[
  {
    "file": "dakake/Female Spirituality in Islam--Dr_ Maria Dakake_6hvzqpRnDAQ&pp=ygUSTWFyaWEgTWFzc2kgRGFrYWtl_1750212204.opus",
    "text": [
      "I was asked to speak today about female spirituality in Islam. And there are two problems with this. First of all, it's a huge topic. It's difficult to do it any justice or to speak comprehensively",
      "about female spirituality in Islam without reducing the richness of Muslim women's spiritual experiences to some a small number of idealized or simplified tropes. I can't solve that problem but i'm just going to recognize it and hopefully what I'd like to do today is share with you",
      "women that we find in the tradition, they will help maybe give you a taste of some of the different forms of female spirituality that have been recorded and in fact celebrated in the Islamic tradition. The other problem is the question of whether there is something like a distinct female spirituality, that's different somehow from male spirituality in Islam?",
      "I would say that the answer to this is both yes and no. No, because the ultimate aim of the spiritual life, the religious life of any kind, whether it's mystical or simply the pious life of a Muslim, is ultimately the same for men and women. And if we think about the mystical life or the spiritual",
      "The ultimate end of that journey is the same for men or women. It's a journey from the attachment to the world, to intimacy with God, from dependence on worldly things to a complete tawakul or reliance on God. A journey from a kind of binary rationality way of understanding ourselves and God in this way",
      "and God, and finally of course a transcendence I should say of one's self and one's spiritual desires, sorry worldly desires. A journey from that toward a pure love of God alone. But every spiritual journey has a starting point. And every spiritual is a path that requires not only wrestling with flaws that one finds in ones own soul",
      "soul, but also going around or through or over the many obstacles that one's external life or the dunya as you would say in Arabic places in one's way. To the extent that men and women faced external or social obstacles in the dunyā, in the world their paths were",
      "even if not absolutely so. For example, when we talk about the male life of a Sufi mystic one of the motifs or one of metaphors that's often used as I just mentioned in my comments is that of a journey but for many men particularly Sufi men it wasn't just a metaphor they actually went on a journey, they left right?",
      "who decided after a spiritual crisis that he needed to leave his wife, his family, his job for 10 years of wandering. I can assure you that this was not a path and is still not really a path that's open to women. I have husband and children and I'm not sure how he would feel if I came home and said look honey,",
      "years do a good job with the children and I'll be back those kinds of things really weren't available to women they still aren't really available to so that's just one example so what I want to do today if I have enough time is to talk about two general approaches that we find recorded in traditional Islamic sources for how",
      "with some of these different social expectations that men had in their pursuit of the spiritual path. There are women, for example, who tried to demonstrate through their actions and sometimes argued through their words that they had personally transcended the gender norms or limitations",
      "expectations for women without, I should say directly critiquing those different expectations. Just saying that they personally didn't consider themselves to be bound by them. And then there were also women who attempted to pursue spiritual or mystical lives within those traditional forms of domestic or family roles and so I want to look a little bit at both.",
      "the very beautiful talk that Dr. Noss gave us this morning where he talked about hikmah and he talked abut the relationship between hikma and other forms of knowledge, philosophy or theology. And I wanted to say of course that women traditionally even today not that often are usually not authors of theological and philosophical texts but the women we see in these anecdotes",
      "even if they didn't author works of philosophy or of hikmah in one form or another on their own, were nonetheless clearly possessors of hickam that was obvious to those who encountered them personally. And their hikma, their sort of personal manifestation of that hikmam was enough often",
      "particularly the men who they encountered, to record their stories in the various works that they wrote and were really indebted therefore to those accounts of their lives. To tell us something about what spirituality was from a Muslim woman's perspective, particularly in a traditional period. So let me begin by talking specifically",
      "transcended or this path of transcending gender norms. In an edited volume on the legacy of Christian female mystics, Catherine Mooney suggests a pattern in which the men who recorded the sayings and writings of these mystical Christian women often presented them in such a way that they seem to be rather sickly I should",
      "by majestic divine visions that they were too feeble, either intellectually or physically to fully withstand. In the Islamic mystical tradition and the literature that documents it, the situation is quite different, often the opposite. Sufi women are frequently presented by their male transmitters and biographers as strong individuals, clear-headed, witty, independent,",
      "independent and able to undertake sometimes heroic austerities with usually good humor and profound humility as well. We find in Sufi literature a kind of creative play on gender norms and gender metaphors, so for example many Sufi thinkers",
      "or in Arabic, Rajulia. And they use that term to talk about a kind of detachment or fortitude on the spiritual quest, a kind inner freedom from worldly desires that would allow them to wage a kind spiritual warfare on their own souls. The attitude toward femininity though was sometimes mixed. So following ideas found in certain Islamic traditions",
      "text, Sufi writers sometimes presented femininity as the opposite of rajulia, as being a kind of emotional and material dependence that limited a person's progress on the spiritual path. But at other times, femininity in Sufi texts was related to the quintessential esoteric virtues of inwardness, silence,",
      "masculinity and femininity so tangibly defined in the gender differentiated society of the traditional Islamic world were not always perfectly correlated to male and female persons. So if male Sufis sometimes would describe the divine beloved in symbolically feminine terms, we also find sometimes male Sufi such as the Persian Ruzbahan Bakli describing themselves",
      "in relation to God, waiting for the bridegroom to finally come and consummate of course in a mystical way that ultimate union. At the same time women who followed the Sufi path were often described explicitly or implicitly as honorary men. Attar who famously near the opening of his biography of Rabi al-Adwiya famous early Sufi woman describes Rabi Al-Adwiya",
      "Rabi al-Adwiya mentions, or I should say justifies his inclusion of Rabi Al-Aduiya in his biographical collection of Sufis who are otherwise all male. He justifies is inclusion of Rabbi by saying that a woman who walks on the path of God is a man and she cannot be called a woman. At one point Attar in his biography of Rabbi also describes",
      "a obviously non-historical anecdote in which the well known Sufi and pious ascetic, Al Hasan al Basri is said to have spent the night in spiritual discussion with Rabia without once having the thought have occurred to him that she was a woman. Many other examples of the Sufi woman as man can be found attributed both to men and women",
      "The famous Sufi Abu Yazid al-Bistami by Yazid Al-Bastami, who was mentioned of course by Dr. Nass this morning once described the Sufi woman Fatima of Nishapur as both the only true man and the only True Woman that he had ever met. And in another report he referred to her as a true man in the guise of a woman. Again we have an account attributed",
      "to have approached a woman praying out loud and supplicating God in this very beautiful way, out loud, in the Harem of Mecca. And when he keeps coming closer and closer to her because he's drawn to her words, and when he finally gets inappropriately close to her she chastises him for this kind of breach and his lack of modesty. And only then does he say that he suddenly realized",
      "I was so distracted by your words that I did not even perceive that you were a woman. Such stories of Sufi men viewing their female counterparts as honorary women or men in disguise, or else they're professed inattention to the gender of the women, Sufi women that they were speaking to may have served to validate the propriety of their relationships and encounters with Sufi",
      "have been in part intended to deflect any criticism for having such close conversations with these women. At the same time, these stories also serve to raise the status of the Sufi men who encountered the women because it suggests that they were spiritually perceptive enough not to allow that kind of sexual attraction to get into the way, in the way of their appreciation of their spiritual worth.",
      "worth. It is perhaps worth noting, however, that such flexible attitudes toward gender are also sometimes attributed to female Sufis themselves. The sister of al-Halaj, another very famous Sufi, is said to have quote claimed manhood on the path and a much later Sufi woman, Lady Sakina Shirazi described herself for example as a warrior",
      "In an interesting account given by a 14th century Sufi writer, a young slave woman who is much beloved by her master is converted to Sufism after attending one of the preaching sessions of the Sufi Salih al-Muri. In order to be able to devote herself to prayer and mystical practice therefore she cuts her hair and dons the dress of a young male to escape the unwanted affections of her master",
      "to have him give her the freedom to go and attend these sessions. Thus, the idea that gender limitations even in a socially sorry, even in society traditionally stratified by gender did not necessarily always apply to men and women on the Sufi path and the notion that Sufis could transcend these limitations or that they became in some cases meaningless for them seems to be well established",
      "to be well established in the Islamic mystical tradition and may have been emphasized by both Sufi men and Sufi women for good reason, both symbolic and practical. For those pious and Sufis women who sought to pursue the mystical life outside of the typical social roles of mother or wife in a traditional Islamic society, arguments about their ability",
      "their independent approach to the spiritual life and often manifested itself in a life of celibacy or asexuality in relation, in their relationships with men but also it manifested itself and we have many stories about this in the emphatic rejection of male charity",
      "In Sufi works, we find numerous instances in which a single and celibate female Sufi living alone and in poverty rejects the pious and chivalrous offers of her male spiritual admirers to provide for and assist her. Stories to this effect are related in connection with a number of early female Sufis, notably Rabia but others as well. And their rejection of such human charity is usually couched",
      "God alone possesses all things and they will not accept charity from anyone but God. The virtue of relying with complete trust on the provision of God is featured in Sufi literature generally, and of course Sufi men also take a very similar perspective. But in the anecdotes attributed to Sufi women this reliance upon divine provision is commonly emphasized through the rejection of human but always male charity.",
      "For example, we have cases where Sufi women might accept or give charity to one another but then at the same time reject it from men who try to do the same thing. So for example Rabiel Edouia is said to have accepted donations of bread and food from various women who would come to her door but she reacts with disdain to offers of assistance from men",
      "to have male support for her spiritual life. While many Sufi men also lived in a state of self-imposed poverty and abandoned efforts to make a living, women who chose to lead celibate spiritual lives removed from the social protections of marriage and family faced a more serious situation.",
      "always go back to making a living if necessary, but it would have been very difficult for a woman to do that. Perhaps more significantly though rejecting reasonable offers of assistance even from male relatives may have served to undercut a certain source of male authority and perhaps limitation on their spiritual lives. So for example we have a very interesting case",
      "actually the daughter of the Sufi Abul Hasan al-Mekki. And she would spend all of her time in prayer, in the haram, in Mecca. And She refused to get married, she refused to do anything for a living, she cut herself free from all domestic duties but her father would support her by giving her very modest sum of 30 dirhams a year he would provide this",
      "occasion, her father instead of delivering the money himself sent another man to deliver this money to her. And when this man saw the kind of very sad state of poverty in which she was living he felt bad and he added 30 additional dirhams to the bag so she would have 60 dirhms for the year. And When he handed the bag to her she said no, this is wrong you know my father gives me 30 dirhems not 60. And he explains that he had added some of his own",
      "some of his own. And she says, no I can't accept this from you. I can accept it from my father but not from you and so he says all right fine I'll take the 30 dirhams out. So he takes the 30 Dirhams that he gives the bag back to her. She goes now I still can't except it because you know you mix the two coins together. I don't know which is which there might be some coins that you put in there right? So I can take it at all. So this poor man has tried to actually increase her move her",
      "her out of poverty and in fact has made her life worse. But nonetheless, so we might take this story and say oh this is a really great example of sort of pious hyperbole that we find in the literature but before we dismiss it simply as this we should perhaps consider that sorry a young woman's accepting money from an unrelated man may have meant that she was somehow",
      "was somehow licitly or illicitly in his employ. And, in either case that she had ceded some of her spiritual autonomy to him through his reliance on her support. Her reliance and his support. Other anecdotes rhetorically engage the issue of authority in a more direct way. So for example you have a very famous pious woman Nafisa bint Ali",
      "Isa bint Ali ibn Hassan, a famous holy woman of Cairo who miraculously spares the local prince from carrying out what would have been an unjust execution and in gratitude he sends her a very large sum of money. While she accepts the donation, she refuses to use even the smallest portion of it for herself and instead gives it away in charity",
      "to sell some of the thread that they've spun with their own hands, to get just a little bit of money that they can use to pay for their own food. And this money she said was superior to that of the prince because it didn't have the stamp of the Prince on it. The prince had no claim to it metaphorically is what she's saying. In a similar story, a man meets a wandering female mystic along the road between Kufa and Basra",
      "full of dirhams as a charitable offering. And I'm sorry, she says no, I don't need your dirhamas and she produces a similar fistful of dinars which is more valuable currency by a lot. And she says these are worth more because they don't bear the image of the sultan or print the name of the Sultan. In a story I particularly like, I",
      "of course, who is so important. But there are many of these stories attributed to him and he tells the stories himself. So but Abiy Zid al-Basami is said to have encountered an old woman trying to carry a sack of flour into the village. And so he says well I will assist you with this so that you don't have to carry this heavy load.",
      "a lion to come out of nowhere. And he affixes the bag to the lion, and the lion's going to take it into the city. And He says to her, what will you tell the people in the village when they see this? And she says, well I will tell them simply that I met on the road a vain tyrant. Vain because he is obviously concerned",
      "among the townsfolk and a tyrant because he has accomplished this seeming act of chivalry only by, as she puts it, burdening one whom God had not burdened, i.e., the poor lion. In other words, he should have carried it himself into the village. So as I said, for all Sufis there were good spiritual reasons to shun the excessive concern with wealth and certainly the material support of others",
      "Such an attitude discouraged the development of attachments and dependencies on creatures and unworldly things, and correspondingly enhanced tawakkal or reliance on God. But again for Sufi women it had this practical purpose of allowing them a certain degree of independence in their spiritual life to pursue their path outside of domestic or marital or family obligations.",
      "Moreover, the rhetorical language that the Sufi women use in rejecting the donations of male well-wishers again invokes a kind of spiritual notion that they are dependent only on God. This idea of tuekel and that God's authority and God's provision alone suffices. Okay so we have lots of these kinds of stories about very independent",
      "about very independent and celibate women living alone. We understand that this would have been an unusual circumstance, probably in traditional Islamic society, maybe one that sort of attracted some suspicion or concern. And so the rejection of male attachments and their charitable provisions would have a very important part of their spiritual practice in maintaining their independence.",
      "But there are also a number of other stories that we find in the sources, that sometimes don't get as much attention. And those are stories of women who pursue the path of spirituality through not against or in resistance to traditional domestic or traditional social roles for women. Certainly the accounts of very fiercely independent and ascetic",
      "and celibate Sufi and pious women hold a certain fascination, both for Muslim scholars and for Western academic writers. But I think the attention paid to those stories like the stories of Rabi al-Adawiyya sometimes result in the misperception that this was the dominant or normative model of female spirituality in Islam but a fuller study of the literature",
      "suggests that this was only one among other female approaches to the spiritual life. While the celibate and socially independent lifestyle practiced by Rabia and other female mystics was certainly more common among women than men, we should remember that many if not most of the women identified by name in Sufi biographies were married and lived full family lives maintaining close relationships with both spouses",
      "While some married and maternal Sufi women stand fully on their own merits, having earned greater spiritual recognition than their spouses or children, others seem to have gained notoriety primarily through their marital or maternal connections to well-known Muslim scholars or Sufis. Because of this there's sometimes a tendency to dismiss the significance of the reports about these women,",
      "come to prominence because they're the mother, or the sister, or daughter, or wife of some other more important man. But I think that this attitude is somewhat problematic. It fails to consider the simple fact that relatively few women would have had the social capacity or freedom to live independent lives in early or medieval Islamic society. So for example Rabia who's able to live",
      "family connections and that facilitated her ability to live this kind of lifestyle. The fact that reports of these women often come in connection with reports about their husbands or their sons, or so on again also shouldn't lead us to dismiss those accounts because women generally did not write first-hand personal accounts of their spiritual lives or their spiritual insights and so we're dependent really",
      "come to us, you might say indirectly through stories about the men to whom they were related. The fact that these women's spiritual accomplishments were impressive enough for their male relatives to share with their contemporaries either in speech or in written works particularly in a social or historical context in which men might normally have been somewhat reluctant",
      "tells us a great deal about the opportunity and respect for female mystical accomplishment and achievement in traditional Islamic society. Even in those periods in Islamic history when women's lives tend to be less visible to us in the historical record. So let me talk first of all about women who are known, whose spiritual",
      "connected to their role as mothers. It's well known that mothers enjoy a special prominence and respect in Islamic texts. The scholar Esma Barlas points out, in her book Believing Women in Islam, that while the Quran strongly urges respect and care for both parents it also singles out mothers in a number of instances",
      "for which there is no parallel in the case of fathers. And a similar set of unique distinctions from others can be found in canonical Hadith texts. It is perhaps not surprising then that Sufi men are often reported to have been spiritually influenced by their mothers who are sometimes cited as their first spiritual teachers and many male Sufis themselves credit their mothers for developing in them an early taste",
      "life of devotion. The spiritual biographies and autobiographical comments of many prominent Sufi figures, including the founders of three major Sufi orders of the Qadr al-Jilani, Ahmed al-Rafai, and Rumi speak of the pious examples set by their own mothers. While in some cases mothers are said to have merely inspired",
      "others, the mother plays a tangible and facilitating role in the entrance of their more famous sons into the spiritual life. Ibn Arabi's mother for example was a female disciple of Shams Umm al-Fukra and presumably introduced her son to the guidance of this female sheikha who is one of the earliest teachers",
      "spiritual mother. Sufiana Thauri's mother is reported to have offered to support her son with her embroidery while he went in search of spiritual knowledge, giving him the sagacious advice to observe his soul carefully as he acquired knowledge in order to distinguish that knowledge which was truly spiritually transformative from that which brought neither benefit nor harm, invoking a chronic statement.",
      "When Abd al-Qadr Jilani first begins to have disquieting dreams and visions that compel him toward the spiritual life, he seeks initial consolation by discussing these matters with his mother who eventually gives him her blessing and her permission to leave home for spiritual journeying. Like the mother of Sufiana Thauri, Abd al Qadr's mother also sends him off with words",
      "friend other than God, again an invocation of a chronic idea and to cling to the truth regardless of its consequences. As important and as instrumental as the pious mother is in all of these examples she plays what amounts to a supporting role in the life of her more famous son. There are other cases however in which the Sufi mother is an equal or dominant figure",
      "which is referred to as Umm Muhammad. She is the mother of the Sufi Abu Abdallah ibn Khafif, and it's said that on the Laylatul Qadr, that is the night in which the Quran is believed to have come down to the Prophet Muhammad, the anniversary of that event, her son was worshiping in the mosque, she was worship at her home, and they had the exactly identical spiritual experience",
      "only realized when her son came home, which suggests a kind of spiritual equality and a spiritual partnership between mother and son despite the fact that they're worshiping in two different places private and public. In some cases Sufi mothers sit in judgment on the spiritual qualities of their sons not always finding them worthy. The Sufi woman Umm Talq for example warns her son",
      "in his mastery of Quranic recitation could become an argument against him on the day of judgment, right? Despite the obviously meritorious act of reciting the Quran, she's chastising him for the pride that he takes in his ability to do that. We are also told that the well-known female ascetic and devotee Sha'awana of Ubulla had a son who wished",
      "to God and asked for her permission to pursue this. She initially dismissed his request, considering him to be spiritually unworthy but when he later proves his spiritual power to her she happily gives him her blessing to pursue the spiritual life of solitude and journeying and happily agrees that she will never see him again right? She was able to detach herself in this way from him. This account",
      "only for the degree of influence she exercises over his spiritual life, but for the way in which he is able to detach herself from him and agree to separate herself from Him indefinitely. In fact, the calm detachment some Sufi women demonstrate in relation to their children may occasionally serve as a stellar example of the possibility of attaining a true state of detachment from the world. Motherhood is ideally",
      "social context, a mother's detachment from her children would generally not be considered a particularly virtuous quality. Maybe even morally blameworthy but in the Sufi context, even visceral maternal attachments that seem to conflict with the requirement of ultimate detachment form God can at times be subjugated to that attachment to God. We find at least two cases",
      "in which Sufi mothers suggest that their maternal roles might, in fact, have been inhibitive of their spiritual pursuits precisely because of the kind of attachments that motherhood brings. So one woman for example complained to God upon the birth of her child that he had burdened her with something that will impede her spiritual ambitions and yet another berated herself",
      "because she was worried that her son had not said his prayers. Other Sufi mothers are shown as struggling with the painful experience of the death of their child, and this bereavement is often understood as a great spiritual trial. Mu'adhah al-Adawiyya for example loses both her husband and her son in the same battle. She tries to kind of keep a stiff upper lip in public",
      "me, you should be congratulating me. I'm proud of what happened with my husband and my son.\" But in other reports she privately confides to other women that after the death of her husband and her son she lost all desire for living and eagerly looked forward to her own death. She said the only thing she'll miss about this life is praying and fasting but looked very much forward to the next life when she would be able",
      "It is also interesting to note that Muradha represents a distinctly maternal figure in the history of female Sufism. She is said to have served as a wet nurse for a number of young girls in the clan of Adi, near where she lived. And a number these milk daughters went on to become recognized ascetics and devotees themselves.",
      "And at least on one occasion, she makes a connection between the milk with which she nursed these young girls and the transmission of spiritual knowledge and blessing. In addition to mothers we also have a number of accounts of Sufi women who were married particularly to Sufi men and Who really were partners on the path on the spiritual path along with their husbands?",
      "husbands. The work of Anne-Marie Schimmel had already suggested that the idea of the Sufi woman as a celibate female recluse avoiding marriage is a kind of fatal distraction on the spiritual path was a trope that had been somewhat overplayed. A careful examination of the biographical material on Sufi women indicates",
      "of the female Sufi declining offers of marriage in order to be monogamously, if spiritually betrothed to her beloved that is to God. That's certainly present in the literature. Nonetheless many female Sufis were not only married themselves but seem to have found their spiritual lives relatively uncompromised by their matrimonial state. While many of these women were married",
      "were married to known Sufis or to other pious men who may have had an uncommon respect for female spiritual accomplishment, this good fortune was not entirely random. A number of Sufi women are reported to have actively sought out like-minded Sufi husbands who would grow rather than inhibit their spiritual ambitions. In fact, Sufi woman who are reported",
      "for matrimony itself, but for marriage to someone who would misunderstand or limit rather than nurture and support their spiritual lives. Yet even in cases where a woman did not marry her spiritual equal the marriage itself is rarely represented as spiritually limiting. Rather marriage is usually portrayed as offering spiritual opportunities for both husband",
      "For a woman with spiritual aspirations, marriage to a man with similar inclinations seemed to have offered a number of tangible advantages. This woman would have the social protection of marriage but also presumably the sympathy of her husband for lengthy and time-consuming spiritual practices. Her attachment to her husband might offer her access to spiritual resources such as the ability to attend vicar sessions with predominantly male attendees",
      "attendees. The Sufi woman Umdarda, for example the younger wife of the well-known prophetic companion Abu Darda was able to participate in Majalis Adik group meetings where people would recite various pious formulas or names of God that were held in her home presumably at her husband's request although we're told that her husband also looked favorably on her having hosted some prayer meeting",
      "prayer meetings and vicar meetings specifically for other women, so women-only gatherings as well that took place in her home. A woman married to a Sufi man might also gain access to an audiences with well known male Sufi sheikhs whom she might not be able to approach as a single woman through her husband's own connection to these figures. And the story of Fatima of Nishapur is particularly instructive here.",
      "to Attar's account of Fatima in Tazkirat al-Awliya, Fatima aggressively sought out one of the well known Sufis of her day, Ahmed ibn Khadraway for marriage and requested that their first trip as husband and wife be a visit to visit their mutual sheikh none other than our friend again Bayezid al-Bistami suggesting that her marriage to Ahmed afforded her this opportunity she didn't have before.",
      "The presence of a woman at a private audience with the male Sufi Sheikh or in a gathering of men for dhikr, particularly an earlier more traditional period in Islamic culture could easily have scandalized local religious authorities. But if it was done with the permission and presence of her husband few might seriously object. At the same time there are some accounts that suggest the possible tensions that might arise through women's simultaneous attachment to husband and sheikh both",
      "whom theoretically had a claim on her obedience and devotion. When Fatima of Nishapur visits Bayezid al-Bistami with her husband, Ahmed ibn Khadruway, Attar tells us in a colorful account that Fatima removed her face veil and began to converse in a very intimate way with Bayezide. When her husband objected to her boldness in front of the great sheikh,",
      "telling her husband, through you I satisfy my natural desires while through Bayezid I satisfied my quest for God. Here Fatima's need for intimacy and closeness with her sheikh is portrayed as initially in conflict with her husband's right to guard his wife's modesty under Sharia law and social custom but it is ultimately resolved through Fatima own careful reminder an effective reestablishment of appropriate boundaries for the two relationships",
      "In another account, a Sufi master is said to have had a female Sufi disciple of actually a married couple who were his disciples. And the woman was said to be given the spiritual power of clairvoyance. She could actually see what Bayezid, the master, was doing at any given moment. And then the master at one point acts on his own to discredit the woman's",
      "the woman's clairvoyance in the eyes of her husband. He sort of, she claims that he is doing one thing and he actually to her husband and he says he is actually doing something else so those powers of clairvoyants are, the husband no longer trusts them. And when it's explained why he did this, he said that he needed to veil this woman his disciple from her husband",
      "obviously because typically the husband would want to veil his wife from the outside world but here the sheikh veils the spiritual power of the woman even from her own husband so again it's an interesting play on these typical norms. In",
      "relationships between Rumi, his son and his daughter-in-law reflect some similar tensions. So Rumi's son Baha Veled is married to Fatima Khatun the daughter of Rumi spiritual companion Salahuddin. This young girl was reported to have had a very close relationship with Rumi from her childhood having learned Quran and taken spiritual lessons from him even from a very",
      "Saad must treat Fatima Khatun with the utmost respect and on one occasion intervenes on the side of his daughter-in-law in a marital spat, telling her in a private letter that if Baha Veled ever hurts her again he will disown him and refuse even to come to his funeral. While the intertwining of family and spiritual connections here makes it a somewhat different case from the others that we've seen,",
      "legal authority over his wife is compromised by her close relationship with the spiritual master. In a later account, Aflaki reports that when Rumi died Fatima Khatun was so distraught she could not even bear to nurse her young child until she had a dream of Rumi, a vision of Romi in which he instructs her to search for him",
      "his grandson and future successor to leadership of the Mevlavi order founded by Rumi. While the story serves obviously to establish the spiritual connection between Rumi and his grandson, and the eventual successor as sheikh of the Mavlavi order, it also displays an interesting connection between Fatima Khatun's role as mother",
      "and becomes incapable of performing her traditional duties as a wife and mother by nursing her child. She is only consoled, and able to return to those duties with a sense of spiritual purpose when Rumi tells her that his presence continues in her son and his grandson apparently circumventing the domestic and spiritual authority of Rumi's son and Fatima Khatun's husband Baha Velid.",
      "The tensions between the authority of the spiritual master and the authority husband are richly suggestive but only rarely recorded. They almost never resulted in irreconcilable differences between the spouses. Perhaps, the more common dilemma for a Sufi couple was the conflicting demands on each other's time and attention by virtue of their dual responsibilities to marriage and to the mystical life. This problem is never explored",
      "in the biographies of Sufi wives, but occasional conflicts of interest are suggested by the common motif of the pious or Sufi woman dutifully perfuming and adorning herself in the evening and asking her husband if he would like her company. If he replies in the negative, the woman would immediately take off the beautiful clothing and don her ascetic garments and go and immerse herself",
      "In a pair of anecdotes related to the Syrian mystic Rabia bint Ismail, who is married to a Sufi, Ahmed al-Hawari. It's said that she once was so engaged in prayer and meditation that even though her husband kept calling her and calling her, she would not respond. An hour later, she apologized and said she was just too engrossed in her devotions to answer his call.",
      "wonders at her ability to perform her devotions with such regularity. She responds that it is not really such a difficult thing for she simply rises when she is called by God, which is precisely what she had just said she wouldn't do for her husband right he calls her she won't respond. Despite these reported and perhaps inevitable tensions engendered by the conflict between marital and spiritual demands Sufi biographical sources nonetheless suggest",
      "spiritually and practically beneficial for husband and wife. Many Sufi women sought out particular husbands as spouses on the basis of their spiritual credentials, and expected them to act as personal guides on the path. In some cases, the wives are occasionally presented as spiritual superiors to their husbands, illustrating in a marital context",
      "norms that we often find in Sufism, right? The kind of poor beggar coming into the king and saying something very wise. It changes the King's mind. And so you see sometimes this kind of inversion of traditional modes of authority between husband and wife coming up as well. So we have lots of cases where a woman might chastise her husband for his laziness and his devotions or particularly for not praying",
      "the prayer where you wake up in the middle of the night, a special devotion in the midddle of the nigh seems to be something that many pious women and female Suvis in particular were very attached too. And this might have to do with the fact that their lives during the day would've been very full from the morning really all the way through the evening. So the nighttime was really the time when they could be alone so many of them professed",
      "praying in the middle of the night. And often their husbands would wake up in the morning and find that they'd been praying all night, and the wives will say to them you know where have you been? You know the caravan of intimacy with God has left, you know, Caravans Raft, you now where were you all night? But a husband might also benefit from his wife's access to subtler spiritual states",
      "to Sufi women and many of the husbands would then report the spiritual visions of their wives. There's some evidence that Sufi woman were considered more sensitive to or enjoyed greater access to certain types of mystical states or modes of perception. In her work on female mystics, again in medieval Catholicism, Catherine Mooney observes",
      "stories or accounts of female saints seem to stress the idea that women had a subtler character, that kind of left them open to certain types of insights or mystical influences. And we see something similar in Sufi literature as well. I think probably the best known example of this in the tradition is al-Hakim al-Tirmidhi, sort of third, important third century",
      "in third century, ninth century very early pious mystic who relied upon the revelations that his wife received in dreams and visions for a supernatural confirmation of his own spiritual statement and his own status. Whatever the factual basis of these different accounts might be what is important here is not",
      "superiority or inferiority between the genders that they sometimes rather playfully evoke, but rather the evidence that they collectively give of a genuine respect for female spiritual accomplishment among many prominent Sufi men and transmitters and writers as well as for the idea that marriage offered opportunity for spiritual growth for both husbands",
      "cases we encounter, these Sufi marriages are portrayed as true spiritual partnerships with the spouses being in addition to husband and wife close spiritual companions on the path. Rabia bint Ismail's reported relationship with Ahmed al-Hawari her husband is again instructive. In some accounts she sought to make her marriage to Ahmed a celibate one such that she would derive the benefits of marriage without the distraction of conjugal duties",
      "duties, although there are other accounts that suggest this wasn't really the case. But at the same time she hoped to derive spiritual reward and benefit by supporting Ahmed with the considerable wealth that she had inherited and possessed in her own person. But despite the mutual practical benefits emphasized in the case of Rabi and Ahmed,",
      "of a more intimate spiritual nature. There is an image, for example, of the famous ascetic and devotee Shatwana circumambulating the Kaaba with her husband. At one point they both sit down exhausted and share with one another this spirit spiritual weariness that they experience from their shared and unquenchable thirst for God. In one account, a companion of Abu Abdallah al-Burathi,",
      "and his wife Jauhara would sit on reed mats facing one another as they engaged in mystical devotions, an image that provides a stark contrast to the ordinary separation of men and women in prayer. Abu Abdullah's brother, Abu Shuwaib also enjoyed a relationship of spiritual companion with his own wife. And the Sufi chronicler and biographer Ibn al-Jawzi tells us",
      "the two of them worshiping in the best manner, and they died in this way,\" he said, mutually helping one another in their devotions. So let me just conclude by saying while other Islamic texts and even much later Sufi manuals written for men and women would sketch out clear ideals or models of female piety no single ideal or model of female Sufi behavior emerges from these standard biographical collections.",
      "Both celibate and family women are celebrated, and even among family women marital arrangements and maternal roles seem to have differed widely and often in accordance with their own spiritual needs. Thus despite the significance of the phenomenon of celibat women in the early period of Islamic history our brief survey here indicates that the practice of celabacy and social withdrawal were not the only or even the dominant paradigm of early female piety and mysticism",
      "While maternal and marital obligations clearly may have come into conflict from time to time with a woman's spiritual ambitions, accounts suggest that many such women lived and indeed enhanced their spiritual lives through their roles as mothers and wives rather than in spite of them while often making meaningful contributions to the spiritual development of their husbands and children as well. Thank you.",
      "Thank you for that talk. I learned a lot. So, I don't know if this is relevant but... Is the soul genderless? And is therefore gender something that only exists in the physical realm? Because you mentioned that one of the objectives",
      "So is it not possible to reach God by embracing as a woman femininity? Well, I was trying to say, I think in my talk what I was saying that it is possible. But the idea of gender as being something that is not innate, that is kind of secondary characteristic, I thing is suggested already by the very beginning of Sotetan Nisaa,",
      "talks about human beings being created as a single soul. And, as you know the word nafs in Arabic is grammatically feminine and there's a lot of play in all different kinds of ways on the kind of grammatical gender of nafs as feminine but I think clearly what that shows... First of all human beings are created as single souls and then from it its mate right so and then it sort of separated into two and from that",
      "multiplicity of the human race, right? Derives. So I think there is the idea that ultimately transcending gender is the part or one way of talking about the goal of the Sufi path and the question is whether male or female people are still having to live in this world and so how do they negotiate a spiritual path in a world where there are gendered norms? And I shouldn't say these things were just difficult for women,",
      "I mean, obviously there were many men who would like to kind of just go off and not have the responsibilities of marriage and children. And, you know, Abouhamad al-Ghazali could do that. He was wealthy, but not everybody had that opportunity. And so, you now, the gendered social obligations were just sort of obligations of the world. And my point is that there were different ways in which women tried to negotiate that. But the ultimate goal is yes, to transcend all binaries",
      "and all binaries, including gender. Thank you. Next question? Yes, so a question in two parts. Given, as you said, the sort of restrictions of this particular time and age on women and men and the things women could do, not to question any of the women's desire for piety or closeness to God, was it often sometimes for these women possibly an escape from the norms of their society? And so this was one way in which they",
      "different way than society had. Well certainly that's something, that's that's been mentioned in terms of women in the Christian period right so the monastic life in a Christian context offered women the ability to not only escape domestic responsibilities but also to be educated right there wasn't a possibility for them to be outside of that you don't have exactly a similar situation in in the Islamic world and it was",
      "And that, as I said for many of these women to live those kind of independent lives because you didn't have a monastery which was a respectable place for them to go and be supported. That received charitable donations from the outside. It could be a very risky life right? It wasn't normative for a woman to just go and live in a hut by herself or to wander by herself not to mention the fact it could've been dangerous as it would even be today.",
      "It was a challenging life. And so it may, for some have been an escape but it was an escape that came at such a high price and it's hard to imagine that in most cases it didn't have a genuine spiritual component as well. Okay. And related to that you talked about fluidity of looking more broadly agenda and some of these roles. So the distinctions have been very binary male female married celibate.",
      "perhaps more broadly at sexual orientation and gender identity. Is there anything literature or what little there is by the interior lives of these women that we can look more broadly and look at perhaps their sexuality, and perhaps to some extent too this was a perhaps seeking an alternative to heteronormative sort of context of living? Well I mean it would be speculation right you had certainly women who lived alone like Rabia for example were said",
      "were said to have women who would serve her and help her. Or I gave you the example of Muadha, who after her husband and son pass away sort of adopts these young women as her daughters so that they become close. You know, I suppose one could make such speculations. You don't really find anything in the literature that is even somewhat suggestive of that. So for example Rabia bint Ismail,",
      "to Ahmed. So she's married to this Sufi, Ahmed. She's supporting him basically. She clearly has no desire in having any kind of real sexual relationship with him. In fact offers to pay for him to marry other women and serve that function so he'll you know kind of leave her alone let her pray but at the same time",
      "as well to whom she is very close. So, but again there is you know while you do find sometimes things that are suggestive in let's say the love poetry that exists between male disciple and male Sheikh we simply don't have anything that's even slightly suggestive of that in the case of women so it would be speculation. Excuse me could I ask you to just change places with Dr. Grady behind you? And you can go after her.",
      "go after her thank you very much it's very strange because I really can't see anybody with these lights on coming in thank you so much that was so informative and really generous to share that history with us I have a more metaphysical question what is the spiritual significance of the feminine aspect of Allah being or hidden than the more prominent masculine aspects",
      "What's the spiritual significance of that? Thank you. Well, the idea that the essence of God... Again we come back to the metaphysical significance of grammar in the Arabic language which is a sacred language. So the essence or that is again gendered feminine and it's considered to be hidden and removed whereas the attributes and actions of God are things seen and relatable to human nature.",
      "in nature. I think what you see in accounts of many of these women is also a desire to be hidden and to be silent, and that often is the basis of their critique of men. And I think that's kind of an interesting pattern that you see some of these anecdotes. And again they're playful, they're meant to... They are in the spirit of just a general Sufi genre",
      "one-upping someone else in terms of their spiritual understanding, the disciple suddenly having an insight that shocks the master or something like that. Those kinds of things we see a lot in Sufi literature but when you look, you sometimes see these kind of implicit critiques of femininity that I just mentioned at the beginning where femininity is connected to materiality and that kind of thing",
      "associated with the world. But you also had women that kind of flipped that around and they were often critical of men for being kind of too outward, speaking too much, being too willing to sit in a mosque and have lots of people sit at their feet and learn from them and to walk in and have everyone admire",
      "and a woman comes up to him and says, well I can see that you've mastered the art of rhetoric but have you mastered the Art of Silence? And the man immediately is quiet. The account says he never spoke again for the rest of his life. But again, the account that I gave in here of Umm Talq saying to her son yes you recite the Quran very beautifully and this is a wonderful thing but it's also potential source of pride so there's a way",
      "in which the critique that you sometimes see in words attributed to female Sufis or female, or pious women of the men around them was precisely their outwardness rather than their love of sort of silence and hiddenness and intimacy. Thank you. Yes please. Dr. Dikek thank you for your informative and beautiful talk I would like",
      "and a husband, if both partners are engaged in the dhikr and focused on the remembrance of God how would there be interaction between the two? So yeah. Well I suppose if they had reached the state where they were both perpetually in that state there wouldn't be any interaction. But most people aren't at that state right? And like I said there are some of these very beautiful stories",
      "proximity, close proximity to one another even facing one another and invoking God. And so they're not interacting with each other directly but in the Sufi tradition the whole purpose of this sort of gathering for that right? If one is pursuing a mystical life one might do devotions in private, right? But there are also times where one would do especially",
      "context would perform these devotions in a group. And the purpose of performing them in a groups was precisely to act, you know all the members of the group would act as spiritual support for one another and so in the case of a husband and wife let's say sitting privately in their home facing each other doing this they're not interacting but the point telling that story is to say that they were clearly spiritually supporting one another maybe in a similar way. Okay thank you.",
      "Thank you. Dr. Alwan? Thank you very much for your wonderful lecture and reflection. What fascinated me was kind of almost the complementarity in competition between the two genders, and what also fascinated me is the interaction on really the highest level of these saints, of these oliyah men and women oliyyah, saints of God contending almost",
      "and kind of recognizing the extrinsic limitations in gender, and how that affects their psyche. In regards to especially at the beginning of your talk when you mentioned how some of the Sufi men would recognize the, or the, the masculinity, spiritual masculinity in women, what came to mind also was more",
      "that in a sense, because there's complementarity one could say that on the path you know a man becomes more feminine spiritually speaking. They tend towards their inward and the feminine dimension kind of unveils for them so I mean but for women perhaps one could see that you know for them they contact their masculinity or the masculine principle and then how this plays out in life",
      "with the other that could be. So is there anything in your research or in your reflections that speaks to this kind of dynamic of complementarity? Yes, absolutely. As I said, you know, I talked about Ruz Pahanbakli often talks about this but if you even think about the idea that let's say a man in a traditional Sufi context who finds a spiritual master submits himself utterly to that master takes that master as an authority over",
      "over very intimate aspects of his spiritual life, which isn't a typical role for men outside that mystical context. So there is a way in which that is kind of acquiring you might say feminine virtues in a virtual way and so I think that's certainly there and it's important as part of the idea of transcending gender. Ibn al-Athabi who I didn't talk about much here speaks a lot about women",
      "He talks about men really gaining a greater understanding of the divine through women and through their relationship with women. But he also says about women, there are ways in which they have kind of an advantage on this spiritual path because they're already... And of course, he's living in a context where we already are expected to be demure",
      "instead of being prideful and sort of outwardly and showy. And so he said that's already a kind of jump start, they have a sort of headstart on the spiritual path because that idea of, that idea poverty and humility automatically would come more naturally to them because of the social context in which they live. Thank you. Two more questions or make some direct?",
      "insightful about female Sufi life. I would like to ask particularly about the Velaye institution for females, have you encountered any exclusion or inclusion by different orders for this particular? Not necessarily obviously there are different levels of inclusion in Sufi Life but particularly for the Velayeh position.",
      "Yes. Well, I haven't done... This isn't really a direct aspect of my research but certainly there are Sufi orders that would exclude women entirely or there are sufi orders which might allow women to be almost sort of honorary members and not participate directly but maybe in a kind of... They were like mutabarakat. They were women who might benefit from the barakah of the sheikh",
      "their husband who maybe was attached to the sheikh or other male relatives, but wouldn't be direct disciples. Wouldn't actually have that take bayah with him and actually had that relationship of wilayah with the sheikh. But there were other Sufi orders that allowed that. And I think many of the accounts we have of Sufi women they're not full accounts right? They're like sort of little snippets of stories that are told about them so we can only maybe glean some",
      "or maybe make some guesses about what the wider environment was like for women who wanted to pursue a path like this. I think the fact that you have a number of anecdotes that suggest that there were female sheikhas with specifically female disciples, or that you had gatherings that were just of women may suggest us that the norm for women participating let's say in a public gathering",
      "with devotion or sort of mystical devotions was one in which there was a female head and sort of female disciples participating rather than a woman participating, you know, in one that was predominated by men or predominantly attended by men. You know I've been to places in Cairo where there was like a Sufi gathering going on inside the mosque and all the women were outside the mosque",
      "but they weren't supposed to go in and be actually present there. So, um... And I believe in... I might be wrong on this, but I mean some places you know that there's limitations that even the state today would make on certain Sufi orders having official female members and things like that so I think it varies very much from environment to environment. It might have varied you know from one woman to the next and the fact that so many of these women do seem",
      "their spiritual lives facilitated by husbands or sons or brothers might meant that it might have meant that. It was unusual for women to be full members and they kind of were allowed to come along because they were accompanied by their husband, or their father, or something like that. Thank you. Save the best for the last? I'm just interested in your feedback",
      "feedback, Ustesa on this anecdote. In Fez the old city of Fez there's a quarter where the patron saint is a female and this patron saint of course it's not when you become I mean the idea of welly or wellia in this case um",
      "papal council votes on it. I mean, it's almost by popular consent or demand. And this particular woman must have lived three or four hundred years ago and I've forgotten her name. Her husband was a lowlife. He would go out and get drunk and do all sorts of different things. When he stumbled back home and lay on the floor she would clean him up. For years",
      "that life of pure devotion. It's sort of a different side to what you're saying, and... That devotion and that lack of blame towards him for her like the hadith says marriage is half of religion in a sense through that marriage she herself was completely purified",
      "became a great saint. It wasn't through standard Sufism and an attachment to a sheikh, but simply through the... I mean just your reaction to that it's a very different kind of anecdote. You want to know what I think about women becoming saintly because they're married to low-life husbands? I think is probably a common occurrence actually!",
      "No, well okay. So should I give a more serious answer to that? I think that again the you know there certainly is the idea that and we see this in the Christian tradition too. I mean look at the mother of Saint Augustine for example who became a saint just by putting up with her son",
      "you know, this way as well. But I think what's interesting in your story is that she didn't chastise her husband. She just kind of put up with it and in a way tried to chastize him maybe through her own example but very quietly. And that's quite different than the ones that are reported here. You know there's that famous bumper sticker that you see everywhere that says women who are quiet",
      "also don't make history. And so a lot of the women that end up being recorded in these early sources are the ones who maybe were unusually outspoken, but I'm sure and I didn't mean it entirely jokingly, I'm certain there were plenty of women who dealt with this in a quiet way rather than by openly challenging their husbands. Yes, and I do think they're saints. Thank you very much for all that inspiration."
