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Originally Posted by ellimak
Frankly, if you are a Westerner, there are a lot of things in the Qur'an which simply aren't going to make sense if you don't have some knowledge about pre-Islamic Arabia. For example, you won't have an understanding of the idioms used, you won't understand how the split between Sunni and Shi'a happened, and you won't know the importance of the spoken word to this culture (which is important to understanding how Islam spread and why there are still Qur'an recitation contests to this day). I could go on about these kinds of things for pages and pages.
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Yes, that is a longer and more detailed version of what I said: you need information about the context in order to understand the text. What I doubt is that understanding the text itself will give you much insight into the beliefs of the people whose religion is supposed to be based on that text.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ellimak
The point I'm trying to make is, without a context or interpretation (tafsir or tawil, both of which are still relevant to modern practice and belief), a non-Muslim reader is likely to misunderstand and therefore misjudge the tradition. Interpretations don't come from nowhere. In fact, I would say that when it seems a belief is based on a late invention or a wacky interpretation, as you say, it is all the more important to do the work of uncovering its origins through context and exegesis.
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No, they don't. For example, the interpretation of the story of Adam and Eve as a sign or a proof that sex is a sin was born from the history and culture of Western civilization in the middle ages. However, I very much doubt that someone with no previous knowledge of that myth and of the Western civilization would come to that conclusion just by reading the original text.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ellimak
Of course, all of this would only be interesting to someone who truly wanted to take a good look at Islam and form her opinions fairly.
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I can't pretend that I am interested in that, and I also don't pretend to judge Islam, just as I am not interested in judging Christianity, if such entities can be said to exist. If I was, I would certainly read those texts, but I would not fool myself that even a complete understanding of the texts, even with the correct historical context, would put me in a position to fully understand contemporary Islam.
But how does my interest, or lack thereof, in Islam invalidate my opinion that religious beliefs are only loosely related to their founding texts, and that those founding texts are tools that tend to be selectively used to give weight to beliefs that originated elsewhere, through a very complex historical and social process?