Week Two Blog – Mary Petersen-Unger
In week two many of the readings dealt with the difficulties of understanding the Qur’an and the different levels of understanding the Qur’an. I was feeling a great deal of frustration. I felt that I would never be able to gain any, but a slight cursory, access to what Muslim’s believe to be the divine word of God. How could I possibly grasp an understanding if even many of the translations were fraught with errors and misunderstandings as was discussed in the article by Ziauddin Sardar, Reading the Qur’an – The Contemporary Relevance of the Sacred Text of Islam? As Sardar pointed out, a translation can only present an interpretation of the Qur’an (Sardar, pg. 41). I wanted to understand the actual living words revealed by God to the Prophet Muhammad! What is it in the Arabic language that would draw people to tears when they were reading the Qur’an? Sardar, a Muslim from Pakistan, wrote about the warm feelings he felt when his mother read the Qur’an to him when he was young and how he was able to internalize the Qur’an through her reading, “…for mothers start reading the Qur’an and getting the child to repeat the words, again and again, till the Arabic sounds become familiar and can be recited from memory. And so it is that our connection to the Qur’an is infused with associations of the warmest and most enduring of human bonds. The Qur’an enters our lives as an integral part of home and domesticity, the environment in which we become aware of ourselves as a person” (Sardar, pg. 3). As a westerner how was I ever going to have this kind of warm association and intimate knowledge of the Qur’an? Sardar spoke about the difficulty of accessing the Qur’an, “The Qur’an does not yield its meaning without a struggle with its text. To see the significance of an allegory or metaphor, to separate the truth from the simile, the eternal from the transient, the universal from the local, one has to struggle with words and concepts, contexts and interconnections, and the structure and style of the Qur’an. This is not an easy or quick task. It requires effort and patience” (Sardar, pg. 11). My poem expressed the frustration that I was feeling during week two over trying to understand the Qur’an without understanding Arabic and with little understanding of the Muslim faith.
Sardar points out four reasons that scholars have used against translating the Qur’an from Arabic: The supposed superiority of the Arabic language; the unifying of Muslim nations of one faith and one language; the problem with translations being an interpretation of the Qur’an; and finally that translations could subvert the meaning of the Qur’an (Sardar, pgs 41-42). Sardar gives a final justification for the need for translations of the Qur’an, “Moreover, it would be an odd God who, having established diversity and citing different languages and people as one of His signs in the Qur’an, then proceeded to defy it by requiring that He can only be understood in a single language” (Sardar, pg. 41). I finally came to the conclusion that I would just need to let myself absorb the Qur’an over time. The only way that I would have any understanding of the Qur’an would be through absorbing the beauty of the Arabic language and the words, even though I would not be able to understand them, and by closely examining the artistic endeavors that have been created by followers of the Islamic faith. With a completely open heart and mind I would hopefully come closer to understanding the religion. Perhaps understanding Arabic will be in my future – but at this point I will need to rely upon translations, however imperfect, and to listening and looking at the various art forms to give me an understanding of the Qur’an and of Islam.