Children of Dust_ A Memoir of Pakistan - Ali Eteraz [100]
“A Muslim wouldn’t agree with that,” I pointed out. “Muslims believe that the Quran is uncreated. This means that the words in the Quran are one and the same as God.”
“I’m sure, though,” Dr. Conrad said, “that there have been people—perhaps Muslims themselves—who don’t believe that the Quran and Allah are synonymous with one another.”
I nodded. “There were. They were called the Mutazilites. Though there aren’t any more of those.”
Dr. Conrad shrugged. “They’ll make a comeback.”
“What would you say about the huruf al-muqatta’at?” I asked.
“Translation?”
I rummaged in my backpack and pulled out a copy of the Quran. “There are certain strings of letters in the Quran,” I said, flipping through to the beginning of the second chapter, where one such string—alif lam mim—could be seen. “They occur in various parts of the Quran. Muslims believe that no human being knows the meaning of these letters. If all language is man-made, as Rorty alleges, then we should be able to figure out what these mysterious letter combinations mean.”
I thought I had Dr. Conrad on the ropes. He pushed his eyeglasses up on his nose and stared at the letters.
“Oh yes,” he said suddenly. “I read an article about these. The author, who was a Muslim, said that these letters are actually hieroglyphics from an earlier language—one that was prevalent in Arabia before the advent of Arabic. He said that the three letters found at the beginning of the Chapter of the Cow—those that you’re pointing at—actually make a picture, much the way that Chinese words are actually symbols.”
“So what are the letters alif lam mim a picture of?”
“A cow, I believe.”
“There’s a picture of a cow at the beginning of the Quran’s Chapter of the Cow?” I exclaimed.
“Seems like a reasonable, rational explanation, doesn’t it?”
I nodded slowly. “So then, according to a postmodernist, the Quran is simply a number of things that Muhammad pieced together from whatever was floating around in the air?”
“A postmodernist would say that Muhammad was simply doing what any great novelist does. Or, in Rorty’s words, he was a ‘strong poet.’ Like Homer or Shakespeare.”
“Then Islam is nothing more than a compelling story that a lot of people came to believe in unison?”
Dr. Conrad nodded. “A postmodernist calls that a myth. In Islam’s case it spread worldwide, mostly because the Arabs were an ascendant military force, but also because Islam, with its messenger Prophet and archangel and monotheistic God, offered stronger imagery than what was out there at the time.”
I gathered my materials and took my assignments home. Reading through my books, I noticed that while postmodernists appreciated religion for making advances in ethics and morality, they argued that people no longer needed to rely on religion to know the right way to behave. Religion was considered nothing more than a “personal idiosyncrasy.”
“What does that mean?” I asked Dr. Conrad the next time we met.
“It means that religion is analogous to a nervous tick or an obsessive-compulsive disorder,” he said. “Religion isn’t something which is shared universally by all people, because all people aren’t the same religion and even people of the same religion don’t practice the same way. Therefore, religion can’t be universal and thus can’t universally guide humanity’s behavior.”
“So how do we know how to behave?” I asked. “What is shared universally?”
“We look to reason.”
“But how do we know what reason is saying?” I asked.
“One way to do it is to look at what everyone else is doing.”
2
When I looked around to see what was popular among my mostly twenty-year-old peers, the big winner was sex. Consider:
My roommate Jon, an atheist who believed the future of the world would involve androids,