A conversation with Prof Nasr
From the Blog PkColumnist.com: A conversation with Prof Nasr - When I arrived on the seventh floor of the building, the familiar door leading to Prof Seyyed Hossein Nasr's office was locked. It was Saturday, Oct 23, 2010. I went to the far end of the long corridor and waited. His office is on the top floor of the Gelman Library of George Washington University in Washington DC. We were going to meet at 10 a.m. and there were still five minutes left. The elevator door opened and he emerged into the hallway. "O, I am sorry, Dr Iqbal, I am a bit late." He said. "Actually, I am early," I said as we embraced. We walked into his office. He had made the special trip on a Saturday for this meeting, for which I thanked him, and said: "I want to discuss with you the situation of the Glorious Quran in our times, and specifically the unprecedented situations that arise as the contemporary world encounters the Noble Quran. There are some 1.6 billion Muslims now on earth. Only about twenty per cent of them actually open the Book sent down for their guidance." Nasr: It is true that only twenty per cent of the Islamic community is Arab, but that really has very little to do with it. We are faced with an unprecedented situation because of other factors. Of course, not even those fluent in Arabic can simply open a copy of the Quran and begin reading, with full comprehension of all its layers of deep meaning! And it has always been like this: throughout Islamic history, after the early expansion and the Umayyad period, a large part of the Ummah was not Arabic-speaking. The Persians, the people of the Indian Subcontinent, the Turks, the Chinese, the Malays, the Africans—even in the so-called Middle Ages, the majority of Muslims did not have Arabic for their mother tongue. Despite this sociological and linguistic diversity, however, Islam and Islamic civilisation could only survive, in fact, flourish, insofar as the Noble Quran preserved its centrality. Someone in Sumatra hearing a verse of the Quran would weep as much as someone in Fez or Cairo, and their physical location and the language they grew up in were irrelevant to their piety. There were established channels through which the external and inward meanings, the message, and even the art of litany of the Quran were transmitted across the vast reaches of the community of believers, the ummah. There was a historical infrastructure for the dissemination of the Quran and its understanding. Those who knew would teach those who did not know: people would listen to its transmitted understanding in khutbahs (sermons), transmit it through literature, through stories… And then, of course, one should never overlook the very important aspect of hearing the Quran. Do not forget that the Quran is an oral revelation; it was not originally a written revelation analogous to Moses receiving the Ten Commandments inscribed on a tablet on top of Mount Sinai. The Prophet, upon him be peace, first heard the Quran. This experience of hearing the Quran is extremely significant. The fact that people might not understand every sentence is in a sense really irrelevant to the basic presence of the reality of the Quran in their hearts and minds. The new situation we are facing, therefore, is not simply the fact that eighty per cent of contemporary Muslims do not speak or read Arabic. It is that many of those traditional channels I just described have become weakened, or even, in some cases, destroyed. This is heightened also by the introduction of modern education into the Islamic world, as a new so-called intelligentsia—I hate to use this word, because they are not really what we know as the khawas (the elect), but merely educated people in the modern Western sense—came to the fore. Even people without advanced modern education began to be trained in another way of thinking, of connecting subject and predicate, of looking for meaning in sentences other than the traditional Islamic way, as they approached the Divine revelation, and otherwise as well. These acquired habits of mind were very different from the way traditional Muslims thought about and looked upon the text of the Glorious Quran. So our task in the modern world is first of all to recreate, as much as possible, those channels of the transmission of the authentic knowledge of the Quran; and, secondly, to redirect the Muslim minds whose ways of thinking, even unconsciously, have been transformed by the methods of modern Western education back to the Islamic norm. Iqbal: So even while these minds are being trained, do you not think that we also need to simultaneously revive that direct, heart-to-heart mode of transformation? Nasr: Absolutely. And that is what is at the heart of what has happened in the Islamic world. Since you spoke about tasawwuf-even though the channels of traditional knowledge transmission were largely bypassed or dismantled, this did not always mean that the turuq died out as well. Many, al-hamdu li'Llah, survived those violent projects in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries of the Islamic calendar, that is the 18th-19th centuries of the Common Era, against tasawwuf! Those projects were of two kinds: first, the puritanical, rationalistic, reductionist, simplistic interpretations of Islam which came out of Wahhabism, and later Salafism; second, the modernist movements and colonial influences. These influences, although opposed to each other in certain matters, are joined in so many other things: they all "worship" modern science and technology, they are all indifferent to Islamic art, they all join hands in their opposition to Sufism-but for different reasons, and they are all opposed to the Islamic intellectual tradition. . Read Full Post
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