    ]
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    "text": [
      "Good evening and welcome to the Athenaeum Symposia, the Frank Islam Athenaeums symposia at the Germantown campus.",
      "Germantown campus. We're really excited to see you here, I am Joan Naik English professor and director of the Athenaeum Symposia speaker series and without you we could not really have these events. And we are very very excited and as you know it's called the Athenaem symposia and of course its for the Greek goddess of wisdom Athena and I'd like to share with you just for a moment other words that mean wisdom",
      "According to the Oxford Dictionary, synonyms for wisdom are discernment, insight, perception, perceptiveness, perceptivity, sagaciousness, sagacity, sageness and sapience. I am sure tonight we are going to engage in sagacity and sapiance. We are going",
      "and incredibly knowledgeable about women in Islam. By the way, I would like to introduce Lisa Clark from the library who is going to have the honor and privilege of introducing Dr. Deke. Welcome! My name is Lisa Clark and I am a reference librarian here at the Germantown Montgomery College Library",
      "Montgomery College Libraries. This past year, Montgomery College libraries was honored by the National Endowment for the Humanities as well as the American Library Association with a collection of titles of books and DVDs called The Bridging Cultures Bookshelf Muslim Journeys. These titles were meant to be the foundation of scholarship-based programs like this one",
      "and to discuss more about the Muslim community, their beliefs, their customs, their history and culture. Muslim women are the topic of many of these books. In particular we have three books that will be giving away actually today. Dreams of Trespass by Moroccan writer Fatima Mernissi. Leila Ahmed's A Quiet Revolution. Persepolis by Marjane Sartrapi",
      "All of these books in some ways touch upon the options that are available to Muslim women and their communities, the choices they make for themselves as well as their role in society. We're fortunate today to have Dr. Maria DeCake who is the associate professor and chair of the religious studies program at George Mason University to help us talk about some of these issues.",
      "Dr. Day-Cake received her PhD from Princeton in the Near Eastern Studies. She's a founding member and director of the Interdisciplinary Islamic Studies Program at George Mason University. Her research interests and publications lie in the fields of Islamic intellectual history with a particular interest in Shiite and Sufi traditions, Quran commentary, and women's religious experience.",
      "religious experience. She's written a book, The Charismatic Community, Shiite Identity and Early Islam which was published by Sunni Press in 2008. Dr. Akeem De Kake has published several articles on women spirituality and Islam and this coming spring Harper Collins will publish Study Quran which is a collaborative project for which she served as associate editor. Please help me welcome our very prestigious speaker",
      "Dr. Maria Dekeg. Good evening, thank you very much Lisa, thank You Joan, thank all of you for coming it's wonderful to see everyone here I'm very happy to be speaking on this subject and I am very happy",
      "I think will end up being very important. All right, so speaking about women in Islam is a huge topic. I teach an entire course at George Mason on women in Islamic and we still don't really finish usually the last three weeks I kind of squish into the last class somehow as you know it's a big topic because there",
      "2.2 billion Muslims in the world spread over all of the continents, all of major continents. There's 45 Muslim majority countries. One in five human beings is on the planet is Muslim and of course it's a very diverse population. And there are Muslims in all parts of the world does anyone know? I hear from Lisa that you get a book if you ask a question",
      "a question maybe if you answer correctly what is the most populous Muslim country Indonesia we have our first winner and of course now we know there are also substantial Muslim minority populations in Europe and North America as well and as I said there's tremendous diversity there wherever Islam went",
      "know today is Saudi Arabia. It moves into the central lands of the Middle East and out from there toward Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, into Southeast Europe, into Central Asia, into the subcontinent, and finally into Southeast Asia. And wherever Islam went it really adapted itself to the local culture. So of course the religious principles, the religious texts, those things remain standard across",
      "much to the success of the Islamic world. You could travel from India to Morocco with one language and one currency, and one set of rules that you knew so it was great for trade. But in terms of things like...things we're going to be talking about tonight social culture, dress architecture art those things adapted very much to",
      "Islamic cultures, you might say. In India, in the Middle East, in Iraq, in Sub-Saharan Africa, in France, in United States. It's also a bit of difficult topic to talk about because there are a lot of preconceptions and misconceptions about women in Islam. Everyone knows that there are five pillars in Islam I often say people tend to think",
      "have to oppress women. And so there's already this perception that Muslim women are oppressed, that they don't have choices, that the Muslim world is particularly oppressive and does not value women. This is not true. It's certainly not entirely true. So I hope to bring some of that to light this evening because",
      "Because there are so many negative misconceptions, when you're trying to inform people, you're usually trying to point out to them all of the things that they miss and don't make it into our media images. And sometimes it feels like you're always trying to present a very positive image. What I'm really trying to do is balance things and try to give you a very balanced view of Islam.",
      "I'm going to begin, even though I want to talk about Muslim women in contemporary times. I also want to begin by talking about what it says in the Quran about women and women's issues. Most of you probably know that the Quran is the scripture for Muslims. It is their scripture. It Is a scripture that they hold particularly dear. Muslims consider the Quran to be the direct word of God so not just",
      "words, the very sounds that the Qur'an has within it are considered to be sounds that God has spoken his very words. And for that reason Muslims are not very open to criticisms of the Qur-an in exploring the Qurans certainly asking questions of it but not criticisms of validity or authenticity",
      "they hold very, very sacred. So what does the Quran say about women? Well when we look at what the Quran says about God one of the things that we might note is that the Quran never calls God Father. In fact Muslims never refer to God as father not even metaphorically and there are a lot",
      "where the Arabs of Arabia prior to the coming of Islam considered God to have daughters, for example. Muslims in the very early period were aware of Christians and Christian notions of Jesus as the son of God which the Quran does not accept but in general it is not acceptable for Muslims to call God father and this is in some ways very significant. One of the things that Jewish",
      "scholars have had to get over working within religious texts is the fact that God is associated with this image that is completely male. And it simply will say, it's not a burden for Muslims looking at their scripture. Or we could take another story which... Image here for that miniature painting. The story of Adam and Eve.",
      "So the Quran tells the story of Adam and Eve in a way that is largely similar to what you find in the book of Genesis. In the Bible, Adam and eve are created they're put in the garden God tells them you can eat from any tree except this one They eat from that one And they're banished but there are some important differences in the chronic account Of the Adam and eve narrative which is told in several different places throughout the quran as You may know in the biblical version",
      "Eve is the one who was initially tempted by the serpent. And the implication being, the serpent thought she was an easy target, right? So he tempts her first and having succumbed to temptation, she then becomes a temptress and tempts Adam. And when they discover what they've done",
      "Why did you do this? Adam says, the woman made me do it. And he turns to the woman and the woman says, The serpent made me Do it right just passing the buck along. And then of course they're banished from the garden but not before very specific punishments are given to them including the punishment for women of pain in childbirth. In the Quranic narrative, Adam and Eve are told together not to take from the tree",
      "Simultaneously, they eat from the tree. When they're confronted by God, they simultaneously admit what they've done and immediately repent. God forgives them, although he does banish them from the garden, but without these punishments that again have often remained a kind of burden in Western Christian or Jewish feminist narratives. The Quran contains another number",
      "very positive female figures. Mary, the mother of Jesus has her own chapter in the Quran. There's a lot more about Mary in the Qur'an than there is in the Bible just to give you an example and Mary is a fairly heroic figure in the quran. There is no Joseph for those who are familiar of course with the Christian story. There was no Joseph to protect her, to lead her on her journey,",
      "she has to go off by herself, give birth by herself and answer the inevitable accusations by herself. All right so there are a number of other women but we'll move on from there if there are questions I can certainly take those after. One of the things that the Quran does quite clearly is it establishes",
      "between men and women. Because there's no priesthood in Islam, you have imams of course but imams are sort of first among equals or people who happen to know quite a bit about the religion but they don't have a priestly status. And all of the major rituals in Islam can be completed individually by either men or women. In other words, women are not dependent upon men",
      "male clergy to fulfill their religious duties. This is a very famous verse in the Quran from Surah 33, 33rd surah of the Quran. I can see people squinting in the back so I will read it to you in case you can't see. The verse reads,",
      "and the patient women, the humble men and the humble women, The men who give charity and the women who give Charity. The men Who fast in the women Who fast. The Men who guard their chastity and the Women who guard Their Chastity.The men who remember God and the woman who remember god often in their hearts and with their tongues God has prepared for them forgiveness and a great reward.\" Now I think one of the noticeable aspects of this particular verse",
      "verse is the constant, almost pedantic way it continually says. Why not just say the Muslims and those who are believers and those were obedient and those that are truthful why not just be general in this way? Why make it so clear that its men and women, men and woman, men an women? And all of the qualities up here they relate either to primary ritual practices that Muslims do or spiritual qualities",
      "supposed to acquire or particular social norms like guarding their chastity. Why is it that this is equally for men and women? And this verse was revealed to the prophet Muhammad in response to a question actually posed to him by his wife. His wife, Um Salama noticed that the Quran always spoke in general terms and didn't seem to speak particularly to women.",
      "of Islam, the Prophet Muhammad. Why is it that God doesn't speak to us? Why doesn't he speak to US? And the prophet Mohammed didn't say to her, oh be quiet, of course you're speaking to everybody what are you doing asking questions about why God reveals this and why God revealed that. He doesn't say anything. And a few hours later when he went to lead the prayer this particular verse was revealed to him in answer ultimately to his wife's question",
      "So I think that this is, this verse and there are other verses as well. I don't have time to go through all of them that very clearly establish the idea that men and women have the same religious responsibilities and they will have the reward for fulfilling those responsibilities. As clear as the Quran is about the spiritual equality of men and woman in that women are spiritually independent of their husbands one",
      "important women in Islam is the wife of Pharaoh. And Pharaoh has to be the most evil man in the Quran, and yet his wife is considered to be one of the most saintly women who ever lived. So as clear as it is about this spiritual equality of men and women, the Quran also, as I think is well known, makes a social distinction between men and woman. It sets up different roles for men and",
      "hierarchy between men and women on the social plane. And particularly within the context of marriage. So very famous, and very controversial verse of the Quran in surah four clearly establishes men as the head of the household. It explains that men are the protectors and maintainers of women",
      "that men have the responsibility to support women with their wealth, and this is a principle in Islamic law. Men are responsible for their wives, for their children, and to the extent that they need it, for all of their female relatives. So men are the ultimate providers, and in exchange for this, the Quran also gives them authority. It gives them",
      "wives, it asks women to be obedient to their husbands and it also gives men permission to discipline their wives in certain circumstances. So if we take all these things together which is in this one verse, verse 34 of surah 4, we can see that it clearly establishes a patriarchal structure that assumes male authority within the family",
      "The Quran also says that in the context of discussing both marriage and divorce, that men have rights over women. I'm sorry, women have rights just as men have right over women but the men have a degree above them. And this question is what is this degree? The Quran often uses these very open-ended terms without a lot of definition. If you were to ask medieval commentators",
      "commentators on the Quran, they would say oh I can tell you what the degree is that they have over women. Intelligence, rationality, strength soundness of character etc etc etc but I do think personally when you look at the verse it's situated directly in the context of a discussion of marriage and divorce and I think the degree relates to that that men have a degree of freedom, a degree",
      "within the marital context that at the very least differs significantly from that of women. You may know that the Quran establishes, at the beginning of this same surah, surah 4 or chapter 4 of the Quran, it establishes the right of men to practice polygamy. I don't have the verse with me but it is an interesting verse if you want to look it up. I'm sure you could pull out your iPhones and find it very quickly",
      "But the verse clearly establishes the possibility of polygamy, but interestingly it does it for the purposes of justice. It says if you cannot deal justly with the orphan girls then marry the women that seem good to you two, three or four which is the establishment of the limit of four Muslim men.",
      "If you cannot deal with them equally and equitably, then only marry one. So the Quran clearly establishes this possibility of polygamy. And polygmy is something that is not widely practiced in contemporary society, contemporary Muslim societies but it still is practice. It does still exist and certainly as a possibility",
      "in most Muslim-majority countries. And finally, I mean there are other things we can talk about but try to be brief here. Finally men have a the Quran gives to men a unilateral right to divorce so a man can divorce his wife without cause at will. There are certain repercussions to him divorcing his wife which we can",
      "for men. All right, so in this sense if we look at all these things together we can say that it's quite clear that the Quran emerges in a context that's patriarchal when the Quran emerged in the seventh century practically the whole world is patriarchal in nature. It largely ratifies that patriarchy. It assumes it and it largely ratified that patriachy",
      "But it doesn't leave it untouched, and I think this is important. If you read the Quran carefully, you can see that it is trying to provide what I would call an amended patriarchy. That is a patriarchy that also establishes some rights that are very key and very important and have historically been very important for Muslim women. So, for example, as many of you know,",
      "property rights for women. So even today, Muslim men and women, even if they're married will typically keep their finances separate. A woman, if you notice in this first it says men who give charity and women give charity. Men and women gave charity separately on their own independent property. This is a significant advantage. Women didn't have",
      "have property rights in marriage, in this country until the early 20th century. When a woman got married her property was absorbed by her husband it became his property and he was alienated from her in principle and became his whereas women had these rights in the seventh century in the Islamic world now you might ask in the 7th century where did women get money right? It's not like you know typically women went to college",
      "didn't happen like that exactly. But there were ways for women to have their own personal property and acquire property, and that's also on the basis of rights that are given to them in the Quran. So women in the Qur'an were given rights to inheritance. They inherit from their relatives. And it would seem if we look at what the Qur-an says that prior to the coming of Islam in Arabia not only did women inherit",
      "the idea of women inheriting was considered absurd. But they were inherited, they could be inherited. So were their husband to die and this is very common in lots of tribal societies actually if there were their husbands to die his brother could literally inherit her and sort of keep her reproductive power you might say within the family, within the broader family. The Quran forbids inheriting women as if they're property",
      "And this was something that was really shocking for the community. When the verse came down giving women a share of inheritance, some of the Prophet Muhammad's companions were like, really? You know maybe you should... I mean like women can't carry swords and things, you're gonna give them money? Maybe you should go back and ask God about that again. Maybe you heard it wrong right? There was really this kind of...and it has to be repeated twice in the Quran in response to these questions that came up.",
      "So that was one way that women would acquire money, and the other way was through marriage. So the Quran requires that when a man marries a woman he has to give her a sum of money or piece of property that they agree on. And it has to be physical property. It can't be I promise to read you poetry every night for the rest of our marriage or something which is lovely! And then you can certainly ask for that, which is what I'm going to get to but it has",
      "And again, how important, how big, how substantial their property would be would depend upon the social class of the woman and the man who were getting married. It could be very substantial or it could be something that was more of a token. It can be jewelry but it could also be large tracts of land depending on the status of the people who are getting married",
      "One other thing to mention is that marriage in Islam is a contractual relationship. That's not to say it's limited to a business relationship, but it has a legal basis in a contract and so when a man and woman get married in Islam they sign a kitab literally a piece of writing that states their marriage contract",
      "of their marriage. Those of you who might be familiar with the Jewish marriage custom, traditional Jewish marriage customs, you sign a ketubah which comes from the same word and the marriage contract of course, and these are several examples that I have here, the two on the top well the one on the Top left and in the middle of course our medieval very beautifully ornamented and illustrated copies of a marriage certificate and then we have some modern examples here below",
      "here below. The marriage contract, besides stipulating in a kind of general way the responsibilities husband and wife have to each other, in the marriage contract the wife is also allowed to add other conditions to her marriage if the potential groom accepts. And so there are spaces for",
      "of her marriage that she is asking for in her marriage. And only the bride writes additional conditions, the groom doesn't write additional conditions and this what I'm talking about by amended patriarchy on one hand there's recognition of male authority greater male power within family but also traditions that develop based in the Quran that develop in Islamic law that are meant to provide protections for women in this situation where they might be particularly vulnerable",
      "vulnerable. So the marriage contract, a woman according to some depends on the school of law there's multiple schools of Islamic law but some schools of law allow women to write in all kinds of things into their marriage contract so a woman might write into her marriage contract that her husband is not allowed to take any additional wives right should she worry that he was going to do that. She might write",
      "that she wants him to allow her to work outside the home, that she want's to continue to reside in this city. That he needs to provide her with a house of a certain size or quality. It could be all kinds of things. He needs to provided her with an amount of money every month. It can be all kind of things or you could write nothing. I don't recommend that. If someone gives you a blank check, you write it whatever you can and see if you can get away with it.",
      "This is certainly something that is possible. Okay, so this is sort of the situation of women within marriage. Within the family more broadly I would say it's important to recognize even though there is a kind of hierarchy of husbands over wives, that unevenness isn't necessarily the case between mothers and fathers in relationship to their children. So many of you may know that mothers are very much validated into some",
      "very valued, I should say, in Islamic culture. According to Islamic law, men and women have equal rights to have children. In Islam you can practice contraception but you can't do it if your partner, if your marriage partner is opposed to it whether it's the husband or the wife. So if they both agree they're going to not have children or postpone having children that's fine but you",
      "The Quran suggests that there should be a process of mutual consultation between mothers and fathers in raising their children. And while the Quran, in several places, mentions the importance of respect toward your parents it always mentions them together, your two parents. In Arabic, it's always your two parent, your to parents, your too parents that are mentioned. And there is a very famous saying, a hadith attributed to the Prophet Muhammad.",
      "He said, oh prophet of God to whom do I owe the most? And the prophet said well to your mother. And he said yeah after my mother you know everyone forgets about the mother. After my mother to whom Do I owe The Most and the Prophet said your mother and he said right and after my Mother the prophet Said Your Mother and after My Mother and then the prophet",
      "So this sort of triple endorsement of the importance of mothers over fathers I think is very important. At the same time, it's important to recognize that motherhood, you know, the position of motherhood is not the only reason why women were validated. The Quran does not present, although Islamic culture certainly would say this but the Quran itself doesn't present children as being",
      "The primary purpose of marriage is to have a relationship of love and mercy and comfort between two people. All right, very quickly then one other thing is to talk about since I mentioned this hadith of the prophet is to take about the role of women in the Prophet's life. So the Prophet Muhammad as I said was born into this kind of hyper patriarchal tribal culture in Arabia where it was all fighting, women were completely devalued and so on.",
      "valued, and so on. And in this culture what was really important to your social status were your fathers and your brothers and your sons, those key paternal relatives. The prophet Muhammad doesn't have a brother. He doesn't he doesn't any brothers. He does not have a father and he doesn' t have sons. His father dies while he's still in the womb.",
      "died either in infancy or in very, very young childhood. Which means that except for some uncles who did play an important role in his life the Prophet's closest family relations were his wives and his daughters. And the tradition continually represents Muhammad as being publicly demonstrably affectionate and loving toward his daughters",
      "And according to the standards of his time, his companions often complained that he was overly indulgent toward his wives. It's well known that the Prophet Muhammad had multiple wives, that at the time of his death, he had nine wives.",
      "really and too young for marriage, his wife Aisha who was nine when he marries her. What is much less well known is that the Prophet lived the overwhelming majority of his life in a monogamous relationship, a monagomous marriage with a woman who was 15 years older than him. He marries",
      "He has a loving and happy life with her. He first becomes a prophet and starts receiving revelation while he's married to her. She becomes the first person to believe in him even before he believes in himself. When he receives the first revelation, he says, I think maybe I'm possessed by jinn or something or I'm going crazy. I don't know. And she says to him, no, no. I know you're not going crazy, right? So in many ways, she is the first",
      "wife with whom he has children that live to adulthood and he's married to her for 28 years. It's only when Khadija dies, when Muhammad is 53 years old, that he begins to take additional lives so from 25 to 53 I'd say the good years but I don't think it was necessarily the case because I'm looking forward",
      "During those years, he was married monogamously to one woman who was older than him when he did take additional wives after the death of his first wife. Besides Aisha, who was very young, he also married two women who were older than hem another woman who is about the same age as him and a couple of women in their 40s As well as one or two Women who were under 30 years old so it's not that He only married young girls",
      "young girls, it's not that he always loved to have a polygamous relationship. These are things that he did toward the end of his life and with the exception of Aisha, the young girl who he marries at nine all of the other women that Muhammad marries were either divorced or widowed women who had been married before. And in marrying these women he essentially sets a precedent which says there should be no stigma attached to marrying divorced women, to marrying widowed woman because in fact these were",
      "These were the majority of Muhammad's wives. Okay, so these wives play important roles in his life. I talked about the importance of his first wife. There are a number of crucial points in his mission, difficult points in this mission where he turns to his wives or individual women among his wives not just for comfort but also for advice and there are times when they gave him very sound, important advice that changed in some senses the course of history for this early community",
      "this early community. There were women amongst the earliest converts, many of them defied their families to follow the prophet and they continued to play very active roles in the community. All right so women continue to be active even after beyond the time of the prophet to some extent although like many religious communities it's true of Christianity as well, women are there at the beginning",
      "beginning and then as things get institutionalized women kind of get pushed to the background a bit. Okay, so I want to talk a little bit about what it means for a woman to be in the public sphere in Islam right? The Prophet's wives as well as many of the women in the early community were there and present at battles and community discussions and so on and to some extent that continues but this is often predicated",
      "of modesty, the importance of the idea of modestly which is a primary subject of both Fatima Mernissi's book and Laila Ahmed's book in The Muslim Bookshelf collection. So I wanted to talk a little bit about what the Quran says about modesty. Oh first of all yes let me show this picture. This is an artist rendition I want to just say of the mosque in Medina where the prophet lived the last ten years",
      "years of his life. And I think if this pointer works, I can show you that all around the mosque built into the mosque were these small apartments which is where his wives lived. Muhammad did not have his own house so to speak each house belonged to one of his wives and he would rotate one night with each wife right? This becomes an Islamic law standard for equitable treatment",
      "treatment in part not in total, in part in Islam. All right okay so this is one of the things that the Quran says about modesty and about dress when we talk about modestly even in our own culture I think there tends to be a double standard for men to be modest",
      "whereas women is more passive. So men are not supposed to look or, God forbid, touch and women aren't supposed to reveal this kind of active-passive thing. But when we look at what the Quran says, we see that it enjoins both active and passive modesty on men and women. And even though female modesty gets a lot of coverage in the Muslim world, if you go to the Muslim World, you'll see that men tend to dress a lot more conservatively than men do here. You don't see a whole lot of men walking around in shorts",
      "in shorts and tank tops, and things like that. They tend to dress more conservatively as well. So in this 24th chapter of the Quran it says tell the believing men to lower their gaze and guard their private parts so active and passive modesty. That is purer for them. And tell the believe women to lower there gaze and guards their private part. So if we stop there its the same injunction but then of course goes on",
      "some more detail about female modesty. So they should guard their private parts, so tell the women to lower their gaze and guard their privates parts and not to reveal their adornments except that which is apparent and to draw their head scarves over their bosoms and not reveal their addorments to any but their husbands fathers, husband's father's I won't go through all of those we take a long time",
      "And let them not stamp their feet so as to reveal what they hide of their adornments. All right, as I said the Quran is very well known for ambiguous language in fact it says that at the very beginning of one of its chapters of the Quran it says there's ambiguous language In this text What are their adorns? We're women we have lots of adornment",
      "So it's typically understood, certainly in context to mean hair. Yes, to mean physical bodily features sometimes even to mean jewelry the word itself can mean any of those things and particularly means jewelry so its metaphorical. So it leaves and again except what is apparent? It's only apparent if you show it right? My point is I think this very important",
      "I think this is very important. My point is that most Muslim women understand this to mean that they should cover their hair, among other things. But it does leave a lot of room and a lot flexibility in terms of interpreting exactly what that means. And it tells them to draw their headscarves using this Arabic word khumr which means literally head scarves. But It tells them",
      "talking about Arabia here where even men cover their heads, right? So because of the sun. Some people might argue that it's assuming a head covering and saying you might want to make sure that it also covers your chest. Okay. Nonetheless most women understand this to mean they should wear something that covers their hair. And I'll give you some examples of different ways there are many other",
      "600 million ways that this can be interpreted for each woman. But you can see there are different ways that has been understood. Sometimes it can be a very simple scarf, sometimes it can very ornate. Sometimes there's the concern to make sure every part of the hair is covered. Sometimes that's not necessarily the case. I said when Islam went to various parts",
      "to the culture there. So we see up here a woman from India, one of the things when Muslims came to India they found women wearing saris. Women didn't entirely change their dress, they just changed the way they wore their saris so instead of the loose end of the cloth just going over their shoulders sometimes they would just pull it loosely over their head and that was considered significant or sufficient I should say. Here",
      "What will be, what are headscarves? If they were to pray, they would put those scarves over their heads. All Muslim women cover their heads when they pray but you see that they've taken their headscarf and they've drawn them over their bosoms. They drape them over there bosom. And this is one way very common in the subcontinent",
      "women to dress modestly, maybe one interpretation of that particular chronic verse. And the headscarf certainly in its modern incarnation is something that is often completely compatible with other forms of Western dress. So women will often wear especially in the West or wear a head scarf with what would otherwise be ordinary Western dress and as you can see it's no bar to participation",
      "participation in life in any way and not even to sports, right? So here we have some women who've been able to participate in sports. Many of you know in the last Olympics there were several Muslim women who participated from various countries. In some cases rules having to be changed about the kind of clothing you could wear when competing, right. Oops sorry I'll go back. This of course is a Muslim swimsuit",
      "And I had a very good friend in graduate school who was Egyptian, and she wore a swimsuit like this when she would go to the pool at Princeton and swim. And one day she went and she left her bathing suit there. And she told me, Maria, you know, it was the funniest thing because I had to call up the recreational center and say, you now, I left my swimsuit there. They said, oh all right we'll look for it. Is it one piece or two pieces? She's like well actually it's four pieces.",
      "piece and she said dead silence on the other end of the phone okay but anyway as you can see this is something obviously that is or certainly can be compatible with all kinds of activities and women have been very Muslim women are very good about doing that there are two other verses though to mention I'll oops part of",
      "Sorry, chapter 33. It says, O prophet, tell your wives and your daughters and the women of the believers to draw their cloaks over their bodies. That way they will be known and not harassed. And I think that's significant for a couple of reasons. First of all here it's not talking about headscarves. It's talking about wearing clothing that's loose enough that you're...the features of your body would not be apparent. One of the classical ways",
      "that this is manifested would be in, for example, this type of dress which is very common in Iran or Shiite parts of Iraq which is called the chador. And in addition to wearing a headscarf women will sort of very large open sheet like cloth that they would pull over their heads and either hold under their chin or sometimes pinned to the sides",
      "or in Persian means tent, and it's literally to almost create the idea of being inside when you're outside, right? Almost creating a tent around yourself. Again, not all Muslim women dress like that, but that would be maybe one very literal interpretation of this particular Quranic verse. And the Quranic first also interestingly gives us a reason why women should do this. It says so that they will be known and not harassed.",
      "So the understanding is they'll be known as women who are modest and chaste, and of good moral values. And so therefore men would not harass them, right? It's telling us two things. Number one that the purpose is to avoid harassment for women. And also that it should be addressed that marks them within their society as people, as women of particularly high moral character and chastity.",
      "After the terrorist bombings in London, the 7-7 bombings on the Tube, there were a number of anti-Muslim incidents and hate crimes that took place. And of course women who are dressed in an obviously Muslim way wearing hijab, wearing a head covering would be particularly vulnerable because they",
      "because they would be particularly visible as members of the Muslim community. And one particular Muslim authority in England, not all of them but one actually said you know while this situation is going on women who are wearing headscarves maybe you can take them off because the purpose of wearing the head scarves is to avoid harassment and in this very specific kind of context it might actually engender harassment right? So again that importance",
      "of the purpose, that the Quran often usually gives somewhere a reason for its particular ruling and Muslims tend to take that reasoning very seriously. Okay, the final thing the Quran says about covering or modesty for women is addressed very specifically to and about the Prophet's wives coming from the same surah and this is embedded in a larger discussion",
      "the prophet's wives that make them unique from other women. For example, they're not supposed to remarry after the prophet dies. And here it says, oh you who believe enter not the prophets houses obviously where his wives would be unless permission is granted to you for a meal and when you ask his wives for anything ask them from behind a veil this is the word hijab in Arabic that's used generally for the head covering",
      "for your hearts and for their hearts. After this particular verse was revealed, Muhammad asked his daughters and his wives specifically, not all of the women in the community to cover themselves completely that is not just to cover their hair but also cover their faces parts of their faces as you see again different interpretations",
      "Again, different interpretations of that here. But again it's quite clear that this was directed at the wives of the prophet and Islamic law does not make covering the face required for other women. Nonetheless obviously being like the wife of the Prophet was a good thing to be and so gradually over time certainly by the medieval period if what we read in literary sources about the Islamic world suggests",
      "suggests that most women, particularly women who are of upper class or middle-class women would likely have covered themselves completely including covering their faces. That starts to go away toward the end of the 19th century, late 19th Century early 20th century. Most Muslim women begin to remove the face veil just keeping the head covering although as we know there are still places and still women",
      "completely in this way. And these are three different interpretations, obviously the one at the bottom is the burqa, the complete sort of covering where there's just a screen or a mesh covering so that no one from the outside can see in but to some extent they can see out. Okay, so these are the basic three scriptural bases of modesty and particularly of veiling in Islam. Veiling was already a common custom",
      "and Laila Ahmed makes a very good point about this in her other book, Women and Gender in Islam. When Muslims move out of Arabia and they go into the Fertile Crescent in Egypt and Iraq and Iran and so on, veiling of women is certainly middle class and up-women is common, right? It's just what one does. Okay. So the example of the wives of the prophet that preexisting culture meant that veiling became ubiquitous or almost ubiquitous. We have a few cases and sources where it'll say",
      "and sources where it'll say things like, you know some woman was very distraught. And so she went outside without her veil on and her disheveled her hair and things like that but that's something that's done in an unusual case. Okay, so one of the big arguments then becomes how do we read or understand the veil when Muslims start to encounter Westerners in particular",
      "19th century and the 20th century, the veil becomes a very politicized thing. And there's a big debate about is the veil something that's empowering? Is the veil someone oppressive? I think it depends on the veil. I think depends on context. I-I think there are a lot of factors that are involved. But certainly there are lots of women who, and as certainly as women become more public take a bigger role in the public sphere they've become advocates for themselves",
      "themselves. And a lot of female Muslim advocates for themselves and for their rights will be arguing for their right within the context of Islam, but a lot are also arguing specifically for their to live as they wish to live, to dress as they want to dress. These are just a few examples of these kinds of things. On top hijab my dignity, my life, hijab referring to the head covering most commonly. I like",
      "I like the one, the British one, keep calm and dress with dignity. The headscarf is frequently glossed as dignity, as a form of dignity again linking those two concepts. And Allah raises your dignity again this term dignity very common in connection with the veil through the hijab when a strange man looks at you he respects you because he sees that you respect yourself. These kinds of messages increasingly",
      "increasingly common among Muslim women. And the question then becomes, once women dress modestly and there's an acceptance of them in the public sphere what is the possibility of them attaining important positions, positions of authority? You know, in many parts of the Muslim world including in Tehran women make up a majority of college students right? The percentage of college",
      "in Tehran, 65% female. So women are certainly playing important roles in society and moving up in terms of the authoritative positions that they have. So up here you see, of course, some faces you might recognize. Benazir Bhutto unfortunately assassinated a few years ago but prime minister of Pakistan. Sheikh Hasina who's the Prime Minister of Bangladesh.",
