Blindspot!
From Issue: 1035 [Read full issue]
Literalism
An ayah is a sign, a pointer, or an indicator. It points humans toward a certain direction. That pointer is a guide, but only inasmuch as it continues to be followed. The Quran uses this word often. It reveals that certain circumstances, certain people, certain discussions, and certain occasions are signs guiding or pointing to understanding or comprehension of the Truth. As it said, it also proclaims itself as universal guidance (2:2), pointing all who have moral consciousness in the direction of an ethical basis for living. But ethics inevitably develops, transformed by the constant makeover of human knowledge, experience, and change. If all there is to the Quran was its grappling linguistic competency in seventh-century Arabia, we should not only still ride around the desert on camels and live without air-conditioning, we should also still enslave other human beings, accept silence as a woman's agreement, and think that the sun moves around the earth each day until it rises in the east and sets in the west, while the earth stands still as the centre of the universe.
The moral, technological, economic, social, and ecological context at the time of revelation, including its linguistic utterances, was necessarily constrained by the limits of that context. The expansive and eternal intent of universal guidance toward right actions, as known to an omniscient divine, whose Self-disclosure as revealed in seventh-century Arabia, was not properly rendered but was particularized within the parameters of the social-cultural, moral, legal, and linguistic constraints of that context. If one truly believes in the eternity of the divine, then one cannot accept that Allah begins or ends with the particulars of Quranic utterances. Indeed, philosophically, limiting Allah to the utterances of the Quran, a specific text, would also limit Allah to seventh-century Arabia. The extent to which Allah's particular textual exposure is equated with Allah's totality in Its transcendent and unknowable reality is the same extent to which some think that Qur'anic patriarchy reflects Allah, rather than that context. One scholar expressed the idea that the god of the Quran is patriarchal, reducing Allah to the patriarchal contextual articulation and nothing else. That is a kind of shirk (violation of tawhid). It holds the seventh-century Arabian conceptual framework of Allah, and the epistemological constraints of that context as equal to Allah. Such thinking, which concretizes Allah to the limitation and literalism of the Quran's revelatory context, parallels the Christian discourse that literally takes the notion of God's incarnation as the body of Christ.
Compiled From:
"Inside The Gender Jihad: Women's Reform in Islam" - Amina Wadud