Learning to listen

I advise newcomers to the Qur’an, before reading, to pause instead to listen. The title “Qur’an” means “recitations”, and the book is intended to be recited and heard.

It is easy to find recordings of the best Qur’an reciters by going, for example, to Qurʾan.com, where you can select any passage of the Qur’an, click on settings, choose a reciter, and press play. I suggest choosing “AbdulBaset AbdulSamad (Mujawwad)”. Abd al-Baset Abd al-Samad was among the best known and most popular Qur’an reciters, and his voice is exquisite. The mujawwad style is one of two major traditions of recitation. It is more stylized and musical than the murratal style. If you are a Protestant, what you hear may seem alien. Christians from traditions in which the Bible is chanted, sometimes in an unfamiliar language, will be on more familiar ground. But alien sounding or not, it seems to me many listeners will come away with increased appreciation for the skill, training, emotion and centuries of tradition that combine in this exquisite art form. Qur’anic recitation is more than an aesthetic exercise; it also makes a clear theological message: These words are no ordinary words, but are unrivalled in beauty, in truth or in perfection; therefore they demand to be recited not just with precision, but also with artistic skill. Like a Bach Mass, the best Qur’an recitation is doctrine performed as high art.

Equally helpful is to observe Muslim hearers of the recited Qur’an. Listening to the Qur’an is sometimes an aesthetically and emotionally charged experience in which the very words of God are experienced. In Muslim-majority societies the sound of the recited Qur’an marks holidays, births and deaths, and measures out the rhythms of the day. Consequently, the sounds of the Qur’an may have a deep emotional resonance, even for Muslims who are not particularly pious, in the same way that an Oxford agnostic may find that church bells, Christmas Carols, or the melody of an old hymn still evoke powerful emotion. A surprising number of Muslims memorize the entire Qur’an, often as children, contests and ceremonies to celebrate the completion this feat of memory are common in many Muslim communities, and those who accomplish it are thereafter honored as Hafiz al-Qur’an.  The words of the Qur’an are everywhere read, recited, remembered, a constant reminder that God speaks.

If we come to read the Qur’an after listening to it, and with with a sense of what it evokes for our Muslim friends, we will be much better able to recognize the limitations of a translation, where the rhythm, the rhyme, the musicality and the economy of the Arabic are lost and unrecoverable. But in the end most of us, whether Muslim or Christian, will have no choice but to pick up a translation. The Qur’an is intended to be read and understood, not merely appreciated for its aesthetic qualities. And as we read even the most flawed translation will not obscure the most obvious literary feature of the Qur’an: the voice we are hearing (with the notable exception of suras 1, 113 and 114 which function like opening and closing prayers) is the unmediated voice of God. 

This brief statement will raises two charged questions: Is the author really God? And can Christians address God as “Allah”? These questions are important, and endlessly discussed, often unhelpfully. But because these questions risk distracting from our main goal of listening to the text itself they need to be dealt with. I will address them separately in the next two sections.