      "essentially like a minister, or cabinet secretary in Iran. Ingrid Mattson the first female head of the Islamic Society of North America huge organization of Muslims and here this woman is Amina Wadud she's an African-American Muslim convert to Islam who attempted in 2005",
      "as a woman lead a mixed gender prayer. Women can lead other women in prayer, but if it's all men or if it is mixed gender the person who is leading the prayer should be a man. But here this is not widely accepted in the Muslim community, but she has kind of opened a door and I think it is important to acknowledge that. Okay again some other important women. This is Amina Wadood again here Esma Barla",
      "here, Esma Barlas, two Muslim feminist scholars who've written important influential works on the Quran and what it says about women. And just before I open it up to questions, I just quickly will show you this just for a little bit of fun at the end. There is a new female superhero that Marvel Comics is releasing. I don't know exactly in what extent she is Muslim.",
      "around her neck, I can see. But we have to see. That's just been announced. Up here, this is a billboard that there's a lot of these very inspirational billboards around. You've probably seen them as you drive on the highway occasionally. This one just debuted in Southern California and again about overcoming differences and being together which is its slogan, it's hashtag. And apparently I'm told this is",
      "a couple, right? These two is not just a publicity stunt. Anyway the other three come from an interesting series that my kids love actually and it's called The 99. And it's a comic superhero series cartoon that was developed by a man in Qatar and it based on the fact that the Quran identifies 99 names and qualities attributed to God. And so all of the characters are named after one of these 99 names",
      "And as you can see, there's a number of both male and female superheroes. And what I love about this is that you have a whole variety of Muslim female superheroes, right? We have some that wear this kind of a scarf, some that where that kind of scarf, Some that don't wear any scarves, some the full face covering. They all work together for peace and truth and justice.",
      "And it's really an entertaining series. So even popular culture is catching on. So I'll stop there and see if you have any questions. My question concerns the Sharia. Yes. I want to know if the Shariah is a legal punishment in all the Muslim countries? Sharia, of course, as you know, refers to, in general,",
      "the body of Islamic laws and rituals that Muslims follow. And in the, let's see 44 Muslim majority countries most of them do not continue to practice the corporal Sharia punishments that you know are mentioned in the Quran so in Iran, in Saudi Arabia now in Nigeria and a couple other places but for the most part no",
      "part, no. Those particular punishments are something that most Muslim countries no longer use. They still consider the crimes that were associated of course with those punishments to be very serious crimes. So for example adultery it may not be punished with capital punishment anymore but in many Muslim majority countries it does remain a crime right? For which you can be criminally prosecuted. But yes",
      "to be practiced in most Muslim majority countries. Good, thank you. Yes? Hi, I just want to say thank you once more for coming. My question deals with sexual harassment. So in our culture and in our society we kind of focus on don't get raped rather than don't rape. And the text that you provided was that way they will be known and not harassed in terms of modesty. Do you think that kind of encourages blame to be put on the victim?",
      "put on the victim? It certainly could be read that way, absolutely. And there you know the idea that women are responsible to some extent for the sexual crimes that are perpetrated against them I think is to one extent or another a double standard that we have everywhere unfortunately but yes the idea",
      "prevent that. It doesn't always, Muslim women will talk about this even though they might be completely dressed in fact there was an interesting documentary of this man from Cairo he's a man right? He dressed in a full sort of burqa type hijab so you couldn't even tell he was a man and he was getting followed in the street you know and he is like unbelievable right? So it doesn't we know that it doesn' t actually work to prevent sexual harassment",
      "in that way could be understood to mean that. That's right, yeah. Is it usually taken that way? Because you said that the text is read as something literal and not with metaphors. So I'm wondering have you seen instances where people actually quote the text and say that she kind of deserved this because she wasn't... I haven't seen instances like that. I would assume that it would be something",
      "an understanding rather than something that is, but as you know this is a serious problem with us now. The question of rapes on campus and should women, should there be a message, women don't get drunk so that you don't rape? So unfortunately I think this tends to be pretty pervasive. Thank you. Thank for coming out and speaking to us. My question is when I saw the woman she was leaving",
      "you know, she was leading the prayer. I've never really seen anything like that before in my life. Right. Do you know where in the Quran or any of the hadiths where it mentions about women leading prayer? There are some texts about women leaving prayer but they're not general. They're sort of very specific contexts. But when Amina Wadu did this and again, it was very controversial. When Amina wadoo did this",
      "these textual sources were things she and others drew on as justification for what she did. So, for example, there was a famous companion of the prophet, Um Waraka, and she was one of his companions from the very beginning, and when he came out to battle, she said, I want to come with you. And he said to her, no, you stay home, you lead your family in prayer.",
      "And obviously there were both men and women in her family. So this is an example where the prophet very clearly, everyone agrees that he actually said this, where he actually designated a woman to lead her mixed gender family in prayer. But as you know, that's a different thing than in public, let's say in a mosque leading a mixed gender prayer but that was one of the things they drew upon. Then in the second Islamic century",
      "founder of the Islamic school of law, Ashafi, the founder of Ashafiyy School of Law. He lived in Egypt and there was a woman in Egypt who was a descendant of the Prophet, great-great-great granddaughter of the prophet, and she had a reputation for tremendous learning and scholarship and knowledge and also piety. And when Shafii was on his deathbed he said I don't want anyone to say the funeral prayer for me except for Sayyidina Nafisa",
      "who was this woman. And she indeed led the funeral prayer for this great founder of the Shafi'i Islamic School of Law, but as you probably know, the funeral is said standing up. It's not said with the act of bowing and prostration. So if we just go back to the picture for a minute, one of the... There's nothing in the Quran that says women can't lead prayer,",
      "when Muslim scholars wanted to condemn her for what she had done, they actually couldn't find anything that said women shouldn't lead prayer because apparently no one ever thought a woman would want to or would think to do it. And so they never actually made a law about it. So they couldn't actually find something. All they could find was something that said the prayer leader should be the person who knows the Quran best and who can recite the best and so on. So, they couldn�t find anything to justify it but their �one of their arguments is",
      "prayer, Muslims will make a full prostration on the floor. And some people argued that it didn't really seem seemly or certainly modest for women to be bending over and bowing down in this way with men behind them. So again, it came back to this issue of modesty. Thank you. Thank You for coming out and speaking to us. I have two questions.",
      "One is, what gained your interest in Islam? And the second one is, is it true that the Arabic and Quran is from the olden times so no matter how scholarly you are, it's hard to translate? Well, so for the first question, isn't this interesting? Okay. No. I became interested in Islam because I grew up not really knowing anything about",
      "anything about Islam. There weren't any Muslims in my community where I grew up, a small little community in Connecticut but when I went to...I spent a year abroad at Oxford University as an undergraduate and they said to me oh you're an American you really need to know something about the Middle East and I say well I'm not interested in the Middle east you know I'm here to learn about European parliamentary systems you know and they say no no no you need to learn something objective about the middle east you American so anyway",
      "Anyway, they sent me to this class and I found it fascinating. I found a really interesting in fact the most interesting part to me was precisely how powerful Islam was as something that shapes people's lives and consciousness still in the Islamic world. And so that drew my interest and from there I began studying the Islamic revolution in Iran. I find that very fascinating. That was the first major world event",
      "remember as a child was the taking over of the US embassy in 1979. And so that drew my interest in Islam. The Arabic of the Quran is very difficult, yes it is a very old form of Arabic. It's quite different in some ways from modern standard Arabic but certainly not impossible. Someone who knows modern standard",
      "someone who speaks modern English trying to read Shakespeare. There's going to be some strange turns of phrase, there's gonna be some words that you don't quite understand or words that mean one thing today they meant something a little bit different to Shakespeare but you'd be able to figure out generally what was going on and so it is very did the language is very difficult also very beautiful but yes quite distinct from Modern Standard Arabic.",
      "religion who's a real scholar of the religion so the famous Muslim scholar, theologian Ghazali is referred to as Imam al-Ghazali. So the title imam or it would be imama is not usually given to women however there are women who have been able to attain a degree of religious knowledge scholarly knowledge of Islam such that they do become authorities right?",
      "who became very authoritative commentators on the Quran. You have women who become scholars and experts in the law, and now in certain parts of the Muslim world like Indonesia and in Morocco they're actually creating a kind of core of female muftis, people who give legal opinions. And they realized this was really necessary because a lot of times women have a question about ritual or about law and they might feel embarrassed.",
      "might feel embarrassed because it might deal with a personal matter or marital matter, and they might feel embarassed going to a male legal scholar. And so they're training women with real expertise in Islamic law so that they can actually issue a fatwa, a legal opinion for other women in certain cases. Thank you. Thanks for coming out tonight. I was just wondering about like",
      "women compared to 20 years ago and how they are now in the Islamic society, what are some ways that they've made more profound impacts on the religion as itself? What ways have they sort of come out from being behind men? Right. As I said you might have to go back even a little further than 20 years and the situation of women as I said it varies a great deal depending on political situations",
      "political situation. So you know, I mean if you take Iran in 1979 prior to that women were very prominent or not very prominent but had some prominent roles in society and they were very free and very Western sorts of laws and certainly Western sorts address and so on and then suddenly 1979 comes the revolution even though women participated in the revolution initially at least Khomeini",
      "at least Khomeini, Ayatollah Khomein says women should all go back to their houses and they shouldn't participate in society this way anymore. Eventually that doesn't happen now you have women there but these things tend to fluctuate but I would say in the last 20 years what's really important is you have a growing number of women who are becoming scholars, becoming knowledgeable in their own religious tradition and so people like Amina Wadud or Esma Barlas",
      "Barlas, Aziz Al-Hibri who's also based locally runs a very important organization for Muslim women. They're really becoming experts in their own tradition and so they can begin and they're really very strongly starting to say hey wait a minute you know there are things in the Quran that you're you know that we're supposed the rights in the Koran that were supposed to be given and you know what you really haven't always given them to us you know and really being aware of questions",
      "of the law and being able to challenge these kinds of things. And certainly, initially when women started to do this very vocally in the early 90s both in North America eventually it spreads to other Muslim countries as well or two Muslim countries I don't want to say that America is a Muslim country. The you know initially there's a lot of hostility toward them on both sides right Western feminists saying you know why are",
      "If you really want to be a feminist, just give up this whole Islam thing. It's hopeless and follow us.\" And a lot of very conservative traditional Muslims saying, oh, you're just a feminist. You're a lackey of the West. And so it was very difficult but these women persevered. And in fact they have opened a conversation. And now wherever you go in the Islamic world leaders feel at the very least the necessity",
      "of the importance of women's rights. And that may not seem like very much, but I think when you open a door like that it's very hard to close and I do see things continually moving forward. Thank you. Yeah. Thank for coming doctor. My question is regarding what's going on right now in Saudi Arabia. Women are currently fighting to get their driving rights.",
      "influencing factor in the Islamic world. Is there a fear that by allowing women, if Saudi Arabia particularly was to allow women to drive they will be opening Pandora's box and hence allowing like... Saudi Arabia is really the only place where that box is closed. The situation of women driving in Saudi Arabia",
      "It's just so discouraged by the kind of religious police that they have women actually being stopped if they drive and things like that. And then, they're brought down to the police office, the police department, and their fathers or their husbands or whatever have to bail them out. But there's technically no law they can be charged with. So but certainly Saudi Arabia and Kuwait I believe are the only places where women literally can't drive every other part of the Muslim world",
      "of the Muslim world, they do indeed drive. And it's interesting because in Arabia women rode horses and they rode camels which is the equivalent of a car today but somehow there's something about a car in Saudi Arabia. But I should say that in general Saudi Arabia continues to very strictly enforce something that is not really strictly enforced anywhere else in the Islamic world",
      "called walaya or wakala, which is male guardianship of women. So that in traditional times ideally women shouldn't travel and go far outside of their neighborhood without their husbands knowing, without permission of their husbands, right? This idea that they were the protectors and maintainers of women so they needed to guard them and protect them. Most Muslim women don't do this today but in Saudi Arabia",
      "Arabia this is still taken very, very seriously. And I have a student from Saudi Arabia who told me that when she drives from one province to the next in Saudi Arabia, her husband automatically gets a text message saying did you know your wife just crossed the border? And her husband's like really you're cutting around my phone here with this but again we also have to be careful of the ways in which modern technology",
      "technology can actually allow some of these things that couldn't really be monitored in any kind of serious way before to be implemented. But again, Saudi Arabia is a very unique case. Thank you. Two quick questions. Have you ever worn the burqa? And the second question is, can you talk about heaven from the Quranic texts? Can I talk about what? Heaven. Heaven.",
      "I haven't been there. But I'll tell you what I've heard. With regard to the first question, no, I haven' t worn the burqa. I did live in Iran for a year doing research so I did wear the chador that you saw, the tent thing and I wore that. You don't have to wear that of course everywhere in Iran but some of the research that I was",
      "libraries in these sacred centers and there I felt that it would really stand out if I didn't wear it. I have tremendous respect for the women who wear it every day because it was all I could do to keep it on me but at any case so yes, I have worn that in Iran. In Iran as you know you're required to cover yourself at least in some way right? At least with a veil. Heaven.",
      "The Quran is probably, of the three monotheistic scriptures, it is absolutely the most descriptive in terms of what heaven or paradise will be like after you die. If you've read any of those descriptions, you know they tend to be very physical descriptions. They tend to Be some people would say very sensuous descriptions So it's described as a garden with lush foliage with continuous fruit",
      "with there's four rivers in paradise, as there's Four Rivers and Eden in the Bible too. But the four rivers and paradise are identified in the Quran as a river of pure water or river of Pure milk or River of pure honey and a river pure wine so even though Muslims aren't supposed to drink wine here There's wine in Paradise although it says It's the kind of wine that doesn't make your head spin So one of my Muslim students once said to me including",
      "once said to me in class, oh you mean I'm doing all of this just so I can go to heaven and drink grape juice? Like, I don't think so. So in any case but the... But it's described in this way, of course it's very famously described as having these very pure almost ethereal women that are there as well. And but it's interesting, it's",
      "doing sexual things. They're not described in a very sexual way, but they are described as very beautiful. But one of the things I often say is that what the Quran pictures the people in paradise doing including with these beautiful women is sitting across from each other and talking. So men get to paradise and there's all these beautiful",
      "That's it, just long conversation. So yes, but in all honesty one of the critiques that has been leveled against the Quran was leveled already from the medieval Christian period was that it describes a paradise that's too physical, that's to sensual, that not detached enough, that is not spiritual enough and it certainly is described in that way",
      "of paradise were meant to be understood literally or metaphorically. Thank you very much, it was really interesting and thank you for the effort. You know it's very hard coming from the culture country so from Arabic countries too. I have two comments first it's about Prophet Muhammad who married Aisha nine years old as you know",
      "As you know, there is few schools for interpretation of the Quran and there's extreme school too. So I think the last two many ima agrees he marry Aisha when she was 14 or 15 because the extreme school they wanna use this",
      "use this excuse so they can get the girl is now to marry at nine years old. This is the first one, but can I? Yeah sure, I'll just try to keep it in mind yeah. And the second one is regarding the hijab and also there's too many study about it, there are too many interpretations of Quran too and there are",
      "And if you take, I think there's too many studies in Egypt and North Africa regarding this too. Yes. I just want to clarify that. Sure. I'll just give a couple of quick responses. Yeah, there are some people who the majority tradition says that Aisha was six when she became betrothed or engaged to the prophet and nine when she was literally married to him.",
      "him and the understanding being in Islamic law women are not supposed to be married to men until they've reached puberty. And so that was the idea, that she had reached pubert at nine and then it was decided she could marry Muhammad. I know there are people who say no, she was betrothed at 9 and married at 13 or something like that. It's a possibility, I mean no one really knows, people didn't keep birth dates back",
      "But in either case, she was young. She's young enough that we're told that when she was married to the prophet, she reports that she was still playing with dolls and that the prophet would come and sit and play with her as well, that he would sort of indulge her childhood in that way. But yes, there is a concern about this. One of the things that's kind of interesting about this is if you look for example at medieval critiques—and of course there were a lot of medieval Christian critiques",
      "critical of him marrying lots of women and they were very critical of different aspects of his life. They weren't critical about this, they didn't say gee can you believe he married a nine year old girl? And this was because it wasn't uncommon in medieval Europe for girls to get married at that age right? Our culture is a very different culture for sure and there are some very strict Islamic countries",
      "on the books that nine is the minimum age of marriage because of Aisha. And sadly, there are some parts particularly tribal parts of the world where girls are being married at that very young age but most certainly urban centers in the Islamic world don't... Girls don't get married at nine and most commonly. But yeah it is a concern. And secondly yes, there're a lot of political issues with the hijab. It goes in an out",
      "in and out, it has also social repercussions. Technically in Islamic law there isn't slavery anymore in the Islamic world but when there was technically even slave women who were Muslim we're not supposed to wear, we're no supposed to cover their heads so there's a social component to it as well for sure. And as you know I don't know if your from Egypt but yeah I thought maybe from your accent but as you",
      "see women dressing, all walking around dressing like Jackie Kennedy. You can see it for yourself if you go to a copy of Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram from the 1960s. You don't see any women wearing hijab. All women are dressed in very Western dress. You would never see that today if you went to Al- Ahram, to the newspaper and Leila Ahmed talks about that. So there are political reasons and yes social and economic reasons for hijab is a very complicated subject. Thank you for your comments.",
      "Hello. My question actually sparked when you mentioned that you lived in Iran. Yes. I'm just curious if you have seen the movie Not Without My Daughter? I know of the movie, no, I haven't seen it. Yeah. It's basically an American family. The husband is from Iran and he decided to take his family for vacation in Iran upon getting there he takes advantage of all the women having no rights or anything",
      "and she had to escape the Turkey, and all that. They later reunited, you know? Did they? Well... Yeah. I just thought I would point that out. Yeah, I saw the movie last year, so I don't know much about it, but I'm just curious how the state is now concerning women in Iran or just anywhere in the Middle East or any of the Islamic countries. Yeah. Again, it's going to vary to a great extent. Like I said, you will see certainly women in positions of authority. You'll see women",
      "You'll see women working very good jobs as doctors, as bankers, as managers and so on in Iran. But you know they're... Women are still required to dress in a particular kind of way. You still have marriage laws that are very strictly according to the Sharia. One of the things I should mention is that Sharia law of course is very broad. And someone had asked me about Sharia corporal punishments in the Shariah",
      "Some countries not practiced anymore. And there are lots of aspects of Islamic law that are not necessarily practiced even in Muslim majority countries, family law tends to really stick and so certainly depending on what kind of a situation arises you could have a situation where... And there situations where women are treated very unjustly under particular interpretations of those laws but",
      "I didn't have any problems when I was there. The women I knew didn't had any problems. There's still issues about traveling, you know? I went there by myself initially. My husband joined me later. He was in school and so I went their by myself and I couldn't really travel not that they wouldn't let me travel of course they would because you know I'm American but they... You know I wanted to travel with other",
      "and they couldn't travel without traveling with one of their male relatives, for example. And at one point I did have to stay in a hotel when I first got there by myself, and it was just the strangest thing for a woman to be staying alone in a hotleroom. And I didn't quite get this. You know, I walked in and everyone was very nice to me, and I went up to my room and I got to the hotel I'd been travelling, and thought, you know,",
      "I laid down on the bed and the phone rang. Miss Maria, Miss Maria are you all right? Is everything alright? Is Everything alright? Yes, everything is fine. Thank you for checking. The room is lovely. I'm gonna go to sleep now, you know, and I hung up and 15 minutes later the phone rings again. Miss Marie, Miss Marie is everything alright. You know they were so concerned about what would happen with me in this room and I thought well I'd really like to just take the phone off the hook because I'm afraid they're going to do this all night long but then",
      "So I didn't. But so I really, in that sense it can be limiting right? I couldn't travel unless I wanted to travel alone which I didn' feel comfortable doing until my husband came because other women weren't allowed to travel without a male relative. Yeah, there certainly are limitations. Thank you very much.",
      "I was basically just wondering about like with marriage, are they still arranged marriages? Do women actually have a say in who they are going to marry? That's a really good question. Arranged marriages are yes, still quite common in the Islamic world of course it's breaking down a little bit because you have men and women going to college there in co-ed classes so it's more like",
      "your parents that you're really interested in this boy in your math class or something right like so there's a little bit of finagling there probably always was historically but um but yes there still are arranged marriages and this is important not only for women but also for men. So both for men and women marriage is really a family affair, and so it would be extremely difficult",
      "like or disapproved of in some way would really be difficult for him. But, in principle, in Islamic law, it's not on the Quran but in Islamic Law if a woman has never been married before then she needs the approval of her guardian in order to marry who is usually her father and if her father is not alive it might be an uncle or adult brother or something like that. If the woman has been married",
      "she's either divorced or widowed, she doesn't need someone to a guardian to sign for her. And the principle behind that of course was protection right? The understanding being let's say you know a young girl who hasn't had much experience with boys or with men is not necessarily going to be in a good position to know who's going to make her happy and her parents assuming they have her best interest at heart",
      "to approve of her marriage. But also, and this unfortunately is a right that women have that does not always often does not get recognized or observed but no woman can be forced into marriage according to Islamic law so even if a woman's never been married before and her father says I want you to marry this person",
      "And there was a case where a woman was married against her will by her father during the time of Muhammad, the time he was alive. The woman came and complained to Muhammad about this, and he said your marriage is invalid. If you continue this, it's essentially going to be fornication. This isn't a legitimate marriage. But unfortunately that doesn't always tend to be the case, and it tends to conflict sometimes with this really important point",
      "respecting your parents. And so if your father says, I want you to marry this person, even if you have the right to say no technically, you can also feel guilty about saying no and so on. So it's a very tricky issue. But thank you for bringing that up. It's very important. Thank you. Thank me very much. Thank You for being a wonderful audience."
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "dakake/Intro Dakake_s Testimony__tpUPyPPKJM&pp=ygUSTWFyaWEgTWFzc2kgRGFrYWtl_1750208497.opus",
    "text": [
      "Good evening, everyone. Welcome. We just want to welcome everyone to this great event. My name is Paulina Hasi and I've been helping with translations and I just wanted to give my testimony and also pray in Russian. I will translate, I promise. Just to start off this event and presentation.",
      "Благослови Лиен, всех выступающих. Мы молимся во имя Твоего Иисуса Господь. Аминь.",
      "New Horizons for Leanne and wonderful families that open their hearts to bring orphans and love them and serve them. Thank you so much. Please bring more opportunities for more people to be involved in this wonderful ministry. We pray in your Jesus name, amen.",
      "My name is Paulina, and I was born and raised in Russia. I've been here for about 17 years. I have a wonderful opportunity to be a part of this ministry. Thank you, Leanne, so much. It's a true pleasure and privilege for me",
      "with the skills that I have, the Russian language. I had many opportunities to translate for families, to help communicating between families and children in person or over the phone. And every time I am very touched and very just impressed with the hearts, servant's hearts that I see in these families.",
      "families and I just want to tell you how much I appreciate what you are doing. It's amazing. A lot of times we may not realize the huge impact of, you know, how much you impact those children and you really change their life forever. They really don't have any concept",
      "family, parents. So just to be in the family and to be loved and also to have an opportunity to love because they have a need not to be love but also to love so I just really want to thank you for opening your hearts",
      "to orphanages in Russia and I worked with orphans before. So every time, I am broken when I meet people like yourself. And thank you so much for doing it. It's a great, great value. The children may not truly see the whole picture but they are blessed",
      "changed forever. And I want to introduce Leanne and also Taylor, and the presentation we're going to have. And i look forward to working with you so please don't hesitate to call me and I will be very glad to translate for you help you out sometimes just come over just to hang out",
      "Because it is a transition for them to be in a foreign country, foreign language. So really it's a blessing for me to be a part of this great ministry. I thank God for Leanne and all the effort. So many hosting agencies have closed. And I thank you, Leanne, for being so fervent and keep going. It's just wonderful. Thank you so much."
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "dakake/Maria Dakake_ _Maryam_ Pious Woman_ Saint_ or Prop_w8Ccbgq7DbM&pp=ygUSTWFyaWEgTWFzc2kgRGFrYWtl_1750207970.opus",
    "text": [
      "Good morning. As-salamu alaykum. I don't think I'll actually answer the question necessarily that I pose in my title of my paper, but before I begin, I want to thank Nick and Jane and the Ibn Arabi Society for inviting me",
      "I want to thank Zaytuna also for hosting and all of the people that Zachary thanked. I want them too, he sort of mentioned them, he seems to know all of these people who contributed to this so I share my thanks with him and I want thank him also for his very beautiful paper that I enjoyed very much this morning. I'm very happy to be here it was very difficult to get here for me yesterday but as we know any place its really worth getting to there's a hard",
      "there's a hard and long path to get there so I'm very happy to be here. So Maryam, pious woman saint or prophet the stories of Mary and Jesus in the Quran are theologically rich and complicated despite their relative brevity as compared to the accounts of other major figures such as Moses or Abraham and the chronic accounts of Mary",
      "are boundary pushers. They stretch the limits of how we theologically conceive of the divine and the human, of man and woman, of saint and prophet, and in some places make ambiguous the existential boundaries between these categories. The Quran tells us that Jesus is a human messenger yet it ascribes to him several miraculous abilities",
      "An idea not lost to Ibn Arabi, who in some places mentions that one of the extraordinary qualities of Jesus was precisely that he was mistakenly considered by some, in other words certain Christians, to be God himself. Not only is he able to escape this world through a means other than death, at least for the time being, but he is able to raise the dead,",
      "strikingly, is able to form a clay bird, a bird in the... Clay in the shape of a bird and then breathe on it and bring it to life. Which is an act unmistakably reminiscent of God's creation of Adam. Of course, the Quran embeds the mention of these miracles in repeated assertion that this all takes place by God's permission, bi-idhnillah. But even so, these extraordinary parallels",
      "seem to invite reflection. The Quran describes Mary as a righteous woman,,, a term sometimes also used for saint or. But she is also described in ways that might seem to take her beyond this category and, in fact, to approach the category of prophethood or.. She is born miraculously as a result of the prayer of her mother.",
      "which comes very close to the notion of Esma or the protection that in Sunni tradition is attributed only to the prophets. She has granted several miracles, some of them bestowed in private but some witnessed by others and she even serves as a kind of guide for the prophet Zechariah albeit a largely passive one. And of course",
      "upon her by the angel Gabriel, the Angel of Revelation which she then delivers to her people albeit silently. And finally of course she is a named figure in the Quran and distinction usually not completely usually held by prophets and is implicitly included among the prophets list of profits a series of profits mentioned in both surahs 19 this were named after her so it's Mariam and in Surah 21 at NBR",
      "And yet mainstream Islamic doctrine, following Quran 1643, holds that prophets are always male. We only sent before you, meaning Muhammad, men using this word which is gendered to whom we had inspired. So on this basis, Islamic tradition generally",
      "Islamic tradition generally holds that prophets are only male. But then again, the servants and devotees of the Jewish temple were also only male, and Mary as we know crosses this boundary as well. These ambiguities provide rich opportunities for reflecting on the chronic view of the potentialities of the human state in the ability of human beings to transcend the ordinary limits of their humanity,",
      "But these opportunities for reflection are rarely pursued at great length in Islamic thought, and indeed are often submerged out of a concern to maintain a certain degree of doctrinal purity with regard to these various categories. And with good reason, one might argue, for in other parts of the Quran these boundaries are clearly affirmed. Jesus, son of Mary, was only a servant. The male is not as the female.",
      "miracles approximating divine prerogatives is generally not a conversation starter in Islamic context. But the question of Mary and her status as a pious woman, a saint or a prophet has indeed engaged some of the prominent intellectuals and religious scholars of the Islamic world. For some such as Fakhreddin Razi she represents the paradigmatic case of sainthood or wilaya",
      "including the Andalusians Ibn Hazm and the Mufassir al-Qurtubi, also from Andalucía. Mariam is a prophet de facto if not de jure. Given that the idea that Mariam was a prophet seems to have been viewed favorably at least in some Andalusean circles and given that the debate about her status seems to offer a perfect case for the exploration of the relationship between prophethood",
      "and sainthood, a relationship that was a major concern for Ibn Arabi as we know. One might expect that this is an issue that Ibn Abdi would have been keen to address in his works. Yet as far as I can see, and I have to say when Nick invited me here I said I'm not an expert on Ibn A'dabi but as far I have been able to see he does not address this issue directly. And I think it would be very hard",
      "that Ibn Arabi considered Mary to be a prophet. Significantly, of course, she is not included in his famous study of the Qur'anic prophets, al-Fasus al-Hikmah. She's mentioned there in the chapter on Jesus, of But in this work, as well as in the Futuhat al-Makiyyah, he does make some rather intriguing statements about Mary that seem to impinge on this debate and in some ways to make it more complex",
      "of the chronic statements I just mentioned. So in the rest this paper, I want to examine what Ibn Adabi does say about Mary and her really unusual case. If there is one category into which Ibn A'dab consistently puts Mary it is in the category of those who have attained the state of spiritual perfection, Kamal or Kamalia. In multiple contexts and for multiple purposes, Ibn Atabi cites the well-known Hadith of the Prophet",
      "that many men attain to the state of spiritual perfection but among those spiritually perfected persons there are only two women Mariam and Asiya, the wife of Pharaoh. And this hadith of course seems to echo the Qur'an's own presentation of these two women as examples of true believing women in contrast to the wives of Noah and Lot. One clear statement",
      "I'm going to read Eben Adabi's discussion of the elusive spiritual category of the Abdal. That is, the 40 saints who exist at all time and when one dies another comes and replaces them. The name Abdal relates to that. He says know that silence is one of the four pillars, arkan, by which men and women are considered Abdal Someone asked how many are the Abdals?",
      "40 souls, nafsin. He was then asked why didn't you say 40 men? Rajulan he said because there may be women among them and this is similar to what the Prophet said regarding spiritual perfection, kamad when he mentioned that they that is the perfected ones also existed among women",
      "and Asiya, the wife of Pharaoh. That's the end of Ibn Arabi's words. We will return to the importance of silence as a spiritual quality related to perfection at the end when we discuss the role that silence plays in the Quranic account of Mary. But for now, we cite this passage as a clear statement from Ibn Arbi that women can reach",
      "even if he does not use the word saint, waliyah to refer to Mary here or anywhere else that I could find yet. Despite Ibn Arabi's clear assertion of the possibility of female spiritual perfection however this assertion seems to rest uncomfortably with two other ideas about gender that are important in Ibn-Arabi thought first the chronic assertion",
      "that he takes very seriously and repeats in numerous contexts. And second, the metaphysical importance of the female as a locus of receptivity rather than activity. And of course, he accepts the traditional hierarchy between activity and receptivity even if he sees them both as indispensable and complementary to one another. Indeed Ibn Anabi rarely mentions the notion",
      "without some reference to the degree that men have over women, according to the Quranic verse. In a lengthy passage in the Futuhat al-Maqiyyah, Ibn Arabi discusses what he considers to be his description of the best or choicest manifestations in several spiritual categories. So he tells us that among the divine names God has chosen the name Allah as the best. Among the celestial realities He's chosen the throne.",
      "Among the months, he's chosen Ramadan. Among the days, he has chosen Friday. Among nights, he chose Laylat al-Qadr. Among surahs, he chooses Yasin and so on and so forth. And he goes on there are many of these categories. And among this list we find an assertion that the best of all human beings are the messengers, Rasul. That the best men, that is male human beings, is Muhammad.",
      "Mary, and Asia. Again, repeating this idea of their spiritual perfection. He says, as for his choosing Mary and Asia, this is on account of his attributing spiritual perfection to them which is normally only for men despite the existence of the degree that men have over them. For verily this degree is existential and does not change.",
      "As a choicest among women, we might note that Ibn Arabi would seem to put Mary and Asya in a class similar to that of the messengers and alongside Muhammad as the best of men. Nonetheless, female perfection, he asserts, does not nullify the degree that separates men and women hierarchically. Rather spiritual perfection is attained in spite of this disparity. In another interesting passage,",
      "Ibn Adhbi mentions the spiritual perfection of Mary and Asya as the basis for accepting the possibility that women might contribute in important and substantial ways to the rites and rituals of religion. But he begins by giving an explanation of how this spiritual perfection might exist alongside woman's degree of deficiency. Indeed, women are not restricted from spiritual perfection even if a woman is deficient",
      "relative to men for this degree is related to her creation because she was created from him that is from man from Adam right referencing the creation of Eve from Adam but this place has no burden on her with regard to the attaining of spiritual perfection for verily man who is Adam was created dust and he is associated with dust while Eve's creation is from",
