With humans in portions, how can the path be one?

Human beings are divided into parts, and their paths, experiences and levels are of every variety. Does the Quran, whose basic emphasis is Tawhid, aim to eliminate this diversity and these differences entirely, in the sense we know? After all, how will the tawhid to which the Book invites, with its strong emphases on constantly using reason, thinking, reflecting and comprehending, unite a humanity that in essence harbors difference?

Yet the Quran itself constantly emphasizes the difference among people too, and says that these differences come about by its own choice and will, and that this holds for people both a "sign" (ayet) and a "test." There is also a strong emphasis against these human communities, expressed as different communities, branches, tribes, languages, understandings, merits and wretches (şakileler), using these differences as grounds for superiority over one another.

The different knowledge given to people, the different merits, the different property and possessions are all adornments, accidental features, of this world, which is nothing but "play and amusement." To get stuck on what God gave or did not give people, as part of their test, in language, race, color, wealth and poverty, to try to make them eternal, to value them more than play and amusement warrant and to boast or grieve over them constitutes the real motivations of idolatry.

The discourse of the Quran is an invitation that makes all these differences unimportant, but makes them unimportant by recognizing them, giving them their due, and, when the time comes, establishing their fiqh and law, and binds them all to a whole, to the principle of unity. While historicism, with its comparisons made from today back to the past, tends to see a difference and to bury the message of the Quran in history, as it were, because of this difference, it ignores that similar differences may be found among the people of the period in which the Quran was revealed too, and that the Quran was targeting precisely that difference.

Differences among people inevitably bring with them different perceptions of the address and hence different interpretations. Although the Quran in the end comes from a divine source that is the source of absolute knowledge, the human being it addresses is a being afflicted, with all his historical mortality, with his limits, his forgetfulness, his time and place and his feelings.

The attempt to historicize the divine address that man, in his historical being, faces is first of all an effort to enter, by crossing the limit, a realm that man, with his mortality, cannot grasp and understand. If he has the power, no one will stop him, but it is obvious that the knowledge resources he possesses will not suffice for it. Indeed, even the differences that appear among the ways of reading the Quran all manifest in a way that points to this limitedness of man.

As Salman Sayyid puts it, "The gap between reading the Quran and understanding the Quran cannot be closed. We can never say that our inner mental state is the same as the mental state of the creator of the Quran."

In fact, the desire in Quranic interpretations to catch what is in God's mind, as it were, brings the effort of historicity close to a kind of psychoanalysis of God. At times this work can seep at certain levels into the studies put forward in the name of the "science of maqasid" (the real purpose behind the rulings of the Quran, the benefit-maslahah it tries to secure). It is therefore very important that the science of maqasid be pursued with a sound humility befitting the limits of the God-servant relationship; otherwise it is inevitable that it will be subject to an ideological instrumentalization of political demands on the path of modernizing Islam and the Quran.

That the Quran can be subject to different readings and interpretations is a sign not of its historicity but precisely of the richness and depth of meaning that corresponds to the order of differences God created. That the Quran can be a source of gleams addressed to every person's own experience, feelings, troubles and level does not of course show that it is also a source of every kind of meaning contrary to one another. The Quran itself says that some verses are muhkem, having a definite meaning and being such as should be understood the same way by everyone, whereas some verses are müteşabih, that is, verses whose meaning is closed, metaphorical-figurative, or which it is impossible for everyone to understand the same way (Ali-imran: 7).

On the other hand, there is no special indication of which verses are muhkem and which are müteşabih. When something is pointed to in the Quran but its detail is not given, one generally resorts to the Prophet's (S) role as explainer on the matter, but there too no detailed indication is found of which verses are müteşabih. And among the ulema who touch on this subject, there is no unity regarding what they point to as müteşabih. That is, the müteşabih itself has turned into a subject of debate. Precisely as a manifestation of a state of creative ambiguity, as Thomas Bauer points out in his book "The Culture of Ambiguity and Islam" (İletişim Yayınları), whose Turkish translation will soon be published.

God knows best, of course, as is said in the müteşabih verse itself, but I think that müteşabihness points to an open-ended field of meaning that emerges largely through differences of level and understanding among people. That is, with the conclusion Allame Tabatabai too reached, what is müteşabih to one can be muhkem to another.

Despite all this scatteredness produced by differences of level, history, temperament (meşrep), sect (mezhep) and so on, the Quran can still be, for all Muslims, a unifying text in a way of its own. Precisely as Sayyid points out in his metaphor: "The Quran is the needle, and our readings are the threads that stitch the ummah together."