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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 June 2019
For centuries Muslims have asked whether the Qurʾan should be recited and memorized first and foremost, or whether one must prioritize understanding the meaning of its complex language. What is the best way to encounter God's Word? To explore this question, a women's Qurʾan lesson in a slum of Old Cairo illustrates modern Muslim anxieties over the place of discursive meaning in encounters with the Qurʾan. This article elaborates the concept of affirmation as an analytic to grasp how the women relate to the truth of revelation. Affirmation is a performative and discursive hermeneutic practice that deploys Qurʾanic citation, situates Qurʾanic concepts in daily life, and sutures the efficacy of Qurʾan education with correct language and with right action. Their lessons are indicative of reformist trends in Qurʾan education that open onto questions of meaning and understanding in relation to human interactions with divine speech.
Author's note: I am grateful to the women of Batn al-Baqara who welcomed me and allowed me to think about questions of Qurʾan and meaning with them. For their critical comments at various stages, I thank Emmanuelle Stefanidis, Basit Iqbal, Robert Launay, Junaid Quadri, and my supportive cohort of postdoctoral fellows at Northwestern University. The critical comments of the anonymous IJMES reviewers and the fine editorial work of Akram Khater and Jeffrey Culang brought clarity to my thinking.
1 All translations from Arabic into English are mine, except for translations of the meaning of the Qurʾan. For the latter, I have drawn on Haleem, M. A. S. Abdel, The Quran: A New Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)Google Scholar.
2 For an introduction to the concept and debates surrounding the Word of God, see Radscheit, Matthias, “Word of God,” Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾan, ed. McAuliffe, Jane Dammen (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 5:541–48Google Scholar. The Qurʾanic text self-referentially employs the terms “God's word” (kalām Allāh) (2:75); “our Lord's word” (qawl rabbinā) (Q 37:31); “his word” (kalimatuhu) (4:171); and “words from his Lord” (min rabbihi kalimatin) (2:37) (541).
3 Egypt's Islamic revival (al-ṣahwa al-islāmiyya) began in the 1970s with an increase of religious discussion and practice in the public sphere. It was marked by new religious publications, radio and television programs, and forms of dress (especially among women), as well as an emphasis on religious education. Numerous factors contributed to this turn to piety, from the failure of Arab nationalism to the return of migrant workers from the Gulf. Egypt's Islamic revival was shaped by regional transformations and in turn came to impact regional as well as global revivalist trends in places such as Indonesia and the United States. On Egypt's Islamic revival, see, e.g., Ahmed, Leila, A Quiet Revolution: The Veil's Resurgence, from the Middle East to America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2012)Google Scholar; Esposito, John L., Islam and Politics (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1998)Google Scholar; and Haddad, Yvonne Yazbeck, The Islamic Revival since 1988: A Critical Survey and Bibliography (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997)Google Scholar.
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9 Ware and Launay, “How (Not) to Read the Qur'an?”; Reinhart, Kevin, “Fundamentalism and the Transparency of the Arabic Qur'an,” in Rethinking Islamic Studies: From Orientalism to Cosmopolitanism, ed. Ernst, Carl and Martin, Richard C. (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 2010), 97–113Google Scholar.
10 Ware and Launay employ the visual metaphor of opacity in describing classical Qurʾan education: “The single most important epistemic difference distinguishing adherents of the classical approach from reformists is that the former are convinced of the opacity of signs and the latter of their transparency. For reformists, the Qurʾan can be reduced to the meaning of its words. Whoever masters its language thus has access to the content of the book and can decipher its message”; Ware and Launay, “How (Not) to Read the Qur'an?,” 354. The visual metaphor expands our attention to the senses so that audition is not the exclusive sensory mode. The language of transparency and opacity also invites us to consider the Qurʾan's own language of veiling and unveiling, as well as its self-reference to verses that are clear in meaning (muḥkamāt) and others that are ambiguous (mutashābihāt).
11 Through the Wizarat al-Awqaf (Ministry of Endowments), the government body that oversees the regulation of religious affairs, the state regulates formal initiatives to train teachers, issue instructional licenses, and conduct religious lessons.
