Table Of ContentGod is Beautiful
God is Beautiful
The Aesthetic Experience
of the Quran
Navid Kennani
Translated by
Tony Crawford
polity
First published in German as Gott ist schlJn3, rd edn C Verlag C. H. Beck oHG.
Munich, 2007
This English edition C Polity Press, 2015
The translation of this work was funded by GeisteswissenschaftenI nternational
- Translation Funding for Humanities and Social Sciencesf rom Germany, a
joint initiative of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Federal Foreign
Office, the collecting society VG WORT and the Borsenverein des Deutschen
Buchhandels (German Publishers & BooksellersA ssociation).
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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5167-5
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kermani, Navid, 1967-
[Oott ist schan. English]
Ood is beautiful: the aesthetic expetjenceo f the Quran / Navid Kermani.
paaes cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
Tran11latedf rom German.
ISBN 978-0-7456-5167-5(h ardback)
I. Aesthetics in the Qur'an. 2. Aesthetics-Religious aspects-
Islam. 3. Qur'an as literature. I. Title.
BPl34.A38K4713 2014
297.l '2232-dc23
2014021613
Typeset in 10 on 11 pt Times NR MT
by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited
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Contents
Pr,face vii
1be First Listenen 1
Remembered History 4
The Quran and the Traditions '9
Conversions 14
The Community of Quran Listeners 24
The Adversaries' Impotence 33
The Power of the Word . 45
About Verbal Magic 52
Language and Poetry in Ancient Arabic Society r 59
\
2 The Text 67
The Poeticity of the Quran 70
Creating Horizons and Altering Horizons 75
The Quran as an Open Text 91
Ideaa nd Structure 114
la the Quran Poetry? 129
J The Sound 133
Oral Scripture 136
The Text as a Musical Score 155
Restriction and Reification 162
God Speaks 167
' The Miracle 185
Al-JurjllnT's'S cience of Composition' 202
The Direction of the Discourse 227
l'jll: and the Quran's Reception History 233
ti The Prophet amonat he Poets 252
The Islamic Prophet and the Aesthetics of Genius 255
Pluto'11L egacy 269
vi Contents
Poetry and Prophecy 274
Muhammad and the Poets 277
The Language of the Angels 286
6 The Sufi Listeners 293
Sama' and Quran Recitation 297
The Listeners Slain by the Quran 303
The Terror of God 311
The Pleasure of Listening 320
Romanizationo f Arabic and Persian Wordr 346
Glossary 348
Notes 3SO
References 421
Index 4S4
Preface
Religions have their aesthetics. Religions are not collections of logically
reasoned norms, values, principles and doctrines. They speak in myths, in
images, rarely in abstract terms. They bind their followers not so much
by the logic of their arguments as by the aura of their proponents, the
poetry of their texts, the appeal of their sounds, forms, rituals, even their
interiors, colours and odours. The insights they strive for are brought
about more through sensory experience than through mental reflection;
they are aesthetic rather than discursive in nature. The operations that
make up their practice are not didactic lessons but rather occurrences that
move the faithful physically as much as mentally. This is true of all reli-
gions, and it is nothing new. · ,
Turning to Islam, however, we encounter an odd paradox: lslam_'sa es
thetic dimension is of central importance to the Muslim self-image, if only
because the Muslim Prophet's greatest - and, according to many theolo
gians, his only - confirmatory miracle is the beauty and perfection of the
Quranic language; yet, at the same time, the aesthetic dimension has
hardly figured at all in the Western view of Islam, art historians' research
aside. Hardly any academic writer would deny that Muslims experience
the Quran aesthetically - as a poetically structured text and as a musical
recitation - and that the reception of the scripture as an aesthetic phenom
enon is one of the essential components of Islamic religious practice, at
least in the Arabic-speaking world. Nonetheless, although the aesthetic
reception of the Quran is so important and obvious, it has never been
proportionately reflected in Oriental studies: researchers noticed it early
on and occasionally stated it, but are only gradually and sporadically
beginning to address it. The limited resonance of such efforts is evident
not least in the fact that general descriptions of Islam as a rule still com
pletely ignore the importance of aesthetic considerations within the
Muslim religious world. The formal properties of the Quran, for example,
which are of capital importance for Muslims' faith, have only recently
interested at most the philologists among Orientalists - and most of those
who passed judgement on the Quran's form condemned it. That the Quran
could excite aesthetic pleasure, 'that it could even be simply the best book
viii Preface
in regard to language, rhetoric and literature and, beyond that, literally
unsurpassable for all individuals and peoples, and that this supremacy is
evidence - the strongest evidence - of the authenticity of the revelation'
- as Angelika Neuwirth precisely stated the import of the doctrine of i 'jiiz,
the miraculous nature of the Muslim revelation 1 - that doctrine was long
seen by Western readers as absurd, explicable if at all by religious fanati
cism. The catalogue of offences compiled in 1910 by Theodor Noldeke,
to date probably the most important scholar in German Oriental studies,
under the harmless-sounding title Zur Sprache des Koran [On the language
of the Quran], remained the paradigm for Western assessments at large
until the 1970s (recall, for example, Wansbrough's harsh words in his
Quranic Studies, the most-discussed work on modem Quran research).
