The series, the imam and the layman (3)

(Question of the profane: when we read the Koran we do not understand anything. On this, I join Voltaire when he states in The Dictionary of Philosophy (1704) that this book “is a rhapsody without connection, without order, without art (…)”. So, like Imam, how do you read this Koran?)

Imam response

This question is quite understandable, even predictable, of a modern and profane spirit. As you have noticed, Voltaire, himself, faced with a Koran translated in his mother tongue, French, finds only remarks disjointed, without coherence or beauty. It is not wrong that some spirits will only find in front of the Koran closed doors, thereby becoming hermetic to its message, its strength and its beauty. It is no longer enough to say that only a semitic and Arab psyche can access the evocative power of the Koran to explain such a gap of taste and sight. Sohrawardi, and Avicenne before him, spoke of a properly eastern logic (Mantiq al ishraqyioune) to grasp the embodied revelation in the Koran, but it was not to support the thesis that only an ethnic group was able to read it but well to recall that there are specific psychological characteristics to approach this book.

The Koran has different types of formulation. Indeed, composed of 114 chapters (the famous Surats), themselves structured by a set of verses (just over 6200), the Koran can have oracular verses (like lightning strips), lyrical (to take us beyond our consciousness) or taking the form of prose (to argue against our consciousness). It is also true that “few books are currently the subject of debates as burning and contradictory as the Koran! Despite an abundant traditional literature of exegetical comments, this book, although dating from fourteen centuries, is still largely unknown and a difficult approach, not only for the non-Muslim, but even, in many respects, for the Muslim himself “(the Koran p.9). Today, unfortunately, the Koran symbolizes war for many people in the West.

The Koran, if it is seen as a “rhapsody without connection” is also, it is true, because often it is not read in its original language, Arabic, and it is not contradicting me to say it; Let me explain. Beforehand, you should know that you have two types of “specialists” of the Koran or approach: the historians-orientalists who read it according to its history (diachronic reading) and our traditional commentators who read it by taking it as it is and affirming that it has its own internal logic (synchronic reading); There is what is called the method by self-defense (“the Koranic self-referential discourse”-Boisliveau), which means that the Koran is explained by itself, one must seek to understand its speech from itself.

In contrast to this approach, many historians-orientalists, like Mezzi, deny that the language of the Koran may be enough to understand it, and will therefore favor the search for external data, and in particular, a context, a sociology or a comparative history of religions to analyze it. For them, the human sciences must come to the aid of Muslims to help them “better” understand their holy text, showing them the multiple influences that the Koran suffered; belong to this school, Noldeke, Goldziher, Blachère, Imam Tariq Oubrou, Ghaleb Bencheikh, Abdennour Bidar and others. I specify that it is not our approach and that we belong to the traditional (synchronic) school. The Koran, for the Muslim, is above all a prayer and meditation book, a master and a director of conscience par excellence. The high technicality of its structure does not really interest the common, it is its symphonic beauty and its evocative power which affect it first, from the origin.

In order not to give you the impression that I walk you, dear profane, I come to my essential point of the demonstration. What I would like to say, first of all, is that the latest studies on the Koran (Neuwirth and the Corpus Koranicum program) showed the place of rhyme and rhythm in the unit of the Koranic text. Despite, an apparent “anarchy” or “disorder” when a believer hears or listens to the Koran in the Arab language arises a harmonious unity which detonates with its apparent disorganization, thanks to the rhyme of the verses; Which is not noticeable for a non-Arab ear. This is why that a Voltaire, Libertaire and Merchant (… of slaves in particular), could neither share nor recognize this taste for the textual beauty of the Koran.

In addition, redundancy is a style specific to semitic languages. If we wanted to bring the style of the Koran closer to another style known in the West, to try to better understand it, it would be with that of heraclitus fragments. The structure of the fragments is, like the Koran, oracular to the point that Westerners called Heraclitus, the dark. Faced with the style and thought of Heraclitus, Voltaire is disarmed; He also preferred Democritus that he found laughing rather than this sage “having compassion for his fellow men”, that is to say the mentality of these philosophers of this obscure century of lights. Besides, Heraclitus is a fundamentally oriental thinker and will never be a Western thinker. Finally, if we want to do a comparative study on the Koran, it is with the fragments of Heraclitus that we must seek an opening to the analysis of the Koranic discourse; An idea that I offer to researchers. Because, you should know that before the discourse of speculative philosophers (born with Aristotle), talkative philosophers and writing their chatter in sums, there was a simple, frugal language and willingly combining contradictions, and seeking to painfully reach wisdom.

