The following text is taken from the book by Massimo Campanini entitled The contemporary Islamic school of thought (216 pages, € 11.50, Il Mulino, 2009)
The Egyptian philosopher Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd (born in 1943) is another thinker who has attempted to interpret the Koran from a historical perspective. He tried to apply historical hermeneutics to the Koran, inspired by Gadamer and Ricoeur, but did so following his own original ideas. The subject of this interpretation has been at the centre of his studies ever since his PhD thesis on the Koranic exegesis of the medieval Andalusian mystic Ibn ‘Arabi. It was within the framework of this hermeneutic investigation that, at least initially, his main work was based on the “concept of the text” in Islam and on the assumption that the Koran is eminently a text. The word “text,” in Arabic nass, refers primarily to composition, unlike the Latin textus in which greater emphasis is placed on structure and construction. In the course of time, however, the concept of nass was fossilized and a number of radical and traditionalist Muslim philosophers such as Sayyid Qutb (see Chapter VI, par. 1) stated that where there is a nass, all interpretation is forbidden. Since the Koran is a nass, its interpretation would therefore be forbidden. Abu Zayd instead wished to return to the Koran all the potentiality of its contents, not only normative but also ethical, social, theological, narrative, artistic contents, etc.
The Koran’s textuality implies firstly its linguistics and historicity. These two aspects are closely linked, because, “the text can only be a cultural and historical product” since it must be explicitly linked to a certain culture and a certain social, political and anthropological reality. This leads to the conclusion that, “ultimately, religious texts are simply linguistic texts, in the sense that they belong to a given cultural structure, that they are products that comply with the laws regulating the culture they originate in and for which the language of this culture is quite rightly the main semiotic system.” Now, linguistic signs transform the content into symbols and “the linguistic analysis is the only means offered to humankind for understanding the Koranic message and, from that starting point, Islam itself.” Albeit important, the element of linguistics is only a starting point; the Koran’s historical dimension has in fact a specific philosophical scope.
It is extremely interesting to observe how, according to Abu Zayd, the Mutazilite philosophy of the Koran, stating that the Koran is not the divine eternal Word but a “creation,” is the most suited to hermeneutic orientation. Abu Zayd in fact assumes an explicit position in favour of this Mutazilite doctrine:
It is necessary to distinguish between the eternity of power and the temporality of actions. Divine power is eternal since it is an attribute immanent to being a-temporal and uncreated. Acts, on the contrary, are written in history since the original manifestation of divine power is the creation of the world, necessarily a temporal phenomenon. […] If the Word of God, in its implementation, is an act, how can the Koran that is nothing but a accident of the manifestation of this Word be uncreated and eternal? […] What will happen to the well-preserved Tables that, according to some, contain the Koranic text? Will they be eternal or created? We believe that it will necessarily be created, exactly like the “Throne” and the “Seat”, because should this not be the case, one would have to be addressing various eternal entities. Thus, if this well-preserved Table is created, how can the text written on it be eternal?
Once the revelation had started, the Koran became part of history; it was secularized. This is a process that involves the entire cosmos. The very act with which God created the universe implies that all that followed is historical.
The first divine act is the creation of the world, its emerging from the “nothingness of the shadows to the light of existence.” This act marked the beginning of history, since it is only from this moment onwards that it is possible to speak of “time.” The creation of the world is therefore per se an historical event. […] Historicity is hence an immanent feature of the creation of the world itself. It is of little importance whether or not the world was created ex nihilo or started using a raw material. The concept of historicity implies here the revelation within the temporal dimension, although this time was still at its very beginning, on the very threshold of being. This was the instant of the rift, the border separating absolute existence, divine transcendent-existence from temporal existence.
The secularisation of the Koran deriving from its historicity in no way implies a hardening of positions. One must, in fact, distinguish between sense and meaning:
One can say that sense is what the text means when it is written. However, restricting oneself to this kind of meaning would signify freezing the text in a certain era that would end up by transforming it into a monument of the past that at best would amount to pure historical testimony. But, since in the culture we are addressing, religious texts have a specific epistemological status, their meaning does not stop evolving, so much so that often the meaning of texts is a fundamental element at stake in the battle between different social forces within one same religious community. […] The sense is provided with a degree of stability while the meaning is fluid, variable depending on the interpretative perspective of its parameters, although it generally appears calibrated in its sense.
