Blog 4: The Opening - my explanation

Blog 4 is about the first seven verses of the Qu'ran, which in the translations Sardar uses go like this. Each line is given three different translations.

In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful.
In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful.
In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful.

Praise be to Allah, the Cherisher and Sustainer of the worlds;
Praise be to Allah, Lord of the Worlds,
All praise is due to Allah, the Lord of the Worlds.

Most Gracious, Most Merciful;
The Beneficent, the Merciful.
The Beneficent, the Merciful.

Master of the Day of Judgment.
Master of the Day of Judgment,
Master of the Day of Judgment.

Thee do we worship, and Thine aid we seek.
Thee (alone) we worship; Thee (alone) we ask for help.
Thee do we serve and Thee do we beseech for help.

Show us the straight way,
Show us the straight path,
Keep us on the right path.

The way of those on whom Thou hast bestowed Thy Grace, those whose (portion) is not wrath, and who go not astray.
The path of those whom Thou hast favoured; Not the (path) of those who earn Thine anger nor of those who go astray.
The path of those upon whom Thou hast bestowed favors. Not (the path) of those upon whom Thy wrath is brought down, nor of those who go astray.

Madeleine Bunting describes these verses as impenetrable. Frankly, if that's enough to baffle her I'm glad I don't have to teach her mail merge.

Let me help. No honestly, it's the least I can do. Let's start by reducing the three versions to one and taking out the repetition.

In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful, the Beneficent.
Praise be to Allah, the Cherisher and Sustainer of the worlds, Lord of the Worlds.
Master of the Day of Judgment.
Thee alone do we worship, and thee alone we ask for help.
Show us the straight way, the right path.
The way of those on whom Thou hast bestowed Thy Grace, not the path of those upon whom Thy wrath is brought down, nor of those who go astray.

Now let's remove the pointless capital letters, replace the deliberately anachronistic words with modern synonyms and tidy up the phrasing.

In the name of Allah, most gracious and merciful, who does good. Praise be to Allah, lord of the worlds, who cherishes and sustains them. You're master of the day of judgment. You're the only one we worship or ask for help. Show us the right path, the way of those you show grace to, not the path of those upon whom Thy wrath is brought down, nor of those who go astray.

I left the last bit, because that kind of thing only really sounds right when you phrase it anachronistically. To be fair, it's an entire sura in which no-one is explicitly burnt at all, metaphorically or otherwise.

Except that as Sardar says, you have to read every bit in relation to every other bit, so given all the burning in the rest of it it's fairly clear what wrath means. I'll have (much) more to say on this subject. And just saying it's a metaphor won't cover it, because I'll be arguing that specific passages very clearly aren't.

And Sardar himself has limits to his liberalism. As he says here

There will be a day when all different worlds will return to their source, the forgiving and just Lord, to receive their individual share of reward and punishment.

So don't go thinking he's come further than he has. I'm sure he'd fit in just fine in Texas.

To go back to the seven verses, though, what's so impenetrable about that? I've stripped it of its poetic phrasing, but that's all.

And maybe that's it. Maybe it isn't about the actual meaning of the words. Maybe it's about the rhetorical impact. Sardar certainly waxes lyrical about it on that level. Which makes sense if you remember that Muhammad was illiterate, and delivered the text orally. Assuming he ever did of course.

And taken in context with the rest of the book, there are endless reams of possibilities. Why a certain word in one context, a slightly different word in another? Why repetition in one place, and not in another?

But these are games you can play with any text. Postmodernists delight themselves for hours, taking bus timetables and phone books, and weaving fabrics of meaning from them. It's not without its rewards, but the moment you start playing you move away from ultimate meaning. That's the whole point of it.

And this is the problem with the metaphorical spiritual approach. It borrows postmodern techniques for its purposes, but it can't face seeing them through. To make the attribution of superhuman origins stick, you'd have to show that a religious text was rich in meaning beyond the possibility of human authorship, and humans are so good at that kind of thing it's an unachievable goal.

It's particularly true of this text, when the surface meaning is so clear. God made the world, various things about God are admirable, we don't worship anyone else, and so on. There's really no reason to be so perplexed.