So as not to leave the Qur'an "abandoned"

Because of the coronavirus, the great majority of people are living shut up in their homes during Ramadan, and we must not forget that above all else Ramadan is the month of the Qur'an. Of course, the relationship between the Qur'an and the believer is not limited to Ramadan alone. At every moment of life, in all twelve months of the year and on every day, the Qur'an is a guide for believers that lights their path in this world and leads them to the right way. Even though it was sent down to all people, guidance reaches only those who open to it the eye and the ear of the heart.

For those who do not believe, the Qur'an is an ordinary text: when read, it may or may not move them, it may or may not give them information or inspiration. But for a Muslim, the Qur'an is the place where a human being addresses the Creator directly, an address that comes from the Creator and, when it is recited, a response given to that address. In other words, the text is a very complex channel of communication, since it is at once the speech of its Owner and the response of the one addressed to that speech.

Muslims generally do not read it as they would read any ordinary book. A preparation precedes the reading: with ablution, with a spiritual purification by seeking refuge in God from Satan, with humility and good manners. The relationship between the reader and a text read in this way cannot be compared with the relationship to any other text. This way of reading largely determines both the ways of understanding the Qur'an and the ways in which the Qur'an affects human beings.

The Qur'an ceases to be a text merely perceived by the mind and analyzed and decoded in its semantic dimension; it becomes a "Qur'an" that performs its function in its own distinctive way at the very moment it is read. The Qur'an is, that is, an agent whose very existence is completed by the reader's "reading" of it, and which in this state carries out its effect. The book's quality of being a Qur'an is completed not by its revelation but by its recitation, that is, when it finds the heart and the mind it is to address.

Classical hermeneutists pay little attention to the characteristics of the people who read a text, their approaches, the level of their intellect and personality, in the understanding of a text. There is a fixed, encoded meaning immanent in the text to be read and understood. All that is needed for the understanding of the text is the deciphering of the meanings encoded in it. And anyone who meets the requirement of a certain methodological procedure can do this.

Yet the manner of approach to the text (the book), the level, intention, seriousness, preparation and personality of the one approaching actually take part in the understanding of a text; they either give life to a text or leave it, in the Qur'an's own expression, "mahjur" (not understood, not read as it should be, not made into a Qur'an, not appreciated, its requirements not fulfilled).

In classical exegetical practice, too, what is decisive is an image of a Qur'an to be understood through an analysis carried out by separating out the muhkam, the mutashabih, the mushkil, the nasikh, the mansukh, the metaphorical, the rhetorical and so on in the meaning the Qur'an contains. This image in fact regards the book less as a text that is listened to and made into a Qur'an than as an object, a tool, to be analyzed and consumed. As the subject of extremely cold, academic studies, the verses of the Qur'an are treated as though they said nothing to the academic or expert examining them, and one tries to exhaust them merely through analyses of their meaning, context and historical function. Let us admit that there are also many valuable Orientalist studies produced in this manner on the textual characteristics and meanings of the Qur'an. But one must see that the relationship of those studies to the Qur'an is very different from a believer's relationship to the Qur'an.

It is thus the case that reading the Qur'an is perceived as a matter of expertise, and that this suggests distances between the book and its real addressee. This "suggestion" does not always come by such subtle ways, either. Everyone knows that there is also a far cruder and far more dominant discourse to the effect that not everyone can understand this book. Yet the Qur'an has an address aimed not even at Muslims alone but at all people, and in practice it performs its function without any need for the mediation of experts.

Of course, no one can say that understanding the Qur'an as a source of jurisprudence, law and legislation requires no expertise. But the expertise, scholarship, and faculty and level of ijtihad required by this dimension of the Qur'an do not exhaust all the ways of understanding the Qur'an. Moreover, even for those who possess this level of knowledge and expertise, a result binding on all Muslims can emerge to the extent that the Qur'an's own way of affecting them is kept open, that is, to the extent that it is approached with proper manners and decorum.

Of course everyone reads the Qur'an, can read it, and can speak and write about it in all sorts of ways, but the privilege of understanding it and of deciding how seriously to give it a place in one's life belongs only to those who believe that it was sent down from God, and to the muttaqin, the God-fearing.

The book itself says this in its opening verses: "This is the Book about which there is no doubt, a guide for the muttaqin, who believe in the unseen, establish the prayer, and spend out of what We have provided for them. And who believe in what has been sent down to you and what was sent down before you, and are certain of the hereafter."

People who do not fit this description will also certainly understand some things from the Qur'an within a hermeneutic circle, but what they will understand, or what it is that they have understood, needs to be examined separately.