Furthermore, Cuypers and Gobillot write in their little book “The Koran”: “While the Western literary tradition is heir to the Greco-Latin rhetoric, according to which a discourse must develop in a linear way, between an introduction and a conclusion (linearity that one can appear schematically in ABCDEF …), the tradition or semitic” rhetoric “, it is entirely based on the principle of symmetry. This can take three forms, which we find everywhere in the text:

– either the parallelismwhen textual units with similar semantic content are included in the same order, for example ABC/A’B’C ‘;

– either the reverse parallelism Or specular composition Or “In mirror” : ABC/c’b’a ‘;

– either the concentarismwhen the two slopes of the above symmetries are connected by a central element: ABC/X/A’B’C ‘or ABC/X/C’b’a’ ”(p.49-50).

Jacques Berque had already recalled this structural form of the suras which he called the “interlacing structure” of the Koran. The sudden ruptures present in the Koran are the mark of the Koranic text, as if he wanted to constantly put the reader on alert so that he does not succumb to a linear phraseology which could, in the long run, generate a fall asleep. “… The Koranic presentation likes sudden jumps, writes Jacques Berque. He passes without transitions from one subject to another, to return to the first, or to others. This device, which is accentuated by Western translations, produces a variety effect, which the stranger takes easily for inconsistency ”. This phenomenon was already present in the old Arab poetry considered, because of such a variety, as “accommodation of souls as al-Sakkaki said (Qara’l-Anfus)” (by rereading the Koran p.723).

These ruptures or bifurcations (“To think is to branch out”) have become “a kind of rule of continuous discourse” Koranic. The Qur’an is like a gigantic cave with a multitude of galleries, today it looks like a gigantic network where a multitude of interconnected themes are being: an immeasurable Network. And we come back to what the theologian Al Razi had said: “The Koran came down like a single word”. If we have integrated what has just been said, and in particular the presence of a Koranic discourse that will be delighted to maintain its reader on alert and encourage them to branch off/think, we understand this type of verse differently:

(Well what! Don’t they think about the Koran? If he came

from another than God, they would find contradictions there

many (Koran IV, 82))

But, in this same sura above, the Koran provokes our understanding, confuses us, to force us to think and states as if to jostle us

(Say: “Everything comes from God”. (…)

All happiness that happens to you comes from God;

Any misfortune that strikes you comes from yourself.

(Koran IV, 78-79))

A thought that excludes and cannot go beyond contradictions to try to seek unity beyond the oppositions, however necessary for the life of the cosmos, cannot fully grasp the Koran; In the Koranic universe as in the universe of quantum mechanics where, “according to the concept of quantum superposition, an object can be in several places at the same time”, it is necessary to have an agile and non-binary intelligence. We all remember Schrödinger’s cat “neither dead nor living” but having these two states at a time, that the Koran states in his own way by recalling that “on all sides assail him death, and yet he (the damned) does not die” (Koran 14.17). The Koran particularly likes the “non-binary” and executes fools, especially happy fools.

Encyclopedists of 18^th A century that could read the Koran, saw the world by exclusion of opposites to better flatten it. The philosophers of the Enlightenment have been real platists in their conception of the reality of the world. Thus, was born, the linear and binary thought of the rationalists of the Enlightenment that current physics disavowed in block. But such a thought comes up against the “logic of the Orientals” nourished by the Koran and wisdom. Many great western thinkers sought to understand the Koran, and among them the great Goethe, who had said “if Islam means subject to God, we live and die all in Islam” (Divan – p.103). So, I read the Koran by enjoying his message which struck my conscience like these waves of an agitated sea hitting the rocks of a wild shore, to invite me to branch off, in other words, to think.

Here is dear profane, an attempt to answer your third question, and know that absolute knowledge belongs only to God.