Koranen må nytænkes

In my book "Mafhûm al-Nass" (The concept of the Text, first published 1990) I introduced the historical and linguistic dimensions of the Qur'ân by critically rereading the classical sciences of the Qur'ân, concluding that the Qur'ân was a cultural production, meaning that pre-Islamic culture and concepts are rearticulated via the specific language structure.

Although the Qur'ân became the producer of a new culture, any genuine hermeneutics has to take into consideration the pre-Islamic culture as the context without which ideological interpretation will always prevail.

In the year 2000, in my inaugural lecture for the Cleveringa rotated Chair of Law, Freedom and Responsibility, especially Freedom of Religion and Conscience at the University of Leiden I added to the historical and cultural dimensions of the Qur'ân the human dimension.

I presented the concept of the Qur'ân as a space of Divine and Human communication. Under the title "The Qur'ân: God and Man in Communication," I attempted an elaboration of my rereading, and therefore a re-interpretation, of "the sciences of the Qur'ân," especially those sciences which deal with the nature of the Qur'ân, its history and its structure.

In this enterprise, I employed some methodological approaches, such as semantics, semiotics as well as historical criticism and hermeneutics that are not generally applied, nor appreciated, in the traditional Qur'ânic studies in the Muslim World.

I focused in my analysis on the vertical dimension of revelation, wahy in Arabic, i.e., the communicative process between God and the Prophet Muhammad that produced the Qur'ân.

As this vertical communication, which lasted for more than 20 years, produced a multiplicity of discourses (in the form of verses, passages, short chapters these discourses had a chronological order.

In the process of canonization, from which the canonized scripture emerged as mushaf, this chronological order was not preserved; it was replaced by what is now known as the "recitation order," the "official closed corpus" according to Arkoun.

According to the orthodox view, the Qur'ân was perfectly preserved in oral form from the beginning and was written down during Muhammad's lifetime or shortly thereafter when it was "collected" and arranged for the first time by his Companions. The complete consonantal text is believed to have been established during the reign of the third caliph, `Uthmân (644-56), and the final vocalized text was fixed in the early 4th/10th century.

It is important, even if we uncritically adapt to the orthodox view, to realize another human dimension present in this process of canonization, which entailed the early rearrangement and the late application of signs of vocalization to the consonantal script.

Being so deeply involved in the debate about the present hot issues of modernization of Islamic thought or/and islamization of modernity I started to realize that both the modernists and their opponents are, like the classical theologians, trying to situate their position in the Qur'ân claiming implicitly or explicitly its status as a Text.

As a text, it should contain no contradiction because the author is God. Historical background was always used to verify and justify whatever the interpreter wanted to prove; history after all is subject to different reading as well.

Like the classical theologians and the classical jurists the proponents of modern hermeneutics try to articulate their position by creating focal point of gravity to be claimed the universal, the irrevocable and the eternal truth. The anti-modernist would just change the focal point of gravity to claim the opposite.

As I said earlier in my critical comment of the feminist hermeneutics 'as long as the Qur'ân is dealt with as only a text, which implies a concept of author -divine author which is God- the only way is to find a focal point of gravity to which all the variations should be linked.

It is then that the Qur'ân is under the mercy of the ideology of the interpreter; if a communist the Qur'ân would reveal communism, if a fundamentalist the Qur'ân would be very fundamentalist text; if a feminist it is a feminist text etc.

In my inaugural lecture for Ibn Rushd Chair for Islam and Humanism at the University of Humanistics in Utrecht (may 27, 2004) I developed my thesis about the human aspect of the Qur'ân one further step, moving from the vertical to the horizontal dimension of the Qur'ân.

By the horizontal dimension I mean something more than the canonization, or what some other scholars identify as the act of the prophet's gradual propagation of the message of the Qur'ân after receiving it, or the spread of the message through the "interpretive corpus," according to Arkoun.

I mean the dimension that is embedded in the structure of the Qur'ân and was manifest during the process of communication itself. This horizontal dimension could only be realized if we shift our conceptual framework from the Qur'ân as 'text' to the Qur'ân as 'discourse'.

