Should a text define a society or should society be judged based on its attitude towards the text?

[rug]

In not letting a text define a society but rather working towards making a society interpret and value the text in its secular, humanistic interpretation could be the best way forward for a homogenous, pluralistic society which places greater value on life – any life, every life

May 17, 2016, 10:44 pm
Arshia Malik

When a handful of scholars since the Crusades and throughout Europe's medieval period began translating, interpreting, editing, publishing and commenting upon the immense corpus of primary texts regarding the rise and expansion of Islamic Civilization, they more or less consciously endeavoured to give definition to Islam as a civilization, that is, a unified body of beliefs, ideas and values. This inevitably led to a self-styled promotion of themselves as interpreters of that 'Islamic Civilization' to the 'West', which in turn led to an erroneous intellectual enterprise - that of tending to present Islam as a 'tradition' that was static, timeless, and uniform, and by implication, impervious to the dynamics of change or of historical process.

According to Richard M. Eaton, in his collection of Essays on Islam and Indian History, Oxford University Press, 2000:

"...Moreover, recent critics have sensed in much of this scholarship a political motive. Scholarly concentration on the classical texts of Islam, and especially on those produced during the formative eighth-to-eleventh centuries, encouraged the belief that this particular period represented some sort of 'golden age', after which Islamic Civilization was doomed to a slow and painful decline. And the notion of a declining Islamic civilization suggested, in turn, that Europe's relatively easy conquest of Muslim societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the continued European domination over them into the twentieth, had been not only inevitable but justified."

The problem with the corpus of primary texts is that they were mostly compiled several decades after the death of the Prophet in the time of the third Caliph Uthman and it can be safely presupposed that while compiling anybody of literature there are sure to have been errors, mistranslations, conflict of interests and linguistic challenges. That subsequent history somehow attached primacy of text to reason and termed the text as infallible is what has brought us all to the "clash of civilizations" and an ossification of the text and its interpretation even engineered hijacking of interpretations to suit various schools of thoughts and jurists who inevitably are misogynistic and theocratic.

But a text can't define or represent a society or its culture. In fact, in all the debates in atheist groups, agnostic ones, anti-theist or even believers' groups, every reasonable believer had this to say that:

"Everything and everyone is inspired by God to a greater or lesser extent. It's not God inspiring us but us reaching out to the universe and world around us and being inspired by it. It can inspire great acts and not so great acts, all are of course flawed human acts and defined by their context."

http://nation.com.pk/blogs/17-May-2016/should-a-text-define-a-society-or-should-it-be-judged-based-on-its-attitude-towards-the-text

[immoderate]

1. Let it be.

--imm