if read with a different vowing while men claim Allah who however it could be translated those who were with him all right and so these are some of the slight variations that you have within the readings that we then tried to that try to bring out in different places within within the Quran the more extensive example is this one that you have in sort of Yassin and they said oh Kumar Kumar in Bukit oh you're ordering ills upon yourselves though you have been reminded now here though you have been reminded is actually not we used the Huff's recitation for most of our translation that's not actually the Huff's recitation this is actually from another recitation and which says in lucca - all right and so we have the discussion here where it says their response to the message bears to the disp of from the message bears to the disbelievers is that the punishment the disbelievers foretell will befall them because of their disbelief in the most widespread reading of this verse though you are reminded in though catacomb is read in lucca return meaning if you are reminded in this reading the ellipsis indicates a rhetorical elision that constitutes the object of the interrogative and serves as a rebuke as if to say do you augur ill and disbelieve even when you have been reminded to translate to I guess normal English it's like when you say to your kids if you do that one more time and then you don't say what you're going to do because it has been a rhetorical effect that a punishment that you're actually not going to do all right anyways so in another canonical reading in dookie tomb is read ina vous character meaning now that you have been reminded at an bukhara tomb another reading is an lugar tomb meaning because you have been reminded and so you have this actually this verse we didn't get into it because also there's different readings of tall yoku maku this is actually this verse of Yasin is one of the most difficult verses to fully explain the multiple different readings of it which actually I think is a great thing that we should do now is a translation of the Quran that has all of the variants from the different readings in notes below but that is the variance from the actual different transmitted readings not oh it could be read this way it could be read that way etc all right last feature and then I'll go to jihads big question is we also have maps these maps these first maps are pretty standard Arabia at the time of the Prophet and you see the Persian Empire of course the Byzantine Empire and this shows the path of the first Hydra down to down to Abyssinia and then this gives you some of the dates of the major campaigns during the life of the prophet sallallahu alayhi wa send them then these maps gives some great details so for example Mecca the higher stations a lot of people don't actually know how these work and so we've put those in but then also I think we've really got some of the best maps of Medina that you'll find in in almost any book so this actually this was done by doubt case wit doubt case wit has spent 25 years researching the geography of of Medina and and so this for example shows what is the actual path of the prophets Hydra up to the kuba mosque where the first Juma prayer was prayed and then from there after staying there a few days up into the center of Medina and one of the things that these maps actually do is they show you for example the prophet's mosque was ingeniously located just about equidistant between the house and the husband's tribes so you know we've got the story of HUS wha his camel choosing the location of the mosque but we can also tell that his camel was very politically astute and then this these battles this is doubt case what he walked these battle scenes he went out I mean he went over every inch and he really walked these battle scenes so he really knew you know exactly how it worked because if you actually he was telling me I don't know this for a fact but it's um you know if you go back into some of the histories actually they get the bat some aspects of the battle wrong because they didn't know the geography so you've got these people who are writing commentaries who didn't actually know the geography of Medina well and so there are actually some details that are wrong for example about the trench the Battle of the trench or they're slightly wrong about the Battle of odd and things like this and so doubt casement was able to do this this is the Battle of a hood and this is the Battle of the of the trench right here so you can really get a sense of this because you know Mount Hood the Battle of odd actually has more verses pertaining to it in the Quran than any other historical event during the life of the prophet sallallaahu so this kind of sums up the features that we have we also have 15 essays the essays are done by people like Ingrid Matson and Mahakala Kadam and Hamza Yusuf did the essay on death and dying and they also had Muhammad Azumi who didn't want to own the collection of the Quran and the actual process of the historical collection redic did one on sufi commentaries our Sufism in the Koran and things along these lines I actually tell everybody I think the best place to begin the whole volume is by reading Ingrid Matson's essay on how to read the court and I think she did an amazing job it's a beautiful really a beautiful essay so now having said all of that let me go to Jihad's real doozy of a question this project changed my life in innumerable ways I really I mean I can't even begin to really talk about in terms of my actual relationship with the Quran I mean this was a gift from God I mean this is just like to just be able to sit down and and do this and I mean to really in a sense like I didn't have a choice I had to be fully engaged with the Quran and you know with the word in like constantly in one way it was a little sad because sometimes it took away from what you might call my devotional time with the Quran that you know I would you doing this I had want to go just sit and recite the Quran more or things like that but no I had to sit down and I had to you know research write to edit what somebody else had written about about a part of the Quran but the beautiful thing about that was that that process then developed more of a yearning for the for the Quran and so it's really to have that yearning constantly was a beautiful thing and still beautiful thing terms of my relationship with God you know only God knows you know Allah you know it's it's in demand I wanna be a combat to me huh affairs are a record with their final hands and so you know but at times yes I do feel you know I do feel that there are ways in which I far more deeply understand the Word of God and many of the aspects of the of the intentions behind it one of the things that really came out to me over time and really going through a lot of this is that one aspect of the Quran is that it's almost like the Quran there's a question that people often will pose to Muslims about like well you know it's if Muslims you know promised Muslims think the Quran is the word of God and and so long as they