HarperCollins' Study Quran considered harmful
OP - December 04, 2015, 10:36 PM
HarperCollins, now HarperOne, once upon a time published a "Study Bible" that was widely renowned among biblical scholars as being excellent. Now they're on the Qur'an's case (without a hamza). The main editor is Seyyed Hossein Nasr.
SH Nasr has been kind enough to deliver his own introduction to this work. As a result, we have an unfiltered view into how SHN, and his subeditors, read the Quran - more to the point, how they expect YOU to read it.
I do not intend here to indict the Qur'an nor Islam. I have my own manner of reading the base text, and I am still working out how to define how to "coexist" with the religion at large. So, here is what I have gathered about Nasrism, the religion of God as revealed to SHN.
xxiv: "The Prophet was the instrument... Aisha [said] 'His character was the Quran'". In effect, the Hijazi aristocracy has already admitted that would-be Muhammadan biographers must use the text to reconstruct the Prophet's life. The circularity of the Sira-focused Hadith is built-in.
xxvi: "No sacred scripture of which we have knowledge speaks more about the cosmos and the world of nature than does the Quran". Given that the Tanakh alone actually bothers to *tell* most of its biblical stories, rather than just alluding to them so that the poor reader has to run to a library of Syriac hymns every dozen verses or so, either Nasr doesn't have sufficient knowledge himself or else he is being deliberately obtuse.
"For Muslims the Islamic shari'ah, or Divine Law, is the concrete embodiment of the Divine Will as elaborated in the Quran for the followers of Islam". This also isn't true, given how the adulterer is stoned in accordance with Torah and not with sura 24, which sura is in fact included in the Study Quran. (Also note Nasr's prolix and redundant prose. There are fifty pages of this to wade through.)
xxviii - "the paradisal delights described in the Quran are not sublimations of earthly delights, as some have claimed; but earthly delights, both those that are permissible to Muslims in this life and those, such as wine, that are not, are presented as earthly reflections of paradisal realities." Passive voice, hiding a falsehood. Where I see wine described in the Quran is in sura 16, aya 67, where it is presented as a creation of God as a gift to the people and as a lesson. Wine has no Platonic symbolism in that context (although I'm sure the Sufis invented one).
"without the advent of the Quran, there would have been no Islamic sciences as we know them, sciences that were brought later to the West and we therefore would not have words such as 'algebra', 'algorithm', and many other scientific terms of Arabic origin in English." I missed the Sura of Turing Machines last time I leafed through the table of contents, but hey.
xxix - "provided over the ages the principles as well as the inspiration for the sacred Islamic arts from calligraphy to architecture". I'll get to calligraphy soon; but here I'll note that the architecture of the early Umayyads was just Byzantine architecture, and the later Umayyads and 'Abbasids were borrowing from the Sasanians and Hindus. To the extent the Quran even mentions previous architectural monuments, like the Temple, it assumes jinn built them (suras 27, 34) much like the old Greeks thought cyclopes built Mycenae and Troy. The Quran mentions architecture most when it can observe them in ruins, and say "see what was the end of the unbelievers".
"practically no sculpture of consequence, and the fact that calligraphy is so central to Muslim life, are directly related to the Quranic message, in both its form and content" - ignoring the sculptures mentioned around Solomon, again. But here I'm just nitpicking. Some hadiths admitted with the Bible that Solomon was a sinner and idolater. The ambiguity - at best - around sculpture and around Solomon himself did channel Muslims away from the art. But is it really good to be channeled away from sculpture? I believe that to restrict a people away from art is inhuman. It's worse when you consider that Abraham is praised in suras 21 and 37 for destroying art.
xxx - the Quran is "inimitable". Not true; it's only inimitable because Muslims by force do not permit to imitate it.
xliv - "contemporary writings about the Quran... that... do not accept the Quran as revelation... in some extreme cases, such sources are based on either thinly veiled or sometimes outright hostility toward Islam and often... published for the sake of worldly ends, such as gaining fame or furthering academic careers". Since this cannot refer to the average populist bookseller this must refer to secular scholars (who can hope for such a career); like Michael Cook and the late Patricia Crone. (When I read this I felt a physical repulsion at its author.)
Again, I am not indicting the Qur'an nor Islam here. But I think we can indict Nasr, and HarperOne - of gross negligence, of dishonesty, and of inciting an antihuman and obscurantist worldview.
English-speaking Muslims who pick up this book are going to be diverted to an ugly form of Islam.
Topic: HarperCollins' Study Quran considered harmful