[I was going to send this in to The Australian as an opinion piece, but decided I might as well put it up on Dervish as I don’t think they’d publish an anti-Manji reply]

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Tampering with the Text

Thomas Jefferson, former President of the United States and primary author of the Declaration of Independence, prepared an edition of the Gospels in which he exorcised passages that he felt obscured the philosophy and message of Jesus Christ. With a sharpened razor he carefully cut up pages from the Bible, removing stories about the virgin birth, Jesus’ attributed miracles and his amazing resurrection, and pasted the remaining verses onto a blank sheet to produce what is known as the Jefferson Bible.

More recently in an article published in “The Australian” 25 July, a self-proclaimed ‘Muslim refusenik’ Irshad Manji, has called upon Muslims to take a hacksaw to their holy scripture, the Koran. While she agrees with the vast majority of the world’s Muslims who abhore the vile twisting of certain passages to justify the most un-Islamic of acts, Manji goes a step further. If only those verses did not exist, she plaintively cries, then there could be no twisted interpretations.

As an example, Manji points out that Muslims often neglect to mention there is an important caveat to the Koranic statement: the murder of one is the murder of all, “except as punishment for murder or other villainy in the land.” She argues that militants use this caveat to justify killing in retribution for the deaths of Iraqi children and US tax money supporting the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land. But what Manji neglects to say, is that the Koran is referring to capital punishment as exercised by the state. There is absolutely no room in that verse for individuals or stateless groups like al-Qaida, to begin committing murderous retribution for whatever real or perceived crimes might act as catalysts for their killing-sprees.

But that brings us back to Manji’s proposal. Referring to the Episcopalian Bishop Spong, who has garnered some controversy for suggesting that not all verses of the Bible might be considered equal, Manji seems to suggest that by exorcising verses from the Koran, there would an end to the religious mania of extremist Muslims. If only it were that easy. There is no logic to how militants attempt to use religion to justify their crimes, and no matter how many verses Manji might cut with a razor, terrorists will always find some excuse. If they don’t find it in this verse of the Koran they will find it in that verse. Osama bin Laden could make a dictionary declare jihad, and there would still be addled minds following him on his murderous rampage.

For over fourteen hundred years, Muslims have held to the belief that the Koran is the word of God as imparted to the Arabian Prophet Muhammad . In fourteen hundred years, Muslims have come from every conceivable race, class, culture and background to manifest a diversity that staggers the mind. Take the Australian Muslim community for example; our Muslims come from over seventy different countries all with their particular languages, foods, habits and cultures. For fourteen centuries (and a hundred or so years in Australia) Muslims have been able to interpret their scripture in enlightened ways, without resorting to wholesale excision. It did not take a trimmed-down Koran to produce Rumi, the most famous Muslim poet, who said: “The middle path is the way to wisdom,” or Ibn Arabi, who compared his heart to the Koran, saying: “I follow the religion of Love… this is the true religion.”

But if we do attempt this strange immolation of scripture, where should Muslims start and where should they finish? What Manji might find offensive, another might find benign. Who is the ultimate judge of what is offensive and what is palatable? Perhaps if there is potential for violence, we should consider deletion. In the Bible, Jesus instructs his followers to hate their parents, and warned that he was no peace-maker, but that he came with a sword. But it is only the cultic mind who might interpret these statements literally. What if those statements were designed to bear fruit of a different fashion? What if they were deliberately provocative so as to force people to think about them?

William P. White wrote: “The Bible is a harp with a thousand strings. Play on one to the exclusion of its relationship to the others, and you will develop discord. Play on all of them, keeping them in their places in the divine scale, and you will hear heavenly music all the time.” Might we not extend that analogy to the other great texts that have produced world civilizations? The Avesta, the Vedas, the Pali Tipitaka, the Tao Te Ching, and the Koran (to name a few) have endured for centuries as mystical books of guidance. There is something in these pre-modern texts that has given humanity the ability to glimpse beyond the everyday, mundane reality. They have been the source of ethics, morality, legal guidance and more for countless generations of humans across the globe. For this reason alone, we should respect their words, and not rush foolhardily into tampering with their precious texts.

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