Consequently, Western scholars oflslam have never been able to take the
i 'jiiz of the Quran quite seriously, even though it is a foundation of Islamic
faith and, strictly speaking, the only miracle in Islam. Instead, they have
treated it 'as a theologoumenon of particular exotic charm, a model of
dogmatic partiality, not to say an aberration of an entire culture- at best,
as a vagary of exaggerated Arabic cultural pride', as Neuwirth critically
notes,2 and this foundation of faith has remained beyond the scope of the
general Western awareness of Islam. When the Western layman wants to
know why people believe in the Quran, he takes up a translation and
studies its content. The interjections of Muslims, in particular those of
Arab origins, that the substance of their revelation cannot be grasped by
means of a translation, are acknowledged marginally at best. Often the
insistence that the Quran is untranslatable is interpreted as evidence of the
closed-mindedness or even fundamentalism of Muslims, as when discus
sion turns to Turkish children in Germany who learn the Quran by heart
in the original Arabic without understanding a word. And yet the objec
tion - common even among enlightened Muslims - to reading (much less
reciting) the Quran in a language other than Arabic involves axioms of
the world of Islamic faith.
The purpose of the present book is not to refute the value judgements
of the early and middle periods of Oriental studies and to follow the
Muslim theoreticians of i 'jiiz in drawing on literary scholarship to affirm
the beauty of the Quran. Rather, this book describes Muslims' relation to
the Quran and the meaning of the aesthetic dimension for that relation.
Its focus is not on the work but on its reception by an audience. The Quran
itself is examined only to the extent necessary to discern whether it presup
poses or at least suggests a specific aesthetic mode of reception. In Western
Quran studies, an approach has long [been predominant] that either
centres on the presumed author Muhammad's intentions, influences and
motives or else analyses what the Quran is - that is, what its words really
mean (when no longer 'burdened' 3 by theological exegesis, winnowed from
the 'chaff of often errant scholasticism', which may sometimes contain 'an
occasional grain'),4 what genre it belongs to, whether it is complete,
authentic, flawed, ethically acceptable, or well written. This book, on the
Preface ix
other hand, aims to explore what the Quran is for Muslims, and hence
sees it as a structure - not as a concrete object but as a system of relations.
The relations discussed in this book are those between the text and its
recipients. No text exists - let me assert at the outset - except in such
relations. When we consider those relations, however, the diverse and
often fabulous forms of testimony, argument and interpretation of an
aesthetic reception of the Quran step forth out of the exotic or not ration
ally understandable sphere, and it becomes easier to see why Muham
mad's relation to the poets is particularly delicate or how a theology could
arrive at the wondrous dogma of the Quran as a literary miracle.
The entire history of Muslim and primarily Arabic literature and theol
ogy up to the present is permeated with testimony of aesthetic apprecia
tion, accounts of individual situations in which recitations of the Quran
provoke ecstatic reactions, and acclaim for certain reciters. They appear
in all genres, in all kinds of contexts and eras, and every scholar of Islam
must inevitably encounter them regularly. A history of the Quran's recep
tion that places all of these testimonies in order and includes all the rele
vant considerations would be too ambitious a goal at present. As a
beginning, we can do no more than collect evidence from individual seg
ments of this history, discuss them, and let them speak for themselves.
SinceI cannot exhaustively treat the subject in general, especially in view
of the number of blank spots in the scholarship to date - still too great
- I would like to look at six points in depth to discover the general .in the
particular. ·
Numerous issues are touched on only briefly or not at all in this book.
All those effects, for example, that are not linguistic in the narrow sense,
such as the influence of the Quran on the fine arts, are not discussed, in
spite of their aesthetic relevance. Likewise the reception of the Quran in
non-Arabic-language communities is mentioned only in passing, since it
is too different from that in the Arabic-speaking countries to be incorpo
ratedi n the scope of the book's argument. The Persian authors cited treat
the Quran as an Arabic text and discuss its reception by an Arabic
speakinga udience. If individual occurrences, accounts or views of earlier
Muslim authors are often set in relation to interpretations of modem
philosophy, aesthetics or literary scholarship, this is not done with the
intention of showing that knowledge was already present in Islam that
occurred only later to Europeans. People have always reflected on the
receptiono f texts, images and sounds that they find beautiful or moving.
It goes without saying that they have sometimes come to similar conclu
sions. Although most of the sources with which I am concerned are quite
old, they often speak - in their different terminology - of experiences and
impressions which are not foreign to us, and which may emerge more
clearly in their singularity, and also in their familiarity, when contrasted
with experiences and impressions from other contexts.
In closing, a word about the word 'aesthetics': in the pages that follow,
it is not used to indicate some doctrine of the beautiful rooted in the
