"Id Senin 23 Oktober, khutbah di Universitas Melbourne, didepan sekitar 1000
(seribu jema'ah) sementara di Universitas Monash, jema'ah Indonesia juga
sebanyak itu, sementara di lapangan sepakbola Monash, mahasiswa India, Sri
Lanka dan lain-lain, menyelenggarakan salat - jumlahnya cukup impressive. Dan
berikut sebuah resensi mengenai Qur'an - Taqaballah minna waminkoom. NuimSent:
Monday, October 23, 2006 10:54 AM
Subject: The Qur'an
The Qur'an, by Phillip Adams
Books that Shook the World. Good title by Allen and Unwin for biographies of
history's most telling and troublesome texts. The series began with Plato's
Republic and Darwin 's Origin of Species and I've been talking to the authors
as each new volume arrives. To Francis Wheen on Das Kapital and Christopher
Hitchens on Rights of Man. Christopher and I might disagree on Iraq , but we
sing the same song on Thomas Paine.
While knowing something of Plato's writing and a little more of Darwin's,
Marx's and Paine's I find myself abysmally ignorant of Muhammad's Qur'an - far
and away the most influential text on the planet in the early 21st Century -
and by far the most misunderstood. For example, I didn't realize that it's
deeply offensive to Muslims to describe the Qur'an as Muhammad's. Muslims don't
think for a moment that he wrote it. Tradition holds that he couldn't have -
that the prophet was illiterate. Rather he received it - channeled it if you
like.
So the words of the Qur'an are God's, not man's, descending to us via the
Angel Gabriel with Muhammad taking dictation. This took a few years, between
610 and 622 CE, beginning during Ramadan, which turns out not to be an Islamic
holy month but a more ancient Arab tradition when blood feuds were called off.
Protests by Christian and Jewish fundamentalists notwithstanding we endlessly
debate the authorship of The Bible. Thus Harold Bloom told me that some of the
best bits in the Old Testament were written by women, and more scholars argue
about the authenticity of the gospels than angels dance on the heads of pins.
(The next in this series of world-shaking books is The Bible, a brief biography
by Karen Armstrong) But for 1.3 billion Muslims such questions or suggestions
would be heretical. While the Qur'an is forever open to debate, whilst its
meanings are constantly analyzed, you're dealing with God's official handbook.
Given that Australia has a great many Muslim neighbors and that we're at war
with Muslims in a few countries, it's probably as well to understand this.
The author of the book under discussion is Bruce Lawrence, Professor of
Religion at Duke University , who told my listeners that Qur'an means
'recitation'. And recite it Muslims do. Another guest on my program,
Dr.Abdullah Saeed, Sultan of Oman Professor of Arab and Islamic Studies at
Melbourne University told how he'd memorized the entire text by the time he was
six - and would recite in Arabic all the time. Even tough he didn't speak or
understand the language. It's the same for 80% of the world's Muslims who are
not Arabs and don't speak Arabic. But from Africa to India to South East Asia
they still recite the Qur'an in Arabic, a bit like Roman Catholics with the
mass in Latin.
That degree of devotion, rarely surviving in the other monotheistic faiths,
goes some distance to explaining the intensity of reaction to Salmon Rushdie in
1989 and the outrage over alleged abuses of the Qur'an in Guantanamo . Lawrence
was in Indonesia during the Danish cartoon controversy and I anxious to stress
that 99.9% of Indonesian Muslims - like their co-religionists around the word -
did NOT riot or burn buildings. "Where are the moderate Muslims, people ask me.
They're everywhere! Two of them just won Nobel prizes - one for peace, the
other for literature".
Lawrence describes the Qur'an as sublimely poetic, any translation being a
poor 'echo'. "It moves, it glides, it soars, it sings. It is in this world but
not part of it".
As an atheist who observes all religion with at least an attempt at the
detachment of a Martian anthropologist I pass Lawrence 's views on to you. And
his belief that the divine text is still open to argument and modernizing. He
calls the Qur'an "a book of signs' that requires endless discussion. It is not,
it seems, a book of unequivocal rules and regulations. Nor is there an Islamic
head office, a Vatican where an infallible authority defines dogma. The Qur'an
is up for grabs - by Sunni, Shia or bin Laden. There are 'Pentecostal
Madrassas' which are literal and "Jesuit Madrassas" where debate is crucial.
The Qur'an itself states it contains passages that are firm whilst others are
ambiguous - but neglects to say which is which. Now, in the 21st Century, the
debate rages on the Internet, between Islamists and majority moderates.
"Militant moderates" says Lawrence "remain a fractious minority who stress
the confrontational. The majority of Muslims demur". And he insists that Islam
is a religion of peace. So closely is the concept of peace (salam) related to
surrender (islam) that the two are interchangeable.
Islam is a fact of life. As is the Qur'an. Neither is going away, and it
would help if a few people in the Whitehouse (and the Australian government)
began to understand this.
Nuim Khaiyath <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Subject: FW: The Qur'an
Date: Tue, 24 Oct 2006 10:48:20 +1000
From: "Nuim Khaiyath" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Machfudz Noor" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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