Minister's Musing

Rev. Mark Ward
Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville

June 2008

As Unitarian Universalists we value the opportunity to encounter other religious perspectives. Our tradition holds, after all, that religious truth is not fixed and final but an evolving thing, and that other traditions that may seem foreign at first have much to teach us. That said, the process of learning is not always easy.

We have found that in the class on the Qur’an that Matt Stollenwerk and I are teaching this spring. Most of us in the West have had little more than glancing acquaintance with Islam, and what we do hear in the news media has little to do with the life of faith that most Muslims live. So, diving into this rich and diverse religious tradition is challenging work. And nothing is more daunting than encountering the Qur’an itself.

One text in the class on Islam that I had in seminary described this holy book as an “ugly duckling,” a work that to Westerners seems awkward and impenetrable at first but whose beauty becomes clear on further acquaintance. The context of the Qur’an, the Bedouin culture of Arabia, is unknown to us, and the Arabic in which it is written is unfamiliar and seems jarring to our ears. Moreover, there is no narrative line carrying the reader through the book.

There are figures mentioned that we seem to recognize from the Bible, yet the stories told about them are very different. Encountering the Qur’an, then, requires of us the difficult work of suspending judgment and simply taking it for what it is.

Our class took as its text a book called Approaching the Qur’an by Michael Sells, which includes in a pocket on the back cover a CD of various Muslim speakers reciting key passages from the Qur’an. We have found that the beauty of the Qur’an recited in its original Arabic really is remarkable, and, while there is much of it that remains strange to us, we have begun to get a glimmer of what makes it so powerful.

It’s been a delight to join with a group of about 20 to work through some of the early passages of the Qur’an and to reflect on how they speak to us and challenge our own thinking, as well as to come to appreciate a little better than we did before this rich and growing faith tradition.