THE NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF WORLD RELIGIONS
Volume II: Judaism, Christianity, Islam
Edited by Jack Miles, David Biale, Lawrence S Cunningham and Jane Dammen McAuliffe
W W Norton & Company; 2,182 pages; $100 (Sold together with "Volume I: Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism")
At a time when religious faith is coming under intense scrutiny, The Norton Anthology of World Religions is presenting a documentary history of six major faiths with sufficient editorial explanation to make their major texts intelligible across the barriers of time and space. This second volume in the series is a textual overview of the three monotheisms - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - from the early scriptures to contemporary writings. It is presented as a journey of exploration, but any reader who hopes to emerge from this literary excursion with a clear-cut understanding of these religions will be disappointed - and that is the great strength of this book.
First, the selected Jewish writings show that contrary to some popular assumptions, religion does not offer unsustainable certainty. The biblical story of the binding of Isaac leaves us with hard questions about Abraham's God, and later, when Moses asks this baffling deity for his name, he simply answers: "Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh", which can be roughly translated: "Never mind who I am!"
At its best, religion helps people to live creatively and kindly with the inescapable sorrow and perplexity of human existence. Today, believers and non-believers alike tend to read Scripture with a dogged literalness, but in the premodern period traditional exegesis in all three monotheisms was a form of intense creativity.
Thus the Talmudic rabbis developed an inventive form of exegesis that they called midrash (from darash : "to investigate"). They imagined Moses returning to earth in the second century B.C. as a yeshiva boy and, to his consternation, finding that he could not understand a word of Rabbi Akiba's explication of his own Torah: "Matters that had not been disclosed to Moses were disclosed to Rabbi Akiba and his colleagues." Sinai had been just the beginning. Revelation was an ongoing process and would continue every time a Jew confronted the sacred text; it was the responsibility of each generation to continue the process.
Scripture did not, therefore, imprison the faithful in outmoded habits of thought. In his selection of Christian texts, Lawrence S Cunningham hints that some of the Gospel stories may also be a form of inventive midrash that drew on texts from the Hebrew Bible, but unfortunately he does not spell this out clearly to the reader.
In the same way, the Quran was never read by itself but always in the context of an immense and intricate net of commentary that developed over the centuries - mystical, philosophical, legal and logical. The Arabic quran means "recitation," and, Jane Dammen McAuliffe explains, the physical text was always secondary to its oral performance in the mosque. God himself had insisted that the Quranic message must be understood as a whole and explicitly warned Muslims against drawing partial conclusions from the text. A far cry from the two British jihadis who ordered "Islam for Dummies" from Amazon when they travelled to Syria last May.
The habit of regarding the Bible as historically accurate dates only to the Protestant Reformation; that outlook has since passed to the Muslim world. In a 2003 essay, the South African scholar Ebrahim Moosa complained that the practice of reading the Quran like "an engineering manual" had created a "text fundamentalism" that distorted its message. The appearance of the printed page, an image of precision and exactitude, also symbolised the developing scientific and commercial outlook, and has, perhaps, helped to give birth to a distinctively "modern" view of religion as logical, unmediated and objective. But like art, the truths of faith rely on intuition rather than logic.
At a time when religion is often regarded as inherently violent, the anthology reminds us that it has also been a force for peace. The insights of Dorothy Day, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King Jr and Desmond Tutu all show that a passion for justice, non-violence and integrity have been just as important in the history of Christianity as any Crusade. This anthology will also challenge those who believe that Islam is irredeemably intolerant and fanatical. The classical account of the prophet's ascension to heaven, the mythical paradigm of authentic Muslim spirituality, is also a story of pluralism, since the prophets of all three monotheisms greet one another as brothers and listen respectfully to each other's insights.
But, alas, religiously articulated violence is now a fact of life. McAuliffe includes the work of Sayyid Qutb, one of the Muslim thinkers responsible for the modern enthusiasm for jihad and Osama bin Laden's declaration of war on the "Judaeo-Crusader alliance." But when we also read Malcolm X explaining that his experience of the inclusiveness of the hajj inspired him to renounce his former racism; Fethullah Gülen, who insists that tolerance, forgiveness and love are central to Islam; and Tariq Ramadan, who instructs Western Muslims to embrace democracy, we gain a wider perspective. Unfortunately the Jewish and Christian editors have not included their own perpetrators of violence and intolerance in the anthology, leaving the reader, perhaps, with the misleading impression that Islam alone is guilty of this abuse of faith, even though Rabbi Meir Kahane and the Reconstructionist Gary North are also part of our modern story.
Socrates taught his disciples that a truly rational person understood how little he knew. This book will unsettle some current certainties about the nature of faith and, in so doing, may help its readers to arrive at a more nuanced and accurate perception of our predicament in this dangerously polarised world.
© The New York Times News Service 2014
