Comments on: God Speaks Arabic

By: reenad

reenad — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 17:56:24 +0000

Hi there,
i am an undergraduate student,writing a project on koran translation. i chose Dr Laleh Bakhtiar’s translation THE SUBLIME KORAN
What do you think of this translation.
Many thanks

By: tsk

tsk — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

sweet…. i was thinking of adding a “holy book” section to my bookshelf and i was going to ask for a recommended english translation. now i don’t have to.

my question is, though, what about an explainer? can you recommend any books (and i’m not in one of your classes, so one or two would do) that explain sections or put them into even more context so that an outside reader would have an easier time with the text? not as glib as cliff’s notes, but i think you get the idea.

By: sepoy

sepoy — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

tsk: I would recommend 2 books.
Michael Cook’s A Very Short Introduction to Koran. Which is very short and quite good.
This will give you clues on the text of the Qur’an and how to understand it as such.
The second, way more important recommendation goes to the issue of context I discussed above. Imagine the Qur’an to be a Director’s Commentary to the Life of Muhammad with lots of making-of extras and special features on the history of the region and its people.
As such, the best place to start is with a biography of the Prophet – and one that USES Qur’an (and other historical sources) – like F. E. Peters’ Muhammad and the Origins of Islam.
Incidentally, I have an extra copy :)

By: desesperanto

desesperanto — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

how did people reconcile the emphasis on orality and the holiness of a written text? if orality was so great why didn’t god just make mohd. memorize it?

is this view that orality was not influential in the islamic world until colonialism the definitive/uncontroverisal one? you mention the slowness to print a quran as indicating the preference for orality but there were numerous written qurans, and i’ve read about the centrality of paper to islamic cultures (eg. Paper Before Print) and mohd’s view that paper was a way to spread the quran.

what were the printers of 1493 in istanbul printing?

By: sepoy

sepoy — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

desesperanto: God did make Mohammad just memorize the Qur’an – who then had his closest suhaba memorize it in turn – as it was revealed. There was only one copy of written Qur’an (mostly fragments – compiled AFTER Muhammad during Abu Bakr) until ‘Uthman and the first fitna (civil war). Casualties of Muslims who had the Qur’an memorized caused consternation that with their death, the word of God will be lost. Hence, copies were made from all extant versions and that is the definitive form it took.
Now, you confuse ‘writing’ the Qur’an (in manuscripts etc.) with ‘print’. My argument about orality is in re: to the arrival of print culture in the Islamic world. Hundreds of thousands of hand-copied manuscripts of Qur’an existed in the Islamic world until the c. 19th.
The printers in Istanbul were jewish businesses.

By: desesperanto

desesperanto — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

re:printing, i was actually asking — you use the paucity of print qurans as *evidence* of the emphasis on orality but why doesn’t the popularity of written qurans indicate an enthusiasm for the written/not oral?

By: sepoy

sepoy — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

simply because illustrated manuscripts of the Qur’an were not used in any religious, pedagogical or cultural ceremonies. They were commissioned as works of devotion to be housed in sacred spaces. Anyone wishing to know the Qur’an was not given a manuscript but was handed to a Hafiz for instruction.
The ascendancy of print culture left the religious elite holding the notion that a cheaply produced and widely distributed copy of the Qur’an would prohibit people from giving it the proper respect.
The basic argument is that knowledge of the Sacred was transmitted orally – whether through memorization of the Qur’an or through the Sufi master’s instruction or intonation. If you look at the way religious instruction is constructed to this day, you will find the same emphasis.
The Islamic model for knowledge throughout medieval and pre-modern times was to personally visit the Master – and if that fails, a direct student of the Master. Even the ‘isnad is build concisely around the framework of X heard from Y who narrated etc. Fact checking the ‘isnad is done via judging whether X could actually physically have heard it from Y or not – not that X read about it in a publication from Y.

By: Oscar Chamberlain

Oscar Chamberlain — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

The emphasis on the oral transmission of knowledge has its good points. The Word, taken literally, can lead people into some really dreadful mistakes. While some oral masters have been fanatics, others have counciled against literal fanaticism.

I wonder if anyone has even done comparitive work on the shift from oral to written transmission of knowledge in religion. Hindus, and I believe Buddhists as well were reluctant to write down their major teachings for centuries. First century Christianity is particularly fascinating as the oral tradition of Jesus’s sayings moved around the Mediterranean along with the letters of various Apostles.

By: sepoy

sepoy — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Oscar: There have been a couple of studies. Ong’s Orality and Literacy is what comes to my mind straight away – and it is a brilliant work. A hot new topic amid my colleagues is Tazkira literature – which are sayings of Sufi masters written down by disciples. I expect much new material on the transmission of knowledge to emerge out of this new scholarship.