Premodern Islam had a quality something modern Islam has lost: the quality to embrace multiplicity and ambiguity.
For centuries the Islamic intellectual tradition discussed in detail Qurʾānic multiplicity and ambiguity in meaning and recitation.
For centuries the Islamic intellectual tradition discussed in detail Qurʾānic multiplicity and ambiguity in meaning and recitation.
We had a *qualitive* approach to the Qurʾān and how we understood it to be true and historically authentic. With Enlightenment modernity we started to have a *quantative* approach to truth, this mathematical approach viewed ambiguity as equal to untruth.
I remember lecturing to a room full of imams on the premodern embrace of multiplicity and ambiguity in Qurʾānic studies and tafsīr. At one point I cited Suyūṭī on this, and before I could mention it being Suyūṭī an imam started shouting I was lying and mistaken.
In my seminary courses on Qurʾānic studies I always start the first lecture on defining the “Qurʾān”. I first need to drive home to the students that the tradition defined the Qurʾān as “that which is strongly transmitted from Muḥammad Ibn ʿAbdullāh as being Qurʾān”.
This is an open-ended definition of the Qurʾān, as that what is transmitted is multiplicit, sometimes ambiguous, and can end up in many mediums, such as today’s post-1928 Cairo Muṣḥaf which they know best (and which is always the first answer they provide in my question).
The different ambiguous and contradicting theories surrounding the Aḥrūf, faithfully recorded and discussed by the Islamic intellectual tradition, can only be appreciated from a qualitive approach to truth. The quantative mind will end up in doubt...
Pardon the pre-coffee typos...
Thomas Bauer wrote an important book on the tolerance for ambiguity in Islam:
cairn-int.info/article-E_RHR_…
cairn-int.info/article-E_RHR_…
