Page 30 - History of The Quranic Text | Kalamullah.Com

10 THE HISTORY OF THE QUR'ANIC TEXT

Speaking of the Biblical scholar Van Buren, Professor E.L. Mascall states
that " [he] finds the guiding principle of the secularization of Christianity
in the philosophical school which is commonly known as linguistic analysis."26
If such is the aim of linguistic analysis in Biblical studies, what other motive
can there be in applying it to the Qur'an?
This being outside the realm of what is tolerable to Muslims, an alternate
strategy is to substitute the holy text with vernacular translations, then
inflate their status such that they are held on a par with the original Arabic.
In this way Muslim societies, three-quarters of which are non-Arab, can
be severed from the actual revelations of Allah.

There is necessarilya mismatch between the Arabic of the Koran and
the locallanguage of primary education... The tensionisexacerbatedby
the fact that modernity brings an enhanced concern for the intelligibility
of scripturesamong the believers at large.Asthe TurkishnationalistZiya
Gokalp (d. 1924) put it: ':<\ country in whose schoolsthe Koran is read
in Turkish is one in which everyone, child and adult, knows God's
commands't.F

After describing the futile Turkish efforts to displace the actual Qur'an
with a Turkish translation, Michael Cook concludes,

To date,the non-Arab Muslimworldshows littlesignof adoptingthe idea
of a vernacularscripturein the manner of sixteenth-century Protestantism
or twentieth-century Catholicism."

If all other stratagems are left in tatters, one last resort remains. As
described by Cook:

In a modern Western society it is more or less axiomatic that other
people's religiousbeliefs(though not, of course, allforms of religiously
motivated behaviour) are to be tolerated, and perhaps even respected.
Indeed it would be considered ill mannered and parochial to refer to
the religious views of others zs false and one's own as true... the very
notion of absolute truth in matters qf religion sounds hopelessly outqf date. It
is, however, a notion that was central to traditional Islam, as it was to
traditional Christianity; and in recent centuries it has survived better
in Islam.i"

26 E.L. Mascall, The Secularization if Christianity, Darton, Longman & Todd Ltd.,
London, 1965, p. 41. Dr. PaulM. Van Burenisthe author of "The SecularMeaning
of the Gospel",whichis based on the analysis of Biblical language [ibid, p. 41.]
27 M. Cook, TheKoran: A Very Short Introduction, p. 26. Interestingly ZiyaGokalpwas
a Donma]ew who convertedto Islam [M. Qu~b, al-Mustashriqim tea al-Isldm, p. 198].
28 M. Cook, TheKoran: A Very Short Introduction, p. 27.
29 ibid, p. 33,emphasis added. Cook'swords, 'that wascentralto traditionalIslam',
seemto implythat it is no longer appropriate for modern Islam.