      "the dust does not prevent Adam from achieving perfection, neither does her derivation from man according to Ibn A'dabi take away from a woman's possibility of reaching spiritual perfection. And continuing with his words he says God gives an example of this with regard to women in that He made her a source of religious legislation and here and in",
      "who went between Safa and Marwa hurriedly in the midst of the valley seven times, looking for a source of water because of the thirst afflicting her son Ishmael from which she feared he might perish. And the hadith about this is well known. Thus God made the action of Hajar hurrying between Safaa and Marwah a legal requirement among the rituals of the hajj.",
      "Thus, despite her degree of deficiency, woman can be a source not only of law but even of sacred ritual. For when the pilgrims perform the rite of the sai, they do so in imitation and remembrance of the actions of Hajar.\" Here Ibn Anubi references Hajar as the source of imitation, but he suggests that it is only possible to interpret this situation in this way—in other words, that she's",
      "about the spiritual perfection of women in the cases of Mary and Asya. In other words, importantly, he suggests that Mary is not simply an exceptional case, although she is also that, but her spiritual perfection makes the spiritual perfection of other women conceivable as well. While Hajar may be the source for the obligatory rites of the hajj, in another passage Ibn Adhbi indicates that Mary was the initiator",
      "fasting, through which she could be said to join the ranks of men and which put her in the company of the prophets. And that her fast was said to surpass even that of the prophet David.\" So he begins by mentioning the fast of the Prophet David who is said to have fasted one day and then broken his fasten-ex and then fasted",
      "And sometimes this is referred to as respecting the right of God in the day that you're fasting and respecting your own rights or the rights of your body in the way when you break the fast. And then Ibn Anabey after explaining this says, but some considered the right",
      "two days and then broke fast for one day. This is the fast of Mariam, upon her be peace. For she took into consideration that men have a degree above them. Thus she said, perhaps I will make this second day of fasting a compensation for this degree. And so it was. For the prophet, peace and blessings of God be upon him, testified to",
      "perfection, kamal, as he testified about the perfection of men. And when Mary considered that the witness of two women equaled the witness one man she said, two days of fasting for me has the same worth as one day of fasting four men and so she attained the station of men in this way and equaled David in the virtue a fasting",
      "Thus one must deal with the soul as Mariam dealt with her soul until she overcame her soul through her intellect. And this is a beautiful illusion for those who understand it. So although, as we have seen above, Ibn Arabi asserts that woman's existential deficiency in degree was unchangeable, here he tells us that Mary attained to the rank of men by virtue or perhaps he means",
      "he means virtually, precisely by recognizing this deficiency and compensating for it in this case through an additional fast. Interestingly, Ibn Arabi goes on to note that if Mary attained the rank of men by virtue of her fasting, Jesus attained nearly to the rank God himself since he was able to fast for long indefinite periods of time and to stay up all night without sleeping",
      "sleeping, which he said made him appear to be like al-Qayyum whom neither weariness nor sleep overtakes citing the famous Ayatul Kursi. Which Ibn Arabi says may have led some to claim that he was God himself and I think this passage is somewhat intriguing because it seems to acknowledge the idea that Mary and Jesus both sort of stretch",
      "humanity here specifically through extraordinary ascetic practices. Yet the degree still remains as existentially even if it can be compensated for spiritually and we see that it persists even into the highest spiritual realm so, for example in a passage from the Futuhat Ibn Arabi asserts that while both men and women may attain the station of perfection only man attained the station",
      "The highest state of perfection is ekmelia. And here too, though he makes an intriguing comment and we're going to stop at this point maybe talking about the degree. He makes an interesting comment where he says that both men and women can share in the station of nubuwa but only men have",
      "of Risala. So they can be prophets in the general sense, but not messengers. And I think this is kind of interesting. He doesn't say what women may have made it into this category or been given this category of Nabua. I don't know who else he would have thought of if he didn't think of Mary. But nonetheless,",
      "distinguishing between nubuwa and risalah as categories that men or women could or could not be part of does seem to follow his early predecessor Ibn Hazm's argument about why Mary could be a prophet because when he talks about the verse of the Quran that says we have not sent any before you except men to whom we revealed, it's arsalna. And so that relates to risalah or to messengerhood rather than to prophethood",
      "that therefore, although women couldn't be messengers they could be prophets and Mary was therefore not excluded. And we see a kind of interesting ambiguity about women's position as well at the highest levels of spiritual achievement in this very lengthy section of the Futuhat where Ibn Arabi discusses the Asnaf al-Awliya, the different kinds of saints.",
      "He begins by talking about the saints that come from among the prophets. Or really, the prophets from among those saints who are prophets. And then he talks about the Saints who are messengers. And he talks also about the saint who is Sadiqa, which we know this is attributed to Mary. She's Sadi'ka in the Quran. He doesn't connect it to her here though.",
      "And here he's very clearly following Quranic categories, right? He's the Sadiq and the Shahid, right, the truthful one and the witness or martyr. And the Saleh, the one who does righteous deeds. These three are mentioned together in verse 69 of Surah An-Nisa. So he's following this.",
      "the saints among the Muslims, the saints Among the believers, the Saints among the devoutly pious The Saints among truthful, the Saint's among the humble, the saint's among those who Who preserve their chastity. The saints among those remember God This is also a Quranic list this comes from Surah 33 verse",
      "verse 35 where very famously it refers to both the male and female in both of these categories, right? The Muslimun and the Muslimat. I said the Muslimeen and the Muslims, the Muminin and the Muminaat, the Qanateen and Qanataat, and the Sadaqeen and the Sadakaats, right. And so when he... So he has this whole list of the different categories of saints as I said beginning with prophets then messengers",
      "the Siddique, then the Shahid, then The Witness, then that the Righteous and then he talks about these other categories. The Muslim, the Mu'min, the Devoutly Obedient and so on. He goes down this list when he makes that transition. He says...he mentions both Mu'minin and Mu'minaat, Muslimeen and Mu'Minaat. Khanateen and Khanataat And he says explicitly at the beginning of this section That these include both men and women",
      "men and women. And then he says, interestingly, every group we have mentioned includes both men and even though he doesn't talk about men and in those earlier categories. He just talks about it as if there were only men in those categories. But he then says, every",
      "For reasons that are not clear to me, Ibn Arabi in various places seems to leave open the possibility for women to achieve this status of at least prophethood as well as the highest levels of sanctity however ambiguously at times. But when it comes to Mary who given his own interpretation of her status and her importance",
      "for this status, he remains enigmatically silent. I have not found any text where ibn Arabi clearly describes her as a Nabiya or a Waliyah. As we've seen, ibn Abdi's most frequent reference to the status of Mary concerns her spiritual perfection which she mentions regularly. Yet while Mary's spiritual perfection is attributed to her in a prophetic hadith, it is evidence from the Quran",
      "from the Quran that is usually adduced to assert the possibility that she could have been a prophet. And this evidence is widely known, as I mentioned in the beginning of my paper. The fact that she's the only woman mentioned by name, that she occurs in lists of series of prophets in the Quran. And of course, the most significant argument for her prophethood... Ten minutes? No way! I have longer?",
      "I have longer? I'm listening to Nick. I'm going to go with what he says. Okay, all right. But in many ways the most significant argument for prophethood would seem to be the fact that like the Prophet Muhammad Mary has a direct personal encounter with the angel Gabriel, the Angel of Revelation an encounter usually understood to be unique to prophets other women for example the wife Abraham or the mother Moses did indeed receive inspiration",
      "right or wahi from god but mary alone has both an auditory and a visual encounter with the angel again many theological descriptions of prophethood talk about this visually visual element of seeing the angel as key to being uh a basis for prophethood um and of course what the angel delivers",
      "child Jesus. And one may even say that Mary's experience of the angel is more intimate, although less verbal than that of the prophet Muhammad for the angel does not merely deliver the sound of the words of God into her ears but also delivers a very life-giving breath of God in to her body. Ibn Anabi spends a good deal of time discussing this miraculous reception and conception as you may be aware however when Ibn",
      "as he does in multiple places. He is primarily concerned with the relevance and significance it has for his metaphysics of gender, including the relationship of activity and receptivity as they manifest in the male and the female. His unusual interpretation of these two events, however, gives no indication that Mary's encounter with the angel suggests her prophethood. Indeed,",
      "for the angelic divine spirit that creates the child inside her. This is in contrast to his representation of Adam as active in relation to the creation of Eve, and he sees these two as complementary events. The creation of eve from Adam without a mother and the creation Jesus from Mary without a father. And this is despite the fact that in the biblical account of Eve's creation from Adam which has influenced Islamic hadith",
      "and also Islamic commentary on the Quran. It said that Adam was put to sleep, God put Adam to sleep before he pulled out the rib to make Eve. And I think a few states more passive than sleep really. In fact, the notion of a sleeping Adam from which Eve is drawn out is a far more passive image than that of the heroic Koranic image",
      "desert to give birth to Jesus. And I have two children, no one can tell me that giving birth is a passive experience, not even Ibn Arabi! And yet we read in the Fuzuhat al-Makkiah that God did not allow Jesus to be the locusts that receives the activity of Mary lest man should be the locus that receives",
      "the activity of the angel who was imaginalized in the form of a man. Hence, Jesus resembles his father, an angel, a spirit and a male. Now, activity and receptivity are complementary conceptual pair deeply embedded in metaphysical discussions about creation and procreation and about the relationships between God and the world and between men and women but of course they're not just complimentary",
      "hierarchically ordered concepts. And Ibn Arabi, as I said, is rather explicit about this in many places. But in this final part of the paper, and I am almost done, I want to think about some of the ways in which activity and receptivity relate to the states of prophethood and sainthood, and also how they relate to another set of concepts that are important in Ibn Abdi's thought. And in the Quranic account of Jesus and Mary, that is namely the complementarity of word and silence.",
      "silence and the way in which both word and silence are transcended through this very important Sufi concept of illusion or Ishara prophethood can be understood as having both an active and a receptive component a profit must be a priori a perfectly receptive locus for the divine word or message which he or she has been chosen",
      "activity on the part of the prophet at the moment that the divine message is conveyed may somehow distort the word or compromise its delivery. Indeed, the Islamic tradition tells us that when revelation came to the prophet, at least sometimes he would fall into a kind of trance-like state in which he was prone and helpless before the onslaught of revelation, recovering only once it had been delivered. Ibn Arabi suggests something similar about Mary. He says",
      "When the angel first appeared to Mary in the form of a man, she was naturally frightened that he intended to do her harm in some way and sought refuge from God. Ibn Arabi says if the word as Jesus had been transmitted to her at that moment, Jesus would have turned out very ugly and disfigured because of the alarmed and therefore active even defensive state of Mary.",
      "God at which point she relaxed he says at one point transitioning from a state of pub to busts of closeness and defensiveness to openness the state of passivity in receptivity to the deliverance of the divine word is a characteristic of all prophets as profits that is as nebby een according to ibn adab ee a prophet is defined by",
      "or commands pertain only to himself or herself. It is only when the prophet is charged with conveying these divine commands or laws to others that he is considered a messenger, rasul, or one who has sent, mab'uth. By this definition, Mary would seem to fit the category of nebuah for she does indeed receive a message from God but one that communicates to her directly",
      "She is not asked to convey the message to anyone else. In fact, as I will discuss in a minute, she is called to do the opposite. Receptivity to divine grace or communication without the responsibility of explicitly transmitting it is also a quality associated with the saints as distinct from the messengers. For example, the messangers convey what they received",
      "Saints convey the gifts they have received existentially through a kind of spiritual transparency that obviates the need for verbal communication. It is often said when one sees a saint, one should immediately remember God just from seeing them. And while the messengers are given miracles or signs to be performed in public as evidence of their providential mission,",
      "like the food in Mary's locked cell, a secret gift for the saint alone. A pure blessing, karama, for the Saint not one with an instrumental or evidentiary or public purpose. For Ibn Arabi, a state of prophethood without the obligation to deliver divine message to the broader community is what he calls general prophethood, naboo amma and at least one point in the futuhat he identifies that with walaya",
      "seem that on all accounts, Mary fits Ibn Arabi's category both of Nabu'a Amma and of Walaya. As I mentioned above, Mary was not asked to convey the message that was given to her verbally. Jesus is the ultimate word from God that she received from the breath of the angel Gabriel,",
      "word from the angel bodily rather than merely orally so too does she deliver the word with her body not with her speech indeed after giving birth to Jesus with her buddy she is instructed to maintain a strict fast of silence and he refused to speak to anyone when her people see the child in assume the worst about what",
      "she maintains her fast of silence. Instead of defending herself verbally, she communicates through illusion, isharat elehi, pointing to the infant in such a way as to suggest that they should speak with and to him. Although her family are furious by what they take as an insulting suggestion on Mary's part,",
      "speaks in clear and lucid words, communicating his own spiritual state explicitly and his mother's innocence implicitly. Jesus is the Rasul what is Mary? I'm going to just finish with one statement about silence. Ibn Anubi we saw at the beginning of",
      "characteristics of the abdahl, these 40 saints. But he tells us that a saint can never be completely silent because silence is a purely negative attribute and of course the saint has been charged with remembering God all the time. So it can't be",
      "path who choose silence as their means, they are only outwardly silent. Inwardly, they're always invoking God.\" And he also says that those who choose this path of silence are given by God an extraordinary ability of ishara, of illusion. That even though they have like Mary vowed",
      "They are able through gestures to communicate what they need with incredible accuracy and efficacy. And of course, as we've seen, illusion is the very final act that Mary performs in the Quran. So Mary strikes us in her chronic portrayal as one of Ibn Arabi's silent saints, outwardly",
      "communicating only through illusion, allowing the divine word to communicate itself and be brought into the world simply by her presence, by her body. Indeed, Ibn Arabi cites Mary as a paradigmatic case for this kind of illusion. And what is illusion except silent communication? A communication through the body rather than through words.",
      "transcends them both. We cannot say that Ibn Arabi either accepts or rejects the notion of Mary's prophethood or sainthood, since he doesn't express these judgments explicitly. But we can say that Mary as she is portrayed in the Quran is certainly not excluded from sainthood or prophethood as they are defined by Ibn",
      "and is sometimes, as in the case of illusion, presented as a perfect case for these descriptions. Thank you."
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "dakake/MEIS Podcast_ Faculty Profiles_ Maria Dakake_eXC1L0qmXV8&pp=ygUSTWFyaWEgTWFzc2kgRGFrYWtl_1750210940.opus",
    "text": [
      "Good morning, this is Bassam Haddad. I am the director of the Middle Eastern Islamic Studies program at George Mason University and I'm very lucky to have with me today",
      "We have an echo. We're going to kill it. Don't worry. All right, so you heard that twice, that it's a good morning and that I'm very lucky to be here with Professor Maria Daycake who is our awesome professor teaching a number of exciting courses here at the Middle Eastern Studies Program",
      "stories I can share with you. I will introduce her in just a minute, but we are very happy to have you Maria with us. Good morning. Good Morning. Thank you Bassam. Thank You for joining us and this is the Mies podcast. This is episode two. We had the first episode with Professor Sachedina and I'll be speaking with literally almost all our faculty those who are willing to come on in the next few weeks and showcase what our program has in store",
      "Our discussion revolves around our professors' teaching, research and activities outside the university or inside the university but outside the curriculum if you will. And we also address some current moments or events if time allows. This is about a 30 minute conversation so join us. Let me before too long let me share with",
      "Professor Daycake's bio. Dr. Daycake researches and publishes on Islamic intellectual history, Quranic studies, Shiite and Sufi traditions, and women's spirituality and religious experience. She has just completed work on a major collaborative project to produce the first HarperCollins Study Quran which comprises a verse by verse commentary",
      "be a couple years ago actually maria will correct us this work draws upon classical and modern quran commentaries making the rich and buried tradition of muslim commentary on their own scripture written almost exclusively in arabic and persian accessible to an english to an english-speaking audience for the first time in such a comprehensive manner she is also currently uh working with daniel madigan",
      "on the way to coming out, the root-leash companion to the Quran and is working independently on a monograph on the concept of religion as a universal phenomenon in the Quranic, in the Islamic intellectual tradition. So, and that is of course just this snippet there are a number of publications and activities and various intellectual production type of material",
      "that I would like to address with Maria throughout this conversation. So first, Maria before we get into the details of research and teaching if you can just tell us quickly how you're faring? How are you doing in this COVID world? Well, I have my daughter at home like so many other people but she's a middle school so she's pretty independent",
      "I have actually been doing a combination of online teaching and in-person teaching as well. It's not really that common, I think most faculty are teaching mostly online or via Zoom but I really felt...I have a college age son so I really",
      "I go in, teach one of my classes in person in a mask. It's a little trying, a little difficult but I think it's worth it. I think you're on mute Bassam. Sure am. I'm just checking with everyone to humanize our experience and sort of start out with something a bit more personal.",
      "What we would love to know, Maria, is first some sort of an intellectual journey in terms of your research. If you feel free to share with us what you have right now in production but also how you got here in terms",
      "She is studying Shiism in particular. My first book was on Shiism and its early formation, and what I was interested in there was, in that particular book or that particular project, how did Shiism come to be seen as a separate entity within Islam? A separate...I don't want to use the word sect. I have a problem with using that in connection",
      "of entire tradition with its own religious authorities and texts, but still within the Islamic tradition. And I was interested in some of the intellectual influences what was the environment? What were early Shi'is thinking about or what other modes of thought were they interacting with as they developed this sort of distinct Shiite identity instead of doctrines.",
      "you know, that has always been very important to me understanding how intellectual traditions develop within particular contexts not seeing them or studying them in a vacuum. For example, in that book I talk a lot about how Shi'i doctrines are in conversation or being developed almost in opposition to certain Sunni or proto-Sunni ideas",
      "around that time. And then, so I thought that I would probably do that line of work. I was also very interested personally in Sufism part of the word talked about the relationship of Shi'ism and Sufisim but then in, I think it was in 2008 or 2007-2008, I was approached by a Seyed Hossein Nasser who's someone",
      "who has been a mentor to me since even before I entered graduate school and asked if I would join a team of people putting together this study Quran for Harper Collins. Harper Collins has, you know, a study Bible, a studied Torah. I think they even have a study Bhagavad Gita now and they wanted to study Quran. And so I agreed to join.",
      "a woman's voice. I think he wanted someone who knew the Shiite tradition well and so I joined that, and that was a major eight-year project which came out in 2015 but it was...I'd worked with the Quran in my earlier work on Shiism",
      "a second PhD in some ways, going through you know putting together this text and going through all of these commentaries hundreds and hundreds of pages of commentaries. So but also there as well I was interested in looking at the diversity of voices,",
      "interacting with others, are developing their point of view in relation to others. I think there's a kind of common understanding that certainly not for people who do Islamic studies but for people outside of the discipline that the Islamic intellectual tradition is sort of monolithic in nature heavily authoritative and of course that's really not the case. There were many voices, many opposing or differing voices",
      "differing voices that engage with these texts over a long period of time. Maria, it seems that we are cut off. Going ahead. Go ahead. Yes. Maria I think that we got cut off for a second right after you said a long time, we got",
      "you know so that was a kind of major project that was completed. I've done some additional work on chronic studies as you mentioned, i have this new co-edited volume coming out. I worked with Daniel Maddock and George Archer on that and that's a collection that was really meant to address a kind",
      "project become very familiar with. But a sense that there were people who studied the Qur'an from a kind of historical perspective, setting it in its 7th century Near Eastern context looking for influences and predecessors to some of its ideas, people who had a revisionist view. And then a large segment",
      "working in Quranic studies who want to study the Qur'an within its traditional context. In other words, looking at it within its reception history within Islamic studies, looking that it's exegetical or commentarial tradition which of course is what we were doing with the study of Qur'aan and looking at how it influenced other disciplines, other religious sciences whether it was theology or law and so on really sort",
      "at the Qur'an as a text that develops in its significance over time, as Muslims engage with it. And some people felt there was really no possibility of productive conversation between these different ways of approaching the Qur-an, these different scholarly methods and sort of theoretical bases for looking at this one text.",
      "Daniel Madigan and George Archer, we really felt that wasn't the case. That in fact all of these different ways of studying the Qur'an had a lot to teach each other or could inform one another, that it would be very productive to put these in conversation so this particular edited volume has as one of its goals or had as one",
      "to ask them where possible, to comment on other methodological perspectives in the tradition and to really try to make a case with the volume itself that these different ways of studying the Qur'an can be put into useful conversation, generative conversation with each other. So we have 40 articles",
      "be out in September. You might be on mute, Bassam, because I'm not hearing you. I'm trying to avoid speaking on mute and as I was saying, I'm",
      "I was on mute. This is remarkable, Maria. I have followed a lot of the intellectual production that you have given us and as you know, I've been at Mason for some 14 years and I've followed the work that you've done, the conferences you've been to and the approaches that you",
      "and insightful. If there is anything else you'd like to say about your future work or where the trajectory is going, that would be wonderful. Sure. Yeah, so the trajectory continues. I have sort of two separate projects that I'm working on now. So one is a book monograph. Hopefully,",
      "Islamic theory of religion. And this is, it's really, it is also kind of a new field but it's based very much on my previous experience and really you know isn't in a sense a kind of culmination of that journey so as you may know I started as a graduate student at Princeton in an area studies program in Near Eastern Studies and the work that I did on Shiism there was",
      "as history and as religious studies. When I came out, I interviewed both for history and religious studies positions and ended up taking the religious studies position at Mason. And you may or may not know that the Princeton Near Eastern Studies Department, or at least the people that I work with there tended to be very theory averse. And so I entered this Religious Studies department and suddenly felt this need to really orient myself in the field",
      "in a way that I hadn't really done when I was studying within this area studies context, based on obviously different types of methodologies and so forth. And one of the things that really struck me was that, of course Islamic Studies within the broader religious studies framework is often accused of being under theorized but one of",
      "I noticed that is that religious studies theory broadly tended to really not engage Islam very much. So theorists of religion, you know would talk about the Christian tradition or the Hindu tradition, the Buddhist tradition or indigenous traditions, or sometimes a Jewish tradition but Islam really got very short shrift and you had a sense that their knowledge was very superficial",
      "studies theory more generally and you know important exceptions Geertz of course, and Talal Asad really important exceptions to that but they're sort of the exceptions that prove the rule in many cases. And so I felt that there really needed to be an understanding of Islam is the second largest religion",
      "of religious studies, I think it's something that needs to be taken into consideration. At the same time there is a kind of common understanding now started really with Jonathan Z Smith that religion as in itself as a category is kind of made up category that it's made up by religious study scholars themselves. It is the product of imposition",
      "of an assumption that religion is a universal experience and has universal components wherever it manifests in the human world. And this really isn't a justifiable construct, or justifiable category or way of categorizing this aspect whatever it is of religious, of human experience. At the same time you had people like Steven Prothero",
      "Rothero talking about how the religions are really so different it doesn't make sense necessarily to treat them together in a single category and when I thought about this, particularly the idea that this was a Western category. This had come out of the Christian tradition that Christianity was spoken or unspoken the kind of framework for understanding other religions and so that it had this kind of",
      "I think we also lost you for another five seconds when you were saying the religion has this kind of, and then you cut off. It must be something that is happening for a couple of seconds but you got off at that moment",
      "religion that kind of and then they've got up all right so there was i guess um i'm not quite sure where that was but uh i'll say that i think a kind of common understanding now that is very popular in the field that religion is a kind-of western construct and particularly a construct of religious study scholars themselves they constructed their own category to study",
      "that the idea of religion is invented in a sense, um, in, in the West as a universal category. But in my own work on the Quran and what the Quran says about religion, and then also in Shiism and saying Shiism because there's this sort of, um you know development over what does it mean to be part of the Muslim community? What does it means to be apart of this community? Um, are these separate religions so to speak? And I realized",
      "the Islamic tradition has its own conception of religion. It has a theory of religion both as a universal aspect of human experience but also it has individual manifestations, it's a genus and it's species right? As we think of it today in common understanding and it has its",
      "Muslims thought this was a legitimate religion or not, right? The common term for religion being can be used for religions that traditional Muslims would consider false religions or illegitimate religions. So and at the same time there is a notion of religion as broad and all encompassing as let's say Sharia or the idea of religious life is for Islam. There's also a sense",
      "a distinction, right? There is you know deen and dunya. There is spiritual virtue and there are also sort of secular virtues that are mentioned in early Islamic thought so my idea was to try to think about if we were going to form you know formulate a theory of religion coming from",
      "inform or be in conversation with these theories of religion that many people think are really rooted in the Christian tradition. Thank you. Thank You very much, Maria. So I mean, I have a couple questions and I had those questions also with Abdulaziz Sachdina but I'm going to move on so that we don't keep you for too long. I'm",
      "share with us some snippets about your teaching, the courses you offer and the things you enjoy teaching. Yeah well I teach you know that the kinds of standard courses in Islamic studies. I teach courses on things I'm interested in Quran and Hadith. I teacher a course on Islamic thought which when I came to George Mason it was",
      "a course here in Religious Studies. I teach courses on Sufism, I teach of course called the Life and Legacy of Muhammad where I sort of look at different, because there's no canonical compilation of biographical studies on the Prophet Muhammad and his life. And so I look at how his life is reinterpreted over time by both Muslim authors non-Muslim authors",
      "Next semester, I'm gonna be teaching a kind of new course. One of the other things I've been interested in, I mentioned women's experience of religion. So I've done some things with women and Sufism. I'm working on another project on female Iranian 20th century Iranian commentator on the Quran but I like to try to include women's voices",
      "I try to find them as much as I can in the sort of pre-modern past of the Islamic tradition, but also include them in my courses. And so next semester actually I'm teaching a course called Muslim Women Writers and we're going to look at female authors who engage their tradition from different perspectives, you know either from a scholarly perspective,",
      "people sort of engaging Islam from a women's perspective in fictional works as well. So it's a new course, hopefully it will go well. Thank you. I'm also trying to find out if you have ideas about incorporating some of the events, developments",
      "that we have been witnessing for the past maybe two years or even 20 years into anything that you think would be worthwhile to share. Are the topics you're addressing and you're researching amenable to sort of connecting in some way to current events? Because this is what many students come in, they come in with a background. Either it's problematic",
      "or sort of a learned or an abridged background? Is there anything that you might think up in terms of your future courses that incorporate some of the events we've been witnessing, maybe in the United States but also beyond? Yeah. Well, I mean certainly in all of my courses,",
      "of these things as well. When you talk about 20 years, are you talking about specifically in the region? Are you talking here in the United States? Anywhere. Anything that you feel... Is it something that is an imperative of sorts or is it the sort of thing where the actual material speaks for itself regardless of being connected to current events or contemporary? Right.",
      "Well, I mean, I think that one of the issues that I'm or what I shouldn't say issues, but kind of one of ideas that I always have in the back of my head that I want students to get in my teaching is to think about how some whether they're traditional or their more recent types of thought emerging from Muslim intellectuals.",
      "Muslim intellectuals or coming out of either a Muslim majority or Muslim minority context, how do they offer a kind of commentary or critique on the events that we see today? So for example, the idea of community. There's a lot of discussion now about how disconnected people have become from their physical",
      "physical communities, right? People are online. They have their sort of social media communities and groups but they're not always so connected to their physical communities. And we see this kind of rupture within physical communities in what happened with the election,",
      "perspectives on what it means to be American, or instead of this sense that we're all in this together. And the question is how do Islamic conceptions of the importance of community obligations, the idea of sort of knowing your neighbor regardless of what your neighbors perspective is, could that be a corrective? Could that be kind of commentary on some of these divisions that have taken place here",
      "uh here or let's say um with regard to the environmental crisis i do teach a course called religion in the natural environment um to what extent are religious conceptions of the natural world or the environment you know something that can contribute to a broader ethic of conservation, a broader",
      "I am concerned about the fact that we tend to look at religious traditions as something to be studied, as an object to be studies by a knowing subject in the Western academy. But what happens when you flip that? What happens when",
      "in the United States. What would they have to say about these developments going on? What traditional ethical values or ways of thinking about moral virtue, or communal connectedness, how could those respond to or contribute to this conversation about the types of responsibilities that we have either",
      "um to the natural world uh and so on. So yeah those are the kinds of things kind of flip that lens. Wonderful, thank you so much I actually usually ask at the end a question that you kind of like began to address which is basically if you can share with us anything about other activities",
      "with the background of what's happening in the world, whether it drives that sort of new direction. Is there anything that you'd like to share with us about any other activities or any other topics that are on your mind? This is a free moment. What I would mention also that, of course my work with the Islamic Study Center here",
      "I'm now also part of a steering committee for a new research center here on campus called the Center for Humanities Research. And this was a project that a number of us began in humanities departments three years ago or so when we realized that there was a lack of understanding about what humanities research is, even at our own university.",
      "humanities research is also something that's often done alone. You know, we don't sort of co-author things and do projects. We sort of work in our little silos and so on. So the idea was to try to make humanities research—it's very vibrant here actually on Mason's campus—you know, sort of make it more visible but they also make it",
      "all in a Zoom environment. But it's meant to try to draw, it's an interdisciplinary center and so it's mean to draw in other disciplines as well that are interested in humanities work or have something to say or can partner with humanities scholars or humanities scholarship use humanity scholarship in their work and of course support humanities",
      "It's both to support the work, the traditional work that humanities scholars do but also to support more public facing activities. To make the humanities more comprehensive and we really felt at this time it is so important just as you were mentioning things going on right now in just in the United States",
      "to let's say the understanding of COVID, where it's going how it might end, how people should behave. What are the ethical norms that people should recognize and establish in relation to the responsibility of others during this pandemic? What is what are the history of pandemics? What have, what types of literature",
      "out of what artistic inspirations have come out of previous pandemics or situations like this in the past. All these things are really humanities subjects, or the work of humanity's scholars but they you know have something to say about how we should understand either while we're in the midst of this pandemic or as we're coming out of it to understand",
      "felt that there needs to be more appreciation for the contributions that humanities scholarship can make. And we wanted humanities to be the center, right? So often you'll have a project as a social sciences project or even a natural sciences project and they'll bring in one humanist, you know, they'll ring in one humanity scholar to offer a humanities perspective.",
      "you know, the center. It would be the pivot and then it would interact with these other disciplines. We lost you again for a second. Okay, so we lost you but we lost at the end of the sentence, it seemed. So we should be good. I think people can make out what has been said",
      "what has been missed. And this is precisely what we have been doing, many of us have been regarding many topics, so what you're doing with the humanities, gender for instance, the ideas that you don't just have an event on something and then you get their gender perspective. Same thing with political economy, you have an even on all kinds of things, then you",
      "of this wave of intersectionality where you have to actually incorporate more factors and more dimensions, and integrate not just incorporate in a parasitic manner but integrate which is going to make it challenging for disciplines to maintain their really sometimes thick boundaries",
      "So this is all exciting. But luckily for us, we already have our PhDs. We're not going to have to worry. I'm just joking. No, but it is a challenge. It is a",
      "You've been an extremely dedicated educator. And I know this from you stepping up and volunteering to do things that are sometimes not as easy to do in terms of adding to your time and so on, to be with our graduate students. And we also run the undergraduate minor Islamic studies. So thank you for everything that you do at Mies and George Mason. And",
      "the subsiding of the pandemic because we will end up seeing each other again. Is there anything you'd like to say by way of parting words? Well, I want to thank you for doing this. This is great and it's nice to have a chance to talk about your work, to sort of think about it in a broader perspective so I really appreciate",
      "seeing all of your other interviews with other scholars. Thank you, and this is where I'm going to put you on the spot in public, and that is Maria has been... There was no arm twisting, soft or hard. Maria has agreed to join me as a co-host for as many of these podcasts as possible. It's the Middle East and Islamic Studies podcast at George Mason University which will go",
      "go on and we will be featuring our other colleagues but also we'll be featuring various other topics and some of our alumni as well as our current students. And that is something that we're all very excited about. Unfortunately, we cannot do this live because of the pandemic but you know the other side or the half full cup is that",
      "have an event or to have a conversation you can just plug into Zoom or hopefully not Zoom, this is not Zoom. This is Ecamm. You can plug into something and you're right there. Thank you very much for joining us and giving us this time. I will see you maybe next week while we interview other people. Okay. Very good. Thanks. All right, Hassan. Thank-you. Take care. Thank You too. Bye."
