Thursday, July 31, 2003

Koran or Qur'an or Quran_ To "K" or not to "K"

Let me begin by admitting that I don't think it's possible for anyone to have been less knowledgeable about Islam than I was at the beginning of this week. But when I ran into the Newsweek story about a scholar's theory that there was a Syriac background for the Qur'an, my interest in biblical criticism led me to investigate. I still don't know much about Islam and Muslims, but I have learned enough to understand a little more about the depth of my ignorance.

Dean Esmay is a regular read for me. We're certainly not at the same point on the political spectrum, but Dean is a dependable source of a sort of populist common sense that appeals to me. On top of that, he's linked to me a couple of times and been very much a gentleman in how he's done it. He posted something yesterday, though, with which I strongly disagree. I commented on his site about it, thought about it some more, and realized that I really had not known enough to comment intelligently. I still don't know as much as I would like, but here goes anyway.

Dean is adamant about spelling the name of Islam's holy book K-O-R-A-N (caps his). I can understand some of his frustration. Back in the old days when the Muslim's book was rarely discussed, it usually made its appearance spelled with a "K." Now that it's becoming a more popular topic, there are all kinds of spellings: Qur'an, Quran, al-Qur'aan, etc. It's confusing, even annoying.

The problem isn't with the book itself. It isn't with the Muslims either, Part of the fault may lie with the scholars who study Islam. Part of it is with the journalists who write about the topic. The real problem, though, is the difficulty of "transliterating" a word from Arabic to English. If you've ever seen Arabic, and by now we all have, you know that it doesn't look anything like English. It's one of those languages like Hebrew or Chinese or Japanese that are so different from western European languages that they are completely unintelligible to us. We might be able to pick out a word or two from a German or French or Italian newspaper, but we can't even figure out where the words begin and end in Arabic or Chinese.

What scholars and journalists who are writing about these cultures must do for English readers is to "transliterate" names of people, places and things. There are two goals when you transliterate. First, try to help the English reader approximate the sounds of the name as closely as possible. This can be difficult because each language has sounds that are unique to it. Semitic languages like Hebrew and Arabic have glottal stops that we do not have in English. Transliterators sometimes will use apostrophes to represent these sounds. Second, the transliterator will try to preserve nuances in the spelling of the original language. For example, in Arabic, as in Hebrew, there are two similar but distinct sounds represented by a "k" consonant and a "q" consonant.

The Arabic word for Islam's book begins with that "q" consonant. At one time, transliterators used the Roman letter "K" in an attempt to approximate the sound of the word. The more modern approach is to preserve the distinction in Arabic between "k" and "q," a difference that could be illustrated by an Arabic speaker. The different spellings Qur'an and Quran arise because the former preserves a glottal stop, while the latter prefers the simpler spelling since we English-speakers can't reproduce the sound anyway. The preference of scholarly journals and increasingly of journalists is for Qur'an although another scholarly publication would rather do without the glottal stop mark.

We deal with these issues all the time. Did you ever wonder why some Christian hymns use "hallelujah" while others use "alleluia_" Our Lutheran hymnbook includes "Hallelujah! Jesus Lives" along with "Christ is Risen! Alleluia!" Even Bible translations in the same evolutionary line can't agree. The King James translates the Greek in Revelation 19 as "alleluia" while the Revised Standard Version renders those same words as "hallelujah." The word "hallelujah" is a transliteration of the Hebrew phrase "hallelu Jah" or "Praise the LORD." The Greeks had a problem, though, when it was time to transliterate the Hebrew into the Greek because they don't have an "h" or a "j." They transliterated the Hebrew "hallelu Jah" as "alleluia." That's the Greek word found in Revelations 19. Some hymnwriters went with the more Hebraic spelling, others with the Greek. The King James translators chose to stay close to the Greek, while the RSV scholars went with the Hebrew that lay behind that Greek.

There's not just a problem with transliterating ancient texts from very foreign languages. In my lifetime, the conventional transliteration for the capital of China has changed from Peking to Beijing and the Indian city of Bombay to Mumbai. If anything, refinements in transliterations will increase because of the increasing contact between cultures brought about by globalization. We might as well get used to it, because these potential customers and business partners will expect us to pronounce their names right, or as right as we stiff-tongued Westerners can manage.

Down here in the Carolinas, we have a problem. On God's side of the state line, we know how to pronounce "Beaufort." It should be "Biew-furt." Being further north has fouled up the folks on the other side of the state line. Not only do they not know that barbeque should have mustard sauce on it, but they pronounce "Beaufort" as "Bow-furt." We consider from time to time whether this is just cause for an invasion or at least severance of trade relations, but so far we've tried to be patient with those Tar Heels. There are even some soft-liners who suggest that if there would ever be a reason to go all the way up to "Bow-fort" to visit, it might be polite to pronounce it their way while we're there. Maybe those soft-liners have a point for once. After all, it's their town.