12 Mahmood, Saba's ethnographic account of Egypt's mosque movement (Politics of Piety: The Islamist Revival and the Feminist Subject [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005])Google Scholar locates mosque lessons as a locus of the country's late 20th-century Islamic Revival. Mahmood delineates the women's ritual and ethical practices aimed at cultivating piety. On the rising role of Muslim women leadership in education, see Doorn-Harder, Pieternella van, Women Shaping Islam: Indonesian Women Reading the Qur'an (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kalmbach, Hilary and Bano, Masooda, eds., Women, Leadership, and Mosques (Leiden: Brill, 2011)Google Scholar; and Alidou, Ousseina, Muslim Women in Postcolonial Kenya: Leadership, Representation, and Social Change (Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013)Google Scholar.
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14 Robbins, Joel, “Ritual Communication and Linguistic Ideology: A Reading and Partial Reformulation of Rappaport's Theory of Ritual,” Current Anthropology 42 (2001): 592CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the politics of the divide between classical Arabic (fuṣḥa) (including Qurʾanic and Modern Standard Arabic forms) and Egyptian Arabic, see Haeri, Niloofar, Sacred Language, Ordinary People: Dilemmas of Culture and Politics in Egypt (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003)Google Scholar.
15 These are: al-Nas (The People), six verses; al-Falaq (Daybreak), five verses; al-Ikhlaṣ (Purity [of Faith]), four verses; al-Masad (Palm Fiber), five verses; al-Naṣr (Help), three verses; al-Kafirun (The Disbelievers), six verses; al-Kawthar (Abundance), three verses; al-Maʿun (Common Kindnesses), seven verses; al-Quraysh (Quraysh), four verses; al-Fil (The Elephant), five verses; al-Humaza (The Backbiter), eight verses.
16 Brown, Jonathan, “Scripture in the Modern Muslim World: The Quran and Hadith,” in Islam in the Modern World, ed. Kenney, Jeffrey T. and Moosa, Ebrahim (Oxfordshire, UK: Routledge, 2014), 13–34Google Scholar. Brown's typology also includes Islamic modernists such as Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd (d. 2010), for whom the Qurʾan is divine but subject to the conventions of human language; traditionalist Salafis such as Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab (d. 1792), do not feel the need to respond to modernity and rely heavily on hadith; and late Sunni traditionalists, such as ʿAli Jumaʿ, refer to a “traditional Islam” and combine Sunni schools of law and Sufism.
17 For ethnographic accounts of Egyptian schooling, see Herrera, Linda and Torres, Carlos Alberto, eds., Cultures of Arab Schooling: Critical Ethnographies from Egypt (Albany: SUNY Press, 2006)Google Scholar.
18 The second general recitation mode is mujawwad, which employs the dramatic use of melody and register to heighten the emotional experience of the listener. It is the form of recitation typically performed in public. Only the most advanced students study this style.
19 Saʿid, Labib, The Recited Koran: A History of the First Recorded Version, trans. Weiss, Bernard, Rauf, M. A., and Berger, Morroe (Princeton, N.J.: Darwin Press, 1978), 71Google Scholar.
20 The textual compilation of the corpus of the Qurʾan is known as the ʿUthmanic text, named after ʿUthman ibn ʿAffan (d. 656), the third caliph to rule the early Muslim community following the death of Muhammad. The standard sources on the ʿUthmanic compilation are Nöldeke, Theodor, Schwally, Friedrich, Bergsträsser, Gotthelf, Pretzl, Otto, and Behn, Wolfgang H., The History of the Qurʾān (Leiden: Brill, 2013)Google Scholar, esp. “The Genesis of the Authorized Redaction of the Koran under the Caliph Uthman,” 252–76; and Bell, Richard and Watt, W. Montgomery, Bell's Introduction to the Qurʾān (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1970)Google Scholar. For the most up-to-date analysis of the canonization, see Comerro, Viviane, Les Traditions sur la Constitution du Muṣḥaf de ʿUthmān (Würzburg: Ergon-Verl. in Komm, 2012)Google Scholar. On the material Qurʾan (muṣḥaf) on which the 1960 recording is based, see Reynolds, Gabriel, ed., The Qurʾān in Its Historical Context (London: Routledge, 2008)Google Scholar, esp. the discussion in his introduction on the 1924 Royal Egyptian edition of the Qurʾan.
