ellenrobo

The reaction to this week is based on “Reading the Qur’an: The Contemporary Relevance of the Sacred Text of Islam.” The clear split presented in the reading between the more maternal, loved filled side and the more structured, fear inducing side of the Qur’an and Islam is what I found particularly interesting from this week.  Sardar’s personal experience was with learning the Qur’an on his mother’s lap and trying to understand the  meaning of the words.  His questioned the words to fully understanding the meaning behind the words, leaving behind the “rather simplistic position of the Qur’an” (21) that arises from mere memorization.  “My emotional connection became more complex once I started to read the Qur’an with meaning.”  This is in contrast to the systematic, robotic way the Qur’an was memorized in the madrasas he visited in Parkistan “I could see that it had become a much more regimented and violent environment….This was not about inspiring the love of a Sacred Text” (7). Throughout lecture and section I am struct by this tension in Islam, that arises in many disciplines, between a personal reaction to religion and a more systematic reaction.

To represent this artistically, I wrote the word Quran and split it between warm, comforting colors and round shapes to represent Sadar’s own experiences and crisper lines with cool colors of blues and greens to represent the type of Quran teaching that occurs in the madrasas.  I tried to differentiate the patters that filled the letters of the Quran between the two areas.  The warm colored patterns are much more complex because the understanding of the Quran is much deeper when it is imbued with love and meaning. The patterns in the cool section are much more symmetrical and self-similar because the meaning that one gets from the robotic understanding of the text is not very different from any one else’s understanding. I wanted to impart this split in ideas.  By drawing a dividing line, the divide is much more pronounced that it is in reality.  There are many degrees in between these two extremes.