Last week, a group of Islamic scholars released The Study Quran, an English version of a moderate and commented Quran. CNN reported about the event:
Ten years in the making, “The Study Quran” is more than a rebuttal to terrorists, said Seyyed Hossein Nasr, an Iranian-born intellectual and the book’s editor-in-chief. His aim was to produce an accurate, unbiased translation understandable to English-speaking Muslims, scholars and general readers.
The editors paid particular attention to passages that seem to condone bloodshed, explaining in extensive commentaries the context in which certain verses were revealed and written.
“The commentaries don’t try to delete or hide the verses that refer to violence. We have to be faithful to the text, ” said Nasr, a longtime professor at George Washington University.
[…]
On many pages of “The Study Quran,” that commentary takes up more space than the verses, making the book resemble a Muslim version of the Jewish Talmud.
And for the first time in Islamic history, said Nasr, this Quran includes commentary from both Shiite and Sunni scholars, a small but significant step at a time when the two Muslim sects are warring in the Middle East.
Although the idea is noble, it seems intellectually dishonest, for after all, why would these interpretations be more legitimate than those of Daesh? They are all cherry picking, some to justify their bloodlust and the other ones to whitewash their silly superstition.
If to avoid killings for any trifle, the book with instructions on how to treat each other requires longer comments than the very instructions, it doesn’t seem a very useful tool in the first place.
The proposal is also self-defeating: if you need to be updating your book of potions —or changing its ‘interpretation’— every 700 years because it is outdated with the current progress of civilization, maybe it isn’t the best source to get your morals from.
If they are already in the process of choosing which parts they like and which they don’t (or which can be ‘interpreted allegorically’) they could as well take a shortcut and adopt once and for all the respect for Human Rights and individual freedoms as the golden standard to social interaction and public policy. I understand that there are those who, biologically, can not do this and I hope this book will serve to prevent further terrorist attacks from their part — nevertheless, if your starting point is to presume there is an absolute, unquestioned, immutable (oh, the irony) truth, this is a proven recipe for suffering.
We’ve seen it with Christianity, for example. The vast majority of fundamentalists would enjoy to strip LGBTI off their rights, even though the Bible is quite clear that they should be killed. It is good that they do not enforce their doctrine to the letter but, for that matter, they could as well discard the whole book completely and prevent future suffering and mental gymnastics. The same is true with Islam.
