12: Interpretation of the holy texts

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?

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, 3 June, 1998