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "dakake/MIPodcast _33_ The Study Quran_ with Maria Dakake _tV-Ola1W1lc&pp=ygUSTWFyaWEgTWFzc2kgRGFrYWtl0gcJCd4JAYcqIYzv_1750208713.opus",
    "text": [
      "It's the Maxwell Institute Podcast. I'm Blair Hodges. Over 1.2 billion Muslims, or one in five people on the planet, read the Quran as the sacred word of God. Syed Hossein Nasser has written,",
      "recited into the ears of the newborn child, and its verses are usually the last words that a Muslim hears upon the approach of death. In between these moments, the life of a Muslim is replete with the presence of the Quran. Dr. Nasser is the editor-in-chief of The Study Quran. It's a new translation of the Holy Book with notes and commentary. General Editors Joseph Lombard, Maria Daycake, and Kainer Dogley, along with Assistant Editor Muhammad Rustem, spent over a decade on this project. So in this episode,",
      "Joseph Lombard joined me to talk about the study Quran, which is coming out in November of 2015 from HarperOne. Questions and comments about this and other episodes of The Maxwell Institute podcast can be sent to mipodcast at byu.edu. Maria Daycake and Joseph Lumbard, welcome to The Maxwell",
      "It's a brand new translation of the Quran, and both of you worked as general editors on that project. So I wanted to begin by talking about how you first came to encounter the Quran and how that's changed your life, your faith, and your scholarship. So let's start with Maria. Yes, I was myself raised Roman Catholic and went through all Roman Catholic schooling",
      "introduction and familiarity, of course, with the Bible, biblical texts which I learned in school and I heard at Mass and other religious services. But when I was in college, I became very interested in Islam mostly by way actually of Middle East politics. I was a government major and I began studying Arabic and I started to study a little bit about the Islamic world. And I was taking Arabic classes although just beginning",
      "should pick up a copy of this Quran and understand what it says or try to understand what is says. I'd heard so much about it but hadn't read it, and so I picked up a translation because my Arabic was not yet good enough to read the Quran. I had only just begun learning and picked it up and began reading and I read till about",
      "the Qur'an. And I was really very taken with it, very struck by it in part because there is such a sense of the immediacy of the voice of the Qur-an when one reads the Bible or hears the Bible with some exceptions, of course,",
      "spiritual stories, important stories but really told in that form. Different kinds of narrative. But the Qur'an was really more of...the text itself as I read it felt like a voice calling out directly to me and that is something not just I have noticed, of course very commonly understood quality or feature of the Qur-an",
      "often very, very directly. And that struck me it was it was very unusual for me and um it was Very compelling in all honesty but at the same time it was also a little disturbing to me because I had been raised Catholic and I you know for a while put it away after that but not too long uh after i picked it back up again and after reading more of the Quran I decided to go ahead and read",
      "some biographies of the Prophet Muhammad, a little bit about the founding of the Muslim community and the expansion of Islam. And that really began my interest in Islam. I eventually embraced Islam myself. So in many ways, the Qur'an was the opening of that door to Islam for me. How about you Joseph? My story is somewhat different than Maria's. I came from a background as an Episcopalian",
      "Episcopalian. I was active in church growing up, and like Maria, I had extensive exposure to the Bible. My father was a Sunday school teacher. I acted in church plays, forgot my lines, and all of that fun stuff. And then when I became Muslim, I actually became Muslim more through",
      "of the person, of the Prophet Muhammad peace be upon him. And then it was after I became Muslim that I really started reading the Quran in depth and so the Quran you might say although of course is the foundation center axis of the faith in many ways it wasn't necessarily my first experience of Islam and then I started to read it more actively",
      "So I really read it in translation. I was reading the Yusuf Ali translation and the Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall Translation, those were the two that I had an experience with but one thing that struck me is the way in which the Quran moves around from topic to topic It's much different than the text of the Bible",
      "more deeply and fully into the text, it's just like when one gets to know an individual more. And one can kind of understand how all of the shifts in conversation continue to relate to one another. And that experience was something that I think is something I continue on to this day as I've learned Arabic and now experienced the text in the Arabic language rather than in English.",
      "English. As one goes further and further, every experience of the book really is a deepening of one's relationship not just with the Word of God but with God, Godself. So both of you have had personal encounter with the Qur'an that has affected your religious life and you've also dedicated your life of scholarship to the Qurʾān as well. Let's talk a little bit about the makeup",
      "its origin, how it was revealed and recorded, and then how it's laid out for people who haven't yet read from the Quran. It differs from the Bible in Joseph as you mentioned in jumping around so let's talk about that. Maria why don't you start? All right, the Quran itself of course is a scripture, it's often referred to",
      "body of revelation. It is revealed to the Prophet Muhammad orally, or verbally and he himself being traditionally illiterate according to Islamic teachings and Islamic reports taught it to his followers also orally and its only much later that it comes to be written down. And in many ways this accounts for that feature quality I was talking about before where it feels like",
      "like a conversation, you feel like it's engaging you. You don't feel like its telling you the story when you read the Quran, you'd feel like is telling you something about yourself or asking to think about yourself and so that immediacy comes very much or is very much related to the manner in which the Quran was revealed. So Islamic tradition teaches that the Prophet Muhammad grew up in Mecca",
      "culture that believed in one, seems to have believed in an overarching creator God whom they called Allah. Prophet Muhammad's father was Abdullah the servant of Allah so the name as a name of God was already there but still they worshipped other gods as well and the tradition says that the prophet Muhammad did not participate in this and is a young man, a young adult he would go off and meditate",
      "outside of Mecca. We don't know exactly what he did, but the tradition again tells us that he was inherently a monotheist, a Hanif, someone who followed an Abrahamic form of monotheism, one that was neither Jewish nor Christian. And on one of his retreats, you might say, into the cave, it's said that in the middle of the night, one of the last 10 nights of Ramadan,",
      "the angel Gabriel came to him and came to Him actually in a rather violent manner even, grabbing him. Some accounts say grabbing him by the neck or grabbing him be the shoulders and shaking him and saying to him recite or read an Arabic ikra. And the Prophet responds makra meaning either I don't read or what should I read? And so depending on how you translate it",
      "depending on how you translate it. But in any case, he continues the angel continues to command him to recite until the angel finally recites the first five verses that are revealed to the prophet and again these verses are very general they're making him aware of the existence of God who created human beings who taught them what they know And then the angel left and Muhammad ran out of the cave terrified as one might",
      "as one might after an experience like that. And it said, you know, immediately ran down the mountain and saw the angel on the horizon who then identified himself to the prophet Muhammad as the Angel Gabriel, who seems to have been someone already familiar to the Prophet Muhammad and maybe to the people of Mecca in general, as part of traditions of Judaism and Christianity that circulated throughout Arabia.",
      "was concerned and afraid, and he came back home terrified and shaking. And the Quran recounts this indirectly or makes mention of this. And it's really his wife Khadija who calms him down, who tells him that this is not something evil or satanic. You're not insane or possessed by jinn, which was something",
      "In fact, I don't know what this is. She said, but this must be something good because I know your character, Muhammad. I know you're a good person. And eventually after he received more revelations, he came to understand as well as talking with some people predominantly Khadija's cousin Waraka who was a Christian, talking with other people and coming to realize that the messages he was receiving were indeed from God",
      "were very much connected to the traditions of Judaism and Christianity with which he was at least somewhat familiar. So it was an oral revelation initially, a recitation, recite, Gabriel instructed Muhammad. This became a book. Joseph, why don't you give a little bit of history about that? Because that occurred for the most part after the death of the prophet. Is that right? Yes, it did. It said that during the life of the",
      "Prophet, there were several companions who did write down parts of the Qur'an on parchment or on the shoulder blades of dead camels, camel bones, or on date leaves and things like this. But most people could not read and write, and of course writing materials weren't prevalent at that time. So it was mostly an oral tradition. And upon",
      "there was no official collection of the Qur'an. It is said that every year, the angel Gabriel would come to the Prophet, peace be upon him, and would review the Qurʾān. And that the order in which they would review it every year was the order we now have today. So when you go to a single surah of the Quran sometimes the verses from one surah",
      "one surah will have actually been revealed years apart from each other. And it was only by that arrangement, when they would review it every year, that we have it in the form that each chapter or surah came to be. In the year 634, under the caliph Abu Bakr, the Muslims decided to collect the Qur'an all together",
      "with the task of getting everything together. It's said that before this, a few of the companions, four of them are mentioned by name, at least four companions had large compendiums of the Quran. Exactly how much they had gathered we don't know because we don' have those manuscripts with us but there were several who had it. Nonetheless Zayd bin Thabit was tasked with gathering everything together and",
      "given to the caliph Abu Bakr. And upon his death, it went to the next caliph Omar and upon the death of Omar, it wouldn't do. Omar's daughter Hafsa who was also a widow of the prophet then in the year 650 by this time Islam was in places like Basra and Kufa in Iraq up in Damascus",
      "If one person starts reading the Qur'an and reciting it somewhat incorrectly in Basra or Kufa, or both places, then all of a sudden those errors will continue to be repeated. And then you won't... Then people will start to lose the text of the Qur-an. So the Caliph Uthman wanted to unite the community on a single text.",
      "check it with everyone in the community and put it down in the right order. So, the difference between what happened in 634 and what happened 650 is that in 630 for its as if you gather together all of your notes from a bunch of business meetings or from a class. You put them all in one place so that you knew that you had them but then in 650 you gathered them together, you checked them against other people's notes",
      "in the right order. And so this is what happened in 650, and that's what we call the consonantal skeleton of the text. It didn't have all of the dots that it has now to distinguish each of the consonants from one another, nor did it have allof the dashes that would mark the vowels on the text,",
      "least four of them were sent out to the major cities of the Islamic Empire at the time, and probably more. And then the Caliph Uthman ordered that all of the other manuscripts of the Qur'an be disposed of. This didn't necessarily happen. In fact we have the record that one of",
      "objected that he had to burn his, and he did not. But nonetheless the whole of the community was from that point forward according to Islamic histories unified upon a single text but it's important to note that from this point forward the oral tradition was still central. It said in Islamic tradition",
      "against one another. And neither one of them can be taken as an independent authority, but the two of them together serve to reinforce one another and it's because of the two reinforcing one another that Muslims believe we have the accurate copy of what was revealed to the Prophet Muhammad today. There was in the news recently, the University of Birmingham they discovered perhaps",
      "as fragments of the Quran in the world. Yes. What do you think about that, Maria? Well, it's interesting because the radiocarbon dating, of course, gives a range of dates and the range goes I believe from 568 to, I think they said 658",
      "say, you know, between from the 640s or even the 630s. It represents a copy of the Qur'an that predates what the tradition tells us or when the tradition tell us the Uthmani codex that Joseph was just speaking about was collected and in that case it gives us evidence first of all that there were written Qurans or Quranic parts of the",
      "prior to the Uthmani Codex. I mean, prior to this some of the earliest fragments that were found were from a few decades later around the 670s and so this is the earliest one that has been found and it's only two folios and I've gone over it very carefully. Of course, it is in a much older style. It's clearly Meccan-style, very well known. Again, a continental text without full dotting but nonetheless",
      "I compared it, you know very carefully to the Quran we have now and it is indeed identical except for the different ways in which company, you Know the dots and the vowels and so forth are marked And it's you know One of the issues that immediately then came up was people said yes But it could also be earlier than that. In fact, it might even predate the Prophet Muhammad himself Which would feed into",
      "feed into certain revisionist arguments that some Quranic scholars have put forward, that the Qur'an drew upon earlier texts that were Christian perhaps in origin. And this might be in that sense or they might take this as possible evidence of that particular point of view but I'd point out a couple of things actually",
      "lot of issues, technical issues. I'm not really an expert in radiocarbon dating. Apparently they've tested the paper or the parchment rather than the ink and of course, you know, parchment could be reused, right? It could be wiped clean. So we don't know exactly. It's early but we don' t know, you can't pinpoint a date well enough to make a dramatic argument about this predating somehow the Prophet Muhammad. But the other thing that is kind of interesting is one of the pieces is from Surat al-Kahf",
      "from Surah Al-Kahf, the 18th surah of the Quran. And it's from a part, a story that's being told about the companions of the cave, which is known in the Christian tradition as the seven sleepers of Ephesus, which of course not a biblical tradition but a Christian tradition and there's something really unusual in that, in the retelling of that story that the Quran gives. In the Christian account for example it says that the sleepers slept for 300 years before",
      "awakened. In the chronic text, it says they slept for 300 years plus nine. And that's a very significant point because 309 years would be the lunar equivalent of 300 years in the solar calendar, which means that this is not something that would have come from a Christian text. A Christian text would have been using a solar calendar. Right.",
      "Islam itself referring to submission to God. It's rooted in Abraham submitting his will to God, and the Quran talks about people of the book which refers to Jews and Christians. So I'm interested Joseph why don't you talk about that element of things? About the Quran's relationship to the Bible. Well the Quran presents itself as very cognizant",
      "scriptures and as the uh as the gospels it doesn't say new testament itself the four previous revelations that are mentioned by name in the quran are what it refers to as the pages or scrolls of abraham and then it refers",
      "to the Injil or gospel that was with Jesus. But also it's important to note that Jesus is himself referred to in the Quran as a word of God, and some have said that from a Quranic perspective, Jesus Himself is, in a sense, the revelation. Now,",
      "that which came before and that the prophet muhammad is simply sent to confirm the message that previous messengers came and that in fact he brings nothing new and so from a quranic perspective everything that's come through all of the prophets",
      "Laws that different prophets have differ somewhat from time to time. You might say they fit more the circumstances in which people might find themselves at the time, and also the rites or manasic as the Quran calls them are somewhat different within each religion. So one might say that it's a presentation where the form of the religions will differ but",
      "Now in history, of course there are many aspects of it that we can't necessarily assess because we don't have lots of the archaeological information that we might want from a historical critical perspective. But this is how the Qur'an itself presents its relationship with the previous Abrahamic scriptures. With some of the stories that it interacts with for example the figure of Noah appears",
      "And a lot of Christians that read the Bible today read that story in sort of a fundamentalist register where they view this story as literal history, where there was a global flood that wiped out all of humankind except for Noah and his family. Does it show up similarly in the Quran? Is that the same type of story? Are there differences? It is different, particularly in the sense that it doesn't have that universal completely catastrophic,",
      "catastrophic element that you have in the biblical story. And, the story is told in more than one place as many of these stories are told and told for different purposes. The story of Noah is really a story...in the Quran I should say, it's really a about his particular people, his group, his Qawm in Arabic, could be his city, his tribe in a sense or whatever",
      "whatever, or his town, his small group of people where he was living. Well, we don't know how small it was, but it isn't universal. It's his particular people that are wiped out by the flood and his story is often told in a sequence of other stories about people to whom God sent a prophet. But then they did not listen to the prophet. They rejected",
      "And they were wiped out by earthquakes or other kind of devastating, what would seem to be natural events.",
      "idea that God has sent many messengers to humanity. He sends them always with the same essential message, that there is one God and that is the only God they should listen to and they need to behave ethically and morally. And when those prophets are rejected, then disaster eventually comes upon their people.",
      "was, this is kind of a side story, but having children. We have children and you get sort of baby things. They always have this little Noah's Ark theme. We had Noah's ark themed stuffed animals in sheets. I actually had Noahs Ark wallpaper when I was young. It's terrifying. It' s not a children's story at all in many ways. So the chronic account",
      "its telling is different. Do you think most Muslims read it as a literal historical account, or are there some Muslims who will read it more allegorical? I mean contemporary scholarship shows that it has resonances with the Enuma Elish and other Babylonian stories and things. Are there Muslims who have more of a revisionist approach where they'll accept the Quran as revealed but they look at a story like when it's talking about Noah as relating something that's actually not explicitly",
      "The Quran is a very frustrating book for a historian. It's really difficult to find history and build it in that way, and it's one of the things that actually helps, you might say, prevent a literalist reading of the stories of some of these biblical figures. To go back to what Maria was saying about the story of Noah,",
      "life of the building, of the ark. Yeah, the specifics, like how many cubits to make it and stuff. Genesis 6, you have this discussion of the specifics. And then Genesis 9 tells the story after the flood. There's no discussion of that in the Quran. Rather, what you really have in the Koran is this discussion. It said from... In the Korah, it says that Noah called his people for almost a thousand years. And",
      "Then God sent the flood. So really, in a sense, it's a story of how incredibly patient and merciful God is that Noah called his people in one way and they rejected that way. Then Noah went and he called his People in another way. They rejected him again. Then no one went and called his Peoples in another Way and he kept on doing it and he Kept on doing It and He Kept On Doing It And then after more than 900 years, he finally said okay God",
      "okay, God, these people are misguided. Go ahead, have your way with them. But I mean, if you really understand how long it is and you even look and you read the language, there's a tendency sometimes when people read the Quran, you read phrases like, you know, if only they were thankful or if only",
      "read it as if God is angry. But really, you know, if you read it, as God is loving and God is merciful, it's more like a parent who would say for a child, if only he would think, if they would reflect, they would see what I'm trying to do for them. And this comes out in so many of the Quranic stories. And I think Noah's is a very good example",
      "in the Near Eastern milieu, it reflects those. Muslims don't see that as in any way taking away from the fact that it might be revelation. That actually even contributes to it because from a Quranic perspective God sends guidance to every single human collectivity and so for other people to have known about this story,",
      "within civilization in many different ways would actually fit into the overall Quranic understanding of the relationship between the divine and the human. Yeah, and it's this recurring story. And Joseph, you actually write about this in one of the essays in the study Quran, The Quranic View of Sacred History in Other Religions. And you kind of situate the Quran as relating stories of prophets going all the way back to Adam.",
      "But it's this cycle of, to use Mormons talk about a cycle of apostasy and restoration. And it seems to be that that is a recurring theme within the Quran, that God is patient, that sends revelation through a particular figure. Ultimately, that revelation is somehow discarded or disobeyed. And then things come to a head and then they have to start over again.",
      "Yeah, Maria, being the seal of the prophet, you talked about how one of the benefits of the Quran is it kind of shows how God is revealing things for particular circumstances.",
      "them back to devotion to the one God. But him being the seal of the prophet then kind of locks Muslims into that text, and there's not an expectation of further revelation, correct? That's right. Well certainly not in that particular way, not in a sense of sending an actual prophet. And in some ways I think that...I mean",
      "In principle, Muslims can accept religions that came before but it's harder for them to accept religions they came after if they're completely new in the sense that this is sort of the final time that God will speak to humanity. But what does it mean? This is certainly something I find when I read the Qur'an. There's a way in which the Qur-an continues to be revealing one might say",
      "the Qur'an says at the end of the sixth surah, right before the seventh surah where many of these stories as I was saying beginning with Noah are told in sequence. It talks about human beings being made khalaif fil ardh, people who succeed one another continuously on the earth and so you know one group",
      "you know, one group of people is given a message and they don't listen to the message. They're wiped out. Another group of People is given A chance you might say and maybe they succeed for a while or they don' t succeed at all And they are Wiped out and then there's another Group of people and You know after relating these stories the Quran will often say, you know Well that's what they did You're not going to be asked about what they've done And so it's not doing this in order to tell you something so much about the past",
      "the past, but it's a way of saying now it's your turn. You know, now you're the Khalifa. Now you are the generation that has inherited the earth and how are you going to respond? And so there is a way in which again because of the immediacy of the way the Qur'an is revealed, there is this sense that it does continue to speak directly to every new generation.",
      "of the Quran. And Maria wrote one of the essays here that I enjoyed, it's kind of about social justice and ethics in the Quran, and one of things Maria you point out at the beginning of that is that it has been difficult for people to wrap their heads around what sort of ethics are promoted in the Qur'an because the Qurʾān is not a systematic treatise as you mentioned at the begining of the interview, that it comes in waves, it comes with flashes inside and different points are being made, there's complexity there so",
      "think, for people to selectively proof text from the Quran. Find a surah or an ayat that sort of seems very violent or very strange and to kind of pull that out of its context and present that as the message of the Quran so this essay that you write is sort of trying to complicate that and make it more difficult to read it so shallowly. So talk about some of the themes, something that you",
      "of women and violence and things like that. So I'd like to hear more from you on those subjects. Sure. First of all, let me just say that one of the reasons why this is an essay on Islamic ethics and not necessarily on law per se, there is a very widespread misperception",
      "This misperception is based, I think in part on the fact that Islam as a religion is a very legally-based religion. And of course the Sharia is extraordinarily important to Muslims. It refers not just law but in fact their whole way of life. So for that reason there is this sense well you know the Shariah is based on the Qur'an which of course it is and so therefore the Qur'm must be a book of law when in fact that's",
      "There's only about 200 verses or so of the Qur'an that give distinct legal rulings, whereas there are over 6,200 verses in the Qurʾān itself. And the other thing is the legal text where you do find legal rulers tend to be in the Medinian verses almost exclusively with the exception of some dietary laws that appear in Meccan verses.",
      "issues, marriage or divorce, family relations, criminal law, economic or commercial practices and so on. All those things are found in the Medinan verses because when the Prophet Muhammad was in Medina that's when he was not just... In Mecca he was just a leader of a small persecuted religious minority but once he gets to Mecca",
      "is in a position, therefore to create and structure a society based on those principles that the Qur'an was teaching. And so, uh, and the Medinian verses are of course it's not perfectly even but the Medina versus tend to be concentrated toward the first part of the Quran. And So for example, the second third and fourth surahs which were all very, very long, some",
      "And so these Medinan verses, when people pick up the Qur'an and they read from the beginning of the Qur-an, even then it's going to be interspersed with other things but they might see more law and legal rulings than if they actually started from the back. I often tell people to start from the",
      "and really are the context in which these legal rulings have to be understood. And so, in the essay I do begin by saying that you may agree or disagree with the particular rulings that you find in the Qur'an or the way marriage or divorce or family relations are structured and so on. You may very much disagree with those but at the same time it's important to understand",
      "moral in nature. It's about constructing a society where everyone is taken care of, where people are not exploited, where there is unity and harmony to the extent possible. These are where everyone bound by certain rights and responsibilities. And this is kind of the framework in which many of these laws have to be understood. Of course it's very important issue of justice and charity",
      "and generosity, and forgiveness. These things are constantly reiterated in the Qur'an. And at the same time of course the Qur-an is revealed in the seventh century a time when throughout pretty much the known civilized world at that time things like patriarchy or slavery were widespread. Islam doesn't bring patriarchy it doesn't",
      "slavery to a community that had not known those things, but in fact is coming into a situation where those things are understood to be normative perhaps even unchangeable. And so although that structure I know there have been a lot of Islamic feminists or female writers who may not consider themselves feminist who would argue that the Qur'an is ultimately not patriarchal and I think indeed it is trying",
      "undermine to some extent, well at least to amend the patriarchal structure such that it is not so unjust for women. But nonetheless, that patriarchal element in a few places comes out fairly clearly. But again I think what's really important when you look at the Qur'an, you have to look at it on one hand honestly and look at what it says but you also have to",
      "And there are many places where the Qur'an seems particularly concerned to uphold the rights or to, it wouldn't have even been seen as rights at that time, but to amend and improve the situation of women at that",
      "regularly subject to. That's Maria Daycake, she's an associate professor and chair of the religious studies department at George Mason University. She specializes in Islamic thought, Quranic studies, Shiite and Sufi traditions and women's issues. She's also co-director of interdisciplinary Islamic studies program at George",
      "that book. Joseph, I wanted to turn to you to talk a little bit about the translation of this particular edition, the makeup of the Harper 1 edition, how long it took and some of the translation issues that cropped up along the way because there's a saying that goes, the Quran cannot be translated. The true Quran is in Arabic. Any translation is simply",
      "those issues that come up when you're producing a translation? Well, that's a very good question. I don't know if one could really say that it's one of the most difficult books to translate considering that you have a new translation coming out just about every year now. But in our translation in particular, when we first set out to do the text, we thought that we were going to use an existing",
      "model that you have with most, not all but most of the study Bibles that are out there. Yeah like the Jewish Annotated New Testament uses the NRSV so they do yeah. The Jewish Anotated New testament uses the nrsv, the jewish study bible uses a pre-existing translation it's the same with the Harper Collins Study Bible Oxford annotated etc. But as we went through all the translations... This was about 10 years ago that you started this right?",
      "started this, we first started this in January of 2006. Okay so you're going through these translations sort of trying to decide? Yes and then we met and we were all at a conference together and we made the fateful decision that there weren't any that",
      "something that is accurate, consistent and eloquent. We actually developed an Excel word chart in which every word of the Quran is located and every commonly recurring phrase is found so that we could track how we were translating everything and keep track of our workflow. We didn't use this to make sure that everything was always",
      "when we had agreed that certain words in different contexts would need to be rendered somewhat differently. But, we did this to make sure that we had consistency and to keep track of agreements that we have made. The workflow was that each of the general editors, myself, Maria, and Janer Galle who's at the College of the Holy Cross, we would each translate a part of the Qur'an so each of us was responsible for about 1 3rd",
      "We would go through a process where we would get the feedback from the other general editors, then sometimes discuss a few of the issues, differences that we might have. And after we had gone through that discussion, then a final edited version of that with some notes regarding disagreements that might still persist would be sent to the editor in chief. He would go",
      "or where any important editorial things, or any differences of opinion had been settled. Report that back to everyone else. But that was just the first step. Then once we had everything down and we really got even deeper into it when we were going into the commentary, we found even more inconsistencies. And we ended up developing about hundreds of translation memos that would have everything in Arabic and in English and all the different instances of it so that we could go through it",
      "We could go through it and sit down and make an agreement about how we would need to work with particular phrases in particular words so that even if we couldn't have a direct equivalence, in each instance there will be consistency in how we were dealing with particular terms. This was really this by the way is I think part of what does set this translation apart. If you go through the history of Quran translation, it is very different from",
      "from the history of Bible translation in that almost every translation that's out there is an individual effort, of the Qur'an that is. And now I think—I hope that we are starting a trend where translations of the Quran will be done by academic committees and hopefully they'll be more translations than it's done by Academic Committees because there are certainly other ways to do it then what we did but",
      "is a translation that works very well for a study Quran, especially because it is consistent and accurate throughout. With this translation, and with any translation from the original, there's a sense that much of the original can be lost in translation, because one of the things Muslims appreciate most about the Quran is its beauty, its structure. That itself serves as a sign of its being a revelation to Muhammad,",
      "Muhammad, the fact that this person couldn't have sat down and wrote this document. This is something that was revealed. So what are some of the syntax and grammar things that get lost in a translation from Arabic to a language like English? Well I would say that a lot of it has to do with the richness of the Arabic vocabulary. And so words have multiple meanings",
      "And it's a tradition that some commentators will say, certainly mystical commentators, the Quran can have many interpretations. And any grammatically accurate interpretation is one thing that God meant to communicate through that verse. But I can give you one example we had there was a word",
      "method, which can mean example likeness parable. It has a wide range of meanings and you know we did try as Joseph explained to be as consistent as possible so that people would be able to read this and say or see even people who let's say didn't have access to the Arabic and wanted to make a study of how a particular word or term is used in the Quran they could",
      "they could at least do a study at some level because we would try to be consistent in the terminology. Methyl is one of those words that completely defeated us in this, and we realized that when we struggled to find one English word that would fit all these contexts, it simply did not. But you see, that already says something about the differences in language. There is a single word in Arabic that connotes in the mind of someone who knows Arabic all of those things simultaneously.",
      "simultaneously. And so, and that there's no way to represent that in English. Another example, another quick example, there's a word that the Quran uses which is ta'weel. And ta'wil was usually understood to mean interpretation. And in discussing the Quran as the history of Quranic interpretation developed sometimes people made a distinction. Ta'weeul was one of the earliest words that was used for this process",
      "because it is a Quranic term itself and an important one. But there came to be a distinction between two terms, tafsir which is what is usually used for Muslim commentaries or interpretations of the Qur'an exegesis. And tafsira really means to explain something in detail. Taweel is a word that means its etymological meaning is",
      "or to know how something is going to turn out in the end. And so this term is used in many ways, I should say different ways in the Qur'an but always it includes...the term always means both interpretation and the fullness of the meaning of something that might only make itself known over time. So for example",
      "to Jewish and Christian audiences, he has these dreams in the Quran just as in the biblical account that of course foreshadow what's going to happen to him and to his brothers in the end. But he doesn't know what they mean at the beginning. He only knows what those dreams mean when everything comes to fruition and he ends up in charge in Egypt and his brothers come to visit him and so on. Only then does",
      "the full interpretation of those dreams are made known to him. But it's also the ta'wil, in a sense, it's the way those things turn, the full meaning that unfolds over time. And so in the beginning of Surah 3, it says that the ta'twil of the Qur'an is known only to God or, in some readings, known only",
      "the true interpretation of the Quran, but it can also mean they're the only ones who know the fullness of the meaning that will be revealed over time. So again, it's a word that in order to appreciate what it means within the context of the Qur'an you need to have its full semantic range, you might say naturally, in your head and we try to do that through the commentary. We would point these things out",
      "it's still going to be fragmented in a way that it wouldn't be for someone who understands the language and all of these meanings would be present to them. Not only the polyvalence of some of these words, there's also just the baggage that some words carry. Joseph mentions this in his chapter on the Quran and translation, and that's the word din, is that how it's pronounced? Din. Din, so that's religion. And you know, religion from the Western context, they talk about trying",
      "find the roots of that word and some people rooted in the idea to treat something carefully, some people root it in the ideas to bind so we're bound to God. We bind ourselves to God religion, we're tied to God but the Arabic root for deen kind of comes from a totally – not a totally different but a different kind of place where it talks about being to owe a debt, to be obedient, to follow human beings are in debt to God so even",
      "meanings, but there's also instances of words where in English they carry this baggage. People hear religion and think an organized church or something like that whereas throughout the Quran that same word could actually be talking about just owing a debt to God being obedient to God perhaps even pointing to the idea of submitting to God so There are so many things that I wish we had more time to talk about but I wanted to also ask about",
      "One of the things that Joseph, you write in this essay is the Quran cannot be translated on the linguistic plane. You're writing this in a book that is a translation of the Quran. It cannot be translate on the linguistics plane. The only true translation of Quran possible is of an existential order. Only those who have assimilated the revelation or immersed themselves in its teaching so thoroughly",
      "Yeah, that's really what the Qur'an tells one over and over again as one goes through",
      "And as one goes over the Quran, you know, there's a tradition now where the Quran is memorized by many people throughout the Islamic world. But that's considered what we call in Islam a sufficient obligation, meaning that if there are people who are preserving the Quran it's not something everybody has to do.",
      "with the Qur'an to the best of their ability. And so over and over again, the Qur-an says do you not understand? Do you not reflect? Do they not contemplate the Qur-'an or do their hearts have their locks upon them? And the Qurr-an will say in many instances none understand this save those who are possessed of intellect.",
      "intellect. And every single time the Qur'an is challenging you to go deeper into its message, understand it more and live in accord with it. It's said that during the life of the Prophet, many of the companions of the prophet, they would only memorize 10 verses of the Qur-an at a time. And then they wouldn't memorize anything more until they had learned how to act upon",
      "those verses that they had memorized. Once they knew how to implement them, then they would go and memorize 10 more verses. This is something that to some degree you might say is lost in the emphasis upon memorization that you find in some parts of the Islamic world today. It's fascinating. Like I say, the idea is that this text, this book is going to translate you",
      "Is this how most Muslims engage with the text? Do you picture Muslims sitting down with the study Quran and reading through it and meditating upon it, or how do Muslims usually encounter the text. With Christians they'll sit down and read different chapters or they have favorite verses that they might memorize or do studies of different stories. How do most Muslims engaged with the Quran itself? How do you see this translation being used?",
      "Well, I would say first of all as you may know the basic content of the Muslim prayer are passages or parts of the Quran. And so every Muslim has to memorize at least a certain number of small chronic passages in order to be able to say their prayers properly and so most Muslims will memorize",
      "you know, a good number of verses so that they can repeat different verses or different passages. I should say not just versus the different passages in their prayers. A lot of young children when they're Muslim at a very early age, they will have to what they'll call read the whole Quran and that's where they actually work on learning how to read the to to actually recite from looking at the text,",
      "And sometimes it's simply learning how to read the entire text.",
      "content necessarily. But at the same time, many Muslims will continue throughout their lives to read the Qur'an on a regular basis, not just in prayers but also as maybe a regular practice to read a few pages a day of the Qur-an during Ramadan. You may know that the Qurana is...Muslims have divided the Qurra into 30 equal sections and this way people can read the entire Qur'aan in a month. A lot of people like to do that during the month of Ramadan because it's",
      "Quran was revealed. But at the same time, I think there is and for good traditional reasons you might say, there's a lot of hesitance on the part of Muslims to engage entirely with the meaning of the text whether by reading a translation or if they are capable of reading the Arabic text itself and they feel that very much they should depend upon traditional scholars",
      "I teach a class on the Qur'an regularly at my university where I'm based in northern Virginia, where there's a huge Muslim community. And so when I teach courses on the Quran, usually 50 to 75 percent of the class come in one way or another from a Muslim background, whether or not they're observant. And if we're looking at a passage of the Quran often say to them, you know what do you think this means? And I've gotten the response in the past well it's not for us to say what it means.",
      "the traditional commentators say that it means. And I think, you know, on the one hand this is true of course, you don't want sort of interpretive anarchy. The Qur'an can't mean everything but at the same time, you now, I do think that the Qur'aan asks for its listeners and its readers to personally engage with the text. There's a passage that says why do not contemplate",
      "So it's asking, it's very directly asking the reader to do that. But there's a kind of hesitation because people are afraid that they'll interpret something incorrectly. And so one of the things that I hope that this will do is now a Muslim can look at an English who let's say is not an Arabic speaker or might be but can't access the traditional commentaries. They can look and they say well this is what how this what I think this verse means when I read it.",
      "commentator said about this. And they can see in some cases, I mean, in many cases the interpretation is pretty uniform across the tradition but for other verses there might be a multitude of interpretations and then they can look at that, they can engage with that,",
      "They don't feel safe doing it on their own. I can look at what these traditional commentators say, but also I think in some ways opens it up for them to have a more personal engagement, more thoughtful and contemplative engagement with the text. Yeah, there's a sense in which this version, the study Quran itself is really presented to Muslims in particular, also for people of other faiths to get to know Islam better. But there was a decision made early on for the scholars involved in the project",
      "scholars involved in the project to be believing Muslims, that it would be a project by believing Muslims. And Joseph I wanted to have you expand on that a little bit talk about the decision to include only believing Muslims on that and also the place of non-Muslims in scholarship about Islam in general. Well I think the decision",
      "himself. And it's something that I agree with in large part, and the reason I agree is because it really is our responsibility to present Islam to non-Muslims and to the broader non-Arabic reading Muslim audience which is the vast majority of Muslims. Amy Childs-Veen put this very well when I was attending a presentation",
      "for the Jewish commentary on the New Testament when she said that reclaiming our history and retelling our story is our responsibility and our right, and that doing so counteracts many of the effects of colonialism. I think that everything that she is saying there as regards to the Jewish tradition applies completely",
      "there hasn't been the opportunity for Muslims to fully, in a sense, tell their story within the Western context. There's too much noise around it and I think that this volume will be an important step towards that. One of the things that we should reflect upon where we sit today is a very interesting point",
      "has quite unexpectedly become an international language of Islamic intellectual discourse. And therefore, to have a study Quran that comes out in English is not just something that's important within English-speaking countries such as Australia, America, the UK, etc., but really has the potential for important international impact.",
      "He's a professor in the Department of Arabic and Translation Studies at the American University of Sharjah. And he's written and translated articles on, and books on Islamic philosophy, Sufism, Quranic studies. And also served as an advisor for interfaith affairs to the Jordanian royal court together with Maria Daycake they are general editors of The Study Qur'an from HarperOne you can read more about The Study Qu'ran you can download some sample pages from it at thestudyquran.com",
      "We'll take a brief break and be right back with the conclusion of this episode.",
      "It's the Maxwell Institute Podcast. I'm Blair Hodges. Today we're speaking with Maria Daycake and Joseph Lombard.",
      "and as general editors for HarperOne's Study Quran, which is coming out in November. You can read more about that book at thestudyquran.com. I've also put links up on the Maxwell Institute's website. So I wanted to conclude this interview by going back to the beginning, the opening surah of the Quran,",
      "portion of the text. So Joseph, if you would, that would be great. I'm happy to do so with the one caveat that I am not a professional reciter. And there are like really professional reciters, right? I mean, there are even competitions where people can win awards for beauty, accuracy. What kind of things do they judge it on? Accuracy is first and foremost. And then also",
      "and to know the rules of recitation, and then to be able to implement them really perfectly. It's really very, very technical to be able to recite the Qur'an just right. Okay so with that caveat this isn't a competition so you'll give us a really good idea for what this sounds like. So here's the opening",
      "بالعالمين الرحمن الرحيم مالك يوم الدين إياك نعبد وإياك",
      "Thank you. That was excellent. And then, Maria, why don't you read the translation of this that",
      "Who did this one, by the way? Who did his translation? Joseph did. Oh good. Okay so Maria read Joseph's translation then of this opening surah. In the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful. Praise be to God Lord of the worlds, the Compassionate, the Merciful. Master of the day of judgment. Thee we worship and from thee we seek help.",
      "So that's the entirety of that opening surah. And what's interesting to me is you then include one, two, three, four... about seven pages of commentary on that and what's",
      "volumes that have been written about just this opening sort of. So how did you decide what to fit in there? And we'll close by talking about some of your favorite elements of the commentary on this opening. Maria, why don't you start and then we'll have Joseph. Well could I actually say something since I'm technically credited with writing the commentary",
      "often we would kind of do our thing and look in the commentaries and present it to everyone else after we finished the research and writing. For this one, since it was the opening one, the first thing that we did was we had a group discussion about what should be included. And then after we had that group discussion, I wrote the commentary. So really, this particular commentary is more",
      "How do you how do you decide how to boil it down in addition to the commentary? There's also about two pages of introductory material as well Right and I would say that this this verse although It is this I should say this passage this or even though. It's very small it is Repeated by Muslims continuously it functions for Muslims in a way That's very similar for example to the Lord's Prayer in Christianity, and people have pointed out that there are some similarities",
      "some similarities in terms of its tone and the attitude it takes toward God. But when Muslims pray, every prayer has a certain number of cycles in it. So the morning prayer has two cycles in the content of the prayer itself. Sometimes people will do additional cycles but there's two cycles on the morning prayers and four in the afternoon prayers and three at sunset and four",
      "And so each one of these cycles of prayer includes and begins with a recitation of this passage. So this is something that every Muslim, even a small child by the age of three living in a household where people are praying all the time will just learn by heart from hearing it repeated so many times.",
      "And it encapsulates the attitude of the human soul toward God from a Muslim perspective. Joseph, what sticks out to you about this and what you all elected to focus on in the commentary? Well, I have to say it was really a privilege to work on this particular commentary.",
      "is because there are sayings attributed to the Prophet Muhammad which say that it is the most important surah. And there's a famous saying, which says that everything that is in the Qur'an is found in the Fatiha and everything that isn't the Fajr is in first sentence of it Bismillah ar-Rahman ar- Rahim in the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful and everything",
      "begins with. But as one goes through it, one really does see that there's a degree to which this is you can really see how this works because for example if you look at what is verse 3 the compassionate and merciful right before it verse 2 says praise be to God the Lord of the worlds verse 4 says master of the day",
      "saying that God encompasses all space. When you say that God is master of the day of judgment, you are alluding to the manner in which God governs all time. And when you are saying that is the compassionate and merciful right between those, it's a way of saying that",
      "one of the central messages that you have throughout the entire Qur'an is that God is merciful and compassionate, that God wants to forgive, that god wants to even annul all of your sins so long as you turn to God. As one verse of the Qur'aan says, God does not change what is in a people until they change",
      "what is in yourself, that God will help you do that more and more and",
      "Thank you for having us. Thank you very much for having me, Claire."