think that the Quran is is the Word of God then we're gonna have this problem like we can't have a dialogue because they're gonna have this absolutist view of the Quran that's like you've got the whole thing backwards it's so long as you think that the Quran is the word of God you know that no human interpretation can ever contain it and it's actually thinking that it's the Word of God and revering it in that way that makes us realize that know whatever that group happens think whatever this there's another way to look at it there's another way to understand the text and one of the beautiful things about the tradition is that it's like a loss upon it's all I wanted that that poly semi that that multiple allusions of the text they're present on the fairy level of recitation that we have seven different with the wiser well-attested modes of recitation ten for when you add the much more once the well-known ones and then all of that just leads that no it's supposed to be something that has multiple ways in which it's understood and certain verses the Koran are going to have different applications in different historical epics they are necessarily going to come out I mean one of the things I would say that if you were to go out I would I mean I don't want to speak for faculty in Rotherham but I would think that if somebody like Dean Aussie were to pick up the Quran today and read it in light of the environmental crisis they would look at it and they would say that for example the story of the Jews in sort of the baccarat who became monkeys because they violated the Sabbath that's the environmental crisis in a nutshell that's it that you violated the nature of things and the commands of God for economic simplicity for economic advantage and everything fell apart it's I mean I would think that that's one of the things that would come out and other thing is if you look at it there are certain things like that that seem to be alluding directly to the way in which the environment is falling apart right now you know where either shallow we're out when the Sun is go to Beijing look up at the sky a Shem circle we're not well either no drew moon cutter odd go look up at the star at night in the middle of Los Angeles where the stars go compare that to what people used to see you know well in did I share or what they left when the camels the pregnant camels are kind of ignored left aside with all that we do with modern machinery right now we've completely lost our relationship with animals and and the commentators will tell you when the when the Quran talks about camels that it's referring to all animals because the camels were the best of animals so there it's just that was when it refers to dates it's referring to all fruits some will say because they're considered the best of fruits you know and then what either woohoo when wild animals are gathered together where are wild animals today they're in zoos and reserves they'd been gathered up they've been gathered together it doesn't mean that none of these things actually also refer to things that happen on the day of judgment but it's like all of these warnings were right there and it's something and this is one of the main things I'd say do you have to really answer your question is the scholar the historian Toynbee Arnold Toynbee he said that the one religion that had what modern man needs is his law though there was one of the jinn that had the answers that modern man needs and the problem was is that Muslims felt too beaten down and I swear if we go to actually just sit there and look in the Quran the Quran has it all there are so many issues for example economics there are actually modern scholars of economics who come and said you know one of the ways to fix problems is to get rid of income tax and a CeMAT established a small tax on residual wealth somewhere between 1 and 3 and 3% zakat that's what zakat is it's a small tax on residual wealth why tax people who are poor to begin with on their income they're just tax people who have residual wealth that they don't need that's the only thing that should be taxed you know and this is people came up with this who didn't know about Islamic principles of zakat and then there's the the issue of the multiplicity of religions this is something that the Quran is the as Ishmael Farooqi said one of the unique things about the Quran is that it's the only religious text that calls upon its readers and the people who follow that text to believe in other religions to believe in the efficacy maybe not today there's all kind of 50 laughs about that but at least the fact that they were at one point in their historical development valid religions and that their religions are from God and that their scriptures are from God that their rights are from God that they all had religious laws from God this is a huge problem that modernity has not been able to deal with is the problem of religious multiplicity a full theology of that is within the Quran and it's something that we as Muslims could give out to the world but that we haven't so there are a lot of things there that if we had I think a little bit more you might say courage as an international community that there's a lot more that we could actually contribute and really be a vanguard it really be leaders within the international community so that's kind of an answer a long-winded answer to your question any other questions yes well one of the principles that dr. nasir wanted and he mentioned this in the instructions first of all that he wanted only Muslims and so that was one of the criteria was only noseless and then how the how the essay topics came about most of them were chosen by dr. Nasir you know I would actually say that if I had chosen like I might have done one about the Quran in the Near Eastern milieu that might have been one essay that I would have preferred to have included as well but so he really chose the topics and we had discussions along the way as to whether we should include a few more and then in terms of choosing the authors dr. nasir chose most of them but I don't I got injured maths and involved and Homs Yusef also um uh Ayub at that time he wasn't the shaken Assad he was just the president of our university to do the one on on Sharia and also um Aza mean we hadn't we had several essays that we did not accept along the way from differing contributors the the essays were really something that took a long time to to get into the shape anybody here has ever edited a book now is how difficult it is to get to get your contributions on time and to get them in a shape that you really feel fits fits the volume I've gone on a long time now so so thank you

Channel: Bayan Islamic Graduate School

Views: 24,382

Rating: 4.9241381 out of 5

Keywords: Joseph Lumbard, Bayan Claremont, Study Qur'an, Study Quran, The Study Qur'an, Qur'an, Koran, Tafsir, Hamza Yusuf, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Harper Collins, Islam, Prophet Muhammad, Suhaib Webb, Zaytuna, Al-Azhar, Sufi

Id: DzGXQkTsp1E

Length: 57min 16sec (3436 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 19 2016