The sense can be stable, but the meaning humankind juxtaposes can vary thereby releasing the text from many bonds, which we would like to describe as “textual.”
It is rather those who read the text only as a system of eternal rules, set beyond time and space, as a sense deprived of meaning, who have “mummified” the Koran, losing the qualities of the authentic Word of God answering humankind’s most intimate needs. The Koran’s entrance into history means instead that God and humankind have connected and are in direct communication.
Contrary to religious thought focusing its attention on the enunciator of the text, in this case God, and makes it the starting point for its reflections, we instead place the recipient, hence humankind in its historical-social condition, at the centre of our interest and make humankind, so to speak, the starting and finishing point. […] The Koran is a religious text immutable in its enunciation. Coming into contact with religion, however, it loses this characteristic of immutability and becomes a dynamic concept open to multiple meanings. Immutability is a characteristic of the absolute and the sacred, just as human kind belongs to the kingdom of what is relative and mutable. But the Koran, a text that is sacred in its enunciations, becomes understandable precisely due to what is relative and mutable, hence humankind, becoming transformed into a human or, if one prefers, a humanised text.
Reducing the text to the level of human reasoning, releases its potentialities of meaning and obviously also of interpretation. “The Koran is a religious text definitively established from the perspective of literal expression, but once subject to human reason, it becomes a “Concept” that loses its fixity, while its meanings proliferate.”
Carrying out a hermeneutic investigation does not mean restricting oneself to an analysis of the text, but, exactly as predicted by Gadamer, it means sparking off the hermeneutic circle. The crucial moment in the hermeneutic circle consists of the relationship established between the interpreter and the interpreted; “exegesis is founded on the interpreter’s mind moving towards the text.” On one hand it is necessary to consider the text in its objectivity, while on the other one needs to go beyond to search for the text’s objective and goals that were established by its author, more specifically God. Abu Zayd is aware of the fact that the text’s objectivity is related to the context. As mentioned,
acknowledging a dialectic relationship between the text and reality implies taking into account two important elements. On one hand the context moulds the text. The culture and language that form the context are the subject and the text is the object. This is verifiable through the circumstances of the revelation, that provides the reader with the text’s social context. On the other hand, there is the second stage, a second aspect. The relationship between the subject and the object is inverted; the text becomes the subject, while language and culture become the object. At this point it is the text that moulds the context. With this second phase, the Koran becomes the producer of culture.
It is a peculiar form of hermeneutic circularity. By becoming the producer of culture, the Koran complies with God’s intention to make it the bearer of a message specifically addressed at humankind.
Furthermore, hermeneutic investigation of this text is cultural and not absolute. The original root is the text in its objectivity, but the text also contains a theology and hence is dynamic, with a dynamism that, as seen, is linked to a human dimension. “The word ta’wil [exegesis, not literal but allegorical and metaphorical], just as it means a return to the original root, also indicates the achievement of the objective and the aim.” Such dynamism serves so as not to harden the text into predetermined conceptual and ideological outlines, emphasising its compositional rather than structural characteristics and to allow its continuous interpretation. We are not distant from the position assumed by Paul Ricoeur when, in his phenomenological and hermeneutic investigation, he stated that possible meanings of the text are infinite.
The fact that religious texts are linguistic texts just like all others, and can be subjected to hermeneutics, and above all, the fact that these are texts that can be placed within an historical context, could raise the problem of whether they preserve (and how) their sacred value. The Koran is the Word of God, which for Muslims is a direct and eternal Word. How can these characteristics that exalt its objective sacredness be reconciled with the historicity that implies the evolution, variability and flexibility of concepts and precepts? To solve this delicate issue, which could result in (and effectively has resulted in) criticism from more traditionalist Muslims, one must carefully distinguish between the literal, linguistic, symbolic (or allegoric) meanings of the text. Abu Zayd considers it particularly important to emphasise the Koran’s symbolic value. In spite of this peculiar symbolic value, the Koran preserves or even exalts its capability to speak directly to the interpreter at both theoretical and practical levels, such as on a theological, moral or even political level. In Abu Zayd’s perspective, the text is alive when placed in contact with the activities of human beings. “Reality is the basis one cannot conceal and it is from reality that this text came, and its concepts arose from a given language and culture. It is through its contact with the activities of human beings that the sense of this text is renewed.”
