The Vacuum of Faith

Sure, the sounds of Qur’anic recitation are mellifluous. Many of the holy book’s suras teach the ways by which Muslims may follow an ethical path. But what disturbs me about Koran by Heart is a quandary that plagues religious communities worldwide.

Nabiollah is virtually illiterate in his native Tunisian. His Qur’anic education has almost entirely subverted any secular knowledge he may have picked up. As the film progresses and Nabiollah impresses the panel of judges at the recitation competition, we learn that he doesn’t even speak Arabic. It seems safe to assume that he doesn’t speak ancient Arabic, either. He has solely been memorizing sounds and vocables which, outside of their obvious euphony, are bereft of any real meaning.

Sells confirms this problem: “In traditional Islamic cultures, children begin their primary education by learning to recite the short suras of the Qur’an,” he writes. (Sells  162) I’ve met rabbis who are fluent in Talmudic and biblical grammatical forms – ancient Hebraic and Aramaic roots and words – but can barely manage to put together a coherent email in modern American English. Admittedly, and thankfully, these rabbinic figures devote their lives to preaching the morals and pedagogic narratives of the Torah. But this notion propagates another a challenging issue: their students, seven and eight-year-old kids who will soon be twenty, thirty, and fifty-year old adults, can recite archaic Jewish statutes but are cripplingly inept in real-world, tangible activity.

These issues are accentuated and become even more problematic when religious and faith-based organizations find themselves deeply, often controversially rooted in ancient social norms that compel them to make decisions that are bizarre and downright unethical in modern society. When a church prohibits its employees access to free or subsidized birth control, citing obsolete biblical edicts, the holy nature of these texts aren’t meshing with modernity; they are fundamentally undermining the evolution of a just and moral society.

So I suppose that the problem is two-fold: on one level, students of religious texts – in this case, of the Qur’an – are simply being coached and immersed in an empty craft. The craft is, in some respects, just a string of sounds. And on another, more disturbing level: often, when religious texts are being taught complete with their morals, they are being taught independent of supplemental secular material. Living in an entirely religious vacuum seems unbefitting of those who are interested in comprehensive intellectual or social engagement.

Thoughts? Rebuttals?