    ]
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    "file": "dakake/Speaker Series_ Maria Dakake_8b5S8dz4upw&pp=ygUSTWFyaWEgTWFzc2kgRGFrYWtl_1750208179.opus",
    "text": [
      "My name is David Germano from the Contemplative Science Center, and we're really happy to present today's talk on Encountering the Divine Through His Most Beautiful Names by Professor Maria Deikink. He's a professor of religious studies at George Mason University, and this is co-sponsored by the Virginia Center for the Study of Religion, the Medieval Studies Program, and the Contemporary Sciences Center. And so this is part of our effort to try to highlight contemplation in the world's religious traditions",
      "religious traditions. Last year we did Catholicism and then we've had several forms of Buddhism, and we have two lectures this month on talking about Islamic contemplation. So we're very happy to have Professor Deke here. And Professor Shankar Nair from the University of Virginia is going to give a more detailed introduction. Right so I'm extremely pleased to have professor with us.",
      "She's a very far-ranging scholar. She's published on Islamic philosophy, she's published Sufism, Muslim spirituality, female Muslim spirituality Shi'ism as well as the Quran Most recently, the truly landmark publication The Harper Collins Study Quran Maria was part of the team of principal editors who produced the first team translation of the Quran in English",
      "contribution of going through the thousand plus years of major influential commentaries upon the Qur'an from all the major disciplines, Sunni commentary, Shia commentary, Sufi. I mean the whole gamut and provide commentary on each and every verse of the Qur-an in that context so rather along the model of a study Bible it's the first of its kind. I know because I was actually one",
      "Over ten years of blood, sweat and tears and personal sacrifice went into this publication. And I'm very happy to see that it's bearing fruit. So today Maria is drawing on one of her many, many wealths of expertise to talk about Sufi Islamic forms of contemplation. Please join me in thanking her for being here with us. Well good afternoon. Thank you all for coming out",
      "all for coming out and I want to thank David for inviting me, and I wanna thank Shankar and also Mick for all their help in bringing me here. And of course Shankar for his very generous introduction. I'm very happy to be speaking here today at the Contemplative Studies Center because I think when most people think of religions that emphasize contemplation or mindfulness, Islam is not usually",
      "first religion that comes to mind. You might think of Buddhism or Taoism, or various forms of Hinduism and so forth. But it probably didn't occur to you either even though many of you here might be people who are very interested in spiritual forms of contemplation or forms of Contemplation in different contexts.",
      "are not aware, often and sometimes they're quite suspicious even about the rich and sophisticated and well-developed traditions of contemplation and meditation that are part of their own intellectual and practical heritage. Those traditions are centrally located in the Islamic perspective known as Sufism a term that some of you may be familiar with.",
      "all parts of the Islamic world in various manifestations and really at all levels of society. So you had very scholarly forms, you had popular forms and so on. And it could be found throughout the Islamic World, all the way from North Africa or Sub-Saharan Africa, all they way to Indonesia and everywhere in between. Now today Sufism is in some quarters",
      "a kind of accretion or something not very Islamic that has entered into the tradition. In fact, it is critiqued from different ends of the Muslim spectrum on the one hand from what we would call Salafi are very fundamentalist Muslims who tend to see as a kind innovations sort of religious or practical innovation in the tradition which I don't think that it is but also by some very modern",
      "progressive approaches to Islam that seek to have a more worldly or scientific, or sort of narrowly ethical approach to their religion rather than one that is overtly spiritual in nature. So while Sufism does continue to be alive all throughout the Islamic world I don't mean to give you the impression that it's not even in Muslim countries where Muslims are minority, even in countries where it's banned explicitly for example in Saudi Arabia",
      "it does at least covertly exist. But, it's nowhere near as popular as it was about five or six hundred years ago when some scholars estimate that maybe about 75% of the Muslim population in one way or another identified with a Sufi tradition. In fact many contemporary Muslims view Sufism wittingly or unwittingly through the lens and judgment of certain Orientalist scholars who saw Sufisim",
      "have emerged in the very law-centered and rigidly apophatic religion of Islam as they saw it, and therefore assumed it had to be the result of foreign influences either from the Indian subcontinent or parts of Central Asia where there were Buddhist practices or from Christian ascetic practices in other parts of the Near East. Anyone familiar with Sufi thought and practice however knows how deeply and pervasively",
      "doctrines and the metaphysics of Sufism is deeply and pervasively rooted in Quranic principles, Quranic terminology, and many other ideas that are specific to the Islamic tradition. So today I want to discuss an idea that is both central to the Islam exoteric theological tradition but also to Sufi thought and practices",
      "The divine names are thought of by Sufis and ordinary Muslims everywhere as sort of a kind of locus onto the knowledge or the presence of God, a place where one can come and encounter something, know something of God. So let me begin with a brief explanation of what the divine names refers to in Islam and how they emerge and are thought",
      "most common and important name for God in Islam is Allah. A name that some consider to be a proper name, as a name specific to him, a name that no other person might be called. You might have noticed just last week there was something in the news about some parents in the United States who want to name their daughter Allah. And I thought oh well, I don't know about that. So in any case,",
      "that it's not a proper name, that it is actually kind of elision of the Arabic term, which means God. Now in addition to this name Allah, the Quran describes God through the use of many other names, which represent God's many attributes. That is qualities or actions that are predicated of God in the Quran.",
      "Now typically, Muslims will talk about the 99 names of God. This idea of the 99 Names of God is very well established in Islam and it seems to be based on a Hadith saying of the Prophet Muhammad where he said, God has 99 names 100 minus one. He is odd and he loves the odd in the sense of odd numbers as opposed to even because",
      "points back to the one. The one who counts them, and it's literally a word that means to count one by one. He who counts then enters paradise. So some of you may have seen that Muslims will occasionally use prayer beads very common of course in many of the world traditions but the Muslim prayer beads usually have 99 little beads on them divided into three sections",
      "Sometimes they'll just have 33. But clearly, the tradition of making what's called a tesbih, the Islamic prayer beads in this way is related to this idea that God has 99 names. Now certainly there are more than 99 predicates of God in the Quran and so even though this idea of 99 names is very important, there's not one standard list of 99 name. There were many lists that were made but overwhelmingly",
      "are found. And so I've handed out to you, there's some up here if you don't have them, this is a list, this isn't 99 if you're interested in counting, I think it's 70 something, but it's a list of 70 names of God that are found on almost all lists of the names of god and so I have on one side the kind of transliterated Arabic name and on the other side an English rough translation.",
      "So these names are understood to refer to God's attributes or qualities, and as such they usually take the form of adjectives or active participles predicated of God. So God is the compassionate, the merciful, the hearing, the seeing, the mighty, the wise, the sublime, the tremendous, the all-encompassing, the knowing. Now you may have noticed when I just said those things that I said them in pairs",
      "And that's because the divine names often occur in this way, in the Quran as pairs that are mentioned usually at the end of a particular verse or sometimes even at the and of a section. A sort of lengthy section within one of the Quranic surahs or chapters. So I've just given you, I won't read them all but I've given you some examples here. God loves not that evil should be spoken of openly save by one who has been wronged.",
      "God is hearing, knowing. So it's clear how the name relates to the idea he doesn't like to hear certain things right? He doesn't want to hear evil being spoken openly or let's say if we go to this one, The Parable of Those Who Spend Their Wealth in the Way of God is that of a grain which grows seven years and every year 100 grains and God multiplies for whomsoever he will and God is all-encompassing",
      "of God again. So this kind of thing occurs all throughout the Quran. There are other cases where a single divine name, or sometimes two, will be put in a phrase that emphasizes the degree to which God manifests that quality in an absolute sense, or emphasizes that. For example it says here, so observe the vestiges",
      "mercy how he revives the earth after its death truly that is the reviver of the dead and that's one of the names uh and he is powerful over all things right or god guides unto his light whomsoever he will God sets forth parables for mankind and God is knower of all things, right? So these are some of the ways in which they occur. Now contemporary scholars have discussed",
      "function that these divine names serve in the Quran's overall argument, that they emphasize certain messages or they divide the surahs into particular sections. Those kinds of things. And those are all very interesting but from a point of view of contemplation, from a points of view as a site for encountering God, the ending of chronic verses with these",
      "always back to God. Whatever else is being discussed, there's always this reminder in that sense of God's presence and that idea of reminder of course is very important as I'll talk about today a little later. So now the names do not always occur at the end of verses sometimes they occur throughout individual verses and they don't always take the form of adjectives",
      "adjectives or active participles, descriptives. Sometimes the names are other nouns that refer to other realities so one of the important ones is that God is light. But the Quran also explicitly identifies God as light. It says God is the light of the heavens and the earth. And this gave many commentators a certain amount",
      "of trouble, right? What does it mean that God is the light? Is God you know that light that's coming out of the LCD projector there what does it means that God as well. A lot of commentators would say well doesn't really mean God is light, means he's like light because he guides people just like light can guide people but the Sufi Abu Hamad al Ghazali 11th century, 11th 12th century Sufi said no no no you're wrong when it says God is",
      "And everything else that we call light is a metaphor. The light of the sun is light because it's like God in that it offers guidance or sustenance and that kind of thing. So you can see how these names sometimes generated conflicts. What did it mean to say that God was light? There are other nouns that God is associated with, like justice for example, or truth. These are also actual names for God.",
      "list that I gave you of divine names, you'll see that they vary in some other ways. Some seem to refer to qualities that God is in himself. For example, living, holy, one, knowing, powerful. Others relate to the way in which he interacts with his creatures. Merciful, forgiving, protector, judge.",
      "all-encompassing, eternal. Whereas others represent virtues that human beings might themselves manifest like generous or kind or forgiving. Some of the names seem to be contradictory. How is it that God is both a giver of life and a givers of death if he never changes? How is He both the partner and the possessor of vengeance? How can He be both of those things at the same time without imagining change in God?",
      "So this is a very long theological discussion that doesn't have to detain us here, but much ink was spilt on it. But I will say this, that one of the conclusions at almost all of the theological treatments of this came to was that the names and attributes are not separate from the essence. They're not distinct in themselves. And in fact there's a question, a debate about how real those names or attributes really were.",
      "So some people would say that the names and attributes are really just God's essence, limited in a way so that we puny human beings can understand it. So we might imagine a light coming through a prism, right? And then it separates into all of these different colors. So if that light is sort of the light of the essence that is too bright, too powerful,",
      "When it hits the prism, the prisma of human intelligence, it separates into less intense forms of light. But also forms of life that appear diverse and distinct to have different colors but we know all those colors are actually really there and not really separate and that distinction is a kind of illusion. It's not real so that was a way of dealing with that particular problem. Now while these attributes and names of God serve",
      "something about God's nature. They are presented in the Quran and Islamic tradition again very explicitly as names, meaning that they're not just attributes and qualities but there things that human beings can use to call upon God to recognize and witness to his presence to invoke some aspect of God in their lives like mercy and certainly for Sufis",
      "invocation of these names in a way that would draw them ever nearer to that untouchable, sublime essence that ultimately remains beyond human reach. One Sufi said the names are the keys to God's attributes and God's Attributes are the Keys to God Essence. So the Quran encourages its readers",
      "of God very explicitly in more than one place. So it says, unto God belong the most beautiful names so call him by them and leave those who deviate with regard to his name. The second one says say call upon God or call upon the compassionate. The compassionate is one of his names you'll see toward the very top of the list there. Whichever you call upon to him belong",
      "nor too quiet, but seek a way between. Now the command to call God by his names is understood by all Muslims to mean that one can use any one of the names of God's, sorry, any one name of the name of God as, names of His attributes I should say, as an actual proper name of god. So in this second verse here it mentions one name in particular, the compassionate.",
      "only uses this name, the compassionate or in Arabic ar-Rahman. It's the only one that it uses as a proper name for God other than Allah but most Muslims understood these verses to mean that any of God's names could be used as a property and you can call upon him according to those names. The Sufi commentator Al-Kushayri who lived in the 10th and 11th centuries",
      "comments on this verse by noting that people tend to call upon God using the names that reflect the way they personally think about God. So he says, people who are very worldly focused on things in the world, they will call God by names like creator or fashioner because they're more focused on God's effects in the word than on God. Those who are interested in God's mercy would call upon him as Ar-Rahman, compassionate",
      "or arraheen. But for Sufis, who were always at least aspiring to come closer and closer to the divine essence itself, they tended to call God either by the name Allah which was associated with the essence, or by the Al-Haqq which means the real. And for Sufi's Al-haqq meant that ultimately",
      "if God was al-Haq, nothing else was real. God is the only real, the only reality. So calling on that name referred to his essence and helped remove their consciousness from other things or to see the illusory nature of other things in existence. Now it should be pointed out that both of these verses right here mention the names",
      "repeated in the title of my talk. And this uses, this term The Most Beautiful is a translation of the Arabic Husna which means not just beautiful in a physical sense but also virtuous and good. All those things are connected together in this word. Muslims traditionally divided the names of God into what they called names of beauty Jamal",
      "with names of beauty referring to God's merciful, protective and imminent qualities. And names of majesty referring to his radical transcendence, his power, his might and at times even his wrath. Because it is always God's beautiful names that the Quran bids its readers to invoke. And because it was believed by invoking God by a particular name you were sort of calling",
      "or upon your situation, it was usually recommended that you only call him by the beautiful names. If you feel that you've been dealt a kind of injustice, you don't want to call out, oh possessor of vengeance because you could be wrong and then the wrong sort of attribute was going to come down on your own head. It was considered somewhat dangerous. Now the idea that God's names could be divided into names of beauty and majesty was understood.",
      "It's a division that's made by all Muslims. But for those on the esoteric path of Sufism, meditation and contemplation and even invocation of God's names of both beauty and majesty, and in fact the continual alteration between beauty and Majesty as a focus in their contemplative practices with regard to the divine are described as being deeply meaningful and spiritually generative for them. That the god whom they sought so fervently",
      "had himself attributes of beauty and terrible majesty, seemed consistent with their own experiences on the Sufi path which entailed periods of spiritual dryness and spiritual bounty. Moments of boundless joy and contentment when one felt that God was very near but also moments of pain and longing when God seemed distant absent and unresponsive. That is God's beauty",
      "Sufis not just names and attributes which they might use in their practices of invoking or meditating upon God, but also encapsulated their own experiences of God brought about by those practices of meditation and contemplation. So for example there's a 12th century Sufi, Persian Sufi Ruzbahan Bakli who wrote what was very unusual actually,",
      "during his contemplative practices. And he will regularly talk about being, undergoing assaults of divine beauty, undergoing assaults of divine majesty, right? Showing that really both of these were in their own way quite difficult for him to deal with. He beautifully describes the sessions of meditation and contemplation as sessions",
      "using the nets of the divine names, right? So it was a way of capturing something of God's presence. Now for some, the extent to which one conceived of God on the basis of his names of beauty or majesty represented different levels of nearness or distance from God. So the 18th century, 18th, 19th century Sufi, Sheikh al-Darkawi who lived in North Africa pointed out that for people who are more exoteric Muslims",
      "the esoteric Muslims, God appears to them or seems to them outwardly to be very majestic and inwardly to beautiful and merciful. Whereas for those on the Sufi path he was outwardly seemed to be beautiful and very merciful and inward seem to be majestic. Now why is this? He doesn't actually say but I would say that in a way",
      "a person who is following an exoteric path might see God primarily as a boundary setter and a boundary keeper, who sort of establishes certain laws and rituals that you have to obey. And so appears in those majestic qualities of sovereign or lawgiver or judge, right? But in those quiet moments when that person",
      "maybe calling upon God to be merciful toward him in some aspect of his life, he might experience God as very merciful. God answers his prayer and also is very near because there's a verse of the Quran that says whenever people supplicate me I respond. Whenever people ask about me I am near so there's this idea that there is a nearness that's generated by the act not of meditation but of supplication,",
      "But for Sufis, whose chief aspiration was to realize the presence of God in all of reality, it would be those names of beauty and eminence that would be in their mind most of the time as they went about outwardly, at least ideally. But because in their meditative practices they were seeking to get closer and closer to the divine essence, inwardly it was very majestic. Inwardly they would understand when they call God",
      "call God the real, meaning that everything else is illusory. That's a kind of majestic quality that cuts you off in a sense from the rest of the world. So I think of it in some ways and Sufis often likened these kinds of things or stories about gods to stories about kings so it's like the ordinary people in a kingdom right? The ordinary commoners for whom the king was probably very terrifying he was the sovereign",
      "authority, but he was also distant. He lived in that big castle up on the hill and you didn't really have to think about him in your day-to-day life except when a tax man came once a year to collect whatever the king said had to be collected. So they would experience God in this way as powerful as or the King they would experienced him as powerful but also is distant. But occasionally they might need a favor from the king and then maybe granted a boon and",
      "He's tremendously generous, because it's very easy for a king to be generous with so much wealth and so much power. But that's different than the experience of the king that you would have if you were one of the kings' courtiers, one of members of his inner circle. Every day, you would the luxury and honor of being present in his beautiful and opulent court but you would also regularly be witness",
      "sovereignty with such regularity and such closeness that it might engender in you even more fear, an even more awe than the ordinary commoner might have in relation to the king. All right so I think what I want to do at this point...I'm going to skip my next slide.",
      "about the divine names and what they are, how they function. I want to talk a little bit more specifically about how they're incorporated into Sufi practices of meditation and contemplation. So I think what you can see is that while Sufi practice of meditation are focused very specifically on Quranic and Islamic concepts like the divine name when we look at",
      "practices, the way that these were actually practiced and some of the meditative techniques that were used we can see that they are very similar to what you might find in other traditions of meditation because human beings are the same everywhere. They have the same problematic brain. They had the same a problematic tendencies right? To distraction and to the love of novelty. They don't like sitting",
      "same thing over and over again. And so Sufis developed various techniques that would assist them in concentration. Now, in talking about the practices of Sufies I have to issue one caveat which is that many of these practices are unknown to people outside of a particular Sufi order. When Sufism wrote they tended",
      "write more commonly about doctrines or metaphysical principles. They didn't tend to write so much about what they were actually doing in their sessions of meditation, it was more of an oral transmission and this is in part because Sufis considered this act of meditation to be at times mentally and spiritually disturbing enough that you needed to have a guide who would instruct you",
      "your bearings a bit in the wrong way anyway while doing this practice. Now meditative and contemplative practice in Sufism is focused on the idea of dhik, which I don't have it here. It's spelled D-H-I-K-R in transliteration. And thik means both reminder",
      "It also means to mention or invoke something. The idea of dhikr is found in various forms all throughout the Quran. Some people will say it's the most common command in the Quran, is to remember or mention, invoke God, this idea of Dhiqr. But it's usually for most Muslims not associated with an actual practice of invocation per se but",
      "but with the kind of general quality of remembering God in their lives. So for example, the Quran says that before human beings, any human beings entered the earth, God brought forth all of them before him and said am I not your Lord? And they all said yes. And then he sends them back right when they manifest themselves on Earth But they don't remember this original sort of commitment that they made to recognize God",
      "God as their Lord. And so it's understood that the whole process of life is an attempt at unforgetting this moment, remembering, right? Anamnesis, this idea of recovering a knowledge that somehow there but forgotten. So the Quran's repeated imperative to remember God was understood at a basic level to mean that all human beings should try to cultivate an awareness of God's continual presence",
      "A quality or characteristic sometimes referred to in Arabic as taqwa. Taqwa is sometimes described as a kind of mindfulness that should ideally be continuous and uninterrupted in one's life, and one that was facilitated in many ways by the spiritual imagination. At one point Muhammad is asked what is virtue? What is virtue, and Muhammad says",
      "says, virtue is to remember God as if you saw him. As if. Because you don't see him. So you're supposed to remember him as if he was seen and that as if William Chittick really points to this role of the imagination. You have to pretend in a sense in order to make it more present to yourself.",
      "faculties know God primarily as absence but is only through the spiritual imagination that you can know God, taste God as he would say, as presence. And that spiritual imagination is really facilitated by the divine names right when you read those names it gives you a kind of imaginative profile of who this being",
      "So remembering God entailed first and foremost cultivating this constant awareness or mindfulness of God at all times. But some passages of the Quran indicate that remembering God, dhikr Allah should entail an actual physical practice related to the other meaning of dhikk namely invocation or mentioning. And so I put this up again it says, and remember your Lord within your soul humbly and in awe",
      "being not too loud a voice in the morning and evening, and be not among those who are heedless.\" So while many passages of the Quran where it talks about dhikr or remembrance, talks about it in a general way this seems quite specific. It's telling you should do with a particular tone of voice and that you",
      "and in evening. And this was the way that it was typically done in Sufi practice, right? So the morning and the evening became our, in fact, particularly important times for the invocation, this practice of invocation. Now, this idea that human beings should or Sufis I should say",
      "or Sufis, I should say, not just human beings. But should remember God both in a general way and in a specific way is something that combination is something That is not totally unique to Sufism but almost completely unique within the Sufi tradition. Nonetheless it has certain reference in the ordinary exoteric Muslim tradition,",
      "of the prophet. So we find, in addition to that chronic verse I just showed you, we find a number of statements attributed to the Prophet that talk about practices either that he engaged in or one assumes his companions engaged and that look very much like what Sufis do in their own practices of invocation.",
      "until sunrise. This grants one the reward of performing a hajj.\" Now, you may not realize that there's a significant distinct difference between dawn and sunrise. We use those terms often simultaneously or... Thank you! Interchangeably. But they're actually different times of day. So dawn is when",
      "the full sun appears on the horizon. And it's a period of about an hour and 40, hour and 45 minutes. And Muslims were supposed to... The first prayer, first canonical prayer of the day that Muslims prayed was supposed to be at dawn. Not at sunrise but at dawn, right? So you would pray this prayer and the morning prayer is pretty short. It's the shortest one, right. And so one would typically like",
      "up out of bed and pray this prayer, and go back to bed. But the Sufis didn't do that right? So they would get up in the morning, they would pray, and then they would engage in some form of invoking God sitting so it didn't refer to other prayers because when Muslims say their canonical prayers are standing and bowing and kneeling and so on. They would sit and invoke God for",
      "It's a quiet time of the day. It's before all the days activities begin, but it's a lengthy enough time for significant invocation. And then invoking in the evening although is not mentioned this particular statement of the prophet would often be between the time of sunset and nightfall just slightly shorter period But again a period of contemplation at the two ends of the",
      "All right, so another hadith of the Prophet. Another saying of the prophet is, The last hour, meaning the end of the world, will not come until there is no one left on earth saying Allah, Allah. The fact that if that name appears twice is important. If it was just once, I'm not supposed to walk in front of this. If It was just wants right? Until there was no one",
      "the last hour won't come so long as there's any Muslim that ever says Allah, right? But to say it twice like that makes it clear that it's meant to be something that's done in repetition. Okay. Now Sufis incorporated the regular practical and physical invocation of the divine names and particularly the divine name Allah",
      "devotions and as part of communal worship practices. So in addition to this solitary practice of dhikr that you might do on a daily basis, Sufis often make more rigorous, more extended retreats in which they would be alone for a long period of time. The traditional period of",
      "sleeping very little, sitting in isolation usually in a pretty small room. And I might have a picture. Some of these rooms were attached to mosques or Sufi centers in different parts of the Islamic world and you would go and sit there and just do devotions, the majority of which would be related to the invocation of either the divine name or divine names.",
      "These solitary exercises were complemented by congregational sessions in which members of a particular Sufi order gathered to engage in the communal recitation of litanies, of Quranic verses or sacred formulae as well as the invocation of God. Usually using the name Allah but sometimes including a recitation all 99 divine names or sometimes focusing on particular ones that might have been important to a given Sufi Order",
      "They at least, at some time involve an invocation of the Muslim, first half of the Muslims' testament of faith which is la ilaha illallah. There is no God but God. Some Sufis argue that they felt uncomfortable repeatedly reciting this testament, la ilahe illallah because they said well what if I die after the first part",
      "There is no God, right? And that's the last thing you ever said on Earth. But in general they tended to focus just on the divine name itself or sometimes the divine or the name Allah has an H sound at the end when you say it in full form it's Allahu. It has a kind of vowel sound at",
      "also just refer to God as huwa, which just means he. As in he, he's the only he that is. He's the thing that is and also this short form of that pronoun huwa is just who, which is identical with the last syllable of the name Allahu so there's a kind of progressive inward movement from la ilaha illallah, there's no god but God, to just Allah, to",
      "inward movement in that way. Now, in terms of which divine names they would use, as I said, often depended on the particular Sufi order but also on the individual. So many Sufis recognized or believed that certain divine names, a repetition, an invocation, and meditation on certain divine name had a particular effect upon the soul. And so a Sufi Shaikh is a Sufie guide or master",
      "master would be able to prescribe a particular divine name or a particular litany of divine names to be invoked as a kind of cure, as a medicine for a particular malady in the soul. Now when they engaged in these practices Sufis also often used different techniques",
      "So sometimes they would alternate their voices. Sometimes they would do various practices related to the breath, right? At times they would all turn eight saying just the single divine name Allah, Allah, that relates to the essence with short litanies of other divine names so that the kind of diversity of God's qualities and his kind of essential singularity",
      "simultaneously in the mind of the person doing the invoking. Some, like Shaykh al-Darkawi who I had already mentioned even report using techniques of visualization so he was instructed by his master that while he was audibly invoking the name Allah He should visualize the five letters of the name allah and",
      "over and over again, at any time a thought, a worldly thought would come to my mind I would refocus my attention on that visualization. It stayed fixed it was like an anchor that I could hold onto when I started to sway, to stray from my thoughts. And he said eventually the worldly thoughts kind of gave up and they didn't bother me anymore then I started having spiritual thoughts, spiritual intimations. He said I avoided those too.",
      "a lesser Sufi might have heard those and sort of reveled in them as a kind of sign that their meditation was paying off, that they were receiving certain spiritual insights. But he said no I rigorously ignored them and kept focusing just on those letters. And he said but then eventually this one...I kept hearing this voice, this idea come to my head",
      "together in one passage of the Quran, and it's talking about God. It says he is the first and the last, the outward and the inward, and just kept coming. And he said I tried to ignore but I couldn't, I couldn' t, it just kept on coming. So finally I said to him, I said that the voice or whatever this idea was coming to me, I don't get the outward! I understand God as a first and",
      "physical stuff that we see?\" And the answer comes to him, I said the outward. I meant the outward if it was anything other than all of that physical stuff you see on the outward, it would be the inward. So outward and that was it. So this, I thought this was kind of an interesting anecdote that's included in one of the letters",
      "really focusing on the divine name almost as a vision, right? That's in his meditative practice and trying to ignore even spiritual insights that he is getting. But in the end this practice kind of uncovers in a sense a problem that he has. Deep down he doesn't understand why it's not the first time he's ever heard that, right. It's not like he was like really the outward. This is a very common chronic verse you would have heard it but in the setting",
      "that problem kind of uncovered itself and was in a way exercised, you might say by this practice and by him actually confronting it. And he reports afterward, then I realized there was nothing in existence except Allah and nothing in created being except Him. So he comes to this ultimate realization. Now Sheikh Ardakawi's experience",
      "Akkawi's experience in invocation is one in which there is this kind of inner doubt that's uncovered, exposed and resolved. But some other Sufis like Ruzbahan Bakli who I mentioned before also talks about an example a kind of experience he has where he's in his congregational not in his private meditation but his congregatioal meditation",
      "repeating the various names of God. Now in the Quran it says that all creatures, in reality even inanimate things like the sun and the moon and the trees and the mountains praise and worship and glorify God but human beings just can't hear it. And so through this congregational meditation Ruzbahan Bakhli has a vision where he can suddenly see it taking place in this way. So while in the midst",
      "midst of the session, he hears God addressing him directly saying I myself preside when your assembly recites my names. Ruzbahan reports",
      "So here it's not the resolution of an inner doubt, but a kind of vision of what the Quran says is going on all the time. Although most people can't understand it. However, the real goal of invocation as expressed",
      "as expressed in slightly different ways and different Sufi traditions is the increasing dominance of the divine names over the soul and consciousness of the invoker. And the increasing penetration of the Divine Name into deeper and deeper reaches of one's being, a bit like the image of undulating and apparently interiorizing archways of traditional Islamic architecture. I have a picture there",
      "Picture there, the Mosque of Cordoba. Like this, the path of invocation through repetition should lead increasingly inward. Sometimes this inward movement was reflected in the types of invocations. As I said you might start out simply by saying the canonical prayer that everybody says and then after that you might engage in certain litanies",
      "recite the Qur'an itself. And then you might recite, there is no God but God and then you would just recite God and maybe at a certain point you would recite that last syllable so even in one session there might be that kind of inward movement. But in other accounts this inward progression was not related to the content of invocation or meditation but to the location what they consider the location of the invocation itself. So many people said",
      "the invocation should begin on the tongue. You begin by actually using, uttering right? The divine name so it begins on the Tongue eventually the invocations should move to the heart at which point it might be a purely silent invocation but still very focused and eventually it would move to what is called in Arabic the Sir usually sometimes the Roh but in most cases the Sir",
      "is usually translated as kind of the inmost heart. I'm losing my voice now. The inmost, but the word sir itself actually means secret because it refers to the part of yourself that is so hidden that most people go their whole lives not even aware of its presence. So ultimately that was the goal",
      "of the self. And for some, it wasn't a purely linear kind of inward movement but also circular. Some argue that all these aspects of the person, the tongue, the heart, their innermost being were all profoundly connected. So if we go to this verse which I had put up before",
      "And remember your Lord within your soul humbly and in awe, being not loud of voice in the morning or evening. And be not among those who are heedless.\" The commentator Fakhreddin Razi, who is not usually identified as a Sufi, he's usually identified kind of rational theologian and commentator, philosophical in some ways but not typically as a sufi. But he gives us a very Sufi interpretation of this verse in his commentary.",
      "He points out this profound connection between the body, the soul and what he calls a spirit or a roux. And says that each one is a kind of door onto the other. The invocation, he says when it is uttered by the bodily tongue is heard by the soul. And the reverberations stir the imagination of the invoker.",
      "intensifies the light and the divine self-manifestation within the very spirit, the roh of the invoker. After this it reverberates back again to the tongue strengthening it further in its invocation. And it continues on in this way as a series of ever intensifying reverberations. The act of invocation thus takes place simultaneously",
      "all three levels, each reflecting upon and strengthening the others. One imagines a kind of chorus of invocations like a choir singing in rounds and filling the consciousness with continuous intonation of the divine name. Finally, Shaykh al-Alawi among others identifies",
      "to be such that the name so infuses the being of the invoker, but it entirely overwhelms his or herself. At which point he or she is no longer effectively the invokr rather it is God who is invoking himself through that person. Now many Sufis would say that ultimately every invocation is always and everywhere God invoking His own name",
      "But for Shaykh al-Alawi, the real goal was to realize that. To come to know that and understand that and feel that in a very clear way. And of course one should also maintain this kind of awareness once one reaches it even beyond the formal invocation so that is as if one is always in the state",
      "enters the mundane world beyond the prayer carpet. Thank you."