This was the theory that resulted in Abu Zayd’s fame and made him one of the most famous Muslim intellectuals in the world. It was also the cause of violent protests in Egypt’s more traditionalist circles. Accused of apostasy, the philosopher was obliged to emigrate to Holland where he teaches at Leiden and Utrecht’s universities. One must however add that, in recent years, Abu Zayd has been very slowly reorienting his thinking and his interpretation. He has not yet systematically published anything in this sense or drafted a book containing his entire new analysis, but I can, however, share some of the fundamental aspects.
The starting point is a real bouleversement. The Koran is not any longer considered a text (nass), but rather a discourse. The perspective is effectively completely overturned. The Koran as a text must have a determined structure (tartib), one that is in a sense consistently consigned to its “physical” form, to the fact that it contains one hundred and fourteen chapters presented in a precise order, an equally precise number of Meccan or Medinan surahs, sentences and words that cannot be changed in place or meaning etc. The Koran in this sense is what Muslims call mushaf, the “Book” in the real sense, written by hand or printed on pages that are bound with a cover. The mushaf differs from the dogmatic, historical and spiritual content that instead the “Koran” represents. The fact of confusing the mushaf with “The Koran”, the exterior and literal aspect with its living contents, has made the Koran a closed and silent body mummified in its objectivity. Here Abu Zayd appears to explicitly reject the thesis supported in the first phase of his reflections, stating that from a certain point of view the Word of God is “immutable” because it is codified within the “text.” This does not mean that there are only negative aspects in considering the Holy Book as a text. However, “debating the Koran only as a text broadens the possibilities of interpretation and re-interpretation, but also allows ideological manipulations not only of the meaning but also of the structure, following the model of controversial interpretations by theologians.”
The Koran as a text obviously has an author, God, who composed it pursuing specific and particular objectives (maqasid). Since these objectives are predetermined by divine will, it is not possible to question their vector or their meaning in any way. The concept of the Koran as a text makes all dialectics impossible. On the contrary, reading the Koran becomes compulsory, almost “metaphysical” and the text assumes the level of dogma. This is the reason for which Islamic theology, Mutazilites included, has considered the sense of the Koran as permanently established in the mushaf. There appears to be a vertical relationship between humankind and God in the Revelation, while Abu Zayd now supports a horizontal relationship that places the interlocutors on a dialoguing level of communication and one that is not negative. As previously established, the Koran therefore is needed to put God and humankind in contact, but the two interlocutors occupy a different “spatial” position and, after all, one that is more favourable to humankind.
As one can see, a number of Abu Zayd’s fundamental premises are impaired or even rejected. Against this hypothesis, now the Egyptian philosopher proposes that one should consider the Koran as a discourse. If it is a discourse, the Koran has an open structure in which it is possible to discover parallel arguing threads. Analogously, the Koran no longer has one single or more than one single objective and a determined mono-directional sense, as obviously occurred in the case of the concept of a text. The Koran presents different options depending on the different situations in which it was revealed. Obviously, in this sense, it maintains its historical characteristics. For example, it is possible to find in the Koran incitements to war and incitements to peace. This, from Abu Zayd’s point of view, does not mean that the Koran is a totally peaceful or totally bellicose text, but that the various surahs mentioning peace and war were revealed as answers to specific historical circumstances in Muhammad’s prophetic experience and in the affirmation of Islam as a religion.
The consequences of this premise are of the utmost importance and Abu Zayd is fully committed to developing them in his lessons and publications. Firstly, the Koran as a discourse is essentially dialogue and debate; it does not convey one single and immutable ideology of metaphysical scope, but it encourages debate, dialectics, and an exchange of opinions. The Koran’s flexibility that previously seemed guaranteed only by interpretations, by hermeneutics, now appears to be guaranteed by the fact that it makes available to its reader (and to believers) ethical and moral reflections, theological suggestions, behavioural precepts that can in turn and in different ways answer needs that arise. The Egyptian philosopher insisted in particular (first of all with me) on the Koran’s argumentative characteristics.
