Meet Tariq Ramadan, an important young Muslim intellectual from Europe. He made the news a few years ago when he was denied a visa to take up a visiting professorship at Notre Dame. His voice is independent, refusing to be a reassuring "Islamic reformation" type, at least not in terms satisfying to those who demand docility. In fact, he's the kind of serious religious liberal who could teach us what a real dialogue might look like.Ramadan was commissioned to write an essay for a recent issue of the New York Times Book Review devoted to Islam. I liked the essay, "Reading the Koran," enough to include it in the readings for my course this semester (to help get beyond the sterile contrast of Bible vs. secularism). I want my students who don't know how to think of the Bible as anything but a book (if a special one for various vague reasons) to understand what might follow were a text revealed, and how to respond to other claims of revelation. Can one just substitute "Bible" for "Koran" in the below, and if no why? Can one substitute "Plato" or "Shakespeare,"and if so why?
Between the universe and the Koran, between these two realities, between these two texts, human intelligence must learn to distinguish fundamental and universal laws from circumstantial and historical models. This intelligence must display humility in the presence of the order, beauty and harmony of creation and of revelation. At the same time it must responsibly and creatively manage its own accomplishments or interpretations, which are sources of extraordinary success, but also of injustice, war and disorder. Between Text and context, the intelligence of the heart and that of the analytical faculty lay down norms, recognize an ethical structure, produce knowledge, nourish consciousness, and develop enterprise and creativity in all spheres of human activity.
Far from being a prison, or a constraint, revelation is an invitation to mankind to reconcile itself with its deepest essence, and to find there both the recognition of its limitations and the extraordinary potential of its intelligence and its imagination. To submit ourselves to the order of the Just One and of his eternity is to understand that we are free and fully authorized to reform the injustices that lie at the heart of the order or disorder of all that is temporally human.
I also sent the essay to the members of a subcommittee of our Literature and Writing programs who have been fashioning an innovative first-year curriculum of readings - which includes some religious texts (Genesis, The Gospel of Mark, and the story of Joseph as told in the Q'uran). I'd asked what they were trying to achieve, and suggested that we might get together to consider how their selection of readings might help students understand religion as well as literature - or at least not get an unnecessarily misleading view. Since everyone seems to think she knows as much as she needs to about the Bible, I sent on the Ramadan essay, ostensibly to help them think about how to select a reading from the Q'uran.Well, we met yesterday, and they all hated the Ramadan essay. So far as I could tell, they hated it for the reason I'd recommended it - it insists that the Q'uran be read as a religious text. Someone who believed the Jewish or Christian scriptures to be divinely inspired would make a similar sort of argument: you can't read it as just another book! And even if you could, you would misrepresent a scripture's place in the literary history of a culture if you didn't attend to the way religious people read that text. But my colleagues were unmoved. We didn't have time to really discuss it, but their displeasure seemed to come down to the fact that the essay should have appeared in the Times Book Review at all. Not because it's an essay and claims that a particular book can only be read the way the essayist reads it, presumably, but because it's theological...
Would a secularist's account of reading the Q'uran be okay? And why don't we see that the same questions can arise about Jewish and Christian scriptures? The episode has made me more skeptical about "Bible as lit," and that much gladder to have assigned Ramadan's essay in my class!
