[Ifroham4]

Not really; read on. http://hnn.us/articles/3902.html

Daniel Pipes Is Wrong ... People Should Read the Koran to Learn About Muslim Terrorism
By Irfan Khawaja
Mr. Khawaja, adjunct professor of philosophy at the College of New Jersey, is a columnist for Pakistan Today. The views he expresses here are his own.


In a brief but controversial column in the New York Sun (Jan. 20, 2004), the Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes argues that we ought not to read the Koran [i] to understand Islamic terrorism. “[R]eading the Koran,” he writes, “is precisely the wrong way to go about understanding ‘what's happening in our world'…. Instead of the Koran , I urge anyone wanting to study militant Islam and the violence it inspires to understand such phenomena as the Wahhabi movement, the Khomeini revolution, and Al-Qaeda. Muslim history, not Islamic theology, explains how we got here and hints at what might come next” (my italics). Indeed, Pipes goes so far as to hint that the recent enthusiasm for reading the Koran plays into the hands of Islamists: “American bookstores reported selling more Korans than Bibles,” Pipes writes. “All this,” he adds, “was music to Islamist ears.”

In thinking about Pipes's argument, it's important to be clear about his thesis, which I've italicized in the preceding quotations. His claim is not merely that one must go beyond the Koran to understand Islamic terrorism but that reading the Koran is the wrong way of understanding it. To say this is to say that by reading the Koran, one detracts from one's understanding of the relevant phenomena. It follows, then, that one can somehow understand the Wahhabi movement, the Khomeini revolution and Al Qaeda terrorism better if one hasn't read the Koran than if one has. This strikes me as an extremely implausible claim, for reasons I'll explain in what follows.

Pipes begins by saying that we should not read the Koran because it is in a special sense “profound”: “One cannot pick it up and understand its meaning when nearly every sentence is the subject of annotation, commentaries, glosses, and superglosses.” He offers the analogy of the U.S. Constitution; a casual reader would not be able to grasp the meaning of, say, the Second Amendment simply by reading the twenty-seven words that comprise it (“A well-regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed”).

Pipes is right to say that the Koran is in a certain sense profound, but the claim does little to bolster his conclusion. Plato's Republic and Mill's On Liberty are profound texts in the same sense, but it seems absurd to say that they should not be read because of their profundity. The more obvious inference is that, given their profundity, they should be read with care. In this respect, Pipes's allusion to the Constitution undermines rather than supports his intended conclusion: the U.S. Constitution may be profound in Pipes's sense, but does that mean that reading it is “precisely the wrong way” of understanding contemporary American politics? How would one understand, say, the civil rights movement—or to use Pipes's own example, debates about gun control— without having read the Constitution? It's worth noting that the Civics Assessment of the National Assessment of Educational Progress expects eighth-graders to have a basic grasp of the provisions of the U.S. Constitution, and expects advanced twelfth-graders to “ be able to explain fully the structure of American government and the political process” according to the Constitution. If high school and junior high school students can be expected to understand the Constitution, why can't educated adults be expected to understand the Koran?

Pipes's claim about profundity is in any case a non-sequitur. A text's profundity says nothing at all about its relevance to any given topic. Profundity in this context is a function of the complexity of the text and the interpretive superstructure required to understand it fully. But the text and superstructure could be complex and yet still relevant. In fact, one irony is that Pipes ignores what seems the obvious fact that the “annotations, commentaries, glosses and superglosses” he mentions are often at pains to emphasize precisely the opposite of the argument he offers. There is an important sola scriptura strain of interpretation in contemporary Islam that argues that because the Koran is the only directly-accessible source of God's will (it's considered a direct revelation from God), it's the only fully authoritative and binding source of Muslim belief and action. [ii] The other traditional sources— ahadith (traditions), sunnah (prophetic example), qiyas (analogy), ijma (communal consensus)—all fall far short in this regard: each reflects God's will, but none directly asserts it. Pipes tells his readers to study “the Wahhabi movement” but fails to see that it is precisely the appeal of this sola scriptura version of Islam that attracts adherents to that movement, as well as to the closely-related Deobandi, Brelvi, Tabligh, and Tului-Islam movements.

One sees this in a powerful way in the testimony of Muslims (or ex-Muslims) who have had the opportunity candidly to discuss the motivations behind their beliefs. In Ibn Warraq's recent book Leaving Islam: Apostates Speak Out (Prometheus, 2003), one Pakistani apostate describes the attractions of Tului-Islam as follows (Tului-Islam is a branch of Islam with a theology similar to Wahhabiism; I've modified the spelling of “Tului-Islam” slightly from the original passages):

I came across the Tului-Islam literature, which I avidly read, and for a short period I accepted it. What appealed to me about it was that its founder, Ghulam Ahmad Pervez, completed rejected the hadith , which he regarded as totally unreliable. He claimed to base his theology on the Koran alone, which he interpreted in a very unique way. He claimed that the Koran advocated an economic system that was socialistic and against private ownership of land. This meant the elimination of feudalism and the doing away of poverty. Into the bargain he also threw in progressive policies about women and criticized the institution of slavery and the death sentence for apostasy, which he alleged were un-Koranic. (Husain Ahmed, “A Rationalist Look at Islam,” Leaving Islam , p. 231).