    ]
  },
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    "text": [
      "Okay, let's begin with you Maria if you can. You wrote this article and what your basic thesis seems to be, you know, you based it on the study on the Quranic verses that addressed Jews and Christians. And you at the title says you offer or refer",
      "offer or refer to as rules of engagement that Muslims need to interact with Jews and Christians. And you also emphasize that it should be done with virtue in good manners, adab. I'm curious the question there... The idea in your title Rules of Engagement seems to imply at least that we're missing some rules of engagement. That we don't have enough them or we don'y have adequate or appropriate rules of engangement especially Muslims are you",
      "Are you, could you explain whether you think we're missing something in our interfaith engagement? And if so what is that? Well first of all let me say thank you for inviting me and thank you all for coming. I do have to say that I don't think rules of engagement was the title I actually gave to the article. No it wasn't. It was a phrase that you used in the article, yeah you were right.",
      "I think that there are rules of engagement that are missing, quite the opposite. I think there's quite a good amount both in the Quran and the example of the Prophet Muhammad himself certainly in other texts about the importance of adab in inter-religious dialogue but also simply in engaging other people",
      "inter-religious debate is often focused on trying to win a particular argument. Whether it's debates within the Muslim community about how they should view Judaism and Christianity, does Islam supersede them? Are they somehow still valid or religions that can provide guidance? Or whether it's",
      "makes the most sense, is the most grounded in logic or reasonable propositions. And I think that the purpose of encountering the other is not simply a matter of trying to win a debate or win an argument. I think the rules of adab are important in that they help us engage the other person as a human being",
      "Sheikh Hamza talked about this importance of humanity, the rights that you have as a human being. And I think that sometimes in debates and especially contemporary society where debates take place on Twitter and they take place social media we never—we lose the encounter or the importance of the encounter with another human being and in my own experience in interreligious dialogue there is nothing like sitting across from a person who",
      "a person who follows a faith that's different from your own, and yet you can see. You can feel in talking to that person and seeing them that they are sincerely striving for truth, and, yet, they come to a different conclusion than you do. And I think that edep helps us remember that it helps us Remember that the other person is a human being and has to be treated with a certain degree of respect",
      "but it also helps us to remember our own humility as human beings. We don't know everything, we have to wait until God informs us at the end about our differences which is a way of saying that no religious scripture in and of itself puts all these differences to rest. In fact, the Quran often says people differ after the book came to them. Thank you for explaining that. I mean, that's what you mean by virtue and other... Well, I think virtue and edep are different",
      "And how did that factor into the engagement? I think that, you know, the Quran as I said in my article tells us we have to deal with other people which is the best, the most beautiful, the more virtuous. But all human beings have this potential for virtue. Virtue is universally recognizable, it's universally attainable, it' universally valued but human beings are born only",
      "with a potential for virtue, virtue has to be cultivated. And what adab does I think is it forces people to behave almost as if they've acquired that virtue. It allows them to, it constrains their worst impulses and forces them to have the best possible opinion of the person that they're talking to. Andrew you are in a political philosopher",
      "tradition quite well and you're also a scholar of Islam. You chose to write on a topic about, you referred as a radical other which is the disbeliever and how that person is viewed from an Islamic standpoint. Do you did you choose that topic partly because you think there's a tension between the Western liberal tradition or liberal societies if you will in the Islamic tradition? And that somehow there's",
      "Muslims who live in the West to fully understand each other? Is that part of what you were trying to get at, in your article? Thank you for the question. Thank you the invitation to be here and thank you everybody for turning out and filling the hall. I think it's actually...I'm glad you asked that because there can be a certain kind of misconception which is to say that there's a special burden on Muslims",
      "that Muslims are particularly distinct in having this as a stumbling block. And to be honest with you, the question is actually motivated from the other side. So if Maria's talking about the ethics of encountering difference from the standpoint of personal ethics—so I, as a seeker of truth, as an arguer about the truth, I encounter somebody who disagrees,",
      "What kinds of ethical dispositions should you cultivate if you care about certain kinds of things? If you care truth, if you can't put your own peace and well-being in harmony with your soul. If you're always arguing with everybody on Twitter, you have a very miserable life even if you don't exactly recognize it And what harm you may be doing to the other right so now so that those are all very very important Concepts as pertain to individual ethics now let's say that we magnify at the level of society",
      "you think about the composition of society, a society that is complex, that is composed of many different kinds of people. I think we're forced to ask ourselves a certain set of questions. First what kinds of differences between us are acceptable and not acceptable? Another question is what kind of differences do we expect to always endure",
      "hope to be eradicated? And when you put those two questions together, you have a kind of political ethics of trying to understand what is the appropriate scope for political action. So let's just begin with what I hope is in this audience a fairly uncontroversial point, which is to say that our country",
      "In which there's a certain kind of imaginary that the country primarily belongs to white settlers and this is at the detriment of people who involuntarily were migrated from Africa or People who are found here, and we're the involuntary hosts of people that migrated from Europe now How you deal with this history is extremely complicated? But I but I think we could all agree at least in this audience That the ideas that dominated this country for a very very long",
      "of this country for a very, very long time which is that white people are inherently superior. That the country naturally belongs to white people. That white people inherently more virtuous, more intelligent, more hard working. These are ideas that have a legacy and we have to live with. Now we may say they're markers of sin, we may their markers of history, we might say they are markers of false consciousness but I think it's the absolute ethical responsibility",
      "that it is our responsibility to expect and to hope, that these kinds of ideas will be eradicated. That these are not objects of toleration, these are no objects of sort-of bemused indifference, right? Oh well my crazy old racist uncle... No, these were objects of eradication. Now so let's take that as a fixed point. Well let's ask what other kind of things we think ought to be eradicate and what kind of thing we think",
      "with toleration and what kinds of things we think ought to be recognized as reasonable differences. So I could go through the list, but I'll just jump to the end of your question from a liberal perspective. There is a category of things that people differ on that are sometimes called your conception of the good now to a religious consciousness. This sounds a little bloodless right? So my belief in Islam or my belief",
      "where I am going and what is the source of my dignity. But for all that, what liberal political philosophy is based on is the idea there are many such ontologies. Now, what do you say about this? One possibility is that one of them is right. Another possi- but then we have all of Maria's problems which is well we, that may be true but lo and behold were always disagreeing about it. Another possibilities that a few of them might be right perhaps to Abrahamic religions, right? So there's just the, right,",
      "of revelations from God and those are what's acceptable. Well another possibility is that all of these questions about metaphysics, about the origins of the cosmos, about purpose of human nature, what is a source of virtue? What makes for a good life? All of those are of the same ilk. Some are religious some are secular but it's the same kind of human activity that ends up in disagreeing about them. And so if you take it at a macro level I think",
      "What's motivating this is that from a liberal perspective religion as a problem and so by grounds of reciprocity The question is well for a religious perspective. What is the what is the attitude towards a conscientious rejection of Anything other than a materialist explanation of the self the body and and human striving So it's more I think a question of my motivation is well in liberal political philosophy",
      "How we tolerate religion is an active question. And so why not see what happens when we try to pose that question also from a religious perspective? So your assumption, thanks for the explanation but your assumption is that in maintained political order in liberal societies all parties need to have that understanding of the other meaning they know what you cannot tolerate or what you can't tolerate.",
      "distinctly a question for a democratic society. So as Sheikh Hamza was talking about Ben-Bayya saying the past is the past, well there are many, many models of toleration. There are many many models coexistence. There're many many model of people encountering others that are radically different from them and lo and behold managing to see the sunrise the next day. The question though is when you have a democratic",
      "itself collectively with no help from anything other than itself. No monarch, no pope, no cast of priests. How can we give ourselves a law or a series of laws that is ours and at the same time as just? So then you have to ask yourself who is included in this self-governing population? And so then you",
      "one of those things That is a marker of being on the inside Rather than being on outside and if that is true, then I think you do need an account of Why that kind of difference? doesn't mean you're not a member of the self-governing people and But then if that's true that I want to know I want I want so a religious person might want to Well, how do I know that you're going turn into a radical atheist",
      "atheist that wants to extirpate religion, close down churches and mosques, and re-educate people such that they think religion is evil. Likewise a secular person might want to know I want to how you view me? Do you view as enslaving myself? Do your view view me as somebody who is engaging in dhulm an nafs? Am i harming my soul in holding these beliefs and thus a possible object of",
      "So I think it's not the most important problem in politics, but that kind of mutual reassurance that I see you as my equal and I see somebody who is equally capable of deliberation in public. It's not also the least important aspect of democracy. Thank you for that. It was an important aspect. She comes out. I want to ask you a question, but first I wanted to see if you had a quick one at what?",
      "qualify white people as Anglo-Saxons? Because I think a lot of the other... We Irish did a lot bad things in this country too, so. Undeniably, undeniably. Policemen for the Anglo-saxons. Okay. I want to pick up on the document you were reading but also on the Marrakesh Declaration itself because it seems relevant to the subject at hand. The Marrakech Declaration is based on the Charter of Medina",
      "of Medina, and I want you to do two things. One is to briefly describe the historical charter of Medin itself what it was but also why you and Sheikh Bin Bayah and others believe its a relevant thing for us and particularly for Muslims to remind ourselves of today? Well his argument, Bismillah, Sheikh Abdullah's argument",
      "of a nation-state is a new concept for Muslims. Prior to that, there wasn't this idea of a national state or citizenship. If you look at all the traditional texts of political science they talk about the ruler and the ruled. The idea what's called citizenship was really not... It's a Greek concept and there's an argument that maybe one of the first problems with the expansion of Islam",
      "than perhaps a Greek model in terms of government. Because the Prophet, salallahu alayhi wa sallam, arguably... And this is a big debatable point but arguably there's not any specific way to rule in Islam. The Sharia is more constitutional than it is statute and there's actually not that many statute laws in Islamic tradition. There's constitutional principles. So the Muslims have ruled in various ways throughout human history",
      "citizenship was not really a concept, the idea of a citizen being involved in legislation and voting and things like this. And so he's arguing that in the original model that the Prophet Sallallaahu Alaihi Wasallam provided when he first went to Medina was an enfranchisement of the different groups that were there. This was a tribal society. The Jews had various tribes and there were also Jewish Arabs who had converted to Judaism.",
      "the polytheists, you had the Christians, you have some Christians and you had Muslims. And so the Prophet created the charter of Medina which sometimes is called the Constitutional Medina it's debatable whether it's a constitution or not but the Charter of Medinah was basically that each of the groups were equal in their rights as inhabitants of Medineh. There's very interesting verse in the Quran when the prophet was chased out of Medenah",
      "You know, you are a rightful citizen of Mecca. They had no right to throw you out and this is the birthright of citizenship. Hence America's one of the few countries that actually has that. The idea where you're born you have a right to be legitimately there and we're in a huge debate right now in our country over this issue but so his idea was a restoration of the charter as an alternative",
      "to the idea of paying tribute. So, the poll tax is not really a poll tax because it wasn't everybody only certain people had to pay it and sometimes there were many examples where that people did not have to pay monks didn't pay it priests did not pay it nuns and things like that so he most Muslims think this is the only way that we would relate",
      "Muslim land and this is what Isis did. They restored the side of Jizya, he's arguing that it's not the only possibility and that the more appropriate one is to go back to the charter Medina and he makes a very cogent argument that it was never abrogated, the Charter of Medina, and shows that historically that it is an acceptable approach to that so that's what he did but it's important",
      "also in the 19th century. And that was done with the Sheikh al-Islam and with the agreement of the scholars at the time, so this is not unprecedented. The Ottomans recognized also that the world was changing and they needed to change with it. Maria did you want her to say something? I have a question for you but go ahead. I did wanna say something quickly about that. I mean I think it's very interesting that he's recommending that people take a look at this and that idea of citizenship is really interesting. I never really thought about that in the constitution or whatever",
      "or whatever you want to call it, of Medina. But one of the things I think is very important in that document, to me as I think about it, is it presents a group of people coming together and agreeing upon a set of principles upon which they're going to live that is not higher than religion but for practical purposes transcends it. And so when people sometimes look at",
      "sometimes look at, let's say the UN Declaration of Human Rights. One of the religious arguments some people present against is that it's setting a kind of moral standard that's really above religious moral standards. This is a standard by which all religions' moral standards are going to be judged and so I think what this does is it says you can have a common agreement that transcends religious difference not because it transcends religion but because",
      "which I think is similar to what Andrew was saying as well, we all agree to live by that. The second thing is that it also points to the kind of claim that your neighbor has on you. Even though there were not just Jews and Muslims but polytheists, as you say living in Medina, but they were living in medina, you had to live together. That claim that the neighbor has upon you",
      "Islam and I think one of we were talking about this earlier. I think the way ISIS deals with things is they're sort of taking these texts and just using them as a blanket guide to action, completely missing the importance of these are people, human beings. These are people who are living in a place. They have a certain right to be there, a certain",
      "And I think that is, ISIS is just the furthest example of how far you can go when you lose that sense of importance. The claim your neighbor has on you. Well I also think the point that virtue or something that transcends religion, that's clearly understood in the prophetic tradition. There's this idea a lot of Muslims and I think there's a major problem with the Muslim world is the conflation of ethics and religion.",
      "There's an argument that you can't ground metaphysically ethics without religion. That's an argue, but the idea that somebody cannot be ethical without religion is completely insane. But a lot of religious people have that misconception and the Prophet clearly stated in his sound hadith whoever comes to you and you find pleasing his deen, his religion, and his character so he clearly separated between religion and character",
      "the Arabs in Jahiliyyah had qualities that he wanted to maintain. And this is why custom and norms are very important in Islamic tradition. Wherever Islam went, it acknowledged good customs and good norms of people that in its essence transcend religion itself. That there's a human goodness that is innate that will manifest in societies that is not dictated by religion.",
      "No, I totally agree with you about the point about there's an assumption by most people that if you don't have religion, you don' t really have a moral basis of any kind. And that is part of human beings but Andrew did you want to jump in? I just wanted to say something very quick on the Medina covenant is that um it you mentioned briefly that includes polytheists and a lot of sort of uh the thought of some contemporary political Islam as well known for a lot",
      "Medina was this kind of symbol of the fusion of religion and state, din wa dawla. Okay? So that year zero of the Hijri calendar begins with a hijra to Medina. What does that mean? It's the assumption of political and juridical and military and all kinds of other power. But in a lot of...so for example, the Tunisian thinker Rasha del-Ghanoushi, in a lof his writings about the post Arab Spring situation in Tunisia he has said the Medina covenant is our arch model",
      "model for politics precisely because of its inclusion of pluralism. And so he says at one point, we Muslims are lucky, we're fortunate that our political experience began in an experience of radical political pluralism and so all of the stuff of politics mutual security, covenants contracts, ordinary day-to-day welfare from the very beginning was presumed to be something that could be pursued across even the most radical religious differences",
      "وكان هذا يصبح مفهوماً كبيراً لما هو التحديث عن المستقبل في الحالة القادمة",
      "Exactly. So it's our affair, this affair of government. Amir is the one who has the amr, the command or the affair but the idea of dholah, of a state was not... They didn't conceptualize it in the same way that modern people do and I think people don't realize how much political Islam has colored the understanding of Islam, of modern Islam. It's very anachronistic",
      "anachronistic to take a lot of these concepts and try to apply them to that early period. And there's, there's a very important distinction in you're very well aware this in the most of the fundamental texts of creed they deal with politics and for instance in the Jauhara which was taught for 400 years at Al-Azhar it says wajibun nasbu imam al adri that is you have to have a just Imam adjust ruler or authority bishari",
      "state is not a pillar of Islam. And it's very clear in the Hadith in Al-Bukhari where the Prophet tells Hudhaifa when he doesn't see any clear polity that he should just avoid all the sectarianism and just be a private Muslim, and that's... He didn't say you have to establish the Khilafah.",
      "And this is something a lot of Muslims don't understand, that it's not a pillar of Islam. The state. I want to get to the issue of both Maria you and Andrew, but both of you have looked at Quranic verses and based on your articles quite a bit in Quranic versus and where you landed with the Quranic verse about Jews and Christians was essentially",
      "you essentially were saying that there are some verses that are favorable to Jews and Christians, and others that are not. And then you wrote this—and I want to read a paragraph from your article and have a quick question about it—you said,",
      "After all, if God had wished to speak categorically against or in support of the soundness of these other religions he surely could have done so. Has Muslim theology always understood the Quranic verses this way? And my second related question is what lessons do you believe should Muslims take away from this conclusion that you're looking at? Right. Well I would say that first of all when the Quran",
      "Quran is talking about these religions, it's always talking about the people in those religions not about the religions per se. It's talking about prophets who founded those religions and it's talking abut followers of their religion so the question is first question is what can you derive about the religion itself from what the Quran says about contemporary to prophet Muhammad's time followers of the religion? I think that as raises Shah Qasimi",
      "Kazemi says in his book or in an article actually, that if you were to look at all the things that the Quran says about Jews and Christians and just sort of put them in rough categories of positive or negative there's certainly a lot more criticism probably than endorsement in some way. But at the same time I think that there are places where the Quran just leaves this issue so open",
      "close the door on the possibility that there could still be guidance, legitimate guidance or salvation from a theological point of view. The question is has this the way, is this the ways it's always been seen? I think when you look at the Islamic tradition even if you look verses are very positive for example 262 or 569 talks about you know the Jews and Christians and Sabians along with the believers whoever believes in God in the last day will have blessed after they'll",
      "that will have the reward with their Lord. When you look at what classical commentators say about those, they don't read them as an open-ended assertion that Jews and Christians have an open path to salvation. They tend to read those in a more limited fashion than the Quranic statements themselves. So they say well these means the Jews and the Christians who followed the original Torah or the original Gospel or who followed Jesus",
      "turn away or that kind of thing. And it's certainly possible to read that way, especially in light of all the other chronic verses if you read it holistically I can see how they come to that conclusion but at the same time i think it's a powerful statement it's not qualified in the context of the verse itself and so I think that it does leave this very much open. But yes the classical commentators had what I would call clearly supersessionist view",
      "had a guiding power in the past, they've been superseded by Islam. And as I say in the article too, one of the arguments would be if you were a true follower of the Torah and the Gospel, you would see the truth and the message of the Prophet Muhammad in the Quran. And I think that's very clearly articulated. It has Koranic basis as well in Surah 7 verse 157 for example. But at the same time,",
      "I think that there are places where the Qur'an just leaves it too open, even to say not all of the Ahl al-Kitab are the same. Some of them are very pious. They pray in the watches of the night. They hear the Qur',an itself and they're moved by it. And I think when you take those open statements and you combine them with the human interaction of people who do follow those faiths,",
      "the face of someone who follows a religion other than Islam. It's not that you can't see those kinds of virtues, that religion was designed to inculcate in other people. And so I think if you take what the Quran says and you take it in the context of relations with other individuals, you know, the matter cannot be completely resolved. And",
      "whatever you might find in classical texts did not necessarily reflect the situation on the ground. Muslims and Christians and Jews often lived together, in peace, and even not only in peace but in very profitable relationships intellectually if you look at Andalusia or something like that.",
      "and which religion is really valid, and who's really saved, and what text really provides guidance. Well these are questions ultimately that are only resolved in the hereafter. I mean we can't make statements about who's saved and who not saved but what we can all do as I said is recognize virtue. And although certain religions might emphasize certain virtues over others, virtues are virtues. Generosity, charity, mercy, justice, bravery, honesty",
      "honesty, we know what those are. And to the extent that we see them cultivated in someone who follows a particular tradition... And that's your basic takeaway for Muslims is to look at that and say recognize those virtues in others when you do recognize them then treat them well. Recognize them for what they are. Andrew, you looked at the Quranic verses about disbelievers",
      "where you land with that is that the God has caused the state of affairs. He's sealed their hearts, he's hardened their hearts and for some people but not others and then you say this in a radio sentence from what you said however in the shadow of the view that God curses unbelievers lie the views that their unbelief is not their fault and that God has decreed it intentionally possibly with some wise plan in mind that is unknowable to mortals",
      "If God has decreed it, what does it mean for those of us who are believers? I mean in some ways you're suggesting that disbelief itself is not the fault of disbelievers because God has caused them to be so. But you also argue that reason and rationality can lead a person to believe whether there's no god. That reason and rationale can also lead you to just disbelieve.",
      "And so my question is how should the believer, those of us who are believers view that disbeliever given what you're saying there? So there's a couple things going on there. One is the question of how Muslims or others should see the doctrine that unbelievers should not be blamed because the state",
      "of their mind or the state of their heart is not their fault. So that's one question and I think the point that I'm trying to make in the article is that, uh, that's the dominant view so when you read certain thinkers that are trying to come to terms with this right beyond Abrahamic fraternity, beyond Jews and Christians how do you deal with this more radical pluralism on my reading",
      "is that it's God's choice, right? That if their hearts weren't sealed or if their minds weren't somehow obscured then humans would naturally be led to what their fitra tells them which is a kind of monotheism. I think that's more or less the view. So then you say well how do I think it should be so I mean I clearly think that if you look at the history of the encounter between Greek philosophy and revealed religion",
      "religion. When the philosophers start talking about religion as a philosophical problem, separate from specific doctrines like the resurrection of the body or things like that, what is a problem in religion for philosophers? So the primary one, I think the primary two really are miracles and prophecy. So if the world",
      "which the Aristotelian philosophers in particular wanted to believe was true, then how is it possible to believe in the suspension of those laws through miracles? The other is how do you understand prophecy? How do you that either there's a god that could actively intervene or that there's human that could be disposed in a different kind of way. The only point I'd like to make now is that from the standpoint even",
      "Those were doubtable doctrines. Those are doubtable views and that the normal exercise of reason could lead one to say that miracles require some other kind of explanation in That whether it's irrational to believe in miracles, and I think there are philosophers that disagreed on that It's certainly not irrational not to believe them Whether it's a rational to think that there could be a psychological",
      "psychological explanation for prophecy which the Farabi and an avicennan explanation explained prophecy is some kind of hyperactive intellect that was sort of immediately connected to The divine intellect it's also certainly not irrational to doubt that this is a source of knowledge. And so you know though the I think the most reasonable approach is to say that from outside",
      "outside of a kind of socialization into which revelation as a source of knowledge, never mind certain knowledge specific examples of prophecy are treated as having veracity that it from outside of that socialization there is an extremely high level of epistemic work to be done for somebody to take that as an exclusive source of",
      "source of knowledge and so as an absolute minimum i just i think it has to be acknowledged particularly in the modern world where uh we know what we know about source criticism we know we know how complex and how changing views about the cosmos and metaphysics are that somebody could regard",
      "as Something that we don't really have any reason to accept Any rational reason to except now that can be said without ascribing Irrationality or without ascribe being false consciousness to those who do believe in them Not everybody manages to do both of those things at the same time, but I think it's a very least. It is a Honest attitude towards knowledge to say that somebody who doubts and miracles and prophecy is not deluded",
      "Is there any doubt about God? There's an assumption of belief that it's a fitrah. It's part of the principial nature of the human being, it's something inclined. Even Fakhruddin al-Razi argues that causation is natural to the human beings, to believe in causation and he gives an example. He said take... And I did this with my kids when they were little. He gives the example of taking a child who's like one year old",
      "and hiding, and throwing something. And then watching the child look for the source. The child doesn't just assume that it popped into existence. So he says that it's a natural belief to seek causes. In fact, the first philosophy in metaphysics is seeking first causes, looking at what are the first causes? There's an argument that most of the Muslim theologians make",
      "make that human beings, if they think about it, they will arrive at this conclusion. I mean there's also counter arguments about the parts, that causation in the parts doesn't assume that the whole has a cause and there certainly is the idea Aristotle makes an argument",
      "existed alongside God so that the cosmos itself is eternal and that was one of the things that Ghazali points out about the problems with the philosophers. But, but one of things that fascinates me about you know I was taught in the creeds that I learned a supersessionist view of the tradition that Islam in the Jauharat says that the Sharia of the Prophet abrogated all previous Sharias. But it didn't deny the idea that there wasn't light and guidance in those traditions that was pointed out",
      "And that is the opinion of normative Islam. The great scholars of Islam grappled profoundly with the problem of disbelief and the problem also of the fate of people outside of Islam. So you have people like Abu Hamad al-Ghazali who, one of the last books he wrote about four years before he died is called Faisal at Tafriqa",
      "the criterion that differentiates between disbelief and heresy. And he makes a very strong argument, that the vast majority... He categorizes people into four categories. Three of the disbelievers, people outside of Islam, three out of those four categories he considers saved. So only one he actually sends to the fire. The other three he considers them saved.",
      "And Abu Hamid is the embodiment of orthodoxy. And Ibn Taymiyyah grappled with this. Ibn Tamiyyah, there's an argument that he's a universalist in his approach to salvation because he had a very problematic with the eternity of the fire as eternal punishment for temporal sin that a merciful God who's defined essentially with mercy",
      "The Quran begins in the name of God, the merciful and compassionate. So he makes an argument and it's a sound book I mean some of his followers modern followers like Ali Al Harbi wrote a book arguing that he didn't write but he did because Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziya quotes from it, his own student. Ibn Rushaiq, his other student quotes from iit and Tajuddin al Subki who wrote a Book called Al Aytibar Fi Baqa Al Jannati Wa Al Naar refuting Ibn Saimiya because Ibin Saimiye argued that the fire will be extinguished",
      "Because he said it wasn't compatible with absolute mercy. And so wrath was not an essential attribute of God. There's no, there's no... God is not as a name. He's not the is not a name of God The Quran clearly says that he punishes people but it's not one of his divine names as a Name and there's a difference opinion about whether the verbs are transferred into names But that that's another matter and then you have something like",
      "have somebody like Shah Wali Allah Kandahar who also argues that people have too many filters and this one of Abu Hamid's arguments, that sociologically people grow up. Abu Hamad says in the Munkith he said I noticed Jewish children become Jews Christian children become Christians and Muslim children become Muslims and he said because of the natural authority of the parent they just believe what their parents tell them",
      "that make it very difficult for people. And then if you take somebody, for instance like Abu Sufyan who fought the Prophet for 20 years and then he finally becomes Muslim whereas somebody else who fought The Prophet and dies in the first battle... That's very unfortunate! Right? What if Abu Sufyian died in that first battle? Did God know that He would have believed after 20 years? These are very difficult things that only God can really sort out",
      "And I think that is the message of the Quran, is that I'm going to explain all this to you. You know it's like the director's cut. You have these films where you can actually listen to the director explain why he did everything. Oh, that's why he does that! Right? So one of the things about according to our belief about the end of time is in the resurrection",
      "and people see everything. And it's all, we're gonna find out who really killed Kennedy. Quincy Jones knows actually. But there are many examples of this in our tradition where they really grappled with this problem of understanding what's holding people back. And also there was a deep compassion I think",
      "community, for other people. We have history... I mean, I'll give you an example. Ibn Omar, Abdullah ibn Omar when Omar was killed a priest visited him to give ta'ziyah. Ibbin Taymiyyah mentions that on the permissibility of doing ta'ziyah for Christians and Jews and things but a priest",
      "leaves. Ibn Omar says, write that down because that's a wisdom. And here I am, you know, 1400 years later, because it was recorded, that wisdom what he meant was on the third day of ta'ziyah, when you offer condolences, be like you were on the first day. In other words, don't let this reminder of your mortality and death diminish as the days pass.",
      "You know, so be on the third day like you are today. And he wrote it as a wisdom. He was taking wisdom from somebody from another faith. Maimonides, Moshe ben Mamun, he studied with Averroes. They were interlocutors. When the Mu'ahedin took over, he had to flee Andrusia because of the Jewish persecution. He goes to Egypt and becomes the personal physician",
      "the Kurdish ruler who reconquers Egypt from the Fatimids. But there's an example of somebody who was honored for his intellect, for his knowledge. So I think Muslims traditionally, they did grapple with these issues and it's very easy to dismiss that oh, they're all kuffar. One of the things that Dr. Dikex said",
      "a lot of people with simplistic views of these problems. Maria, I think I'm going to ask you this question but I know your answer but I don't want to presume that but this idea of the disbelievers, the way we're talking about looking at disbelievers what you were saying earlier about Jews and Christians and the way Muslims should deal with them and engage with them. I assume that you also think that applies to disbelievers as well? When you talk about people with virtue",
      "I mean what she kind of just said because even the ones who have those virtues That we should deal with them the same way with compassion would you know? Well many of the verses of the Quran that talk about dealing with people Gently, who don't agree with you in your religion come from Meccan verses and the interlocutors that are implied our Pagans You know that God doesn't forbid you from doing From being kind and dealing justly with those",
      "justly with those who don't seek to oppress you in your religion. That's with, I mean it's in Medina but it's relating to Asma bin Dabi Bakh who rejected a present from her mother I believe it was. So it's quite clear that these don't just apply to people who are part of the Atul Kitab. It applies in general. Think also about even Moses",
      "Even Moses and Aaron and Harun, when they're told to go to Pharaoh, they're tell to speak. They're told the speak gently. And that's to Pharaoh. Not just wrong but I mean evil right? And cruel so what I'm saying is that I don't think it applies just to Jews or Christians. And I agree that it is possible especially today as Andrew was saying for people",
      "a conclusion of a certain kind of doubt, but it doesn't mean that they cannot also possess ethics and act according to ethics and possess even virtue. And I think the clear example of this is Abu Talib, the prophet's uncle, right? I don't think Shiites will be very happy with him because Shiites believe he became a Muslim, but from Sunni point of view, he never became a muslim. Would anyone say he didn't behave virtuously?",
      "nobly. So I think there are plenty of examples of that, and then you just have to leave... That's not a matter that human beings can judge right? Andrea, I wanna get back to your... You sort of explained this in your opening answer but you use the term, you say you should go beyond mere toleration",
      "recognition of the other. Talk about that definition, what does it look like when you say reciprocal recognition of another? What exactly do you mean by that? Right so again the idea is that I think its pretty obvious that toleration while it sounds like a virtue and in some cases may be a virtue, its something people want to ascribe themselves. Toleration, you only tolerate what you don't like or disapprove of right? So I tolerate too much salt",
      "I probably shouldn't or it takes some effort or something like that. So, I don't think any Muslim in the room today wants to be tolerated, right? What's so intolerable about me that requires toleration in the first place? It wouldn't be bad though. So there are worse things than being tolerated but certainly I hope that we all have higher aspirations for the kinds of human relationships that were capable of, right, except not everything is worth it",
      "not everything is worthy either of toleration or of some kind of reciprocal recognition. So, you know, you're mentioning technology and the evils that it comes with. And so we're all familiar with the kinds of not just, you now let's say Islamophobic or racist views that are going around but views that so radically in denial of science and rationality",
      "our democracy is that nobody can agree in our country on what counts as a fact or what counts evidence. And so the extreme persistence of climate change denial, or things like this... Why are we even talking about religion when we have so many greater evils and ills than our democracy? So that should be your next issue. But you might say well no I don't... That's neither worthy... Certainly it's not",
      "of reciprocal recognition or any kind of positive recognition, the people may be sort of objects of toleration because like Abu Sufyan you may hope that they have an awakening and they realize that they only were in denial of climate change because they listened to too much Fox News or other kinds of media. But even if that's true here's the difference. If somebody were to say you're designing a democracy from scratch forget the constitution",
      "have, you are designing an ideal constitution. Is it obvious to any of us that we would have the exact interpretation of the First Amendment that doesn't allow for some kind of positive cultivation of a public sphere in which genuine knowledge is disseminated and in persons who are capable",
      "Is regard as an object of virtuous citizenship, so you might say in a good democracy Most of the public sphere is something like NPR Okay Not at that level of kind of you know bad taste but sort of like most of the media is publicly funded There's a range of ideological views But there are stand you know Fox News would not be tolerated in a functioning democracy okay? And it's only because you have Something other than democratic norms that are governing",
      "That are governing that's just a thought just sort of a thought to put out there So there's many many things that aren't worthy of your respect Okay, deliberate lying deliberate falsehood deception Stoking up of fear and hatred of non-white people and all those kinds of things. All right? so then you have to ask yourself how do I know the difference what's the difference between Climate change denial and like what she comes it was saying well Why is it kufr like that the Kuffar or their most Akpireen?",
      "stuck being right there arrogant they deny what's obvious they Invite towards a vice and all these sorts of things. So that's the traditional view, right? That Infidelity in that sense quaffer is like Fox News Okay, it is active poisoning and destruction of the human brain and the human self Now I obviously don't think that and as you know There are many atheists that think that about religion right religion is active",
      "active immaturity. Okay? It is actively keeping people in a state of infancy, okay? Now why is that not true? It's not obvious that any secular citizen or political philosopher has to adopt any kind of positive attitude towards religion especially a religion that's based on revelation, that's not like a natural religion it's based",
      "One might say no different in difference in kind from the Odyssey or from Melville or something like that So you have a genuine problem to say what is it? That's going on. That says You are not enslaving yourself. You're not infantilizing yourself in doing what you're doing You are exercising something that I respect now What is that so of course and kill em, the first obligation of all humans is another right seeking Well to reflect or perhaps to see",
      "Or to perhaps the seat or two or or the act of searching for these answers So you might say that might be also a path to recognizing? Kufr right and here we are saying it in this audience so that already is a step towards towards rethinking some things You might say, you know Stephen Hawking he was searching right. He was looking for things He was using his mind and that is something that can't be disrespected. So similarly a secular",
      "secular citizen or person or philosopher might say the religious person is Being human in the most important ways trying to cultivate virtue Trying to cultivate the things that Allow for human life to be livable love community commitment being outside of yourself and reflecting on",
      "matters of metaphysical concern. And I think the twist here, and I'll finish my answer with this is that the way that a lot of liberal or secular political philosophers handle this is to say we don't need to evaluate every religion or every doctrine or every life with this kind of rationality meter. Are you being rational? Is Mormonism rational?",
      "broader sort of step back and you say this kind of activity of living in communities cultivating your conception of virtue finding something that is That is that makes life bigger than it would be otherwise And answering questions that only human beings are able to answer those kind of activities or what is valuable and worthy of recognition",
      "and in general we don't see these activities as always leading toward the same answer. And so, we say that the basic attitude is one of you know something different from toleration but recognition and a kind of reciprocity. And then after that you say you reserve your obligation to say that certain answers to that violate human dignity or violate human reason",
      "human reason or violate the norms that would allow people to live together. So it's not that any time you're engaging in metaphysical reflection, religious reflection, philosophical reflection that you are worthy of respect. It's at the general kind of activity unlike differentiating on the basis of race or origin or intellect is one that is both indicative of human value and one that not everybody tends",
      "tends to agree on through the normal use of reason? I think when you, I was listening to you. I mean, the thought that came to me was, you know, unfortunately the most vocal atheists we have, the new atheists as they're called, you and the Sam Harris's and the Richard Dawkins' and the late Christopher Hitchens and folks like that, they promoted this notion that religious people are not just tragic but dangerous",
      "tragic but dangerous. I mean that's very far from the concept that you're talking about of recognizing people who are actually striving for virtue, right? I mean it makes it difficult is what I'm saying. Right so I'm not a new atheist and I don't subscribe to it but then I should ask myself why, right. So just the way that you know",
      "I don't know exactly whether I agree with this or disagree with that, but there is an interesting question which is Which is When we think about how we approach others in the public sphere What's the difference between what you think is a moral obligation and? What you think as a question of good taste or prudence So You may adopt this kind of strident anti-religious attitude",
      "And I might say, well it seems to me a little bit overkill. It seems to be a little indiscriminate you're gonna loot, you know lump together, you Franklin Graham on the one hand and You know some good religious person on the other hand right? And that just seems to mean that you're Mistaking what makes these things different right? Uh and I think also it leads to a situation in which The only possible answer is apologetics",
      "is apologetics, right? The only possible answer is a standpoint of defense and it only leads to a kind of sort of agonistic public sphere in which even your own principles of science or enlightenment or whatever they think that they're defending. They don't become actual things that you're invested in. They become symbols like it's often reflected about us. You know we want Islamic banking. We want Islamic this but you know it becomes an identity marker more than",
      "More than it becomes an actual thing. So my attitude towards them would be, insofar as it's an active public dispute whether climate change is the wrath of God or as a result of carbon emissions by all means defend the rational solution but this idea that out of all of the things that are causing us harm in the world you think you're doing something",
      "rather than as something to be actually pursued sincerely and humbly, it just has always struck me as... It gives me the heebie-jeebies. To use the technical term. And I think part of that, you know, the identity element is... Has become... I mean, it's always been but it's become so overarching. You know? All other considerations are set aside",
      "aside. So now people identify in groups, I talk about Beni Islam the idea of you know this tribe of Islam and one of things if you know taking a human to be just as a human being and the Moroccans have beautiful saying don't hold anybody in contempt because he might be a friend of God no matter what their states you know they usually you",
      "that so many of us have, which is to determine. We want to know what a person believes so that we can put them in that box of checking it off. It's very quick and easy to do. And so kuffar, kafir, is a nice easy box. And then, you know, it's the man about to jump off the bridge. Oh, do you believe in God? Yes. Alhamdulillah. Are you Muslim? Yes, alhamdulilah.",
      "Are you Sunni? No, I'm Shia. Jump. It's that idea that we tend to just look at those things that separate us and not look at the things that bring us together. And I'll just give you one example. I was with a group of Jewish rabbis and I got into a discussion. Most of them were Reformed but there was an Orthodox sitting next to me on the bus and it was a Reformed one. We talked about afterlife",
      "Rabbi Hillel saying that every Jew had to believe in an afterlife and so the reformed one was making argument against it. When we got off the bus, the Orthodox rabbi said to me I feel so much closer to you than I do to that reformed rabbi You know? And I think a lot of people... It's very interesting if you set aside the boxes you might find that you have much more in common with somebody that might not be in the same box that you're in",
      "that you don't. And one other example of this, anecdotally, Sheikh Nabim Beyah who's the son of Sheikh Abdullah he grew up in a place where it was 100% Muslim and they used to have these animists that came and he said that always the shiukh would treat them really well and feed them and they were from Mali and when there was drought and things they would come over and he says we never looked at them like other than human beings and that we had a responsibility but so he grew",
      "with that attitude. He went to Egypt to study, he was in the university in Cairo and he was a building and there was this guy named Am Gibril, they called him Uncle Gabriel and for two years he used to help them and he helped them navigate Cairo",
      "Christian. He had thought the whole time that he was Muslim, and he told me, he said I wondered how I would have thought of him had I known initially that he a Christian and not a Muslim? And he said it was such a lesson for me not to judge people based on other than their character just based on the box we tend to put people into. Before we close out I want to get quickly",
      "get quickly to ask Shekhar one more question and then I have a question for all three of you, and we'll wrap it up inshallah. Shekhonda, you wrote a piece in Renovash about pluralism outside of this discussion we're talking about just in today's society, and part of your message or your view was that we think we are pluralistic, we have these outward signs of our identities, we've got skin color and all that but there is an inward sort of conformity",
      "conformity that we have, that you call it as a monoculture of conformity. Can you talk about that a little bit in terms of like how do again back to people of faith? How do we view and some of us people of faithful are also part of that culture and get lost in that sometimes so this kind of this phenomena of believing we're very pluralistic when there's actually",
      "that we're all sort of subscribing to in a way. Well, I think of all the things that troubles me most is the inability for increasingly people to just tolerate and actually listen to opinions that they don't agree with. And increasingly people are falling into these silos of what they call echo chambers. And in fact one of the terrifying aspects",
      "your own echo chamber that's for you. So it'll send you only things that you agree with and that you like through this AI, and so I think there's a type of conformity that goes on now. You have to be fully on the program. If you're right, you have to take the whole right package, and if you're on the left, you'd have to the whole left package,",
      "he ran for Senate, he was a very complicated Republican because he was for gun control. He was for legalization of marijuana. He had positions that didn't fit into that box and people it's very difficult for people to grapple with nuance and so for me that's a type of conformity I mean we had I just had Dr. Eva Brand here from St. John's and you know artificial constructs came up",
      "came up and she said, I really hate that word, artificial constructs. He said, that's just the fact that most people are just sheep and they go along with whatever... They don't really think about things, they just conform to whatever that dominant thing is and then it's defined as an artificial construct. It's just people conforming to whatever they grew up in, the environment that they grew",
      "is a problem. And our religion, what fascinates me about the Qur'an is arguably the Qur-an is a textbook against group think because every group in the Qurrn is misguided. The only people that are guided in the Quran are individuals. There's no group that's ever guided in",
      "always go up against the individual and throw him in the fire, kill him. And so it's quite tragic that the Muslims have fallen into a kind of group think where they lose a sense of... Don't infantilize people! We're all moral agents. We have to ultimately make decisions on Yawm al Qiyamah you are judged as an individual. The judgment",
      "according to our tradition. But the judgment in the afterlife is an individual judgment. You're not judged as a group, you're judged as an individual and one of the things that I see that really troubles me is this collectivization. That's why I don't like using these terms that collectivize people. The Quran says, لَا تَزِرُوا وَازِرةٌ وِزْرَ أُخْرًا I don' want to be associated with white supremacy because I'm not a white supremacist. Just because I am white or my skin is white, I don''t wanna be associated",
      "and that's what it does. It turns a person into a group as opposed to a human being, an individual. And it is very important we maintain individuality because I am responsible for myself. Save your own selves and those you are responsible like your children to raise them properly with good character in these things but you cannot save the world",
      "And so this idea, and this has caused more human harm. This idea that we can go out and save the world. You know, that has killed more people than any other concept because all these ideologues that go out have this collectivist view of reality they go and say well just need to get rid of these people. Pol Pot everybody who has glasses cause they can read get rid them cause we need to start over.",
      "that never comes about. And so I think it's really important for us as individuals to maintain that we are moral agents. Don't infantilize women, don't infantillize anybody. Just humans, each one of us is responsible and God's gonna judge. Like I can't judge people in terms of their backgrounds or where they came from. Khilaaf in Arabic difference of opinion, ikhtiraaf comes from a word khalafa what's left behind.",
      "is your background. So the reasons we differ very often are because we have different backgrounds that really do color our ways of understanding reality, so for me this idea of the group... Nietzsche I think was really right when he said that insanity is quite unusual in individuals but it seems to be the norm in groups and I think there's a lot of truth to that. You haven't even mentioned you're talking about nations",
      "and groups, but there's this new thing of identity. What's called identity politics, I mean subgroups you know? You belong to all these little subgroupes and that's even further sort of separating and infantilizing others in that sense. I wanted to end by asking one of you to share your thoughts on a particular thing. I think I was going to read the whole thing where Sheik Hamza actually in his introduction talk read this and I had picked out this quote",
      "and ask you all a question to end this one. This is the quote from Sheikman Beya, and the part that I just want to read to you is just our world no longer identifies itself in religious terms instead it identified itself through culture personal and social interests technologies covenants contracts and treaties but this does not mean that people are not devout and religious make no mistake about it a mistaken diagnosis is fatal the realities of our context today do",
      "as the world today is multicultural. And here comes the important part, I think that its contribution of pluralism itself a virtue provides immense opportunities for humanity to achieve a lasting and natural state of peace. So my question to all of you is to leave us with this your thoughts on if you're living in a multicultural pluralistic world which is itself a word shoe and it has immense opportunity then the question",
      "but all other people of faith, what can each of us do as a practical matter that would go beyond simple toleration and help us see the humanity of all people regardless of their beliefs? What steps can we take towards doing that? What advice do you have for people? Andrew if you want to go first then we can go this way. Right so I think there's this conundrum which is that because we're all moral agents",
      "whatever other set of beliefs and commitments we have are going to be part of our understanding of ourselves. And because we are social and political agents, it is natural that we're going to want to act on our moral commitments in the world, right? We don't have to wanna save the world in a utopian sense but hopefully we all want to improve it in some way.",
      "So you have, I think this conundrum which is we all have this sense of how we would want the world to look. We have a sense of what our teaching tells us how the world ought to look and I think that there are set of very hard choices which is to say let's say from a liberal secular perspective I love it when the Catholic nuns wanted to boycott grapes with Cesar Chavez or",
      "to charity or fight for universal health care. I don't like it when the same religious people want to prevent same-sex marriage, or do other kinds of things in the realm of morality. But where does that distinction come from? Right? So is it just my own secular prejudices that say this is good religious action, this is bad religious action? Or can I give some account of why certain kinds of distinctions are reasonable? And so the only thing",
      "saying here's this obvious answer, here's clear secular distinction between the public and private or what is good and bad. I would just say it's really important to say that just as Muslims living in a country like America want the rest of the country to chill out a little bit on Muslimy things, right? To be very careful about how you talk about the hijab, if you do this then you must believe",
      "believe in this. So Muslims are very, very clear that public power can be an atrocious thing and yet Muslims quite reasonably and I think admirably want to act in the world. They are commanded to command the right and forbid the wrong and yet being a responsible political actor also involves exercising your faculty of judgment",
      "fascinated by the possibilities for this conversation to continue as to why making other people's lives better in some ways but not other ways is a legitimate kind of political activity and what's changed in the modern period, what's change today? And how from a religious perspective you make those distinctions between helping other people achievement of",
      "worldly and bodily and material welfare, but leaving aspects of their intimate welfare or their spiritual welfare for them to work out. It's not an obvious distinction. Muslims are not wrong when they don't make that same distinction. There's no fact in the world, but it's a public conversation that is crucial and is something that I think is just developing",
      "how people argue about that. And you want people to participate in the conversation? Of course, absolutely. Okay. Maria, go ahead. Well I would just say one of the important things when we think about that particular quote that you just read and the importance of pluralism, the way that pluralism is a benefit is precisely it benefits society as the counterpart to the silos that you were talking about. Societies are stronger",
      "societies are stronger, reasoning is stronger when you reason in the presence of other people and have to listen to their truth. There's a refinement of argumentation. And so one of the things that people need to be prepared to do to take advantage of pluralism especially for the idea of coming to a common understanding of what our boundaries? Where, to what extent are we allowed to put our ideas forward in society even as recommendations",
      "do we need to pull back and say that's private? Those things in a society can only be worked out in conversation with the other person. They can never be developed in a silo, they can never been developed. And when you look at societies that historically speaking have been strong, they've been strong precisely because they have been open to difference. I mean one of the things",
      "empire so strong in the classical period was that it had all of these people with so many different ethnicities, different ways of thinking about their religion. There's never one specific orthodox theology, never one school of law. There was a recognition that difference made you stronger, that it helped to refine your thinking and provided a critique, it provided a mirror, provided a check on your own thinking",
      "is something that made America very strong at a certain point, that it embraced people from different perspectives. And so this you know what today we think of as a monoculture didn't always have to be like that. It could be something that was indeed a kind of culture that transcended your difference but that wasn't in fact developed precisely out of the interaction",
      "from that difference, but in a very positive and productive fashion. Not in a negative fashion. not something that forced people to sort of run away. And I think the silos are created in part because our reality is created virtually. So sometimes even though...I think Fox News would be happy to understand themselves as Kufar for the most part. They probably have a license plate or whatever, the hat kind of thing. But sometimes",
      "I do this, you know, I read the news that I normally read. You know, in The New York Times or The Washington Post and then I think...I see people around me who hold points of view and I think how can they possibly hold that point of view? And then I go and I read Fox News and I say oh well that's why they hold that kind of view because what we read creates our reality. We don't interact with people the way that we used to certainly the way people did even a few decades ago",
      "And that's what's missing, that's lost and I think that's has to be recovered. And that is the hope a pluralistic society has. Unfortunately, I mean a pluralist society can precisely force people into their silos. There's a fear of encountering the other. There is a fear having your views reflected back to you in the eyes or words of someone who holds very different point of view. That could be very disturbing thing to hear.",
      "to those echo chambers. But I think that's what we have to continuously resist. Okay. You know, I would... I think one of the most important things to cultivate as individuals and societally is humility. And I think people... Well, to quote a Nobel laureate",
      "The rules of the game have been lodged. The rules on the road have been lodge, it's only people's games that you have to dodge. That we have a sense of what is civil and what is right. And then there are people who don't play by those rules. And those people they need to be seen for what they are as people that actually threaten",
      "civil discourse and it's something very dangerous for a society that wants to use persuasion as the means in which they do things. Now obviously there are many cans of worms that can be opened with this because when you have societies that view things as unjust, then do we rebel? And certainly in Western civilization",
      "rebellion became a very important aspect. I mean the Cromwellian disobedience to tyrants is obedience to God in the Muslim version of that it was to have a tyrant for 60 years oppressing you is better than anarchy and so very different perspectives that came up which is why so much of the Muslim world ended up becoming despotic because there really",
      "was a very great fear of anarchy and what happens when rebellion. But in our culture here, we have a system that's working relatively well. We have a lot of problems. And we have to feel blessed to be in a civil society in America, that we really have to cherish what we have and work to make it better.",
      "where things break down, how terrible it becomes. And unfortunately sometimes our country has a role in where things have broken down and those are things that we have the responsibility of citizens in this country to fight against but I think just a humility is really important. One of the things that fallibilism in religious understanding is extremely important to inculcate into young people",
      "of the truth of my religion, but I should be very, very wary of my certainty about my understanding of that religion. And when we arrogate to ourselves God's understanding, that's when all the problems come out of religion. One of the most beautiful things about our tradition is that the Mufti was in Sahih al-Bukhari,",
      "is God's judgment, when you make a judgement. And Omar bin al-Khattab once his scribe wrote this is what God has shown Omar and he said erase that and write this is What Omar thinks because they understood that they can't speak for God, that all they can do is say I think this is, what God may have meant and this is my judgment in this situation but i could be wrong",
      "debated anyone except I prayed that God would manifest the truth on his tongue so I could submit to it. And he also said that, when I got into a debate with my interlocutor, I believe my position is right but it could be wrong and I believe his position is wrong but it can be right. That humility of fallibilism, that I might learn something, is really important to inculcate",
      "pouring a basic humility to our religious traditions about who we are and what we know is really important. And humility, according to the Quran it is the virtue that will enable you to see the truth. And arrogance is the vice that will prevent you from seeing the truth, I mean that's... And humility just to clarify, humility in your mind also doesn't... Humility means not to sit in judgment",
      "to be too quick to judge others, or does it not? Judgment is... We have to make judgment. Discrimination is judgment. So I'm not saying don't make judgments but make sure those judgments are based on sound reasoning. Opinions, there's something the Greeks had the concept of sound opinion and doxa as opposed to unsound opinion that knowledge is one thing and opinion is important",
      "but your opinion should be reasonable. There's a lot of people that we have opinions, I mean one of the things I read with a freshman in the freshman seminar was an essay on BS which he argues that there is so much of it in the world because everybody thinks they have to have an opinion about everything without thinking about it and so it's just important that we know what we're talking about and we are willing, Imam Madik said",
      "said half of knowledge is saying I don't know just being able to say I don' t know, being able say you know I don''t have an opinion on that because I haven't studied it. I don´t know the issue and I think people take very superficial and glib... You know I'm coining a new word there's so many glipsters out there. Glipsters. You heard it here first, glipster.",
      "that is shallow, superficial and characterized by insincerity. And there's just too much glibness out there of just having opinions about things you really haven't thought about. You ask them and it's amazing what they'll say and then if you say have you ever read the Quran? And that's why I'd recommend reading Gary Wills for people that... He wrote a book called What The Quran Means and Why It Matters. And he's a public intellectual. He won the Pulitzer Prize. He's very well regarded",
      "well regarded, but he wrote that book because he was in a gathering once and they were all trashing Islam. And then somebody looked at him and said, Gary you must have read the Quran what do you think it means? And he felt ashamed that he'd never read the Koran. And so he decided to study and he actually used the study of Koran as the basis and he spent I think a year studying the Korans and the book is the result of it",
      "what he realized about the book itself. And so I think, again, that just is a testimony to his humility of saying, you know what? I've never read the Quran. I don't really know. I mean, I saw Thomas Sowell once. Somebody asked him about Islam and he said, you now, I'm probably the only person in America that's not an expert on Islam. So I'm just gonna have to say, I don' t know. Right?",
      "and giving a round of applause for our speakers."
