A fatwa on the disposal of the Qur’an by fire
[ by Charles Cameron — fire, respect, or local fury? a meld of motives ]
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Yesterday my friend and colleague Dr Tim Furnish posted a piece on the permissibility of Qur’an burning on PJ Media under the title Burning Defaced Korans: Islam-Approved. My own experience of Islam is colored by almost fifty years of exposure to the Sufi poets (I corresponded with Thomas Merton about “dervish” spirituality in 1964, see Merton’s Road to Joy: The Letters Of Thomas Merton To New And Old Friends, p. 333), so my emphasis in these matters differs somewhat from that of Dr Furnish, but I wanted in particular to thank him for pointing us all to the fatwa issued by the Permanent Committee of Research & Islaamic Rulings Of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which informs us, among other things, that:
It has been confirmed in Saheeh al Bukhaaree in the chapter entitled, “The Collection of The Qur’an”, that ‘Uthmaan Bin ‘Afaan (radi Allahu ‘anhu) ordered four of the good and righteous reciters from the Sahaabah to transcribe copies of the Qur’an from the Mushaf which was gathered by the command of Abu Bakr (radi Allahu ‘anhu). When they completed this task, ‘Uthmaan sent out copies of these Qur’ans to every region. Then he ordered that all other pages and copies of the Qur’an be burnt.
The Director of Religious Affairs of the Islamic Center of Southern California, Imam Jihad Turk, similarly remarked in an NPR interview last September (again, h/t to Dr Furnish for the pointer):
The Qur’an as an idea is something that is in the hearts and the minds of the believers and followers of Islam. It’s not the actual text. It’s not the piece of paper. Muslims don’t worship the text of the Qur’an or destroy the Qur’an.
Although it’s not sacred or something that’s worshiped, it is considered the representation of the sacred word of God, and given that it’s a representation of it, a Muslim would want to make sure that it’s treated respectfully.
When Muslims want to respectfully dispose of a text of the Qur’an that is no longer usable, we will burn it. So if someone, for example, in their own private collection or library had a text of the Qur’an that was damaged or that was in disrepair, so the binding was ruined, etc., or it got torn, they might bring it by to the Islamic Center and ask that someone here dispose of it properly if they were unsure how to do that. And what I’ll do is I’ll take it to my fireplace at home and burn it there in the fireplace. So I sort of take the pages out and then burn it to make sure that it gets thoroughly charred and is no longer recognizable as script.
In the Islamic tradition, it’s the Arabic that is really considered the authentic, original scripture. The very early scripture of the Qur’an—when it was first collated and put into a binding there were a lot of loose papers around, and this was about 1,400 years ago. The first companions of Muhammad, led under the leadership of the third caliph, Uthman, actually instructed the followers to take all of those pages and burn them, and so that kind of set the precedent as to what should be done. If you burn it, it destroys the word, the ink on the paper. It’s no longer perceptible, and so therefore it is no longer scripture. It’s just ashes at that point.
Taking those two comments together, it would appear that it’s not fire so much as respect that’s at issue, theologically speaking. Not that the folks rioting in Afghanistan were necessarily rioting theologically.
And in today’s Afghanistan, it also stands to reason that there are other factors in play…
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In my own response to Dr Furnish, I quoted Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi, who wrote:
We have news for the poor creature. He cannot burn the Qur’an. It is impossible. The Qur’an is the uncreated word of Allah. When a Muslim asks another Muslim to hand it to him he does not say, “give me the Qur’an” but rather “give me the Mus-haf.” That is to say , “give me the copy.”
[ … ] The Qur’an is the uncreated word of Allah. That is why it is unassailable. Of course, we treat the Copy with respect. However this unbalanced peasant preacher, in copying Mao and The Red Guards simply displays his ignorance. “Allah uses the enemies of the Deen to advance the Deen.”
When word came to a remote Muslim village in China that Mao’s Revolutionary Guards were coming to burn their Mus-hafs, the Imam assembled all the children and began to teach them to recite the Qur’an. When the Guards finally arrived they were met by smiling villagers in front of a pile of Copies. As the Guards set fire to the books the sounds of a hundred children came from the Mosque reciting the blessed words of the Qur’an.
The subtleties are always more interesting than the barbarities — which is why a scholarly approach to such enthusiastically contested issues is so important.
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FWIW, I’ve come at this topic before, and found myself in some neat conversations — see Burning scriptures and human lives, also Of Quantity and Quality I: weighing man against book, and more recently On fire: issues in theology and politics – ii.