For Muslim scholars the Qur'ân was always a text, from the moment of its canonization till now. It is time now to pay close attention to the Qur'ân as discourse or discourses. It is no longer sufficient to re-contextualize a passage or some passages when it is only necessary to fight against literalism and fundamentalism or when it is necessary to renounce a certain historical practice that seems unfit in our modern context.

It is also not enough to invoke modern hermeneutics in order to justify the historicity and, therefore, the relativity of every mode of understanding claiming in the meantime that our modern interpretation is the more appropriate and the more valid. These insufficient approaches produce either polemic or apologetic hermeneutics.

Without rethinking the Qur'ân, without re-invoking its living status as a "discourse," whether in the academia or in everyday life no democratic and open hermeneutics can be achieved.

But why should hermeneutics be democratic and open? Because it is about the "meaning of life." If we are serious about freeing religious thought from power manipulation, whether political, social, or religious in order to empower the community of believers to formulate "meaning," we need to construct open democratic hermeneutics.

The empirical diversity of the religious meaning is part of our human diversity around the meaning of life in general, which is supposed to be a positive value in our modern living context.

In order to re-connect the question of the meaning of the Qur'ân to the question of the meaning of life it is now imperative to indicate the fact that the Qur'ân was the outcome of dialoguing, debating, augmenting, accepting and rejecting, not only with pre-Islamic norms, practices and culture, but with its own previous assessments, presuppositions, assertions etc.

The Question is, is there any genuine possibility of achieving real reformation without always clinging to tradition, especially religious tradition, to justify and appropriate the acceptance of reformation?

It seems that the paradigm of ambiguity towards modernity, the paradoxical image of modernity as a western product and the equation of modernization with westernization, is still prevailing. Without shift from the paradigm of two independent worldview, western and Islamic, which became more dominant and publicly propagated everyday in the media here and there after September 11, there is no way out of the hock.

As I opened my inaugural lecture for Ibn Rushd Chair, mentioned earlier:

"The world has already become, whether for good or for bad, one small village in which no independent closed culture, if there is any, can survive. Cultures have to negotiate, to give and take, to borrow and deliver, a phenomenon that is not new or invented in the modern context of globalization.

The history of the world culture tells us that the wave of civilization was probably born somewhere around the basin of rivers, probably in black Africa, Egypt or Iraq, before it moved to Greece, then returned to the Middle East in the form of Hellenism. With the advent of Islam, a new culture emerged absorbing and reconstructing the Hellenistic as well as the Indian and Iranian cultural elements before it was handed to the Western New World via Spain and Sicily.

Shall I mention here the name of the Muslim philosopher Ibn Rushd, known as Averroes in the Latin milieu and the importance of his writings in constructing a synthesis of both the Aristotelian and the Islamic legacies, thus, transfusing new intellectual light to the European dark ages?"

My conclusion was the open question, by which I would like also to conclude this project:

"Are Muslims ready to rethink the Qur'ân or not? Is it possible to consider the open options presented in the Qur'ânic discourse and reconsider the fixed meaning presented by the classical ‘ulama'? In other words, how far is the reformation of Islamic thought going to develop?

This question duly brings the relationship of the West and the Muslim World into the discussion. How does this relationship affect the way Muslims "rethink" their own tradition to modernize their lives without relinquishing their spiritual power?

I am afraid the answer is not positive, particularly in view of America's new colonizing policy. Both the new imperial and colonial project of the United States of America and the building of ghettos in the Middle East are likely to support the most exclusive and isolating type of discourse in contemporary Islamic thought.

These colonial projects give the people no option but to adapt to the hermeneutics of Islam as an ideology of resistance; the hermeneutics of the Pakistani Maududi, which divide the worlds only into two adversaries echoed in Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations." We have to be alert and to join our efforts to fight both claims and their consequences by all possible democratic means."

Nasr Abu-Zayd er født i 1944. Han er uddannet på universitetet i Cairo, hvor han også tog sin Ph.d. Siden 1995 har Abu-Zayd boet i Holland, hvor han er professor ved universitetet i Leiden. Teksten er et uddrag af en forelæsning, som Abu-Zayd holdt på en sharia-konference i november 2006, arrangeret af Demokratiske Muslimer. Læs mere om Nasr Abu-Zayd.