Medium: watercolor
In the first chapter of Ziauddin Sardar’s book Reading the Qur’an: The Contemporary Relevance of the Sacred Text of Islam, Sardar includes a line that especially resonated with me. The chapter, entitled “The Qur’an and Me” is centered on the author’s personal background with the Qur’an and with Islamic faith in a more broad sense. He includes a description of his introduction to formal religious education: “Children begin their reading at the end. So I started with the 30th Sipara. It contains short chapters, or suras, some just a few verses long, all rather easy to commit to memory. When I had memorized most of the chapters in this Sipara, and it was time to tackle the longer suras, my mother decided to send me to the madrasa, or religious school, at the local mosque. It is vaguely equivalent to going to Sunday School, but with rather more emphasis on the school since the curriculum is set and the same everywhere: learning to read the Qur’an. Most mosques have a madrasa attached to them; and I suppose my madrasa was like a madrasa in any mosque, anywhere in the world.” (4)
This paragraph, particularly the last clause of the last sentence, stuck out to me and has remained a sentiment I think about when synthesizing the material from lecture and discussion readings. We spend a lot of time talking about the importance of differentiating Islamic art, traditions, and faith from one time period, region, or community from those from different contexts. And it is true, of course, that Islam can and does look very different in different contexts. Though many students of the Qur’an “begin their reading at the end” with the 30th Sipara, I am sure that some do not; it is also unlikely that every student studies in a madrasa similar to the one that Sardar describes in the chapter. However, regardless of the specific motive for attending madrasa, students in the class learn to read the same texts in potentially comparable settings. This paragraph reminded me of the strength of likely similarities in the experiences of many people who identify as Muslims, and of many young students learning to read the Qur’an.
For my creative response this week, I chose to explore the universality of the madrasa setting by highlighting the major difference between many madrasas: the world outside the classroom window. I imagined the view that a student might have outside the window in three different settings: one from the madrasa of the urban mosque on a busy street that I pass by frequently when driving at home (center); one from the madrasa of a mosque in rural Anatolia, Turkey that is described in a novel I read (right); and one in a suburban area, like the neighborhood where I live (left). I chose to use watercolor as the medium for this project because I was inspired by Sardar’s methodical support of viewing the Qur’an as a multi-layered text that can help readers see truth. Watercolor is a somewhat unforgiving medium that can require many layers of work to create rich color and that requires flexibility when mistakes are made. I think this multi-layered approach and flexibility are similar to how Sardar advises one should view the Qur’an.
Z. Sardar, Reading the Qur’an