Silence and Alterity in a Recitation of the Qur'an

Abstract

The Manhattan-based performance art group City Meditation Crew (CMC) staged a sitting meditation on 11 September 2010 on the Syracuse University Quad for which members of the group silently recited the Qur'an. CMC's anonymity -- and invitation to the public to join the recitation -- invites diverse interpretation and seems to advocate for religious pluralism. Prompted by CMC's performance, this article explores the character of silence in the context of reciting the Qur'an, the central religious text of Islam. The article's driving assertion is that Islam is fundamentally open to others, which has to do with its historical origins as well as its ‘live’ oral traditions of recitation. The article discusses Jacques Derrida's writing on the nature of repetition and its relationship to alterity in concert with his later thinking on Islam in Islam and the West, a conversation between Derrida and the Algerian intellectual Mustapha Chérif in 2003 before Derrida's death in 2004. Accordingly, the article explores the idea that, while every repetition of the Qur'an must be always recognizably the same, the Qur'an's ‘live’ oral nature means that it is different at each recitation. Thus, every Qur'anic recitation (like each ‘mark’ of language) calls out beyond any single and conscious self or any particular cultural orientation. Furthermore, silent recitation, like an absence of accountable communication, accentuates how such ‘liveness’ inspires pluralism. Silence lends repetition alterity, understood as a radical openness to the other as a form of faith.

Notes

¹ I thank Zain Ali for his insightful feedback on this article.

² Those who Derrida refers to as ‘authentic believers’ across the Jewish, Christian and Muslim communities ‘are more ready to understand the religion of the other and to accede to that faith’ with its universal structure (Chérif and Derrida 2008: 58).

³ Many revelations were also written, likely on fragments of bone, wood, leather and the ribs of palm leaves (Aslan 2011: 128; Ernst 2011: 26). As Carl Ernst notes, the Prophet's

companion and successor Abu Bakr (d. 624) is said to have ordered a collection of the written revelations, fearing for the preservation of the text because of the deaths of a number of those who had memorized it. He entrusted the compilation of the text to Zayd ibn Thabit (d. 655) who had formerly served the Prophet as a scribe. (2011: 26)

⁴ These stages of development took place in a comparatively short period of time. It seems highly likely that the 114 suras emerged during the lifetime of the Prophet Muhammad between 610 and 32 CE (Ernst 2011: 2). There is general agreement that the third caliph, Uthman (who ruled 644–52 CE), oversaw the formulation of the authorized text of the Qur'an that we know today by around 650 CE, or at least within some twenty-five years after the death of the Prophet in 632 CE (Aslan 2011: 128–9; Ernst 2003: 96; Neuwirth 2006: 143, 2014: 185).

⁵ Passages from the Qur'an are taken from the 2011 Oxford University Press, translation by M. A. S. Abdel Haleem.