It may just come down to a question of politeness and keeping up with the times. Muslims prefer Qur'an or Quran because it is closer to the Arabic spelling of the word. Scholars share the same view. It's the Muslims' book and their word. I'm going to do my best to respect their wishes. Maybe Dean will too if he reconsiders.

The TOE Project

Other bloggers continue to participate in the progressives' TOE (Theory of Everything) Project and comment upon it. Mary, my fellow Lakoff fan at Pacific Views (formerly The Watch), joins us in calling for attention to the topic. Paula at Stonerwitch has some intriguing things to say about modernism vs. postmodernism as it relates to the TOE. Brian at AintNoBadDude gave us a nice plug as well as directing to Danny Goldberg's site. Danny, author of Dispatches from the Culture Wars: How the Left Lost Teen Spirit, left his own comment here. Will it be a grassroots movement_

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Wednesday, July 30, 2003

Get it Firsthand

I wrote yesterday about the Newsweek report on the release of a book about the origins and interpretation of the Qur'an by a critical, Western scholar. Since then, Al-Muhajabah at Veiled4Allah has posted an excellent piece from a Muslim perspective.

She discusses the grapes/virgins issue sensationalized by Stefan Theil in the Newsweek piece, but what I found especially enlightening was the background she provides about how many Muslims go about the task of interpreting the Qur'an. Their approach has similarities to the interaction of the written and oral traditions in Judaism, and their Sunna with its hadiths seems to function like the collections of oral tradition in the Mishnah. Her discussion and links will take you on a fascinating journey that may enlarge your appreciation for the complexity and diversity of Islam as it did mine.

Al-Muhajabah also reminds us that Muslims have engaged in textual and critical analysis of the Qur'an for 1,400 years. Having no access to "Luxenberg's" book and forced to rely on what appears to be a thorough review of it by Syriac scholars, it is at least clear that this critical Western Qur'an scholar took a skeptical approach to this body of material:

"No part of [Luxenberg's] method rests on a blind acceptance of religious or traditional assumptions of any kind, especially with respect to the Arabian commentators. Until now, Western critical commentators of the first rank have not been critical enough in this regard and Luxenberg directly and indirectly through his conclusions proves that their trust was betrayed. Hence any argument that seeks to prove Luxenberg’s findings incorrect cannot assume that the earliest Arabian commentators understood correctly the grammar and lexicon of the Arabic of the Qur’an."

These comments of the reviewers presumably reflect the attitude of the author of the book itself.

I hope Luxenberg read all of this Arabic material for himself. History would teach us the dangers of relying on either second-hand information or stereotyping to reach conclusions about the views of earlier scholars, especially those from cultures different from our own. Martin Luther was a biblical scholar and translator. While there may be some question over the extent of his knowledge of Hebrew, one thing is clear: he had knowledge of the great medieval Jewish exegetes like Rashi and Ibn Ezra only indirectly through an edition of Nicholas of Lyra's biblical commentary that included the glosses of the anti-Semitic Jewish convert to Christianity, Paul of Burgos. Luther's commentaries on the Hebrew Bible contain numerous false attributions of textual additions and misinterpretations to "the Jews," meaning Rashi, Ibn Ezra and other Jewish interpreters. In fact, the real sources of the errors that Luther identifies were Jerome, or the translators of the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, or Nicholas of Lyra, or Paul of Burgos. Maybe if Luther had actually read Rashi, he might not have made the tragic and shameful metamorphosis from outspoken opponent of anti-Semitism early in his career to vicious anti-Semite toward the end.

Al-Muhajabah's veiled4allah is a good place to start to gain more firsthand knowledge of Islam and avoid the error of relying on our own stereotypes or the sensationalized reports of others.

For an excellent perspective of where this controversy fits into the bigger picture that includes things like war and death, read Aslam Karachiwala at Mythic Flow. Spending too much time in academic environments does predispose us toward inflating the importance of things sometimes.

Calling The Dishonest Church to Account

Our guest author, Dr. Jack Good, has just released a new book entitled The Dishonest Church co-published by Rising Star Press and The Center for Progressive Christianity. The book presents an important and powerful challenge to seminaries, pastors and denominational leaders:

"Pastors and other trained professionals of the church often have developed a system of beliefs that is qualitatively different from the faith they communicate to local congregations. Their individual faith has developed, in most cases, after an intense and sometimes painful time of questioning, dismantling, and reconstruction. For reasons that are not clear, these leaders assume that local church members are either unwilling or unable to survive a similar process. So, in an act of dishonesty that threatens to erode the core of the church's mission, they hold one kind of faith for themselves while the literature they produce for the laity and the sermons they deliver assume another, basically different, style of faith for the non- professional."

