The reader difference

"The critical theory of recent times has dwelt more than necessary on the boundlessness of interpretation," says Edward Said. Yet texts themselves impose restrictions on interpretations of them, and these are entirely ignored by the postmodern critics who speak of the "death of the author." According to them, since every kind of reading is a misreading, no reading is better than another, and therefore every interpretation, of which there can be an infinite number, is in the final analysis equally a wrong interpretation.

In his article "The World, the Text, and the Critic" in the collection titled "Kış Ruhu" (Metis Publications), Said says that this approach is in part the product of the idea that the text exists within a textual universe tightly closed to the outside and having no connection with factual reality. Yet texts emerge in the world, out of a lived experience that will never be severed from reality; that is the first point.

The second, and at the same time, is that texts exist by drawing the world's attention, by situating themselves as texts in the world, within the reality of the world.

Generally, the way texts do this also restricts the interpretations that can be brought to them, and places a limit on the arbitrariness that makes every kind of understanding possible.

Said thus rejects the type of alchemist reader-critic who can transform the text through alchemy into whatever contextual reality he wishes "as he likes," since everyone is both subject to the conditions made felt through the text and, whether they want to or not, reproduces them while reading. For even in their lightest forms, texts always have modes of existence entangled with their surroundings, with time, place and society; that is, texts are in the world and therefore worldly, and in this state they are not passive beings but active participant actors.

These criticisms that Said in fact expresses for all texts are an objection to the postmodern readings that wipe out the text entirely and bring the reader to the fore. In this objection he describes as a good starting point the literal (zahiri) interpretations, especially of the Quranic text, by the Andalusian Islamic philosophers Ibn Jinni, Ibn Mada al-Qurtubi and Ibn Hazm.

The reason for the emergence of this school was the excesses of the Batini school in their time, which tended toward almost entirely destroying the textual characteristics of the Quran and toward leaving the content of the Quran entirely to the whims and desires of the reader. We are not talking about the natural and spontaneous diversity in the emotional effects of this text that arises from a person's own limits, capacity, horizon and experience in the face of the text. This diversity undoubtedly also shows the limitless possibilities and infinity of Quranic interpretations, but this diversity points rather not to the reader's priority over the text but to the reader's mortality (finitude) in the face of the text.

That everyone takes a share according to his own capacity in the face of an oceanic text that can have infinite unfoldings is nothing but natural. Here, when a person thinks he has taken the initiative and feels the will to "understand the text as he likes," the matter goes to bending and twisting the book, to distorting the book. It should therefore not be surprising that a significant portion of those who approach Quranic interpretations under these influences today discover and cling to the Batini interpreters within the Islamic tradition.

Not forgetting that a text took place as an event in the conditions in which it first appeared, and focusing attention on the first and final meaning of the word in the context of this event, is in fact the basis of the plainest event or effort of understanding. Subsequently subjecting these words to subconscious analysis, or finding and putting forward possible or hidden meanings that every word might be loaded with in other possible contexts, shows only an intention not to read the text but to distort it. Against such readings, rules of reading that are in fact not limited to the Zahiri school alone, and that establish the tightest possible control over the conditions in which the reader finds himself, were developed spontaneously.

Texts aside, while laying out all the rules of such a reading, the Quran has most concisely shown the reader's intention as well, by pointing to the aspect of the text that increases the guidance of some but the misguidance of others. What is being discussed here is not only a reader who approaches with sincere intention and in the end takes and understands according to his own vessel, but the situation of those who fail to meet the conditions of reading, who on the contrary corrupt their intention from the very start while reading, or who do not fulfill the conditions of reading.

Of course, the difference of the reader is beyond dispute.

How could it not be, when one who does not read the Book without ablution can be equated with one who embellishes his words to give the impression of a book so that what he says will be taken to be from the Book, and who opens the book from the start in order to understand it as he likes?

CONDOLENCES: إنا لله وإنا إليه راجعون. A good person, a poet, a writer, a valued laborer of children's literature, a dervish of our age: all expressions that characterize him and are being used abundantly after him. Above all, our brother Mevlana İdris Zengin, a believer with a deep concern who would not trade his concern for a thousand remedies, has completed his journey in this world and walked to his Lord. May God receive him with His mercy, forgiveness and grace. May his abode be Paradise, his station exalted, and may beautiful patience be poured into the hearts of his loved ones. Our condolences to us all.