The advantages are innumerable. First of all the doctrine of abrogation with its dangerous consequence is nullified. A curious doctrine of Koranic sciences states that some surahs of the Holy Book abrogate others (as explicitly wished by God). So radical or extremist Muslims have claimed that the surahs “of the sword” abrogate those that are more peaceful and open to compromise, legitimising in this way their armed struggle. If the Koran is a discourse, this is no longer possible, because every statement in the Koran must be contextualised. It is its moral message, its religious ideas that are universal. In the same way, there is a move towards resolving an accusation frequently levelled at the Koran; that of containing prophetic tales in contradiction with those in the Jewish Bible or the Christian Gospels. The various stories of the prophets, from Abraham to Moses to Jesus, do not in any way claim to tell the real history of those great personalities, but are included in the Koran precisely as “discourses”, literary narrations with a profound moral, eschatological or paraenetical meaning.
Another analogous case concerns that of the attitude towards, let us say, Christians or Jews. The Koran neither condemns nor absolves univocally; it comments on Christians and Jews depending on the need and historical context. “The Koranic discourse concerning the People of the Book, hence Jews and Christians, is par excellance a discourse of negation,” says Abu Zayd. This however does not apply to everyone; towards pagans and polytheists the Koran is unequivocal.
The position involving non-negotiation with polytheists has resulted in an exclusive attitude with the only possible form of communication being dispute, debate and rejection. With believers instead the discourse varies depending on how they behave; if they succeed they are praised, when they make mistakes they are criticized and condemned.
One should perhaps insist on the line of reasoning used regarding Jews, in view of the profound historical hostility that, following centuries of peaceful coexistence, has in recent times opposed the Muslim community to the Jewish one. Albeit acknowledging that Jews are the receivers of the Revelation and were elected the People of God, the Koran often states that they betrayed the trust God placed in them and hence have been abandoned and are destined to perdition. The Koran states on many occasions that Muslims must consider Jews as among their most ruthless enemies. Well, according to Abu Zayd, this condemnation made sense and was justified in the days of the Prophet Muhammad, against whom the Jews resorted first to derision and then to betrayal. It cannot, however, be considered valid in all eras and places. It must be contextualised and, considering the Koran not a text but a discourse, is helpful in this;
Not being capable of appreciating the discursive structure [of the Koran] is analogous to believing that its discourse can be addressed at all Jews even today. It is not only a question of contextualisation, which is in any case pivotal in the discursive analysis, but above all a question of what the discourse says concerning the context and the how. Now the problem lies in understanding what is historical and what is universal, a problem that keeps all modern liberal Muslim scholars of the Koran busy. If one remains confined to the Koran just as a text, in the end the conservatives will win. While liberals, for example, emphasise the “togetherness” [of Muslims and Jews, for example in the early years of Medina] as universal, abolishing the hostility that remains contextualised within a negative past, conservatives apply the principle of “abrogation” to view this “togetherness” in a historical perspective as the abrogated aspect, and universalising “hostility” as the abrogating aspect. In the current situation of the unresolved Israeli-Palestinian trauma, which hermeneutics or meanings are valid? Conservatives are certain that this means the ghetto, separation, isolation, like the wall built by Mr. Sharon.
Conservative Muslims, restricting themselves to reading the Koran as a text and applying the principle of abrogation, consider the surahs hostile to the Jews as a final condemnation to be applied at all times and in all places. Liberal Muslims instead consider the Koran as dialogue, well aware that the condemnation of the Jews it contains is contextualised in their then hostile attitude towards the Prophet, while it is possible to valorise other surahs that instead encourage dialogue with the People of the Book. As one can see, in this case also, Abu Zayd reserves an important place to hermeneutics. This science in fact can help study as a discourse, in this case the Koranic discourse, capable of reconstructing and integrating within its fabric the traditions and events of varied origins such as warnings, praise and condemnations that are themselves as many discourses.
(Translated by Francesca Simmons)