Religion
Related: About this forumSam Harris Says Qur’an “Not That Good”
June 6, 2012 2:29PM
Post by Hussein Rashid
I’m a regular reader of The Daily Dish by Andrew Sullivan. I generally like his take on religion, and I find his criticism of religion to be even-handed and insightful. However, he recently published a quote by Sam Harris saying that the Qur’an is “not that good,” followed by his own question of “can any readers counter?” It was a shocking and, I thought, lazy post. Not because of Harris’ statement, which is to be expected, but that Sullivan would give it air and frame it in such a way as to give the impression that he agrees. I was very pleased to see that numerous readers did respond, and Sullivan did give them the space to do so.
I was most impressed by the last commentator, an incoming graduate student at the School of Oriental and African Studies. The individual wrote about many of the things that make the Qur’an valuable to Muslims, and attacks many of the assumptions present in Harris’ quote. The Qur’an is a text in Arabic, a language to which I do not believe Harris has access. How do you judge the value of a text if you don’t know the language, or even know how to judge a translation? The King James Version of the Bible is considered a masterwork of English literature, but it is not sound in its translation. I can go on, but again, Sullivan’s commenter did a good job with many of the technical aspects.
However, I want to point out just how paternalistic, arrogant, colonialist, and generally ignorant Harris sounds. (I suppose ignorance is actually a precursor to all the other adjectives.) Here is a text that has over 1.6 billion adherents all over the world, with a 1400-year history. Along comes a privileged white male telling them that he has read the foundational text of the religion and that it has no redeeming value. So all these people, all that history, has no meaning because Harris says so. They are all wrong. He will save them. What of all the people in America who read Jalal ud-Din Rumi, the 13th-century Persian poet, who was so deeply inspired by the Qur’an that his oevre is called the Qur’an in Persian? Are they wrong too? Is Sam Harris really the only person on Earth who knows that the Qur’an has no value?
Harris also says “you can wander blindfolded into a Barnes & Noble, and the first book you pick off the shelf will have more wisdom than the Quran.” This quote is simply a re-working of Thomas Macaulay’s 1835 Minute on Education, in which he says “I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.”
http://www.religiondispatches.org/dispatches/husseinrashid/6049/sam_harris_says_qur%E2%80%99an_%E2%80%9Cnot_that_good%E2%80%9D/
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MADem
(135,425 posts)Children are required to memorize vast swathes of the tome. They have a contest every year in SA for the best reciter (and "best" involves a great deal of emotion and evocative expression in the recitation).
As a text, what it says, basically, is what a lot of other religious texts say. It's not all that odd or mysterious or unusual. Do this, don't do that, God's gonna get ya if you aren't good.
The big difference is that a lot of people who can recite it with verve and vigor have a general idea of what they are saying, but they might not be able to speak any Arabic! It's like the old days of Roman Catholicism when a big chunk of the mass was done in Latin--people could recite the words but they might not be entirely clear on what they were saying.
It is what it is--a religious/cultural/law-source touchstone for a large number of people. Not unlike the Bible or other holy texts.
Jim__
(14,077 posts)Is this "good"?
<iframe width="640" height="360" src="
Is Sam Harris qualified to judge?
rug
(82,333 posts)That undesrcores the role of the Book in Islam.
Silent3
(15,217 posts)I suspect that Harris's comments were about the value of the Qur'an as a moral guide, not about its value as literature or poetry or music.
It's always seemed to me nothing more than the Courtier's Reply that the Qur'an can only "properly" be understood and appreciated in the original Arabic. Even if that somehow were true, then the defense of the Qur'an's value based on the 1.6 billion who claim to follow the book falls apart since only a fraction of those followers actually speak and read Arabic themselves.
white_wolf
(6,238 posts)he really pisses me off when it comes to Islam. He is very right-wing when it comes to Islam.
laconicsax
(14,860 posts)The Qur'an isn't appreciably different from, say, the Old Testament. Some of the names and places are different, but it isn't well-written or home to anything especially interesting or profound.
When compared to other religious works like the Tao Te Ching, it's just stupid--a bunch of fairy stories, commands, and self-adulatory back patting.
All that can likely be improved in Arabic is prose.
riderinthestorm
(23,272 posts)No, I also agree with Sam Harris so there's at least two of us.
And yes, I'd say anyone who believes in any religious text is "wrong too" since I believe they're all bullshit.
This guy seems to be more pissed off that Sam Harris wasn't persuaded to Islam and stayed an atheist after reading the Quran. Labelling Harris as "paternalistic, arrogant, colonialist and generally ignorant" because he finds the Quran to be a bad read signals to me that someone's waaay too touchy about their religion and more than a bit defensive.
