Methods

I'm lying around the house with a mancold, feeling deeply sorry for myself, which is why this is taking a while.

But I'm determined to get this done and sign off for a break, so here we go. Sardar's methods. How does he seek to reconcile the irreconciliable opposites of secular liberalism and Qur'anic literalism? More bluntly, what does he do with the awkward bits?

Sometimes he just flat out ignores them. Take the murder of the calf worshippers. In spite of worshipping the golden calf, a cardinal sin in monotheism, they were forgiven, says Sardar.

Whereas the text says So turn (in repentance) to your Maker, and slay yourselves (the wrong-doers); that will be better for you in the sight of your Maker (2:54). In other words, they were only forgiven once they'd murdered the polytheists among them.

He hasn't actually lied, but it's a dishonest evasion, roughly comparable with a news report that said Dennis Nielsen had forgiven his victims. I pointed out the omission in the comments, but got no response.

Then there's the appeal to metaphor. He uses this about the constant gloating descriptions of unbelievers burning in hell. As yet, he hasn't explained what it's a metaphor for.

Alternatively, complaints about specific verses are brushed off with the remark that you have to read every verse in the context of all the other verses.

And most commonly recently, there's the appeal to historical context. Apparently half of it is only relevant to the time when it was written.

The appeal to context fails for the same reason as the appeal to metaphor or holistic reading. None of these approaches are supported by the text. At no point does it say it's all right, it's just a metaphor, or some of this advice has a sell-by date, or you'll need to cross reference this bit.

But there's another, more serious problem for all three techniques, which is that they're applied selectively. So one moment Sardar is telling you you shouldn't make too much of a single verse, the next he's making three posts out of one use of the word middle. Then he says the horrors are just metaphors, but lets the nice bits mean exactly what they say.

In recent posts, the arbitrary division between the global and the historically specific seems to be his main method. The second sura apparently jumps from the contextual to the general constantly, without ever actually saying it's doing so.

He's aware of the problem. At one point he says The test for those who aspire to become a middle community is to distinguish between the circumstantial, that which is specific to a particular time and place and the general principle which will always be applicable but which needs to find the appropriate form to serve the needs of another time and place.

It's nice that he's noticed the issue, but it might help if he brought some of his much vaunted scholarly skills to bear on it. He doesn't for instance try to establish general principles which would differentiate the one from the other, or highlight verses in the text which can be taken as symbolising the change from one mode of interpretation to the other. He just chooses the interpretation which suits his case.

So all the perfection claim means in the end is that you can defend the book by going through it and making a series of arbitrary decisions. This nice bit is literal, that horrid bit is metaphorical. This nugget of pre-industrial wisdom only applies to seventh century Arabia, that nugget is for all time. This verse should be read in relation to that verse, which stands on its own, and isn't affected by the first verse.

But if such techniques are allowed, then any book can be made to seem perfect. You could do a similar job on the Iliad, for instance, and when you'd finished it would look almost respectable. The courage and the piety of the participants could be talked up, and the war crimes written off as metaphor or context.

Which leads me to wonder why Muslims are prepared to settle for so little. Surely if a book was the work of God, the divinity of it would leap off the page. Why would you need so many arbitrary decisions? Why would God put in the bit about slaying calf worshippers? Or walling up lewd women? Or the right to beat your wife? Why would it all be written from the male point of view anyway?

When discussing slavery, wouldn't God feel the need to distance himself from it? Surely he'd treat it as a far worse crime than polytheism? When discussing homosexuality, why wouldn't he celebrate it as the public boon it so clearly is?

But maybe that's what happens when you tell people something is true from age six. The absurdity of it is made invisible to them. As Ed Harris says in the Truman Show, we accept the reality with which we are presented.