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "dakake/Women and Shi_ism Dr_ Maria M_ Dakake George Mason_yf9FSdzqOco&pp=ygUSTWFyaWEgTWFzc2kgRGFrYWtl_1750209216.opus",
    "text": [
      "is one of many faiths, primarily Christian, Muslim and Jewish. We prepare our students to become religious leaders in the complex and pluralistic society that we live in today. We welcome you to visit our website or take home any printed materials in the lobby. We also happen to have our Director of Admissions here tonight, Tina Demo, so if you have any questions... And we do have an information session on Monday night,",
      "is one of a series that is sponsored by the Imam Ali Chair for Shi'i Studies and Dialogue Among Islamic Legal Schools. And we owe much to the members of our Shia Advisory Committee, and some of them are here tonight, and I know will be coming in probably in a little while. After the presentation, we'll have a short Q&A session so if you have questions keep them in mind. And I'm just going to remind everyone",
      "introduce the speaker. Maria Masi-Daycake holds a BA from Cornell University and an MA and PhD in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University, and is currently Associate Professor of Religious Studies at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. She is the Director of the Undergraduate Interdisciplinary Islamic Studies Program at GMU",
      "Verl Auk Center for Global Islamic Studies. Her research interests and publications lie in the fields of Islamic intellectual history with a particular interest in Quranic studies, Shiite and Sufi mystical traditions, and in women's religious experiences. She is the associate editor and co-author of The Study Quran and author of The Charismatic Community, Shi'ite Identity in Early Islam.",
      "Please join me in welcoming Dr. Maria Daycake. Thank you Susan, thank you Dr. Ayub for inviting me to come and it's wonderful to be here and to see some faces that I haven't seen in a long time so it's a pleasure to be",
      "to come and speak, he asked if I would speak on a subject related to women in Shiism. And at the time, in fact, I had been asked to write an article on female women as, Shiite women, I should say, as moral exemplars. All right? And so I initially thought that I would present on something related to that. So talking about, for example, Fatima,",
      "the daughter of the Prophet or Zaynab and the way in which their legacy has been very influential. But as I thought about it, of course I realized this is a topic that is very frequently covered some people would say it can't be covered enough but their stories in many ways are stories that are told by other people necessarily they didn't write",
      "important as they are, as moral exemplars of piety, bravery and eloquence especially in the case of Zaynab and dignity. They are exemplars that play today a passive role. They're used as inspirations for people particularly in the Shiite case, people struggling with very difficult situations but I thought it might be more interesting",
      "to do something a little bit different and to focus on a woman who's closer to the modern era, 20th century woman named Nusrat Amin.",
      "It may just kind of do that when there's no movement. Okay, so I have to move a lot? All right, you got a little preview there of what I'm going to talk about. So I was interested in her in particular because she is a woman who wrote in her own voice. She is the author and the agent of her own story. And so I would like to focus a little bit on",
      "her today and on her writing, on her Quran commentary in particular. But a little bit about her first. So she's as I said a 20th century figure born in 1886. She dies in 1983. She lives to be therefore if you can do math almost 100. And most of her writing was done",
      "a shah, not during the time of the Islamic Republic in Iran. She is a modern woman in terms of when she lives but she's not exactly modernist. She's path breaking for women in terms",
      "She existentially challenged, that is in her very person, traditional assumptions about the ability of women to hold religious authority and to contribute significantly at very high levels to religious knowledge. But she was outwardly a very conservative woman living in a not-very",
      "for those who have looked at her writing, are very conventional. Very traditional much of what you would expect from someone writing within a very conservative religious context. Okay so she's still here it's not here on my screen okay? So as I said she is very accomplished religious scholar. She wrote nine books including",
      "including a 15-volume Quran commentary, which will be the focus of my talk today. She held ijazahs, licenses to teach, recognizing her expertise in two subjects, in hadith transmission but also in ijtihad. She was a mujtahidah. She is one of only two women in her generation to hold the title of mujtahi'da.",
      "to Hidda. So that meant that she was capable of deriving Islamic law and issuing legal opinions on Islamic law, for those who aren't familiar with the language, based on original sources. The other thing that makes this position that she attained extraordinary is that she did it without any family connections.",
      "Most of the women who reach a very high level in religious scholarship or the religious establishment in Iran are the wives or the daughters of famous religious scholars, or religious scholars who have a family legacy in the tradition of Shiite learning. But she doesn't. Her husband is not a religious scholar.",
      "were religious scholars. She did this on her own. She was also very committed to women's education, she founded a network of schools for women's religious education but for women religious education so remember the active part of her career is during the time of the Pahlavi regime so she is very hesitant about girls going to secular schools where they will have",
      "interact in ways that she would find not very conservative, not very acceptable in Islamic context. So despite the very extraordinary role that she had and that she played there's not very much that is known about her we don't hear about her very much for example her contemporary in Egypt Bint Ashati or Aisha bint Abdurrahman who also wrote a partial Quran commentary is much more well-known",
      "Both in the Arab-speaking world or the Muslim world as well as in Western scholarship. There's a significant amount of scholarship on her. There is very little on Nusrat Amin in Western Scholarship and even in scholarship in Iran. So, the question is why is this? Well first of all we probably hear less about her than we do about someone like Binta Shati because she's from a minority Shiite tradition so",
      "would have limited the number of people who might've been interested in her work. She was a woman, in a man's world, right? And even though she attained this very high position and she received ijazahs, she also by the way... Come back! She also by they way gave... It does come back. She gave ijazas, she issued ijazazhs again to some very important people, people who went on to become important ayatollahs",
      "holas in the Shiite religious hierarchy. But there were still, in her time as probably is not surprising a number of men in the Shia religious establishment who didn't really accept her as a muchta hida, who didn t really think she truly held this authority. In fact when she wrote some of her first books she would write under a pen name which was not uncommon Bint Ashati who I just mentioned has a pen",
      "who were thinking about giving her an ijazah and wanted to have her come. They didn't believe that she had really written the work that she, uh, had that had attracted their attention. And so they made her come and answer a series of questions to prove that she was indeed the author um, of that particular, uh work. Now there is some now, some modern scholarship in Western academia on this Ramin that's just starting",
      "starting and one very promising young graduate student, Mariam Ratner at NYU has written a nice article on her. And she mentions that Nusrat Amin is kind of interest in her is renewed in the 1990s so she dies in 1983 and she's largely forgotten but interest is renewed",
      "of backlash from a number of Muslim women who are arguing for greater rights and so forth in the Islamic Republic. And she is brought out and presented as an example of a woman who was able to accomplish a great deal while living a very traditional conservative life.",
      "one of the women who has written a little bit about Nusrat Amin and talked about this sort of renewed interest in her, in Iran in the 1990s. And I said did this engender a renewed interest for her writing? She is after all the author of nine books.",
      "engaged with. It's not a part of the curriculum at the Jose, it's in very few libraries even in seminaries in Iran. It is hard to find booksellers that will get a hold of it. So this has limited her people's knowledge about her but why one might ask are not Islamic feminists Muslim feminist very interested",
      "has, after all, written a Quran commentary. Much of contemporary Islamic feminism is focused on the idea of women reclaiming the interpretation of the Qur'an or being able to interpret the Qur-an and I think it's in part because she was a very conservative person living a very traditional life. She's married at 15, she has eight children seven of whom pass away before they reach adulthood. And traditions about her",
      "about her or stories about her will say that she was someone who always attended, for example to her domestic duties first. That scholarship was always secondary and when I hear things like that I want to give up right because she had eight children and focused mostly on her domestic duty's and she wrote nine books including a 15 volume Quran commentary. I mean I have two",
      "Okay, but how was she able to do this? She was also very wealthy right. She came from a very wealthy background. She had a lot of domestic help so she certainly may have had a more time to do than initially it might seem she did. Okay, so as I said there is some new research that is being done on her but it focuses largely on her role as a legal authority in Iran and how unusual that is to have a woman at the level",
      "at the level of a muchta hida. And so I was interested primarily in looking at her works, I found that it was a real shame as a scholar if i had written lots of things and then nobody read them. I would feel it was waste and I thought that it at least deserved to be read and in fact one of the scholars who works on her but hasn't really engaged",
      "really engaged her writings themselves, has said I hope that someone even if men aren't interested in this she said I hoped it some female scholar will be interested enough to read her writings and I thought there I am. So so I went looking for her Quran commentary which was not an easy thing to find by the way there are very few libraries",
      "Princeton Library. I went to go look for it, it was pristine! I opened it up the binding cracked like no one had ever read it before that's probably true of lots of other books at Princeton too but certainly was true this one. But I decided to look very carefully at least some passages of the Quran and I didn't get through 15 volumes but so what",
      "preliminary observations from the time I was able to spend with her text. And let me say one other thing about the idea of a woman writing a Quran commentary. We have a long history of women scholars in the Islamic tradition, so people have written about the fact that you have lots of women who certainly many fewer than men but women who reached very high levels",
      "both male and female students, we have a history of this. But if you look at those women, you see that primarily their expertise is in what we would call the nakli sciences, the transmitted sciences. So they write books about hadith, right? Something where they're transmitting knowledge from one generation to another. You don't find a lot of women in the akhli sciences doing philosophy or",
      "doing theology or doing usul al-fib, or doing Quran commentary. And Quran commentary is kind of an interesting genre in Islamic religious sciences because it is sort of both akhli and nakhli, right? It is both an intellectual science in that people are applying, authors are applying their own thought to the text but at the same time it's also a body of literature in which the inherited tradition is also transmitted.",
      "Let me talk, every time I hit this a new part of my speech comes up here. So let me talk first about the structure of this Quran commentary that she has. What it does is it first of all reproduces a section of the Arabic text of the Quran in chunks of about seven to ten verses. She then provides a Persian translation and its her own Persian translation.",
      "existing Persian translation. So she offers a Persian translation of the Quran and then she offers her commentary as well in Persian, and in the introduction to this Qur'an commentary She expresses what a weighty endeavor she thinks attempting a Qur'aan commentary actually is",
      "with the idea of whether or not she should do this. She said, I was constantly torn between a true desire to do this and a real fear. And I think her fear wasn't a fear of social consequences but a fear spiritual consequences, a fear waiting into a commentary on the text which for Muslims is the very word constituted by the very Word of God. So she suggests",
      "she suggests, she makes some claims about her doubts and the struggle that she had in trying to overcome her fears and think about what she could do. And I think this might in part be a way of deflecting potential criticism right? She didn't sort of rush into this in a heady way. She has some concern about it but she says that she decides to do this with certain limitations so",
      "that, and I think some of these are up here. So she says well I thought you know maybe I'm not capable of writing a complete Quran commentary but I've already started doing some translation so the commentary will kind of be a sort of extension of those translations that I've done we all know that translation is in itself a kind of commentary. And she says moreover I'm going to make sure that what I do",
      "She talks about the mishkat al-awliya, the niche of the saintly ones by whom she means the Shiite imams. So she said that she's going to base her commentary on the traditions of the family of the prophet meaning the Shi'ite imam specifically as well as other learned scholars.",
      "controversial verses from a theological perspective. So she said, I'm going to stick to the muhkamat. So those of you who don't know, muhkamat are those verses that were considered to be easily comprehensible on their literal face, right? They didn't need a lot of interpretation. And she says, I am going to try to avoid going too deep into the mutashabihat,",
      "see she doesn't exactly do that. But she also, she defines Mutashabihat in a very specific way meaning primarily anthropomorphic verses of the Quran where God is attributed human characteristics are attributed to God. Okay so then she says and before this gets published I'm going",
      "of Quranic exegesis to read through it and find any errors, and make sure that I can correct them. And then, of course she prays to God to forgive her for any errors that she might make and not hold her heavily to account for that. I'm not going to do anything dangerous is what she's saying right? I'm going to this but I'm",
      "Is it worth reading if she's going to put all of these limitations on? And it is, because in another part of the introduction, she has a very interesting section where she talks about or wrestles with the idea that she knows of the traditions that say that the interpretation of the Qur'an according to one's own opinion",
      "She knows that the traditions about this are many and they're very strong. But she says, doesn't it also say in the Quran that you must contemplate the Quran? Right? That you must... The word that is used is tedebbur, right? You must contemplation, you must think about or tafakkur, she uses that word as well. You must apply thought to the verses of the Quran.",
      "So she says, if it's impossible for us to do any kind of tafsir of the Qur'an based on our own intelligence then what can those verses mean? So even though she gives us a very traditional opening at the same time she tells us that she is not going to shy away from sharing with us her own contemplations on this, on the Qurʾān.",
      "actually go to the text. So I need to go back, actually. So that's a Quranic verse. Do they not contemplate the Qur'an? Of course, it's a rhetorical question. Or do their hearts have locks upon them?",
      "Okay. I need a technical guru up here with me. Okay, so what do we find when we actually look at the text itself? We see a tremendous amount of erudition right she cites like other Shiite commentators before her a wide range of both Sunni and Shiite Commentator she cits Tabari and Zamakhshiri for those who are familiar with that She cites the Shi'i Tafsir by Ayashi which is a compilation of the sayings of the Imams about the chronic verses",
      "the chronic verses. She quotes Tabrisi sometimes directly and she quotes certain passages from Taba Tawai's Mizan, of course, being a contemporary of hers as well. Her...she also quotes independent traditions, hadith traditions, and she of course has all throughout traditions attributed to the Imams but",
      "in a general and anonymous way, the mufassirin. And she usually does this when she's about to disagree with them. She doesn't name the people that she's disagreeing with. She'll say, the Mufassiri in general say this but... Right? And then she will give her own opinion. So we see kind of clear independence of thought in many places it's really her own commentary that dominates. It's not if you're familiar with Tabari Sunni",
      "Tabari's Sunni tafsir, he sort of gives all the inherited traditions and then he kind of gives his point-of-view adjudicating between them. Her own words dominate despite how many sources she quotes. And in many places we see a very mystical streak an Irfani streak and her biographies say that she did in fact study Irfan, this sort of mystical tradition within Iran",
      "have a lot in common, in terms of their basic ideas with prominent Persian commentators who she would probably have been familiar with. Mohsen Faye's Kashani, Ruzbahan Bakli and even Mullah Sadra but she never quotes them directly and she doesn't even I've checked some of these she's not really paraphrasing from them She's clearly drawing from the same tradition right? She's drawing from that larger tradition",
      "Irfan. So when we look at, if we look some of what she says in the text... Let me see if I can get it on screen so that you can see it. Okay, that would be great. First of all, if you look at those particular verses of the Qur'an that deal with gender relations,",
      "female scholars in the contemporary period, we see that again her traditions are very conservative. So for example if we look at the verse that deals with polygamy she simply cites exactly what was there in most of the earlier commentaries.",
      "So I think I can continue on this without the PowerPoint. She offers no specifically woman's perspective on issues, let's say versus dealing with marriage, dealing with relations between husband and wife. She does do things for example she'll mention inheritance and she'll talk about how the rights of inheritance",
      "inheritance that the Quran gave to women was an improvement on their lives. She compares it to the situation women had at the time of the jahiliyyah and pre-Islamic Arabia, and so forth. So she doesn't offer us feminist interpretations of these gender related verses. Okay hopefully all right. But at the same time",
      "patriarchal interpretations either. She just kind of treats them in a very matter-of-fact fashion, right? She just almost translates them, almost paraphrases them again in Persian. One particularly interesting place though is the famous verse 434 which many people point to as perhaps the most patriarchal verse of the Qur'an in its orientation, giving men both",
      "to take care of women and also the right of their wives, and the right to discipline them. At the very beginning of that verse it talks about the fact that men are responsible for women because God has...because of what God has favored one of them over the other. Now the traditional interpretations",
      "say well yes men are favored over women in a number of ways so they um they have greater leadership skills, they have more intelligence and intellect. They are better at self-restraint, they're physically stronger and so on right? So I thought how could she possibly say that given who she is and everything",
      "this. She says, you know men have this and the favor is that men have it and she goes but you know this is just in a kind of general way. She said because we all know there are women both past and present who have excelled men in intellect, leadership, self-control and even physical strength.",
      "her husband was not as strong as her or what it was, but she certainly was not going to let that sit. So it's a kind of tiny intervention she makes at that one particular point. Okay so I want to look at and I think you've probably already seen part of it. She has a very interesting commentary on verse 331 which says say if you love God right",
      "to the Prophet Muhammad, say to your followers, if you love God, then follow me and God will love you. And forgive you your sins. Right? And God is forgiving and merciful. Now this verse and other verses like Surah 5, Verse 51 that talk about the love of God or the love between God and human beings was often a subject",
      "in chronic commentaries. Some people argued that there couldn't really be a relationship, an actual relationship of love between God and human beings because they were too incommensurate. How could the divine and the human possibly enjoy a relationship or of love or experience a relationship of Love? And so they tended to give this these verses a metaphorical explanation. So",
      "What that really means is that a human being obeys God. And when God really loves a human, it means the human being is rewarded by God. But this is not something that Nasr-e-Amin was very happy about. She rejects this. She mentions this, she critiques it, she says this isn't possible, that the Qur'an says love and it means love. For her, love was really important.",
      "and the connection of the idea of love of the imams, in love of God in her tradition. So she says, quote,",
      "a very Sufi idea, a very mystical idea. Indeed the heart and the soul are attached only to God. And sincerity in religion can only take the form of divine love. If the goal of the sincere ones were not to seek love of God and to draw close to him then even if his heart had become completely emptied of earthly delights and all that is other than the truth meaning God",
      "completely emptied of this world and the next. And a heart, when it is brought to its final end, comes with nothing but the love of God.\" It's a deeply mystical interpretation of that particular passage. She goes on... So that's her words. She cites Jaffer Asadik, the sixth Imam saying religion, a religion other than love of god is something else meaning it's not actually",
      "to cite Kashani, a Shiite commentator. Love of the servant for God is the longing of the part for the whole and God's love for the servant is his good pleasure, ridwan, and the rending of the veil of the heart. So again we can see that this she's transmitting important traditions but she's also speaking in her own words very clearly here. Okay so another set",
      "interesting had to do with Mary or Mariam, Mary the mother of Jesus. So she has some interesting commentary on some of the verses that we find related to Mary. So first of all when she deals with Quran verse 42 of surah 3 and remember",
      "Of course, for Shiites one important question that Shiite commentators often had about this verse is how does this statement about Mary relate to the Prophet's daughter Fatima? Because the Prophet daughter Fatimah is often said to have had many of the same characteristics of Mariam in terms of her purity, her inward purity and her special station.",
      "So she engages with this debate and she brings people's perspectives on both sides. And I would say she sort of equally, brings positions equally on either side but it seems to me that very subtly she herself is arguing that Mary's particular chosenness here when it says chosen above the women of the world",
      "prior to the time of the Prophet Muhammad and so prior to Fatima, but she sees it universally. And she argues this in part by bringing a whole litany of particular virtues that are attributed and qualities that are attributed to Mary or Mariam in the Quran. So it's interesting, she's bringing certainly clearly Shiite arguments and bringing this debate. She doesn't sort of as directly",
      "directly critique those who want to hold Fatima as being in exactly the same place as Mary, but she seems to come down on the side that the Quran itself gives evidence that this statement is universal and not limited in any way. Okay another particularly interesting passage in surah 19 which is the surah of Mariam verses 16",
      "Mary in the book when she withdrew from her family to an eastern place and she veiled herself from them. Then we sent unto her our spirit, meaning the angel Gabriel, and it assumed for her the likeness of a perfect man.\" So she tells us the Mufassirin right? She doesn't give us any names right? The commentators say that the reason Mary was outside",
      "serving God and doing devotions to God in the temple. The reason why she was outside of the temple was because she had her menstrual cycle, so she couldn't remain in the Temple because women could not remain in that state in Jewish law. So she left the Temple, the commentators say, and went to the house of her aunt who is the wife of Zechariah",
      "was over and then she purified herself, and she put on new clothes. And just as she was putting on new the angel Gabriel appeared. She doesn't like this interpretation. She says it's quite obvious that Mariam was a person who was constantly devoted to God,",
      "exercises. She was outside of the temple because she went off to a hermitage, to a private place, to some place away from other people so she could engage in even more intense prayer and spiritual exercises. And she says it's quite likely that she went to a cave hidden in a mountain which is of course where the Prophet Muhammad receives his revelation.",
      "And she gives us evidence from the Quran for this. She's not pulling it out of nowhere. Is it going to do it for me? Here we go, okay. In Quran, she cites Quran Surah 23 verse 50",
      "and a flowing spring. So she says, this is talking about when she was in a mountain, right? And she went there not because she was impure, not because he was suffering from the particular female weakness, not becuase she just couldn't be in the temple but because she wanted to go and intensify her worship",
      "Mary is in very good company because the prophet Moses withdrew from people before the start of his mission. Jesus withdrew for people before he started his mission, many of the prophets withdrew and had this period of seclusion before their mission. She says very clearly that Mariam was not a prophet but she says this puts her in the company in that way of the Prophets.",
      "So again, she's taking a traditional interpretation that she found to be dismissive of Mary's station and transforms it into an interpretation that puts her on a level almost at the level of the prophet. At this point too, and I wasn't able to put it on the PowerPoint but at this point",
      "another mystical interpretation about this. And she talks about how Mary felt compelled to leave the temple and engage in these devotions in a solitary fashion so she could be completely emptied of the world, even of her family. Because she said only then could the spirit come to her, could the angel Gabriel come to",
      "Bakli and also in Kashani, where it says that the fact that she was completely emptied and completely purified in this way is what allowed the sun of the spirit to shine, to rise within her. And this is, of course, a play on the Quranic statement that she withdrew to a place in the east which is the place",
      "sun rises, where the light is. And only there could she encounter the spirit. So she's suggesting here in fact that Mariam is driven either by an inspiration or by her own internal sense of what was demanded of her spiritually to go to another place to have this period of seclusion that would allow the angel to come to her.",
      "Okay, so some final thoughts. What I'd like to do is just talk a little bit about Nusrat Amin in her context and as a writer who had multiple identities in many ways, as a woman, as Shiite right? As a person living in the 20th century in a very particular period in Iran.",
      "Okay, so first of all as a Shiite commentator on the Quran Nusrat means commitment and devotion to Shiism and to the Imams and to The teachings of the Imam is very clear. She cites them repeatedly with a clear sense of love and attachment She follows a pattern of Qur'an commentary that we see since the time of Tusi or of Tabrisi",
      "of Tabrisi in the 5th and 6th centuries, of quoting not only or transmitting Shiite interpretations but Sunni interpretations as well. So she's following them very much in that particular methodology of Shiite commentary. And as we saw, as devoted as she is to Shiism and committed as she",
      "some of the traditional Shiite interpretations. Secondly, as a modern writer we see that she gives herself a fair amount of independence from the other inherited traditions or exegetical traditions. She does, of course...she's very modern in her insistence that the Quran is the interpreter of the Quran,",
      "One verse of the Qur'an is to look at it in relation to other verses of the Quran. Something called tafsir al-Qur'an bil-Quran. Although this is, of course, an older concept, it is one that is invoked very often by modern writers as a way of legitimating and giving a kind of divine warrant to integrating new interpretations and new commentaries. She talks about, very much in her introduction, about this idea of tadaabur, the idea that human beings are meant to engage with the Quran,",
      "the Qur'an, that you don't always have to have a medium of some inherited tradition in order to approach it. She says the Qur-an should be understandable to everybody and that in fact uh in the Qurn God himself actually condemns those people, condemns people who do not contemplate the Qurr with their own intelligence so her focus on the idea of Tadabur again something rather modern",
      "contemporary in Pakistan, Eslahi of course at this time is writing his very famous Tadabur al-Quran. Again invoking a very similar concept so in some way she is a woman of her age She is approaching the Quran in a way that we see other people at that time doing. She's very different though from other modern commentators another contemporary of hers of course Sayyid Qutub In Egypt who is translating I'm sorry interpreting the Quran",
      "interpreting the Quran, but with a clear social and political agenda and set of ideas in mind. She doesn't seem to be doing that. Her commentary seems free. She seems to not be trying to push any particular point of view in her commentary, but really a kind of free tedebur, a kind",
      "It is true that she lived a conservative life and that she held conservative views about things that maybe many modern Muslim, either feminists or simply women's readings of the Quran might not agree with. But she was insistent where she had the opportunity to be so",
      "equality of women. And she resisted against tradition, even sometimes against unanimous tradition attempts to dismiss or belittle women's spiritual potential. So I think that her work deserves to be read. I think there is much more to be found there.",
      "We can look at this and learn from our tragically recently departed colleague, Saba Mahmoud that sometimes women's agency recognizing women's desires to act for themselves. To attain what they really want doesn't always look the way people might expect it to look in her study of the women's piety movement in Egypt",
      "She says these women might be dismissed as women who were, again, like Nosrat Amin, overly conservative, overly traditional. But at the same time, these were women who are acting on a religious impulse that was very much theirs and I think Nosrat Ameen is doing the same thing. Thank you.",
      "Thank you so much and apologies for the technical difficulties. I'm glad we got that. Thank you Omar for helping with that. So, we have time for some questions and I'm just going to walk around with the microphone so that everyone can hear any questions.",
      "or as far as her commentary is concerned, its place in the commentaries that have been written about Quran and your access to the copy that you got. What was its contribution to the study of Quran? Well unfortunately I only became aware of this after the time of the study Quran",
      "about it prior to that. It would be interesting to see what the whether it would have worked to be incorporated she certainly I certainly would have loved to incorporate some of these things you said they're very, very beautiful actually they're much more beautiful in Persian than in my attempted translation but you know one of the stipulations",
      "commentaries from up to the modern period were fine, but he didn't want something like Sayyid Qutb To be in there because he felt it was very modernist and overly political and so forth. She clearly wasn't like that But again this is not a commentary That was why of course it's very hard to access like I said there's only a few libraries that have it And it's you know It's not easily it would not have been easily accessible to us as we were doing our",
      "we were doing our commentary but maybe in a future edition. Yeah, Lucinda Mosher I am glad that you're studying her and that you have planned to continue to study and i'm thinking about access might you be considering putting together a short anthology of sort of the gems of her commentary so that we could assign it to our students",
      "to our students? That's a wonderful idea. Yeah, I mean, I certainly could do that as I went through and you know, I sort of pulled some things out and did, as I said, a kind of preliminary translation from the Persian. It would be really interesting to pull those things especially as I say those aspects that are mystical in their orientation because that's where I really see her most, seems to me her most authentic",
      "voice and also based on a lot of learning. I mean this isn't just her own kind of spouting, right? As i said you read these sort of mystical commentaries and you hear very clearly the echoes, the reminiscence of Sufi commentaries or other types of mystical commentary that you've read but it's her own as well so I think those things would be the most interesting so maybe I will pull some of those okay yes",
      "how full is her commentary. And another important consideration, I'm sorry my Parkinson gets... How does she deal",
      "that seem to be quite human of God.",
      "Well, I would say it's interesting. She does say in the... she says certain things",
      "All the time in the actual commentary, but she says that she's going to avoid getting into these issues And but what she means by that is that she kind of will simply state. What the different Theological positions are let's say metaphorically on some of these But she doesn't offer her own In-depth commentary and the ones that I've seen but there are others that I have not yet seen But I would say on the the commentary she makes about love of God this is it's not quite an anthropomorphic",
      "an anthropomorphic verse, but it seems to have a similar kind of import to it in that it's a question of can God really love a human being? Can a human bein g really love God? I mean it's about God's you know does that itself make God too human or too limited by human limitations. And she seems completely you know unwilling to accept a more theological position like the Muthazali",
      "to say that no, this is we need to interpret this metaphorically. She's you know she may not consider that a Mutashabih verse but in a way it is in a kind of similar issue. In terms of the completeness it does indeed seem to me to be a complete commentary on the Quran and yes that does make it very different than Bint Ash-Shati's commentary which is both partial right and small",
      "and small, but it is also focused primarily on sort of literary, looking at the literary qualities of the Quran. Nusrat Amin clearly has a religious purpose. She's clearly approaching this from a religious perspective. And at the same time she says at the beginning in her introduction that she may not be able to rewrite an entire Quran commentary, but she does indeed.",
      "but she does indeed do that. And I haven't seen any place, there are some places where her commentary as I said is almost just kind of a paraphrase like a kind of Persian paraphrases of the Quranic verse just slightly expanded from her Persian translation and maybe she expected to do more of that. But in many places her commentary is quite extensive.",
      "By the time I get up there, he's going to be done.",
      "But consider when the earth shall be founded solidly and your Lord will come with the angels upon land. And this, of course, is developed in different ways by the commentators, the foodies, shihas, you know.",
      "But it would be interesting to study women commentaries, see how they live with verses like this and verses that are not very positive on women.",
      "Yeah, and then again like I said she just there she largely paraphrases or she cites you know the traditional readings of them. She really doesn't offer a lot in the way of kind of new reading of them in terms of the ones that I have looked at closely so I will continue to look at those.",
      "and I will certainly look at that when I'm back in Princeton. Joel Orr, thank you so much for your wonderful talk. In some ways this is just an example of great scholarship in that not only is it bringing something new to us but you're doing so in a way that you're not reading a prepared paper but it's obviously something you know deeply and you're sharing in a",
      "asked about a, it was actually the question I was going to ask. It would be wonderful to have a more accessible version so people can dig into the other one. Another option or idea for you or for others and maybe it's already out there and that's my question. When I went to University of Toronto there was a woman I met there and she put together a handbook of women Bible interpreters historical and biographical guide. Yes.",
      "Yes. And I started leafing through this thing and I realized there are so many, there were so many that we just don't know about. And so is there something like this for Quranic studies? And if not will you please do one? Not for Quranics studies, for Hadith studies yes because I said there were more women in hadith studies than doing something like the Qur'an but I'll say two things about that first",
      "Muslim women, maybe even going back to the early modern, maybe into the late medieval period that are waiting to be discovered. So I don't know if you know the work of Emil Homeran. He's done a study of a woman who lived in Mamluk Syria and Mamluk Egypt and who was a Sufi, a mystic, and she wrote absolutely beautiful love poetry on the Prophet and all kinds of treatises. She was apparently part of the literati, part of these sort of literary circles in Cairo",
      "in Cairo, in the 15th-16th century. And he's now published, translated and published a lot of her work. I saw him give a presentation and said how did you find her? He said well, I went to the Dar al Qutb in Cairoe and looked through the card catalog until I found a woman's name. Now so we have in Istanbul, we have",
      "libraries of manuscripts that have never seen the light of day. And at least there might be more women among them. I was very inspired when he said that, I thought, I'm on the next plane to Cairo, you know, it hasn't quite happened. But to your first question about women's contributions to the Quran, it's interesting as I said they're really we don't know a very many women who actually did what",
      "the 20th century. But we do have, for example, the fact that some of the wives of the Prophet, most particularly Aisha, contributes a good deal to the interpretation of the Quran and she sometimes stands against the larger tradition of male authorities around her and became very authoritative for that reason. So one thing I thought of doing but probably not until ten years from now",
      "from now, is to go through and really pull out for example Aisha's Quran commentaries or contributions in major Quran commentary. To pull them out and publish them separately the same way people have done for other commentators like Ibn Abbas or something like that but it's you know I think it would be interesting there's something that can be learned by pulling them out of their enmeshed positions in those exegetical works and looking at",
      "is a kind of search and recover mission. All right, well thank you so much for your wonderful talk and everyone can have some social time and maybe ask you some further questions but thank you"
    ]
  }
]