When the Quran tells the story of David and Goliath, it’s really the story of King Saul. The Quran speaks of Taloot (طالوت), which is the Arabicized name of Saul. Jaloot (جالوت) is the Arabicization of Goliath - it rhymes with Talut, so if you’re just reading along the parallelism that is set up is one of Talut vs. Jaloot - the divinely-ordained leader of the forces of good against the champion of the forces of evil. Dawood (David) peace be upon him doesn’t come into the picture until the end of the story.
The story of Taloot is one of my favorites. Sometime back in the early 1990’s I was a graduate student at Stanford. The Dean of Memorial Church and of Religious Life at Stanford was Bob Gregg, an insightful and quite wonderful human being. He proposed that some of the leaders of the various religious communities at Stanford should have an interfaith study group that is text-based: in each gathering, one person would be the facilitator. His/her responsiblity was to choose a piece of text from his/her religious tradition and “walk the others through it.” He hosted the group at his home. He went first with the story of Jonah (prophet Yunus peace be upon him) as told in the bible and we had quite the discussion, but that’s another story.
The second time round I volunteered and I picked the story of Taloot. The Stanford campus is home to the Hoover Institution (after President Herbert Hoover). The institution specializes in the study of war, revolution, and peace, and has a decent middle eastern collection in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish. By academic standards there is nothing particularly thrilling about the collection, but for the needs of a lay person like myself it was quite the thing. Hoover had closed stacks - so you couldn’t just go up into the stacks and browse the books. Instead, one would search through the card catalog, write down a call number of a book, and send up a request. Twenty minutes later, voila!
I was supposed to be studying Engineering at Stanford, but God knows I spent many an hour in that library just enjoying these books. The collection on the Quran in particular was quite something. They had every book of tafseer I had heard of, and some that I hadn’t. And they had a number of contemporary surveys of the science of tafseer and its giants that had a considerable impact on the way that I approached these books after that.
In any case, once I had volunteered to present the story of Taloot, I spent a couple of days holed up in Hoover taking notes from every book of tafseer there. I even waded through the tafseer attributed to Mohyiuddin ibn Araby - quite the experience indeed!
If I ever get the time I should probably dig up my notes from that time and post them here. The discussion group had two protestant priests, a catholic priest, a rabbi, a fellow from the bahai community, and myself. I made copies of verses 246-252 of soorat al-Baqara. Seven not very long verses make up the entire story in the Quranic narrative. I mentioned up front that this was the story of David and Goliath, they spent some time reading it, then discussion started. Most people can be quite insightful when they decide to be and this was no exception. People identified several key points, related the passage to their own narratives, etc. But the comment was made very simply that the text is confusing. To someone who has not spent enough time with the Quran this is a book that seems to meander. There is no apparent coherence to the story, one jumps from one scene to the next quite suddenly, and stories of the past are seamlessly interwoven with debates in the present and news of the future. You came out after the seventh verse not really sure if you even understood the story. What happened? And why?
I had heard these sentiments expressed before, not only from “outsiders” to the faith but from Muslims themselves. The feelings were frequently my own whenever I had failed to connect with some passage in the Quran either because some vocabulary was new to me, or because I hadn’t spent time asking the right questions, or because I had come to the passage with my own prejudice, or any of the many other reasons we sometimes misread our own text.
Per the rules of our group I needed to present (10-15 mins) some idea of how Muslim scholars have read the passage. Then we’d get back to the discussion. So I summarized my notes from Hoover. I started with a contemporary Tunisian scholar (ibn Ashour) who focused on the historical background to this story as discussed in Judaic texts. I summarized the classical exegetic approach represented by people such as Tabari, Qurtubi, and ibn Katheer. I mentioned ibn Arabi and other (more “mainstream”) sufi commentators (التفسير الإشاري). And I concluded with Hasan al-Banna’s remarks that see the story as an example of the successive selection of people (تمحيص or اصطفاء) until the ones left are those up to the mission. Aside from talking about the verses themselves I wanted my group mates to have a feel for the multiplicity of approaches that we take to the Quran and the diverse ways in which the Quran becomes guidance.
We still had considerable discussion about the verses. And I was very surprised (ecstatic, but surprised) to find that people changed their viewpoint of the Quran. It wasn’t just that they now “understood” what some commentators had said about the Quran. I would hazard a guess that most of the names I had mentioned were jumbled by the time we left the house that day. That was hardly the point. What some of the people there articulated a lot better than I had been able to was that the key to unlocking a Quranic story is to know up front that it is being told with purpose! One must follow the threads of the story that are highlighted in the text examining them always through the lens of “why?” Why does this story matter? Why are some parts missing? Why is it narrated in chronological or not in chronological order? Why do some pieces of the story seem to refer forward (or back) to other pieces? (How are these pieces connected?) When there is ambiguity, why is it allowed to stand? And if one has some facility with Arabic, why is one word used instead of another?
