Engaging with Islam
Engaging with the Qur'an
The books in Shakir Mustafa's office showcase his wide range of scholarly interests, including Irish drama, English poetry, Jewish-American fiction, and Iraqi fiction and poetry.
Whether we speak of understanding or use a vocabulary of terrorism and war, the words we choose can be as important as the message we seek to convey. Our leaders may be talking about building relationships “between the Muslim world and the West,” but their very phrasing betrays a tacit difference between two disparate entities.
As a scholar of literature and Arabic language in the Department of Modern Languages and Comparative Literature, Shakir Mustafa is attuned to the significance of language's nuances. In recent years, he has heard in the conversations of contemporary Muslim intellectuals the language of the Qur'an—not only in religious and political discourse, but in the arts as well.
For his current project, Qur'anic Negotiations: Contemporary Muslim Writers and the Holy Book, Mustafa is studying the varied ways in which Muslim authors use the Qur'an in their literary writings to critique political and social issues, to examine issues relevant to Muslims' lives, and to spark dialogue about religion that might otherwise be censored.
What unites the authors who tell these stories is an interest in using an ancient holy text as a lens through which to examine the challenges of modern life.
These dialogues are happening worldwide: Mustafa's study includes writers from Europe, West Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. And he writes from a global perspective informed by his own experience as a scholar whose work is unconstrained by national or cultural boundaries. Born and raised in Iraq, he came to the United States in 1990 to study Irish literature at Indiana University, and his scholarly publications include writings on Irish drama, English poetry, Jewish-American fiction, and, in recent years, Iraqi fiction and poetry. But it was only after September 11, 2001, he says, that he became aware of how essential the Qur'an was becoming in Muslims' lives.
He soon found the text's significance reflected in the literature he studied. And in delving more deeply he discovered that Muslim writers have used the Qur'an for a wide range of purposes in their works. Some of these are deeply subversive, as in the case of female authors' use of the Qur'an to critique the status of women both in Muslim societies and in the Qur'an itself. In the story “My World of the Unknown,” for example, the religiously observant author Alifa Rifaat depicts two women who consummate a lesbian relationship by reading the Fatiha chapter of the Qur'an; according to tradition, the Fatiha chapter is read by males as a means of sealing contracts, whether of business or marriage.
“People do believe in the centrality of their faith, but they are not afraid to think about and examine it.”
Still, the scope of his research is not limited to literary acts of resistance. Even novels and stories that are critical of orthodox readings of the Qur'an, Mustafa argues, can affirm the text's central place within Muslims' lives—as in the novel Brick Lane, in which Monica Ali shows her characters engaging with the Qur'an as they make their way through their daily lives amidst changing attitudes toward Islam in the post-9/11 West. Mustafa sees literary works as a model for the ways in which individuals use the texts and doctrines of their faith to interpret the internal and external contexts that color their own real-life experiences.
“One of the messages I want to communicate is that discourse in the Muslim world about the Qur'an, about religion, is much more extensive than we think—more radical and more innovating—and, at the same time, more Muslim than we think,” Mustafa says. “People do believe in the centrality of their faith, but they are not afraid to think about and examine it.” What unites the authors who tell these stories is an interest in using an ancient holy text as a lens through which to examine the challenges of modern life—though the means by which they do this, and the lessons they have to teach, are vibrantly diverse.
For more information, see www.bu.edu/mfll/people/mustafa.html.