He's also angry that Sullivan "may" agree and that he gave Harris publicity for his view. Uhm, Hussein Rashid needs to take a step back because he's starting to sound like the people who criticize those who publish Muhammed cartoons - ie. pretty damn unreasonable.
rug
(82,333 posts)riderinthestorm
(23,272 posts)He seems to be confrontational about virtually all religions and travels with bodyguards because of death threats. Is he Islamophobic because any critique of Islam can earn one that label? For example I know Salman Rushdie is also highly critical of Islam and has been labelled an Islamophobe for his support for a ban on the niqab/burqa.
rug
(82,333 posts)laconicsax
(14,860 posts)While his position is more racially motivated (since he seems to only think that brown-skinned people should be profiled), he bases it on his apparent inability to understand that Muslims aren't just Arab.
Igel
(35,317 posts)My thesis was fairly straightforward: For any text, religious or otherwise, there's a consensus "naive" reading. That's what 90% or more of the uneducated, untrained folk who read it will take away from it.
You can get bogged down with niceties of translation, of looking at the writer's notebooks and letters, looking at cultural tie-ins and discussions of Silence and voice. All of these are well and fine but utterly irrelevant. If you have to take 10 hours to explain what Moby Dick means, well, it's a meaning that most people won't get. They'll read it or any other work--Romeo and Juliet, Old Man and the Sea, Fall of the House of Usher, Brothers Karamazov, R.U.R., Pan Tadeusz--and take away what they take away.
It's the same with the OT, the NT, and the Qur'aan.
The OT, in the simplest form, is screed against infidelity to Yahweh and pushing for expansionism on a small scale. The Hasidim and such are the natural result of a naive reading. You can have educated and exegetical overlays to explain why the expansionist--at least in Palestine--part is purely historical, or why we should be Reformed versus Conservative. Whatever. Naive readers either take away a fairly conservative, expansionist creed or, if not Jewish, just shrug. Yeah, it's a problem. A small problem.
Reading the NT and taking it literally, at face value, leads you become a pacifist. Depending what you know of the first century in Palestine and the apostles, you may become Sabbatarian and Judaizing. You may not. You might set up a commune; you might now. But you're not likely to be very militant in anything but word. If you integrate the OT, you have some fancy stepping to get to anything violent or overly hegemonistic. It's been done, but of the many scores of trivial Xian faiths, most are fairly pacifist and many drop out of politics all together. It takes learning and years of theologizing for much else. The "Religious Right" in the US was in gestation for a generation before there was sufficient theologizing to make it a political, as opposed to a quietist, force.
With Qur'aan, naive readings are a problem. A naive reading puts together some very violent and some not-so-violent texts when it comes to defending the faith and dealing with unbelievers and sort-of-believers. You get a Will to Power out of the text, and it's not limited power of a people over a small patch of ground or a people waiting for a pie-in-the-sky kind of power. No, it's control, and it's now. The same "conservative" trends pop up in the 1100s in Spain, in the 900s in Egypt, in the 1800s in Syria, in the 1300s in Palestine. Some are from naive readings of the hadith. Others are from naive readings of the Qur'aan. It takes learning and years of theologizing to reconcile the various tendencies of the Qur'aan to make it a pacifistic work. Even more than one Sufi was a rabid Islamist with no qualms at killing non-believers, no matter how pietistic the thinking otherwise.
Harris, like me, would have a naive reading. Dear Rashid would be trained in what to read into the text, and would be like many Xians: When he reads the text of his holy book he reads not the words written there but the meaning that he's been taught that they have. "No, you have to interpret that line in the light of this line over here, and consideration that it was written under these circumstances and interpreted by so-and-so to mean this and no more." That's not reading the text; that's using the text as a mnemonic.
But barely educated imams, peasants who've been taught to read and not much else, people cut off from tradition--and that's the majority of a religion's followers--are left with naive readings. Most such folk are lukewarm; but if there's a Great Awakening, if there's some sort of revival, then you get a resurgence of hack preachers with naive readings or, in some cases, preconceived ideas at odds both with the traditional faith and with a naive reading.
laconicsax
(14,860 posts)Harris, while basing his assessment of Islam on a naive reading of the Qur'an, seems to be basing his love of profiling on skin color rather than religion.
SwissTony
(2,560 posts)"Here is a text that has over 1.6 billion adherents all over the world, with a 1400-year history."
