I happen to be in the middle of a much-overdue holiday and I’m reconnecting with my extended family in Hungary – itself a nation and culture long at crossroads between East and West. By coincidence, I have spent the most time on this trip with two of my nephews, who are half-Romany and we’ve traveled together to our various other aunties and cousins scattered throughout the countryside. They are now young adults and I am here alone speaking only in Hungarian, so as I hear their music and we’ve been able to discuss their traditions, I’ve gained depth and nuance from their perspectives I’ve never before gotten.

And again – I am not an academic, and my vacation has by no means had the benefit of expert perspectives, but those “unexpected magnetic fields,” which simultaneously attract and repel? That’s what else I found uncanny as I read about your work. That’s a fitting term for the simultaneous friction & embrace that Hungarians exhibit when exposed to Romany music, cuisine, social norms and rituals. And I’ve seen similar unexpected magnetic field themes show up in a political/socio-economic context, again cast as a kind of East-West issue as a debate regarding the state of the European Union and how the “average Hungarian” has fared.

These musings may extend beyond the scope of how you’d envisioned interdisciplinary thinking, but these were the connections I made as I read your essay. Please keep up your work and I hope you inspire others to join you!

Along these lines, I think it is important to consider that, like language, materiality – human relationships with and understandings of the nature of material objects – can differ very greatly between social settings. This is perhaps not such a new revelation, I recognize, as we might see this idea in long-standing anthropological discourse about “the fetish” in “primitive societies” of Africa, as just one example, but it is an issue the nuances of which I think a secular epistemology may generally have a tendency to conceal.

More to my point, I find myself skeptical of the claim here that “as the Qurʼān sees it, it’s not theology nor doctrine that binds Muslims, Christians, and Jews together but a shared object,” which is “the book” (al-kitāb). I would like to clarify my point here by trying to illustrate what a more sympathetic consideration of an Islamic or Qur’ānic materiality might offer in the way of a critique of this claim and the associated argument.

For one, it would seem a reflection of a particular materiality to say “as the Qur’ān sees it,” as if the Qur’ān has its own agency. I recognize that you probably mean this metaphorically, but nevertheless as we know, the common Islamic point of view is that the Qur’ān is an expression of God’s agency, and therefore a Muslim might be more likely to think about a message contained in the Qur’ān in terms of “as God sees it…” Also, it might be asked when you say “as the Qur’ān sees it,” whether or how exactly you are referring to a physical object here – a single copy of the Qur’ān, or a message that might be made manifest in various individual copies? Is the latter, a message that can be reprinted in virtually infinite physical “books,” a material object?

It is this latter question that I think might speak more directly to my concern here, which revolves around your claim that the Qur’ān depicts Muslims, Jews, and Christians as united around a shared object – the book. In my view, I think this might problematically project a particular materiality onto the Qur’ān and the “book” in question, since we find in the Qur’ān various references to “al-kitāb.” This includes for example references to al-kitāb as a “record” of people’s deeds to be revealed on the Day of Judgement. More importantly, this also includes depictions of the Qur’ān as a part of a larger kitāb that is “kept with God” (i.e. not in this temporal world, this “dunya”). From a common Islamic perspective, it is this larger kitāb that is shared with the “People of the Book” (ahl al-kitāb), parts of which prophets preceding Muhammad revealed in their own time, which have shaped the the theology and doctrines of the People of the Book. And of course it is the corruption – the misconstruing or unauthorized leaving off or adding on of some portions – of this kitāb the correction of which is depicted as a primary purpose of the Qur’ān’s revelation. In other words, Qur’ānically, the kitāb that unites the People of the Book does refer to a shared theology – tawhid – the implications of which are depicted in the Qur’ān as being divisively misrepresented by many pre-Islamic People of the Book. From an Islamic perspective, this misrepresentation of the larger kitāb, then, represents the main obstacle to the type of kindred relations you describe – in a sense, it is precisely what happens in the material “books” of the People of the Book, around which different peoples are gathered, and not in the larger kitāb, that disturbs the kindred relations. Hence the extreme importance for Muslims of maintaining the Qur’ān in its original (revealed) form (and the associated idea that translations of the Qur’ān are never the real deal).

So my issue is that this kitāb that is “kept with God” may necessitate a critical reflection on our own materiality, on our understanding of what an object is. Is it that this kitāb, or “book,” is really an object in the same sense that Trump wielded the Bible as an object? The problem is that this would require us to speculate on the ontology of the “akhirah” (the afterlife or next world, as opposed to the temporal world of the dunya) depicted in the Qur’ān. This would seem to open a much larger can of worms that might include issues such as Scriptural literalism vs. metaphor, for example. If we want to maintain a secular point of view while talking about the Qur’ān, should we refrain from making assertions about Qur’ānic metaphor, and thereby endorse the literalist approach that informs many modern Islamic reform movements, assigning a common modern ontology to the kitāb in question? Must we insist, rather, that the Qur’ān is metaphor, and in either case, to what degree can we really consider a secular perspective to be so neutral, uninvolved in the speculative metaphysical questions about things like God and the Afterlife? Or, is there a way in which these questions about materiality might trouble the literal-metaphor opposition in the first place, along with the religious-secular, or even the ethics of liberal pluralism?

In any case, I hope that my response has not been unfair to your arguments here, and that it might in any way be useful for you or whoever may read it, God willing. Thank you again.

https://thepeoplesinauguration.org

My wife and I are 79 years old and white and privileged (though we live on a modest fixed income–Social Security and a small pension from my wife, June’s, pension from having been a substitute teacher–we are still in the top 1% in the world, I’m sure.

As Valarie Kaur says, In The People’s Inauguration, we have to reimagine our world–which is what I think you are doing with this class you have been teaching.

Thanks again and blessings.

PS: I received your essay from Eric Muhr, the publisher at Barclay Press in Newberg, Oregon. Each Friday he forwards a list of articles that challenge him–12 to 15 articles each week. I don’t always read them but scan the titles. Your title pulled me in.

https://www.archetypalexplorer.com/blog/covid19-pandemic-jupiter-saturn-pluto

Happy holidays.

Although I have yet to read Black Lives and Sacred Humanity I am drawn to the concept of sacred humanity. While I maintain that all of nature is sacred I think there is an argument for shining a spotlight on humanity as a special case. I feel this is particularly relevant when you discuss justice in naturalistic terms. For me, it comes down to the recognition that interdependence (relationally) is fundamental to the nature of existence and therefore is relevant to questions of justice.

I look forward to working with you in the RNA Outreach project.

Cheers, Terry Findlay

Here is the essay by Moran: http://env-tifssrcorg-tifsearch.kinsta.cloud/2020/10/02/edith-stein-and-the-experience-of-god/.