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What
is your attitude towards the current trends in the interpretation of the holy
texts (the Qur'an and the Prophet's sunnah), the purport of which is that any
attempt at extracting a truth from the scriptures would open up a whole array
of diverse interpretations; that even the effort to elucidate and analyze
texts is a distortion, no matter how big a claim to impartiality and
objectivity it makes. Does not this amount to affirming the relativity, or
even to denying the truth that has been propounded by the Holy Writ? Jawdat Said to “Current Islamic Issues” |
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You see, my dear sir, how
the same thing will come up again and again: Do we have to keep grappling
with the problem of the text, a tug of war that seems to lead us nowhere? For
again what is a text? It is aural or visual symbols which we agree they
signify something and refer to it. A symbol must be paired with the
experience, for without the experience the text loses its worth. A text is
just a vehicle for the sense, and the relationship between the text and the
sense is integrative, so that neither is operative without the other, and we
cannot transfer an experience from one nervous system to another without the
text. I have said this before, and I say it again: I keep telling the one who
is an advocate of texts: Refer to the actual reality. No reality can be
gleaned from texts. For instance, the words
'earth' and 'sky' evoke in our minds meanings that are not the same as they
evoked in the minds of the people to whom the Qur'an descended. That
necessitates that we refer to the fundamental source: this is what science directs us to do, and it is what God
commands us to do. The Arabs have a proverb which says that the moon will not
be faster or slower; it will be as it is; it is rather our concepts and
values that change. If the text symbols were the actual reality, then the
word fire would have ignited fire and hurt the mouth of its utterer. That is
then the crux of the issue: once we get to the bottom of it, we shall feel
contented; we shall see that when the signs of the world around us and the
world of souls within testify to what we say, it proves that we have our hold
on truth, and it will be so until something else emerges that testifies
better for the truth. Let him who has a book which is a better guide bring it
so that we follow it (ref. to the Qur'an, 28, 49.) That the pair should be
there is a certainty, like the pairs in all creation: “And of every thing We
have created pairs; that you may receive instruction, (the Qur'an, 51, 49);”
without a pair, there will be no reproduction and no survival of life. The
pair is mentioned by God in reference to the creation and the text, as in the
following verse: “Then, by the Lord of heaven and earth, this is the very
Truth, as much as the fact you can speak intelligently to each other, (51, 23).” It would be to the point if we analyze what takes
place when we speak, by reviewing the elements of speaking: the speaker, the
hearer, the topic under discussion, the words that bear the sense, and the
referent of the sense without which the words lose their significance, I mean
the actual reality about which we speak. Let's again remember the sun, how
the whole world were in the wrong about it for eons of years, when they
thought that it was the one which rotated and not the earth. Praise be to God, Lord of
the Worlds Jawdat
Sa'eed, |
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