“If the tales within the scripture are recycled myths from older prototypes, and the tales differ so wildly from the original versions, what does that say of the scripture? Can I even put my faith in the scripture?”

Scripture is not Revelation

Firstly, I’m unwavering and vigilant to never confuse scripture for revelation. Scripture by definition is a finite text (oral or written) in a specific time, locked in the course of time as a generational inheritance of worldly knowledge generated from the world and handed down with the aim of teaching moral guidance in the form of stories. It is unlike revelation which originates from beyond the world, is infinite and eternal in the ephemeral moment of my encounter with it, and cannot be “handed down”. The moment I begin to talk about some revelation to Muhammad (or any prophet) in the past, I am no longer talking about revelation; it becomes scripture. I’m scripturalizing his meeting with revelation. I can neither confirm nor deny any event surrounding that meeting as it has passed forever beyond any and every avenue of knowledge I have been equipped with.

Scripture is mythical by definition

Scripture relays events from beyond the reader’s direct avenues of knowledge and reason. From some point in the past. Scripture evades the very faculties of receiving knowledge about the world I’m put in. It would be foolish to insist a reader believe in the factual historicity of events beyond their faculties of knowing, let alone the outrageous and extraordinary tales of the paranormal. Anyone saying I must confirm or believe in some past event is deeply conflicted about reality. It is a cognitive dissonance on their part, and I would be foolish to follow their misguidance and delusion. I can only read the scripture as a product of this world. This is unlike revelation.

When talking about scripture, we use literary and textual terms terms like verse and passage. We talk about how it references other things, sometimes within the text, sometimes outside the text (see linguistic anaphora). We may talk about the scripture as referring to some extra-textual referent; some event or element outside the text and in the world. We may even try to put the scripture “in conversation” with some other text, perhaps other scriptures, or a constructed “text” like a baseball diamond, or a Smash Mouth cover. However we talk about it, it is a static object over which I – the observer – can evaluate and measure it to some standard. This is unlike revelation.

Revelation is timeless, eternal

Revelation is not objective; it is necessarily subjective. It prioritizes and valorizes subjectivity. Revelation has no time, no end or beginning. It is not in the past, nor from the past. If its emergence is located in some past as a genesis, it becomes genetic, inherited, reduced to finite scripture bound lockstep with the passage of time. Revelation is perpetually in the ephemeral present – the non-finite space between finite past and future – an unveiling exposé from some infinite source/destination simultaneity. This is what the Quran says: the One revealing the revelation is both the source and the destination of all He reveals, including me and my own existence.

أَأَنْتُمْ أَنْشَأْتُمْ شَجَرَتَهَا أَمْ نَحْنُ الْمُنْشِئُونَ

Are you producing its tree, or are we the Producers?” Reality 56:72

وَأَنَّ إِلَىٰ رَبِّكَ الْمُنْتَهَىٰ

“To your Lord is the destination” The Star 53:42

Reading scripture for scripture suddenly seem rather trivial. To be continued…

I read an ancient Sumerian story of Gilgamesh last night that sounded eerily like the Quranic tale of Solomon who sent a jinn to retrieve the throne of Bilqis (queen of Sheba). The Epic of Gilgamesh not only predates the Quran by at least 3000 years, but also the historical Solomon by at least a thousand years. This can mean only one thing: neither are the original tale and the tale’s origin is ephemeral. Of all the Mesopotamian heroes, Gilgamesh appears to be the funnel through which all these ancient tales pass into the Abrahamic traditions. He is a repository of older legends – a super hero.

The lesson is not to root your faith in history. History is a cognitive construct at best, even if you were there for the event, at worst a distraction from what your aql is intended for. History is never a legitimate source of faith.

So how do you read these tales? I used to teach this in my university course “Reading the Quran” at Santa Clara University and found it very effective when interpreting stories of prophets/heroes in scripture. Consider this absolute legend, John Sudano a.k.a. Smash Mouth Cover Guy.

John is a modern day Gilgamesh whose own heroic feat – singing “All Star” to any melody – is a repository of reinterpretations of earlier musical legends, like Nirvana, Radiohead, Oasis, Drake, and more. Here, John’s performing his musical interpretation of Wonderwall by singing the lyrics of Smash Mouth’s famous “All Star” over the famous melody.

Now consider John’s predecessor, Ryan Adams who covered a much darker Wonderwall in 2003.

For those familiar with the genre, whose is more “accurate” to the original version by the legendary British rock band Oasis? Ryan Adams captures Oasis’s same lyrical composition, while John captures the original melody. Which part of Oasis’s Wonderwall shook up the world? What was the moral lesson? And what is a wonder wall anyway?

