speaks. I don’t know exactly what it meant to be a “scholar” in his time, but it’s only after the death of Muammad, and with his death the guarantee of prophethood’s closure, that the Qur’n can become an intellectual project, the domain of scholars. If theology is what happens when the intellect negotiates with a scripture, theologians can say nothing to prophets. Theology might claim submission to text but really conquers, keeping the words intact but still assuming control over them. The Qur’n was Allh giving humanity his Qul, the command, “Say”—an imperative that occurs some three hundred times in the text. Every interpreter reverses the Qur’n’s flow of power, telling Allh not what to say, but rather what to mean when he speaks. This cannot be helped by calling your reading “literal.” Reading is writing, every time.
Even as the Qur’n successfully repeats itself, speaking to times and places beyond its first audience, a text’s repeatability in part depends on the potential for its old words to produce new results. A verse remains powerful not because it imposes its meaning on the future, but because it accommodates the future’s needs: The verse is not bound to its author or its first audience. While the Qur’n’s references point to what’s outside itself, the outside also pours in. Ideas that did not exist for the earliest Muslim community sneak into the Qur’n, find homes for themselves in the words, and give the appearance of having always been there. One such idea might have been the notion of human souls. Does the Qur’n espouse belief in a soul that exists independently of our bodies? We tend to assume that it does, since the Qur’n speaks of resurrection and we have been trained to think about resurrection in terms of souls. The text of the Qur’n, however, consistently speaks of the afterlife in terms of Allh’s power to reassemble and revive the material body, even after the body has turned into dust; it does not explicitly argue that an immaterial aspect of every person will outlast her physical matter. The word that we now take for granted as equivalent to “soul,” nafs, is used in numerous ways in the Qur’n, typically in relation to selfhood—not only Allh, but even false idols are referred to as having nafs—but never in a sense that undoubtedly produces a distinction between corporeal substance and abstract spirit. Later understandings of nafs reflect the conversation between Muslim intellectuals and Greek philosophical tradition, as found in al-Ghazl, who, despite his defense of bodily resurrection, read the Qur’n while upholding an Aristotelian idea of the soul that al-Rz rejected.28
In his translation of the Qur’n, British convert scholar Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall (1875–1936) explained the Qur’n’s first sra in his commentary as “the Lord’s Prayer of the Muslims.”29 It may be unsophisticated to think of the Qur’n as the “Muslim Bible,” but sometimes that’s what it becomes: As James W. Morris explains, “virtually all the extant English Qur’n translations are still profoundly rooted . . . in a semantic universe of allusions and parallels to the language and symbolism of Bible translations.”30 The first translation of the Qur’n that I read had come from Yusuf Ali (1872–1953), a colonial Indian Muslim living in London. The other major English translation from colonial India was that of Ahmadiyya scholar Maulana Muhammad Ali (1874–1951). Both translators sought to present the Qur’n within the genre of sacred literature as readers of English could recognize it: In their hands, Allh’s Arabic speech becomes King James English, peppered with thou and thy to decorate itself with
