Skip to main content

THE QURAN


One of the odder features of modern culture is the belief that, ideally, we should read as widely as possible. There are so many fields that we feel we should be informed about and so many books others have recommended. And so we are always vaguely haunted by the sense that we’re not reading enough.  In Islamic culture, the Quran is THE book. The words were sent, sentence by sentence, from God to the Prophet Muhammed around 1500 years ago and, over a period of more than twenty years, he simply wrote down what God wanted the whole word to know.  The Quran, therefore, suggests a radical view of reading. There is only one book we truly have to read and that we should spend our whole lives absorbing and reflecting on its message. To deeply know and understand one book is more important than to skim our way through hundreds. We may, ideally,  end up committing large parts of this book to memory and feel no shame that we have scarcely opened another volume.  Though currently unfashionable, the underlying point is crucial. A great book brings us face to face with the considered thinking of a wonderfully intelligent and deeply serious writer. It's an encounter that can (and perhaps should) last a lifetime. If we find in it assertions we want to disagree with, we are stimulated to frame our objections in terms that would make sense to the writer; and we then might imagine what their replies to our comments would be. We enter into  a deep dialogue. We ponder anything that doesn’t quite seem to make sense, we consider what it might mean; we apply the ideas we find in it to our daily lives; we test our experience against it; we find its phrasing and vocabulary slowly influencing our own; our minds end up being shaped by it.  We go back to the same book again and again, we find that as we age we see new things in it, or it becomes poignant because it keeps alive aspects of our younger selves that we are otherwise losing sight of.  This means of course that across our lives we can properly read only a very few books — so finding them becomes important. They may not be initially the most exciting, they may not be page-turners — but a page-turner is designed only to be read once, the cleverest cliff-hanger means nothing once we know the denouement. The books that really touch us may be ones we slowly grow to love; they reveal their depths gradually; they are a little shy, we need to be gentle, at first, in what we ask of them, but once we are friends they will become our dear friends.  The Quran is exceptionally beautiful and profound; but even if it isn’t the one book we are devoted to, it sets the properly high standard for engagement. If a book is genuinely worth reading, it’s worth reading many times. It might almost be the only thing we look at.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

AGAINST SKIING HOLIDAYS

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that a normal person in search of a holiday will enjoy skiing; they will delight in bracing mountain air, thrill at going down mogul dotted slopes and feel pleasantly exhausted after a day of parallel turns. This assumption about pleasure joins a host of others proposed by the modern world. Normal people will equally enjoy white wine, the Amalfi coast, the novels of Margaret Atwood, dogs, high heels, small children, Miami beach, oral sex, Banksy, marriage, Netflix and vegetarianism. We may legitimately delight in all of these elements; the issue lies in the immense pressure we are under to do so. The truth about ourselves may, in reality, be a great deal more mysterious than the official narrative allows. Whatever our commitments to decorum and good order, we may in our depths be far more distinctive than we’re supposed to be. We may — once we become sensitive to our faint tremors of authentic delight and boredom — hate the idea of jogging, the the...
Post a Comment
Dive In »

CLASSICISM

At present, our culture is dominated by a Romantic outlook; its predecessor, and in many ways its more deserving alternative, is a Classical view of life. Classicism is founded upon an intense, pessimistic awareness of the frailties of human nature and on a suspicion of unexamined instinct. The Classical attitude knows that our emotions can frequently over-power our better insights, that we repeatedly misunderstand ourselves and others, and that we are never far from folly, harm and error. In response, Classicism seeks via culture to correct the failings of our minds. Classicism is wary of our instinctive longing for perfection. In love, it counsels a gracious acceptance of the ‘madness’ inside each partner. It knows that ecstasy cannot last, and that the basis of all good relationships must be tolerance and mutual sympathy. Classicism has a high regard for domestic life; it sees apparently minor practical details as deeply worthy of care and effort; it doesn’t think it would be degrad...
Post a Comment
Dive In »

IMPOSTER SYNDROME

 PHILOSOPHY  In many challenges, both personal and professional, we are held back by the crippling thought that people like us could not possibly triumph given what we know of ourselves: how reliably stupid, anxious, gauche, crude, vulgar and dull we really are. We leave the possibility of success to others, because we don’t seem to ourselves to be anything like the sort of people we see lauded around us. The root cause of impostor syndrome is a hugely unhelpful picture of what other people are really like. We feel like impostors not because we are uniquely flawed, but because we fail to imagine how deeply flawed everyone else is beneath a more or less polished surface. The impostor syndrome has its roots in a basic feature of the human condition. We know ourselves from the inside, but others only from the outside. We are aware of all our anxieties, doubts and idiocies from within. Yet all we know of others is what they happen to do and tell us – a far narrower and more edited...
Post a Comment
Dive In »