Here’s the purported original by Oasis for posterity (a fantastic song by any standard).

Now Wonderwall’s fame is nothing short of monumental. This song skyrocketed the success of Oasis to that of the Beatles, a comparison seen as sacrilege by some. Like the Smash Mouth Cover Guy, both bands are heroes in their own right, in their own community. But the origins of the Wonderwall myth doesn’t begin with Oasis at all. It begins in an unremarkable 1968 psychedelic movie about a peeping tom watching a woman through a hole in the wall. His wonder wall. “Who was the woman? What was she like?” he might ask. Readers of scripture also ask trivia around mythical events, often missing the forest for the trees, losing the message in the noise.

Another legend sequence emergese from this unremarkable fountainhead. The soundtrack to that film was written by George Harrison of the Beatles who had just recorded a hit song a year earlier before the film called “Penny Lane”. That’s right: the woman in the film. Now the actual origin of Penny Lane by The Beatles was of course a a street in Liverpool, England, and as a tribute to their upbringing in Liverpool, they wrote the song. And the street’s origins name? A slave trader named James Penny.

So what’s the original Wonderwall and which interpretations embody the original message today? Which interpretation of Penny Lane lives on today? The song, the film, or the slave trader?

We live next to a frozen yogurt shop called Penny Lane. I asked my daughter yesterday “do you know why it’s called Penny Lane?”She said “because it has all these penny-shaped candies!” I laughed, because it reminds me how most people interpret their scripture.

When I mentioned the story of Solomon in the Quran having precedence in the Epic of Gilgamesh, someone predictably countered “but it wasn’t a jinn who retrieved it in the Quran. It was a person!”, as if to affirm the originality of the Quranic interpretation of the myth. He’d really like this frozen yogurt place by my house.

I recently read a famous quote taken out of context. “The isnād is from the religion; were it not for the isnād anyone could say anything they wanted“. The trouble with this is that most people will not only not challenge this claim, they are not aware of its context.

I was asked to expand a bit on how I “read” the Quran now. I was initially motivated by a linguistic analysis of the Quran: a method I am trained to use not limited to just syntax and morphology, but also pragmatics, semantics, historical linguistics, and even psycholinguistics.

This brought me to semiotics, the study of how signs work. When talking about signs, it’s hard to say we “read” them without muddying the waters of what we mean. So instead of “reading” in the linguistic sense of extracting sentential meaning (semantics) from the sign , I prefer to “respond” to signs. Revelation as a system of signs communicating meaningful signals or messages to its intended recipient: ultimately me. I can relay or reflect it, accept it or reject it, but from my own subjective vantage point, my “I” is the end of the line and my observations while relaying that signal are all I can know. I cannot see beyond my vantage point.
My approach is to respond to the Quran as God’s revealed speech directly without the mediation of historical theorization as we find in most commentaries, legal doctrines, sufic traditions, creedal polemics, and other lenses. Lensing is an unavoidable activity in reading. If I’m unaware of the biasing effect of my lenses, then I am likely to never know its limitations; never to know what is the subject, the object of inquiry, or the artifacts of the lens. The goal is to read the Revealed Speech intentionally and thoughtfully as an authentic communiqué, not as a history book (naqlism), or a user’s manual (neo-salafism):

Thus I swear by the twilight. And by the night and what constellates. (The Splitting, 84:16-17)

What proof does twilight provide? What does the night and the constellations therein tell me that I cannot figure out on my own, such that its Lord would speak to me directly in my language? And why do these two signs seemingly reverse the creative activity described at the beginning of the surah? Continue reading →

The following  ahadith are from the collection of widely known prophetic sayings (mutawātirah) as categorized by the 14th century scholar Imam Jalalludin al-Suyuti. There is no consensus on the criteria for mutawātir, but in theory they constitute what scholarly communities today would consider common knowledge and need no further evidence. Mutawātira are exceedingly rare, and according to many scholars non-existent. The two types are lafẓī and ma’nāwī: verbatim and semantic, or in meaning only. Continue reading →

Have you ever talked into a microphone with the speaker facing you? That high pitch screech making you wince just thinking of it? Maybe you heard an annoying reverberation getting louder and louder till you unplugged the speaker or mic. That screech or reverberation is what happens when the microphone collecting the sound signal picks up the artificial echo of the original signal. This signal loop compounds and escalates the volume till it overwhelms the original sound, distorts it, and eventually drowns it out. In other words, the speaker is transmitting the sound back towards the source emitting that sound. This is called feedback. When feedback competes with the source, it’s called interference. Continue reading →