It is not just that there is a moral to the story, it is that there is a purpose in the telling!
A very insightful read Yaser. As as a one-time student of Qur’anic Sciences I find especially interesting your observations about certain passages within the Qur’an not appearing in chronological order.
I am aware of the separation of the Qur’an into the Meccan and Medinian verses, and vaguely recall how the Meccan verses contained more stories of the Prophets, while the Medinian verses contained more rules and regulations.
Have your subsequent readings of the Qur’an lead you to find increased clarity and order in the Medinian verses as opposed to the Meccan verses? Or do you find tafseer essential to a reading of even of the Medinian verses?
Jazaakallahu khayran Suleiman. You raise a point I hadn’t thought about consiously: is there a significant difference in the perception of coherence between Makkan and Madeenan verses?
I don’t have an immediate answer for that. However, Makkan sura’s tend to include more storytelling, shorter verses, and somewhat shorter chapters. They tend to focus on the fundamentals: both of belief and character. (These are generalizations not hard-and-fast rules). I suppose this could justify an argument that Makkan chapters would be “easire” to follow in an almost linear fashion. I am not sure. The story that I mentioned above is in al-Baqarah, which is a Madeenan sura. Also, most of the stories of the Children of Israel are to be found in Madeenan sura’s because they were frequently occasioned by dialogue with the Jewish tribes there.
As for me and my further studies, al-hamdulillah I keep trying. I don’t think scholarly tafseer is a prerequisite to understanding. Quite the contrary, I believe that it is crucial for us to reflect on the Quran at the level that is accessible to us. Understanding that the Quran does speak to us, we can get much out of it. We do have to reflect, and we do have to enquire as to the purpose or implications of the words we are reading. We do have to take them personally, so that we care how they apply to us more than we care how they apply to others. Finally, I have to compel myself to recognize the limits of my knowledge (or lack thereof). While personal reflections are both required and possible, individual tafseer, or definition of law and doctrine based on the Quran, are simply not within the domain of someone that has not studied.
All these are keys (in my view) to individual reflection on the Quran. My experience is that anyone that tries to do this invariably gets something out of it. I hope to be able to share more of my thoughts as time goes inshaa Allah.
How did you find the presentations of your colleagues?
What insights were you able to derive from the alternate text’s presented to you? And how did the narratives of similar stories compare? (i.e., the catholic representation of David and Goliath versus Qu’ran)
So the way this worked is that on any given day there would only be one piece of text presented. It would come from a particular faith tradition, people would discuss it, then the person that had contributed that piece of text would make a short presentation followed by more discussion. In the case of the Goliath story there was some discussion on what the Jewish and Christian texts have to say about it but not as extensive as one might think. I think (although I can’t be sure) that the reason for that is that the Quran takes such a dramatically different tone to the story — there is not much to argue with because the aspects of the story that occupy the most space in the Quran are very different from the aspects of the story that occupy space in the Bible. I seem to remember someone saying something along those lines . . .
In terms of pieces of text presented on other days, the one I remember now (you have to realize this was more than 15 years ago!) was the story of Jonah (prophet Yunus piece be upon him) as presented in the Bible. I also remember the setting of the dicussion that was led by the Rabbi in our group but not the topic. I might talk about the story of Jonah eventually - I have to collect my thoughts.
The fact that most Muslims dont devote time for the Quran daily might be evidence that we do not find the entire Quran relevent to us today. Ignoring such a powerful and useful message should be inexcusable. What initiatives do you think are necessary on a grass roots level to re-establish the connection with the Quran?
P.S. Great blog!
I am blown away, I have to say. I didn’t know that you are as good of a writer as you are a speaker :)
You must miss those days at Stanford, eh?
What actually hits me the most is that non-muslims’ perspective adds a lot to the table. I personally benefited a lot from reading about Islam from non-muslims and talking to non-muslims and listening to their takes about Islam. They sometimes throw in questions that I have never thought of which help me think and some other times they give me answers to questions I was never able to answer. It is very liberating to feel that you can discuss Islam without being protective of it because the further the discussion goes and the more critical you get, the closer you move toward the truth.
Jazaakallahu kulla khayr akhy-l-habeeb. Indeed I find the discussion with people of other faiths very useful if both of us are open to the discussion. One person who teaches at McMaster is Professor Gary Warner. He cited someone (I’ll get the exact citation and post it inshaa Allah) talking about interfaith dialog and noting that in engaging in dialog with other people about their faiths one gets a deeper understanding or appreciation of one’s own faith. This is not about moral relativism. Rather, it is about being open to new ideas and new insights. Wallahu a’lam.
Refering to the taloot story could it imply that the coming king(savior) or (mahdy) would have the same signs to be known from ,inorder to be chosen by his nation?
We should explore the quranic verses and present them to the world. And spend more time in gaining strong faith.