For a Muslim, the sound of Quranic recitation in Arabic cannot be replicated
in any other language; its truth emerges perceptually, not semantically.^15
This limits the efficacy of translation. When the Quran is used in a medita-
tive or talismanic manner, whether through chants, calligraphy, or by
drinking water infused with ink washed from its inscription, it is textual
presence rather than hermeneutic content that empowers the book.^16
Coextensive with its author, divine speech is the infinitely reproducible
and immutable copy of an inaccessible heavenly original. Its meaning
depends not simply on hermeneutics, but the faithful believer’s perception
of God through divine text. This text is embodied not only in the Quran,
but in all of creation–the universe we inhabit is also the sacred text, an
earthly mirror of the divine tablet. The Quran indicates a primordial link
between creation and revelation through the voice of the angel (identified
as Gabriel in early biographies of the Prophet):“Read! In the name of your
Lord who created: He created man from a clinging form. Read! Your Lord
is the Most Bountiful One who taught by the pen”(Q96:1–4).^17 Form
endows creation with physicality much as recitation embodies the word.
Although the Quran describes itself as written through the pen, the dual
meaning of the imperativeikra’as‘read’and‘recite’is underscored in
histories of the Prophet emphasizing his illiteracy as part of his humble
origins as well as proof of the miraculous origins of the divine text. Only
through perception, rather than afixed essence, can the Quran function
simultaneously as book, text, speech, and representation. Never embody-
ing any single aspect, each state of the Quran perpetually differs from
another, producing an ontological bridge without origin between the
sensible world of the human and the supra-sensory world of the divine.
The slippage between meanings enables the supplement of faith that
supersedes the logical structure of an empirical hermeneutic episteme.^18
We cannot know the Quran through modern scientific interpretation, yet
to understand perceptual culture, we must recognize its role in informing
how Muslims engage with the world and its representation.
The Quran accounts for this internalized perceptual mode by repeatedly
challenging even the most skilled of poets to create a passage comparable in
beauty to even its shortest section (Q2:23–24, 10:37–38, 11:13, 17:88). Used
as proof of the prophecy during thefirst centuries of Islam, this discourse
of Quranic inimitability (i’jaz) implicates the relationship between the
ethereal world of God and the material world of humankind doubly:(^15) McAuliffe, 2006 :6. (^16) O’Connor, 2001 ; Handloff, 1982 : 186.
(^17) Abdel-Haleem, 2004 : 428. (^18) Spivak, 1997 :62–64.
108 Seeing with the Heart