Can we doubt Jack's point as we witness what the mainline churches are going through on issues like gay ordination and gay marriage_

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Tuesday, July 29, 2003

Ancient Texts and Tender Feelings

"[T]he next conclusion for us to draw from this is that only after Jesus' death did the disciples grhtml the doctrine of a spiritual suffering savior of all mankind. Consequently, after Jesus' death the apostles changed their previous doctrine of his teaching and deeds and only then for the first time ceased hoping in him as a temporal and powerful redeemer of the people of Israel." Talbert edition.

Reimarus showed his Apology to only a few close friends and two of his children. It was only after his death in 1768 and the discovery by the scholar and librarian Lessing of the Apology in the Wolfenbüttel Libary that any of the work was published. Even then it was only "fragments" of Reimarus' writing and with the dissenting views of Lessing attached. Lessing used Reimarus to buttress his view that the Bible was not a miraculously inspired infallible revelation. At the same time, Lessing argued for a progressive theory of revelation delivered through fallible, human communities and evolving and continuing into the present. For his efforts, Lessing was forbidden from publishing any more of Reimarus by the Duke of Brunswick after successful complaints by the orthodox.

Why was Reimarus so bold in his hypothesizing and so timid in exposing it_ He himself writes that he chose a kind of private martyrdom over a public one. His fears of persecution were not groundless. A contemporary, John Toland, wrote that:

"And such is the deplorable condition of our age, that a man dares not openly and directly own what he thinks of divine matters, though it be never so true and beneficial, if it but very slightly differs from what is received by any party, or that is established by law; but he is forced to keep perpetual silence, or to propose his sentiments to the world by way of paradox under a borrowed or fictitious name."

Another contemporary, Lorenz Schmidt, who authored a critical edition of the Hebrew Bible was jailed. Reimarus' intellectual forebear, Christian Wolf, was put under the ban in Prussia for a time. Of course, there was the reaction of his stalwart Christian father-in-law to consider. There were real risks for Reimarus in exposing himself.

Those risks have not disappeared in all parts of the Christian community. While Reimarus' theories are now seen as primitive by modern critical scholars, there are parts of the Christian community where a critical approach to biblical scholarship still equals expulsion. In this generation, there have been purges of theologians employing the modern approaches born in the Enlightenment in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod and the Southern Baptist Convention. Resistance to a critical approach to ancient texts has never been and never will be limited to one religion. At an individual level, it has as much to do with worldview and personality as with theology or the content of the texts themselves.

"What we discovered was fascinating: Each major philosopher seems to take a small number of metaphors as eternal and self-evident truths and then, with rigorous logic and total systematicity, follows out the entailments of those metaphors to their conclusions wherever they lead. They lead to some pretty strange places. Plato's metaphors entail that philosophers should govern the state. Aristotle's metaphors entail that there are four causes and that there cannot be a vacuum. Descartes' metaphors entail that the mind is completely disembodied and that all thought is conscious. Kant's metaphors lead to the conclusions that there is a universal reason and that it dictates universal moral laws. These and other positions taken by those philosophers are not random opinions. They are consequences of taking commonplace metaphors as truths and systematically working out the consequences."

There is a metaphorical basis even for mathematics. Is mathematics "pure thought," or even more, something that exists objectively outside of the embodied mind_

"Our answer is that the ordinary embodied mind, with its image schemas, conceptual metaphors, and mental spaces, has the capacity to create the most sophisticated of mathematics via using everyday conceptual mechanisms. Dehaene stopped with simple arithmetic. We go on to show that set theory, symbolic logic, algebra, analytic geometry, trigonometry, calculus, and complex numbers can all be accounted for using those everyday conceptual mechanisms. Moreover, we show that conceptual metaphor is at the heart of the development of complex mathematics."

RA's proofs are really just a reflection of the conceptual metaphors running around in his head. They are neatly packaged, repeatedly described as derived from something "pure," and internally consistent, but they are no more useful a description of any "objective reality" than any other individual's metaphorically-based creation. RA is caught up in something similar to what Lakoff describes as the Romance of Mathematics:

"What we conclude is that mathematics as we know it is a product of the human body and brain; it is not part of the objective structure of the universe - this or any other. What our results appear to disprove is what we call the Romance of Mathematics, the idea that mathematics exists independently of beings with bodies and brains and that mathematics structures the universe independently of any embodied beings to create the mathematics."

RA's disproofs of God tell us only about how his own brain works, not about the objective universe outside it. Especially his insistence that he is employing a certain "deductive" approach and not an inductive one open to uncertainty encloses him within the box of his own metaphorical system. He is proud that his arguments cannot be disproved by contrary evidence. That very fact should tip him off that he is talking about his own "faith" and not an objective reality.

RA is obviously a bright guy. He just needs to step back a minute and see that his thought processes are not so different from the rest of us poor, embodied humans.

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