Wills - What the Qurʼan meant and why it matters

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Copyright 2017 by Garry Wills

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Excerpts from The Quran, translated by M. A. S. Abdel Haleem, Oxford World Classics (2008). By permission of Oxford University Press.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Name: Wills, Garry, 1934 author.

Title: What the Quran meant and why it matters / Garry Wills.

Description: New York : Viking, 2017. | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017025971 (print) | LCCN 2017025389 (ebook) | ISBN 9781101981023 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781101981030 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: QuranCriticism, interpretation, etc. | IslamDoctrines.

Classification: LCC BP130 .W55 2017 (ebook) | LCC BP130 (print) | DDC 297.1/226dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017025971

Version_1

To Bud Moynihan

carissime

Introduction: My Quran Problem

K nowing something about the Quran might, in another time, have been an ornament of the moderately learned. Not now. Now we face a world where knowledge about the Quran must deal with militant misuses of it and blatantly distorted reports of what it says. To help the majority of believers in Islam, and to be helped by them, we must see how far terrorists have departed from the book they say they believe in.

Influential people in our country tell us blatant lies about the religion that is followed by millions of peaceful Muslims, and we have no way to correct those claims unless we look at the morality of the Quran.

Yet there are many people who would block our reading of it. They think the Quran is not for reading but for burning. A cranky southern pastor put the book on trial for crimes against humanity, and condemned it to the flames, with terrible consequences abroad. Presumably, it could inflame children to burn down their schools.

Mr. Buckley was hardly alone in blaming the Quran (which he clearly had not read) for the attacks of 9/11. Donald Trump was believed by his devotees when he claimed that he saw, that day, thousands and thousands of Muslims in Jersey City cheering as that building was coming down.

Actually, a range of polls around the world found a majority of Muslims opposed to the World Trade Center attack and other forms of violence. One extensive world poll by the Gallup organization found that 93 percent of Muslims opposed the 9/11 attacks.

More important, perhaps, is the fact that the Muslim majority that disapproves of terrorism is more religious (more Quran-based) than the minority that approves of terrorismthe latter act more on secular motives like resentment of colonial powers. Indeed, Patricia Crone notes that terrorists are theologically illiterate:

People like Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri dont even seem to know their own tradition all that well. Rather, they have stripped Islam of practically everything that most Muslims consider to be their religion.

Thus, when ISIS claimed to be acting from the Quran, over 120 Muslim scholars denounced this as a perversion of the sacred text.

It is not only Muslim authorities who say that the Quran does not favor violence rather than peace. This is also a judgment about the book reached by studious non-Muslimsfrom a secularist genius like Edward Gibbon to a deeply pious man like Pope Francis. Gibbon wrote in the eighteenth century:

A pernicious tenet has been imputed to the Mahometans, the duty of extirpating all other religions by the sword. This charge of ignorance and bigotry is refuted by the Koran, by the history of the Musulman conquerors, and by their public and legal tolerations of the Christian worship.

And Pope Francis wrote in the twenty-first century:

Authentic Islam and the proper reading of the Koran are opposed to every form of violence.

Yet despite this mountain of evidence that the religion of Islam favors peace over violence, and the evidence of the vast majority of Muslims who live as useful citizens in our midst (some of them, like Captain Humayun Khan, dying heroically in the United States Army), there is a large and lucrative business for telling Americans what horrible things are in the Quran (they arent). Dozens of states have passed or proposed bans on Shariah law, as if that were an evil product of the Quran (it isnt). Women with hijabs are considered dangerous, since they are clothing themselves according to the Quran (they are not). Men wearing turbans are shunned as Muslims (they are Sikhs). Mosques are being banned or defaced for teaching the Quran.

This is a dangerous way to alienate the vast numbers of Muslims in the world. Jointly, the two greatest bodies of religious believers, Christianity and Islam, represent over half of the inhabitants of our globe2.2 billion Christians (31 percent of the population), 1.6 billion Muslims (23 percent of the population). By 2050 the numbers will be roughly equal. Yet in this shrinking and interconnected world, there is a vast ignorance of Islam, its varieties, its hopeful possibilities and its lurking dangers. This ignorance undermines any sensible policies toward the Islamic world. The invasion of Iraq, for instance, the worst foreign policy decision of our recent history, was led by President Bush with no awareness that we were not just unseating a dictator but overthrowing a Sunni Muslim regime that ruled a Shia Muslim majority population, with predictable Sunni reprisals that continue to detonate.

I am unfortunately well qualified to speak about our ignorance where Muslims are concerned. After our disastrous invasion of Iraq, I was asked by a friend if I had ever read the Quran. I was embarrassed to answer her, No. I had spent my whole adult life studying Christianity in one way or another, while remaining ignorant of the only other religion of a similar scale. And I was not alone in my ignorance. When I began to ask university audiences how many had read the Quran, dispiritingly few hands went up.

I have to admit that the Quran is not at first a gripping read. My early slogs through it were dutiful and apparently unrewarding. There are no obvious threads to follow, no apparent organizing principle. It is a series of disjunct revelations made to Muhammad, as recorded by his followers on pottery shards or other handy surfaces. These were transferred to paper, then arranged by believers after Muhammads death, not in chronological or topical order but,