21 Ibid., 81.
22 Ibid., 111–12.
23 Al-Azhar plays a major role in religious, intellectual, and political life in Egypt and abroad. It is simultaneously a mediator of state-sanctioned Islam and a place of intellectual diversity that has transformed rapidly since the 19th century. For a general overview of the history and social transformation of this institution, see Dodge, Bayard, Al-Azhar: A Millennium of Muslim Learning (Washington, D.C.: Middle East Institute, 1961)Google Scholar; and ʿInan, Muhammad ʿAbd Allah, Tarikh al-Jamiʿ al-Azhar (Cairo: Muʾassasat al-Khanji, 1958)Google Scholar. On educational reform in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, see ʿAli, Saʿid Ismaʿil, Al-Azhar ʿala Masrah al-Siyasa al-Misriyya: Dirasa fi Tatawwur al-ʿAlaqa bayna al-Tarbiya wa-l-Siyasa (Cairo: Dar al-Thaqafa li-l-Tibaʿa wa-l-Nashr, 1974)Google Scholar. For socio-historical and sociological studies of 20th-century al-Azhar, see Eccel, Chris, Egypt, Islam and Social Change: Al-Azhar in Conflict and Accommodation (Berlin: K. Schwarz Verlag, 1984)Google Scholar; and Zeghal, Malika, Gardiens de l'Islam: les oulémas d'Al-Azhar dans l'Égypte contemporaine (Paris: Presses de la Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In addition to the mosque and university, over two million students attend school through the al-Azhar institutes (maʿāhid azhariyya). On the global influence of these primary schools and their modernizing effects on African Islamic education, see Babou, Cheikh Anta, “The Al-Azhar School Network: A Murid Experiment in Islamic Modernism,” in Islamic Education in Africa: Writing Boards and Blackboards, ed. Launay, Robert (Indianapolis, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2016), 173–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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27 The manual succinctly read: “Kawthar is a river in paradise created by God. It is a miracle for the prophet and his umma”; Muhammad Sulayman al-Ashqar, Tafsir al-ʿAshr al-Akhir min al-Qurʾan al-Karim: Min Zubdat al-Tafsir (Cairo: Al-Gazera International Press, n.d.), 61.
28 This point is significant because if the Qurʾan were eternal it would be on the same plane as God. My depiction of the debate in broad strokes is intended as a heuristic to contrast differing language ideologies, each grounded in a philosophical/theological tradition. For a rich discussion of Muʿtazilite theories of language, see Vasalou, Sophia, “‘Their Intention Was Shown by Their Bodily Movements’: The Baṣran Muʿtazilites on the Institution of Language,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 47 (2009): 201–21Google Scholar.
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30 Ware, The Walking Quran, 4.
31 Al-Fatiha is ritually significant, and is recited to open and bless important transactions and events. Michael Sells depicts the meaning of the chapter as “a microcosm of basic Qurʾanic beliefs in the compassionate creator, the day of reckoning, and the need for guidance”; Sells, , Approaching the Qurʾan: The Early Revelations (Ashland, Oreg.: White Cloud Press, 2001), 173Google Scholar.
32 In Egyptian Arabic, the error would be heard in the vowel preceding the consonant—in the quality of the a, rather than the emphasis on the t.
33 The first “pillar” (rukn) of Islam is bearing witness to the oneness of God and the prophethood of Muhammad (the shahāda); the second “pillar” is the five regular prayers (ṣalāt).
34 Ware and Launay, “How (Not) to Read,” 346.
35 Qurʾan 73:20.
36 Engelke, Matthew Eric and Tomlinson, Matt, eds., The Limits of Meaning: Case Studies in the Anthropology of Christianity (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006)Google Scholar.
37 Ibid., 2.
