Ingrid Mattson, The Story of the Qur’an: Its History and Place in Muslim Life (London: Blackwell 2008).
This is another review of a book assigned for an “Understanding Islam” course I’m taking at Fuller Seminary. This book provides an overview of Muslim perspectives on the history, nature, interpretation, and role of the Qur’an. I have often heard critics of Islam cite verses from the Qur’an that they believe incite violence or that they think reflect a corruption of the Gospels concerning Jesus. It was always obvious to me that these cherry-picked citations were not the whole story, but I hadn’t previously studied the context for myself. The Mattson text helped me better understand how Muslims think about the Qur’an.
I was particularly interested to note the many ways in which these aspects of the Qur’an in Muslim life are resemble the Bible in Christian life. Like the Bible, the Qur’an contains a diverse array of content that requires contextualized reading. I appreciated Mattson’s discussion of different Islamic hermeneutical schools and of the principle employed by most Islamic scholars that the Qur’an must interpret itself. This is similar to any serious school of Biblical hermeneutics: we recognize the Bible speaks in different voices and that part of the interpretive process is to take any passage within the context of how the rest of scripture treats a question. For example, when God commands Joshua to wipe out the pagan nations, we don’t take that as normative for Christians today, in no small part because we interpret that command in light of Jesus’ later teaching in the Sermon on the Mount.
I also note an interesting but perhaps subtle difference here, however, which is the role of history in hermeneutics. A good Christian hermeneutic of the Bible’s conquest narratives would also stress the historical context of those narratives, which in a sense relativizes the immediate commands they contain. As Mattson suggests, there is a similar issue in Qur’anic hermeneutics, because the unique occasion on which a revelation is given provides context. There is also a difference, however, because much of the Biblical revelation is embedded in historical narratives, while the Qur’anic revelation is largely in the form of statements rather than narratives. Moreover, the Biblical narratives span thousands of years of history, while the Quranic revelations all occur during Muhammad’s life. In a sense, it’s easier to contextualize much of the Biblical revelation, because the narrative itself is a key part of the context.
This dynamic also relates, I think, to the question of the Qur’an’s ontology, which Mattson also explains ably. I find the question of whether the Qur’an is eternal or created endlessly fascinating. For Christians, the Bible itself is not eternal, and indeed it is a fully human, fully historical product, even while it is also divinely inspired. Again, the difference is subtler than it seems at first glance: Christians also must try to explain what it means for the transcendent, eternal, timeless God to speak in history. Even more directly, we finally locate God’s “speech” to us in the eternal Logos, which is Christ. So here, this most basic difference between Islam and Christianity – the question of the incarnation of the Word – is central.