Making the Qur'an "speak" instead of "listening" to it

We spoke about the particularity of the believer's position before the Quran. It is not hard to understand that this position is very different from a purely academic approach to the Quran.

Sometimes an intense eagerness arises for a creative reading of the Quran that will meet the needs of our age. It is in the nature of the academic approach, it is in search of the original; it wants to do what has not been done before, to say what has not been said, to see what has not been seen, and if it cannot see, to invent. Meanwhile, there is a high probability that academia does not itself know, in the phrase of the late Hüsamettin Arslan, under the influence of which "epistemic community" it is searching for what. Because epistemic communities have ideologies of their own accord. If a person does not enter into successful contemplation, reflection, and self-accounting and self-watchfulness (muhasebe-murakabe), if he cannot attain, in newer terms, reflexivity, he cannot notice these ideologies that have beset him either. Thinking himself perfectly objective, scientific, someone who has understood everything, he can mistake the small knowledge he thinks he has reached for universal knowledge and pronounce rulings. Man's historicity is something like this. Man himself is afflicted with such ordinary communal or epistemic community ideologies, of which he is often not even aware.

Spinoza has very beautiful analogies about the layers of our knowledge of the universal as a living being. What could the dimension of the universal be for a blood worm? The vein it is in? And what would the whole be for that vein?.. Thus, by enlarging universes layer by layer, we can test our perceptions and knowledge about the whole.

Of course, for human beings the limits and dimensions are very different. There are ways of reaching the whole by making comparisons about things one does not know. Just as, like the blood worm's position within the vein, whatever we know, we can reach certain knowledge about the transience of our own knowledge.

About the text we read, whether we want it beforehand or not, we have a prejudice, a pre-knowledge, a pre-understanding. As we read, these prejudices of ours change and transform but do not disappear. Our pre-knowledge changes, perhaps is corrected, increases. Our pre-understanding is caught in the hermeneutic circle that takes place between it and what we meet in the text, and in this circle it of course keeps turning, changing, transforming, narrowing or widening.

The text we face is the Quran, and the basic knowledge that determines our pre-understanding of it also determines how we will read it. It is the word of the "Creator," who knows everything absolutely, who has taught us what we did not know, whose being we can neither depict nor conceive. We cannot decide what we will hear, what we will listen to, from a "Being" whom we address while He declares Himself transcendent above every body and everything that exists that we know. We open the ear of the soul and listen, we open the eye of the heart and try to see His verses.

There is of course nothing to say about an ordinary person's reading of the Book. For an ordinary person this Book is nothing but a text like any other text. How he will or will not be affected when he reads depends entirely on his own pre-understanding, prejudices, experiences, and of course on his being affected during the reading.

But the believer's intimate relationship with the Quran also determines how he will read it. This does not mean that every believer who establishes this relationship correctly will always understand the same things. On the contrary, every person who keeps himself open to the call of the Quran will find in it what will cast light on him and illuminate his way, will sometimes hear voices meant just for him, and see verses too.

For an approach that objectifies the Quran and decides for itself what it will say, the possibility of the Quran closing itself is very high. The Cartesian objectivist approach that leads to this closing brings such a loss of blessing not only for the Quran. When approaching nature too, man invites the same fate. The meddlesomeness of speaking in place of what he should hear and listen to, and of determining for himself what he should hear from it, is the summary of man's attitude toward nature and being in general in the modern period, and the state which this summary has brought along the path of colonizing the world is plain to see.

One must listen to the Quran by lending the ear of the soul; we must take seriously what the Quran tells us at first. The ambition to surpass and go beyond what it says at first can sometimes lead one to put the Quran aside and say, in its name, everything that has nothing to do with it. This attitude, which we have always identified regarding historicism, holds far more for some Sufi interpretations that claim to pursue the esoteric (batıni) meanings of the Quran. Meanings and interpretations attributed by establishing some relations that are entirely the product of the human imagination, in a way that cancels or makes secondary the literal meanings of the Quran in places, the original meanings understood by the Prophet and his companions and turned into common sense, are no different from instrumentalizing the Quran. From that moment on you feel that the one calling is not the Quran. In its place a discourse that is being forced to be made to speak through the Quran comes into play.

Of course no one can ever deny the possibility that the Quran's extremely rich associations of meaning are a source of inspirations. But none of these inspirations can cancel the wording of the Quran as understood by the first generation.

There are some interesting examples of this, but we have run out of space; we will continue later, God willing.