Allah's version

Jack Mills writes books about Scripture that are unlike anything else I know of. He treats the divine person as revealed in what believers hold as sacred writings as a literary character, a Someone with personality, temperament, virtues, and idiosyncrasies. In 1996, Miles applied his technique to the Lord God of the Hebrew bible in God: a biography, which was both an unlikely best seller and a Pulitzer Prize winner. His subsequent epilogue, Christ: a Crisis in the Life of God, seems to have been more controversial, no huge shock. I appreciated its resolute departure from the more vengeful strains of Christian atonement theology.

Last year Miles published his third volume of literary interpretation of the Abrahamic scriptures: God in the Qur'an (God in Three Classic Scriptures).

Miles certainly has the academic chops for his tripartite endeavor in scriptural exploration. He started out as a Jesuit seminarian attending Xavier University in the U.S., moved on to the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, Hebrew University in Jerusalem and, finally, Harvard. He's been been an editor at the Doubleday publishing house, the executive editor at the University of California Press, and literary book review editor at the Los Angeles Times. Of late he's taught at UC Irvine and edited the Norton Anthology of World Religions. I should add that aside from the Norton volume, I've read them all in audiobook and highly recommend the medium for these exercises in imaginative erudition. You won't get every nuance by ear, but their breadth and audacity come through wonderfully.

I also have to warn readers of this blog post that I'm going to be quoting a lot; it will read more easily on a laptop screen than a phone.

Writing about Allah in the Qur'an, Miles confronts the difficult stumbling block that non-Muslim readers always meet: this scripture admits of no human author, narrator, or intermediary, being the direct speech of Allah via the Angel Gabriel to Muhammad. According to Islamic understanding, it cannot be translated from Arabic. He offers a work-around:

Over the centuries, the view most often taken of the Qur'an by Jews and Christians alike has been the view classically taken by Jews of the New Testament -- namely, "What's true is not new, and what's new is not true." Non-Muslims have disbelieved and dismissed what Muslims believe of the Qur'an -- namely, that it is God's last word to mankind, the crown of revelation, restoring what Jews and Christians had lost from or suppressed in their scriptures by oblivion or corruption.

My invitation here to Jews and Christians and the many others who disbelieve the bold Muslim claim is that, as a modest exercise in literary appreciation, they temporarily suspend their disbelief while together we attempt engagement with God as the central character of the Qur'an, and with the Qur'an as an elusively powerful work of literature.

My invitation to Muslims is that just as they might pray in a mosque on Friday but study its dome as students of architecture on a Tuesday, so they too might play along with this "Tuesday exercise," this literary engagement with just a few selections from the Qur'an read in conjunction with marching passages from the Bible.

As Miles tells it, what Allah is doing through the Qur'an is correcting known stories. Consequently, Allah has no need of linear narratives of episodes in creation history or of stimulating any narrative suspense or uncertainty.

In the Qur'an, when Allah instructs Muhammed about what His Prophet is to say about these biblical subjects, He is clearly speaking to someone who knows this subject matter already in a general way and needs only to have his understanding refreshed, corrected, or completed. ...

What Allah requires of mankind in the Qur'an is, above all, that they should acknowledge His divinity, submitting to him as the one and only God. The Arabic word ’islam means “submission”; the Arabic word muslim ... means one who has submitted. ... As the Qur’an understands religious history, Adam was a muslim in his time; Abraham was another muslim; Joseph a third; and so forth down past the muslim Christ to Muhammad. But a key part of the message of the Qur’an is that the never-changing message of ’islam has been lost or corrupted over the intervening aeons.

... Where the Qur’an coincides with the Bible, then, it unfolds not as a full retelling of the Bible story, as if that story had never been told before, but rather as a set of selective corrections and expansions of an already received account. Where more corrections is called for, Allah has more to say in the Qur’an.

Miles discusses at length the qur'anic account of Adam and Eve and then of humanity's expulsion from the garden of paradise. In Allah's telling, this behavior is not about humanity's permanent fall from a state of innocent grace, but simply the first instance of human disobedience to Allah which has teaches its own remedy.

... True, Adam and his wife [not named] must “descend” from the heavenly garden, but because they have promptly and plainly admitted and repented of their sin, merciful Allah does not condemn them to eternal punishment in hell. In the Qur’an, Adams does not blame his wife the way he does in Genesis. The two of them confess together, neither blaming the other, and neither attempts to blame Satan. Accepting their repentance as sincere, Allah simply precipitates them into earthly existence where, after living a normal human lifetime and dying at its end, they will await His Last Judgment as indeed will all their descendants. They have every prospect, in other words, of eventually ascending to the heavenly garden from which he has sent them down. In effect, he has forgiven them this first sin. True, they must pay a price, but as they begin the life that awaits them down on earth, He has given them a pardon and an immediate second chance.

.... we have all the power we need to resist [Satan’s] deceptions and stay on the “straight path.” If we do succumb, we know that just as Allah gave Adam and Eve their second chance, He will give us ours. Allah is like that: He can be counted on. He is not colorfully or dramatically unpredictable. He is not like you or me nor even, quite, like Yahweh. Agony awaits us if we defy Him, but He is on our side if we let Him be. ...

No wonder Allah is described as "the merciful, the compassionate" in Islamic usage.

This book concludes with a list of how Allah corrects and amends the Jewish and Christian scriptures:

that when God placed Adam and Eve in the Garden of Paradise, He warned them that Satan would tempt them. (In the Bible, no such warning is given.)

that when they succumbed to temptation but then quickly repented, He forgave them and explained that after a lifetime on Earth, bearing only the trials and tribulations that ordinary human life entails, they could return to Paradise. (No such forgiveness or distant hope is proffered in the Bible.)

that when one of Adam’s sons slew the other, God condemned the murderer but coached him toward compassion by sending a raven whose scratching on the ground prompted the remorseful killer to bury his dead brother. (No such solicitous counsel is offered in the Bible.)

that when God sent a destructive flood, he warned those in its path beforehand and provided an ark on which, had they accepted Prophet Noah’s warning, they could all have floated to safety. (No such warning is given in the Bible.)

that when God chose Abraham as His prophet, he instructed him in monotheism before sending him against Abraham’s idolatrous father and his tribe. (In the Bible, God’s command to Abraham is peremptory and linked to fertility rather than to monotheism.)

that when God sent Moses to Pharaoh with the same prophetic message that He later conveyed to Muhammad, Pharaoh initially scoffed but in the end converted and accepted God as the only god. (In the Bible, God takes control of Pharaoh’s mind and bars the gate against any such conversion.)

that when God send Jesus as a prophet to the Jews and they sought to kill him, God rescued him and took him to Himself. (In the Bible, Jesus dies saying, “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?")

Far be it for me to bash the Bible. The Bible is my scripture. The Qur’an is theirs. In writing this little italicized meditation, I hope only that by exercising your imagination this much, you may find it a little easier to trust the Muslim next door ...

That last remark demonstrates Miles' hope in this mind-stretching book. He's clearly appalled by contemporary European/American ignorance and distortions about the beliefs and civilization of our Muslim neighbors. Some of this volume comes off as a slightly heavy-handed apologia, for example in an exhaustive demonstration that Jewish and Christian sacred writings are no less blighted by celebrations of holy carnage as is the Islamic scripture.

Fortunately in this country we enjoy increasing resources for discovering that Islamophobia is unnecessary and just false. Our Muslim neighbors turn out to be quite ordinary humans, like the rest of us. Miles has made his contribution toward our evolution here; we can all do our part.