Jenny Takes a Linguistic Turn

 

Among the people who despise Islam and its prophet perhaps no one does so as heartily as the Evangelical Christian. What then of Jenny who recounts for us her conversion, as an adult, from evangelical Christianity to Islam? (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iiEDH8-upQ) This raises interesting issues broached in my last post and which I will expand on here. Firstly, Jenny shakes and is nearly in tears as she recounts her story and I can only imagine the courage it took to leave her childhood faith AND on top of that to leave it for the most hated ‘other’. I am sure many in her family would have been happier had she become a Catholic or even an atheist. They would even have been happier, I suspect, had she become a heroin addict and a prostitute. In fact, I think in her case becoming a Muslim might be a close second only to being a lesbian. Her reasons, though, shed light on the very thing I was talking about in my post about Melissa concerning the way sacred texts stand forth in different traditions.  Jenny has abandoned the ‘ontic’ Bible for the linguistic Koran for reasons that are, in fact, entirely consistent with her upbringing. In fact, for someone of her Protestant formation the Koran seems hyper-positive and hyper- ontic AND, for that very reason, more biblical than the Bible itself. Might a sense of this lie behind the peculiar contempt our hyper-textual, bibliocentric Christians have for their Muslim brethren? 

Jenny, it seems had concerns about the Bible and took those concerns to a pastor who could not answer them. Of course this fellow may have simply been an incompetent pastor. I’m sure Melissa could have given her a run for her money! I suspect not though. Answers are pre-contained in questions and Jenny has framed her questions in such a manner that only the Koran could be their answer. Indeed, the unfortunate pastor who lost his sheep to the wolves may simply be a man centered on different questions and for that simple reason unable to deal with Jenny’s. One defines one’s existence through the questions one poses and different questions will predetermine different answers. And, though one can, within the horizon of a certain question, preclude all kinds of answers, one cannot prevent he emergence of a new question. What were Jenny’s questions? Well they concerned the question of canonicity! This, in her mind, was bound up with the question of authority: for her unicity is the guarantee of truth. Her (unthematic) position is a philosophy of identity and the problem with Christianity and its book is that it is symphonic and in her mind discordant.

Let’s take the issue of translation first. The Koran, as I said, is not ontically so much as linguistically positive. What is revealed in the Koran are words, Arabic words, not propositions or statements. Thus, the Koran is only a revelation in Arabic. It is, in that sense, the truly concrete universal matching the eternal mind of Allah to the pure particularity of language. This means we are not bedeviled by the task of finding translation equivalents in modern Hungarian for ancient Hebrew and Greek concepts. This is a practical benefit yet, we are told, there are 77 veiled meanings in each verse of the Koran and these are accessible in Arabic only for they are contained in puns, associations, etymologies, root words and a host of other features peculiar to the sonic resonances and articulation of the Arabic language. This means, for one thing, that Koranic ‘knowledge’ is not quite ‘science’ in the Western sense; this is because it is not contained in universal translatable ‘meanings’ or detached propositional content. In fact, the meaning on the Koran is to a great degree articulated in its performance by a reciter. There is no Koran without the magnificent sonic architecture revealed in its recitation and the beauty of its language is, in fact, part of what certifies its truth. Thus, there is no refracting the qualities of the Koran through a multiplicity of translations and languages. It is poetry in the purest sense because it exists wholly and completely in the very materiality of its articulation. It is to that degree as much like a building as a book and indeed architecture is one of the arts brought to perfection by Islamic civilization. It is then, as one with itself as a book can be; its content and its words are one and A is A seems the principle written in every fiber of its being. The Koran is mystical and deep precisely as it is purely positive. This, then, is why if you buy a Koran in English it is referred to not as the Koran but as the ‘meaning’ of the Koran, the ‘meaning’ being, in this context, a reduction of the whole.  

Secondly, the Koran has a single human ‘author’. We have no worries about reconciling Paul and James or Moses and Christ. If these figure are present in the Koran it is only on the Koran’s terms and the Koranic ‘Jesus’ has been filtered already through a quirky (to me) interpretive process into a misunderstood prophet. It is not intertextual and no figures or texts of other traditions are embedded in it in anything like their historical forms. Thus, the Koran is constituted in unicity. It is an uber- text that takes up all the others into its form with no historical residue or remainder. There is in the Koran no trace of the other as there is in the New Testament. Further, the Koran is one book not a canon or collection of books. It is a one movement work not a symphony; it is harmony not dissonance, plurality or difference. It is divided, with a certain wonderful arbitrariness, into chapters of (mostly) diminishing length. There is no rhyme or reason for this arrangement or, rather, there is much more rhyme than reason. Thus, one has in the Koran a text that actually does seem (at least) to float above history in a self-authenticating, self-certifying way (though it also has the peculiar quality of surpassing or correcting itself). It is the text that needs no other text in a more radical way and to a more radical degree than even the ontic bible constructed by Melissa.  

Because it is clear that what Jenny wants is not the Bible but a scripture. Like Melissa, hers is a religion of the book and she has found a more bookish book, the bookliest of books. Jenny has actually perceived something. This something is not simply the banal observation (so beloved of internet atheists) that the text of the Bible contains (like every other text in existence) surface contradictions. She has perceived that contradiction, as in rupture, discontinuity, grafting, polyphony, are a structural part of the Bible itself which, after all, splits into two distinct moments which have to be synthesized and harmonized. It is these ruptures and graftings that are the spur to synthesis: the difference that underwrites it unity or, to use an image, the ‘noise’ that conditions the appearance its ‘information’.  She thinks the Bible ‘bad’ for the very reasons I think it ‘good’! If I may be cheeky, the Bible is not Protestant enough for a truly committed Protestant! If we are to be, not a spirit filled community of love that USES a book, but a people OF the book, radically UNDER the book, then Jenny is absolutely correct: there is a better book for that. The book which is one because (outside of certain exalted perceptions of the Sufis that are not for ordinary ears) Allah is only ever one.