‘Religious Doctrine’ & ‘Religion’: Sharing Some Thoughts

By Charles Ponnuthurai Sarvan –February 1, 2018

The following is consequent to reading ‘What the Qur’an Meant and Why It Matters’ by Garry Wills, New York, 2017. (The touch of ambiguity in the title’s anaphoric pronoun is surely deliberate.) Page reference, unless otherwise stated, is to this book. Professor Wills, now retired, once studied for the Roman-Catholic priesthood; later, he taught Greek and History.

Thirty-one percent of the world’s population is Christian; twenty-three is Muslim (p. 4) and growing. The word “Islam” means submission to Allah, and to Muslims Allah’s will is expressed in the Qur’an: Professor Abdel Haleem in his translation of the Qur’an (Oxford University Press) states that the sacred book is the supreme authority in Islam. The Qur’an is essentially an oral text, audibly received; orally transmitted. The revelations to the Prophet were made over several years, and their ordering in the Qur’an is neither chronological nor topical. This means there is no narrative thread for the reader to follow with ease.  Further, “Some things in the book are off-putting – slavery, patriarchal attitudes toward women, religious militarism. But the same can be said of the biblical Torah” (pp. 5-6).

The Qur’an is a fungible and fraternal text, the latter in that it respects earlier prophets. One of the Prophet’s wives, Safiyya bint Huyayy, was a Jew and one of his concubines, Marya al-Qibtiyya, a Christian (p. 127).  The Qur’an explicitly states: “There is no compulsion in religion” (Sura 2:256). At the commencement of any undertaking, Muslims recite: Bismillah rahmani Rahim (In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful), and every chapter of the Qur’an, except the Ninth, commences with this formulaic dedication. Even a cursory reading of the Qur’an will reveal the emphasis laid on the understanding and forgiving nature of Allah. Pope Francis wrote that authentic Islam is opposed to every form of violence (p. 3): the emphasis, I presume, falls on “authentic”. Yet in the minds of many, the Qur’an and Muslims are associated with violence, if not cruelty; with outdated, barbaric, notions and attitudes. People and groups with influence, either through ignorance or malice, distort the religion: the title of Jonathan Brown’s book, Misquoting Muhammad (2014), comes to my mind. Before we make statements about Islam; before we adopt a position, Professor Wills urges that we read the Qur’an and inform ourselves. It’s unjust and foolish to comment on Islam without reading the book which is its foundation. It’s said that seeing is believing but believing can also lead to seeing in the sense that if we have a prejudice about a group – be it on grounds of ‘race’, colour, religion or sex – then we are predisposed to “see” negatives in them. (The ‘Implicit-Association test’ is of relevance here.) Yuri Slezkine in his The Jewish Century notes “the growing Western antipathy” towards Islam and Muslims (Princeton and Oxford, 2004, p. 365).

Among the several misconceptions Wills attempts to correct two are about Shari’ah Law and the wearing of the hijab. The term “Shari’ah” occurs only once in the Qur’an, and there it hasn’t to do with law but means the right path. Subsequently, “the vague and sketchy elements of law in the Qur’an” (p. 147) were clarified and filled out by “sunnah (the Prophet’s reported behaviour), ahadith (the Prophet’s reported sayings), qiyas (analogical extensions), ijma (scholars’ consensus)”. So it is as absurd to call generally for the banning of Shari’ah law as to demand the banning of Christian law (p. 147). Where clothing is concerned, there were so many calling on the Prophet that it was necessary to afford the female members of his household a measure of extra privacy. The intention was to elevate – not to suppress. For an extended treatment, see Professor Leila Ahmed’s A Quiet Revolution, Yale University Press (commented on by me under the title ‘The Islamic hijab and veil’, Colombo Telegraph, 26 March 2017). Words from the Qur’an are taken out of context, leading to gross misrepresentation. For example, “Kill them wherever you encounter them and drive them out” (Sura 2:191) meant: You must not fight on sacred ground but if you are attacked, then retaliate (p. 133). One may add that the word Jihad does not mean war but struggle, and struggle can take many different forms: the Prophet referred to the major Jihad as being the struggle for self-control and moral betterment.

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But I wonder whether the equation of the Qur’an and Islam is valid. For example, if we say that Christianity is a gentle, or Buddhism a compassionate, religion what we mean is these faiths as they were taught – not as they are practiced in private and public life. Writing on Graham E. Fuller’s, A World Without Islam (Colombo Telegraph, 27 May 2016), I suggested a distinction between religious doctrine and religion with its rituals, paraphernalia, hierarchy, myths and superstitions. Religious doctrine has a divine or semi-divine origin or is from an exalted, exceptional, individual. Simplifying, one could say: While religious doctrine is ‘divine’; religion is a human construct.  Religion being human helps explain why the same religion in the same country can be gentle and tolerant and, at another time in its history, be vicious and hegemonic. Fuller asks, if there weren’t Islam would there be peace? Is the conflict between Jews and Christians on the one side, and Muslims on the other really based on differing theological beliefs? Islam has nothing whatsoever to do with the creation of the Palestinian problem. “The crime of the Holocaust” lies entirely on European shoulders: Palestinians are paying the price for European sins over the centuries, culminating in the Holocaust (Fuller, p. 303). The so-called “Palestinian problem” is one created for the Palestinians by Israel: the Palestinians are the victims and not the originators of this “problem”.

To engage in ‘counterfactual thinking’ (a counterfactual is a conditional containing an if-clause followed by what is contrary to fact), if Tamils had been Buddhists, would history have been different? Given the affinity between Hinduism and Buddhism; given that elements of Hinduism have been taken over into the Buddhist religion (in blatant contradiction of Buddhist doctrine, that is, of the Buddha’s teaching), is this not evidence that ethnicity is more potent that religion? Durkheim (credited with formally establishing the academic discipline of Sociology and being, together with Marx and Weber, one of the principal architects of the social sciences) argued that finally in religion the object of worship is society itself. Abdullah Ocalan, in his Prison Writings: The Roots of Civilization, argues that religion is identical with the concept of politics. Edward Gibbon in Volume 1 of his classic work, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, comments on the collusion between state and religion. Both religion (not religious doctrine) and politics have to do with power; with power, respect and influence. So if we comment on Islam or on any other religion, we should make clear whether the reference is to religion as actually practised or as originally preached.

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