Channel 4’s “The Qur’an” Reviewed
Last week, Channel 4 broadcast a film by Antony Thomas (of Death of a Princess fame) called The Qur'an (see it here), which attempted to explore "what the Qur'an actually says". Karima Hamdan has done a fairly comprehensive review of it at UmmahPulse, and there is another critical review by Rachel Cooke in the current New Statesman. The latter contains a crucial inaccuracy: it accuses the Saudis who print translations of the Qur'an of inserting "anti-Semitic verses"; these are in fact parenthesised explanations derived from books of tafseer or exegesis. I have seen both of the well-known Saudi translations and agree that the Khan-Hilali one is full of jarring interpolations, but they are not "verses" inserted into the Qur'an; there is no attempt to alter the Arabic text. (Other Muslim reviews: Hamza Tzortzis, Adnan Rashid & Hamza Tzortzis.)
From my point of view, there were two big failings in this documentary. The first is that too much of it was unrelated to the Qur'an itself, but rather was related to common controversies about Muslim practice and culture. There was a section about female circumcision, which featured shocking, but quite unnecessary, footage of a girl having this done in Kenya (if I remember rightly from seeing this footage in an earlier documentary from 2005 or so, which one reviewer said made him vomit); this particular practice is nowhere mentioned in the Qur'an, so given that this was a documentary about the Qur'an, not about Islam in general, and that the majority of Muslim women in fact do not have this done, what was it doing in this film? The section about the Egyptian woman who had given up her career to be a stay-at-home mother was another example: while it is true that veiling the head is mentioned in the Qur'an, veiling the face comes from the Sunnah. Of course, the biggest change this woman made to her life was not wearing the niqaab but becoming a stay-at-home wife and mother, something hardly unique to Egypt or the Muslim world, as sister Karima points out:
He also let himself down by using the hackneyed image of the "tragic niqabi". In this case he interviewed a niqab-wearing woman who eloquently and forcefully explained that she gave up her career as a lawyer when she married in order to take care of her children and feels that the niqab brings her closer to Allah.
The whole interview is imbued with such a subtext of tragedy despite the woman in question being perfectly happy with her choices. I can only imagine that if the woman had said that she had given up her legal career to become a pole-dancer in order to explore her sexuality or left to grow organic almonds on a hillside in Tuscany in order to explore her inner chi life-force, Thomas would have been a great deal more enthusiastic.
The second is that, in an attempt to demonstrate the "diversity" of Islam, there was too much weight put on fringe groups in Islam and also controversies which mean nothing to Muslims. The vast majority of Muslims are Sunnis, and while one can understand Shi'ites making an appearance, there was also an array of fringe Sufis and modernists. Abdel-Aziz Bukhari, for example, is the sort of "Sufi" who gives Sufis a good name among non-Muslims and a bad name among Muslims; the fact is that most Sufis believe that Islam is the final religion which abrogates all others; Shaikh Nuh Keller's Letter to Christians in the Ukraine makes this point clearly. It is important to distinguish boiler-plate rhetoric designed to keep the peace between religious communities in places like Syria from the actual beliefs of Sufis, who are still numerous in Syria and Jordan. Genuine Sufis are strict about their practice; they do not include music in their dhikr and they do not drink wine; the references to it in their poetry are strictly metaphorical. They are usually not the people putting on big dhikr shows either; you have to ask around to find genuine dhikr sessions (particularly in Syria, where big religious gatherings are restricted by the government).
Another fringe figure they presented was Taj Hargey, a guy who popped up out of nowhere on John Ware's Panorama show in 2005 who alleged on this programme that the Hadeeth (the reported sayings of the Prophet, sall' Allahu 'alaihi wa sallam) were just a whole lot of hearsay and that the Qur'an is all that a Muslim needs. This is the belief of one small sect, the vast majority of whose adherents live in the west, which does not seem to have much currency in the study of Islam but has absolutely none among Muslims.
Finally, Antony Thomas's handlings of some of these issues really revealed his ignorance. One can understand the study by the German academic calling himself "Christoph Luxenburg" which alleged, among other things, that the reference to "virgins" as being among the rewards for martyrs actually referred to grapes, because of some misunderstanding. The fact is that the grapes of paradise are known of among Muslims because they are mentioned in the Hadeeth, while the companions of paradise are mentioned in many verses which refer unambiguously to human beings and not fruit. He does allow a commentator to reply to this by calling the Luxenburg study "Christian-centred", but no textual refutation is given. Similarly, the controversy about the confusion presented by early, undotted writings of the Qur'an ignores the fact that the text was transmitted orally as well as in writing; people would have heard it, and quite possibly never seen it written down. It was quite common for any aspiring Muslim of knowledge – and many others – to have memorised the entire text as a child, and continued reciting it daily for life (the term haafiz when applied to an Islamic scholar refers not to memorising the Qur'an, which was taken for granted, but to substantial numbers of hadeeth – 100,000 including chains of transmission). So, even if an undotted Arabic word can have 30 different meanings, which meaning each word actually has is well-known.
In conclusion, while I have little to add to Karima Hamdan's assessment of the views conveyed in the programme, as a documentary its main failing is not, as Rachel Cooke wrote in the New Statesman, that it was so even-handed that it became boring; rather, it cast its net too widely, starting out as a documentary on the Qur'an but diverging into a discussion of emotive issues about Islam which are not directly related to the Qur'an, while much of the on-topic material was about irrelevant side issues. There could have been coverage of Qur'anic art or calligraphy, or about different ways of reciting the Qur'an, or about any of the well-known reciters of the Qur'an, or about the derivation of Islamic law, or about a host of other matters, but the presenter preferred to dwell on a few emotive issues which would have appealed to non-Muslims, not all of them relevant at all. This was an unusually long programme which appeared well-crafted and therefore probably had a large budget, but the money and the airtime were wasted on this.