And????
trotsky
(49,533 posts)Because if the Koran really was that good, they'd be Muslims.
struggle4progress
(118,288 posts)trotsky
(49,533 posts)struggle4progress
(118,288 posts)
2ndAmForComputers
(3,527 posts)
emoticon because some people need it.struggle4progress
(118,288 posts)as Orwellian Newspeak: Qur’an is doubleplusungood
2ndAmForComputers
(3,527 posts)And you know that. I quote: Nobody ever got wet ankles wading thru Sam's intellectual depths
I could say what that statement of yours is, but it's obvious enough that I don't need to.
struggle4progress
(118,288 posts)is he going to peddle next? Some of his righteous rants give me a perverse pleasure. I’m simultaneously irritated and titillated. I get the same feeling listening to Rush Limbaugh or Rick Santorum ... Dwelling on Harris depresses me. All that brainpower and training dedicated to promulgating such bad ideas! ...
Will This Post Make Sam Harris Change His Mind About Free Will?
By John Horgan | April 9, 2012
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/2012/04/09/will-this-post-make-sam-harris-change-his-mind-about-free-will/
dmallind
(10,437 posts)Literature? Well sure it's a bit disjointed to say the least but not many 7th Century works have great structure. Poetry? Has its moments but no not stellar. Moral guide for objective moral agents? There it ranges from excellent to abhorrent. Revelatory information about God? Who the hell can tell - there is no way to test its claims in the slightest, and its worth is reflexively determined by one's belief in those claims. If you believe it, "good" is a woeful understatement. If you don't it's unforgivable hyperbole.
Personally I see it as exactly the same as any of the desert monotheisms' holy books - an interesting way to see how huge and lasting worldviews coalesced and progressed in their formative years. Sure from my point of view all would be improved if they had been written by external pseudo de Tocquevilles rather than internal zealots, but you can't have everything, and nobody at the time thought writing down a detailed account of how Islam formed and grew would be useful (or if they did, it is sadly lost to us) so it's what we have.
backscatter712
(26,355 posts)And it came to pass that when Joseph Smith writeth the Book of Mormon, verily he trieth to mimic the style of the King James Bible, but he doth blundered it. And it came to pass that Mark Twain doth said that the Book of Mormon was "chloroform in print." And it came to pass that Twain speaketh truth when he sayeth that if you removed "And it came to pass" from the Book of Mormon, ye would haveth but a pamphlet.
laconicsax
(14,860 posts)Plus, I'm pretty sure that Harris was commenting on the content, not the prose.
trotsky
(49,533 posts)jump in to bash Harris on the basis of a single out-of-context quote. And not just bash his opinion, but personally insult him and/or his intelligence.
Good times. Good Christians.
2ndAmForComputers
(3,527 posts)Just like HCN is a good poison.
rug
(82,333 posts)laconicsax
(14,860 posts)You know, those who deliberately remove a quote from context, actually change it, then use it to attack the original speaker/writer for what they never said/wrote.
Apparently context and only matters when discussing the silly or disgusting parts of the Bible.
trotsky
(49,533 posts)Surely you knew that!
Ninjaneer
(607 posts)The writer of this article needs to take a basic college level logic course.
daaron
(763 posts)Andrew Sullivan, yeah. From what I've seen upthread, Harris has a racism problem, in addition to being an atheist. I understand that's something of a pitfall for some movement atheists, along with a fair dose old-school sexism. I'm not surprised that atheist racists and sexists exist, but unlike fundamentalist religions, it's wrong to, as Rashid did, try to connect his atheism to his racism. Fundies are proudly racist and sexist, when they're racist and sexist, and will happily point to their religious text to justify their racism or sexism. Harris has no such text to which to point, so his racism is likely of that sort of blase' racism that too often afflicts British males.
It's additionally worth pointing out that the Brits are dealing with a whole different sort of Fundie than those of us on this side of the big pond. We have very few Muslim fundies, but very many Christian ones. Of course, nobody would suggest profiling fat Whites to weed out potential militiamen... it doesn't make it OK. Still, I admit I might end up saying something questionable if I had to deal with fundie Muslims on a daily basis, just as I've said questionable things in frustration about fundie Christians from time to time.
Is Harris a racist? Maybe so. Seems plausible to me, given the prevalence of racism. Don't know thing one about him.
Did Rashid's response correctly rebut Harris' assessment of the Koran? Hell no. He rebutted apples with oranges.
Azooz
(272 posts)Saying "Not that good" is easy in English, learning Arabic would just confuse the issue.
Sarcasm
“Of all those arts in which the wise excel, Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.”
- Andre Breton