"The Qur'an is the needle, our readings the thread": building Muslim subjectivity

The relationship established with the Quran is a matter at the center of a person's quality and process of being a Muslim. For every Muslim the Quran is a message sent down from God specially to him, addressing him specially. For that reason, problems concerning understanding the Quran are handled at a very different level from those who read it without believing in the Quran. This Book, which for an unbeliever is an ordinary text, is for the Muslim a form of private messaging between himself and the owner of the message. This gives the Muslim a different privilege compared with others in understanding the Quran.

In fact, there are countless stories throughout history of people who, though not Muslim, read this Book, were affected and became Muslims. It is an experience frequently repeated today as well. At this point, everyone has a meeting point of their own with the truth this Book points to. But from the moment that meeting takes place, the relationship between the Quran and the reader begins to separate from an ordinary text-reader relationship.

The greatest handicap of theology, and of Kalam, which is its language translated into the Islamic world, is that it constantly speaks about God, treating God as an object, subject and problem of science. Yet God, before and beyond being a Being to be spoken about, is a Being to be felt, turned toward, worshipped, confided in, prayed to, befriended, spoken with.

Not talking about God, but talking with God. Reading the Quran is precisely a way of talking with God Himself by going beyond talking about God, instead of wandering in metaphysical shallows. As this Book tells of God, it also tells of man, so the reader gets to know himself as much as he meets God. Thus the wonderful circle between knowing one's Lord and knowing oneself begins to operate in the most effective way. Of course, all this comes about by reading the Quran properly and with due manners (adab).

And again of course, it can be recalled how great an obstacle the difference of language, the difference of history, the difference of society and experience, and the lack of knowledge about the Quran's particular aspects can pose to the formation of this ground of understanding. Of course, on the other hand, one must not hold back from getting to know the Quran and from efforts to approach a more effective ground of understanding with it. In fact, we had said earlier, on the occasion of the publication of Hüseyin Kazım Kadri's translation Nûru'l-Beyan (Vadi Yayınları), that today the Quran is read far more than in the past, and, surprisingly, even more than in Ottoman times. This relationship between modernization and more reading of the Quran may be seen by many as a contradiction or paradox. But we said that when one is versed in the nature of the Quran as much as in the nature of modernization, it is not at all surprising.

Of course, in parallel with the spread of its reading, knowledge about the Quran and awareness also increase. Today's readers of the Quran, who meet it not through a single translation but through many translations, conversations and tafsirs, can progressively reach a point where they feel they are overcoming the language gap between themselves and the Quran. Of course, not at a level that extends to everyone at the same time.

Perhaps one dimension of the reflexivity of modern man that Anthony Giddens speaks of in The Consequences of Modernity (Ayrıntı Yayınları) makes itself felt here for a Muslim subject too. That is, medicine, economics, law, physics and so on, fields once open only to their experts, are turning in the modern and postmodern world into subjects in which everyone can increasingly take part. This can be adapted much more easily to the field of religion and theology, and indeed it is greatly in keeping with the nature of the relationship the Quran aims to establish with the individual.

The relationship with the Quran has always been at the center of the construction of Muslim subjectivity throughout history. Today too this has a distinct cautionary importance for those who always try to explain the emergence and development of Islamism by centering on relations with the West. Islamism cannot be confined to the context of a mere reaction to Westernization or a reaction to Western colonialism. In fact, the first Islamist discourses opposed deviation from the essence of Islam, the neglect of relations with the Quran, Islam's having turned into a religion of innovation (bidat) and superstition (hurafe), and the intermediaries who had come between God and the servant and perverted religion, more than they opposed Westernization. And this opposition is not a matter that can be squeezed into the context of the Islamic world's relations with the West. In every period of Islamic history there have been movements that opposed such degeneration of religion and called Muslims to return to the essence of Islam, with the Quran and the authentic Sunnah at its center. The other reading betrays a tendency that tries to simplify Islamism as a parvenu, rootless movement, or one whose roots lie outside.

In my view, the most important problem (though from an Islamist perspective) of Salman Sayyid's book "Recalling the Caliphate," which we discussed earlier, is that it overemphasizes the position (even if privileged) that Islamism holds against a West-centered world. Yet in a chapter of his own book titled "Hermeneutics," he also gives very valuable analyses to the effect that the relationship with the Quran always lies at the center of the construction of Muslim subjectivity.

In these analyses he sets out very well the hermeneutic conditions under which, despite different approaches, levels and disputes in reading the Quran, the Quran can be the most important unifying element of the entire Islamic ummah.

Perhaps we will continue from another angle later, but as I conclude, a small quotation from Sayyid that can set in motion many associations and images: "The Quran is the needle, and our readings are the threads that stitch the ummah together."