target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#fb3_img_img_85b60e02-26f1-5efd-be3c-b447bc2a3951.jpg" alt=""/>h’s name, I find different answers to the question of what a human being can know from the Qur’n. Do those “firm in knowledge” passively accept the Qur’n’s authority without interrogation of its unclear verses, or can they understand what remains mysterious to everyone else?
For Muslim thinkers who sought an expansion of the Qur’n’s possibilities, whether theologians such as al-Ghazl, philosophers such as Ibn Rushd (Averröes), or mystics such as al-Kashn, reciting 3:7 without a full stop after Allh’s name suggested the existence of an elite class of knowers who could comprehend the difficult verses.3 As we might expect, interpreters tended to identify those elite readers as the ones whose methods and arguments they shared. For philosophers, the “firm in knowledge” were philosophers, who could more fully comprehend the highest truths of the Qur’n, which the Qur’n cloaked in crude allegories so that it could speak to common believers and their undeveloped intellects. For mystics, 3:7 authorized mystical modes of knowledge, a privileged access to esoteric meanings through dreams, visionary experiences, and inspired intuition. For the traditionalist scholars whom modern Salafs would count in their lineage, claims of VIP access to the Qur’n’s meanings threatened the supremacy of Allh’s words and demoted the Salaf’s understanding of them as incomplete.
If there were indeed gifted knowers, who could claim to belong among their ranks? I wasn’t going there. But even if I sought refuge in Allh from the unclear verses, 3:7 still presents a problem: identifying which verses should be marked as “unclear” and thus avoided. This matter itself is left unclear, since verses do not typically make straightforward declarations that they belong to one category or the other. In perhaps the Qur’n’s supreme irony, the verse in which we learn that some verses are clear and others are unclear is itself an unclear verse. If we read an unclear verse as telling us to avoid interpretation of unclear verses, what are we supposed to do? The verse tells me, “DO NOT READ THIS VERSE,” performing a double-bind, and shows that even divine revelations can play cruel literary jokes.
Numerous verses in the Qur’n could be considered unclear because they consist only of disconnected and seemingly random Arabic letters. Some readers, however, would find the meaning of these “mystery letters” to be obvious, either through scholarly or mystical methods of analysis. If the Prophet shows up in a dream and tells you what the letters mean, what can be unclear about them? Other verses might be ambiguous because they describe Allh’s attributes, which later became a crucial point of division among Muslim thinkers; adth-based traditionalists condemned philosophers for using 3:7 to allegorize Allh’s throne and his sitting upon it.4 Linguists argued with each other over the meaning of specific words, despite the Qur’n’s assurances that it had come down in “plain Arabic.” Some questioned what it meant for the Qur’n to label itself an Arabic text while containing words that they perceived to be foreign (for example, one of the names for the hellfire, Jahennam, is said to be Ethiopian). But what if we’re mindful of the problems with reading, seeing the fallacies for which both premodern traditionalists and postmodern literary theorists would undermine claims upon the text’s essence? Depending on how you feel about the attempt to capture meaning from texts, every verse is capable of ambiguity.
Because I don’t think in Arabic, I must translate the Qur’n; but every translation is an attempt to interpret the unclear, potentially violating 3:7’s command. Translators perform work upon the Qur’n to make it comprehensible for greater numbers of people and can do this only by replacing the words that the Qur’n chose for itself. For al-Ghazl
