How does the reading of scripture interact with religious identity? Must polemical texts always foster states of conflict between one faith and another? Can we find ways to deal with such passages that contribute to peace? And how can Jews and Christians widen their interfaith conversation to include Islam, and develop a nuanced appreciation for the Qur’an and its exegetical traditions?

These questions were addressed in April when the ICJS, together with the American Jewish Committee and the Second Presbyterian Mission Council hosted "Reading the Qur’an: The Enduring Legacy of Interreligious Polemics." The program was a day of study with Michael Sells, the John Henry Barrows Pro-fessor of Islamic History and Literature at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, whose academic specialties also include comparative mysticism and the relationship between religion and violence. He was also at the center of a contro-versy at the University of North Carolina five years ago when a conservative backlash greeted the assigning of his Approach-ing the Qur’an as required freshman reading.

Sells began by offering the participants some historical back-ground on the Qur’an. He contextualized it in the 7th-century C.E. social developments of the Arabian Peninsula and the flowering of a multi-genre poetic tradition that achieved a full literary form by the year 950, when the scattered Qur’anic revelations were likewise finally assembled into a completed text. He stressed later that this text could not be sufficiently appreciated in a cover-to-cover reading. Faithful Muslims ex-perience it through liturgical recitation, an articulated system of chanting that affords believers an intensely aesthetic manifestation of the word of God. He played a number of recorded samples of Qur’anic recitation, which were indeed striking, in order to illustrate this point.

Most of the day, however, was spent exploring the meaning, or meanings, of the words themselves, specifically those sections that could be construed as the Qur’an's position on the proper attitude of Muslims toward Christians and Jews. Sells acknowledged the present-day relevance of these texts, which serve both as justification for the aggressions of militant Islamism and fodder for reactionary claims that Islam is a religion of violence, and are therefore often seen as close to the root of the much trumpeted "clash of civilizations." But just as he rejected hard "clash" theory as a dangerous fatal-ism, so too did Sells caution that a definitive reading of the Qur’an's interfaith polemics is no easy matter. Different verses express varying opinions, and even the harshest words are subject to multiple patterns of exegesis. Authoritative readings are as much the product of the authority's agenda, and the reception it meets in the social climate of the day, as the text itself.

This was demonstrated through a text study in which partici-pants were given two different English-language translations of the same Qur’anic passages. The Gracious Qur’an of Dr. Ahmad Zaki Hammad, a scholar with credentials from both Cairo's prestigious Al-Azhar University and the University of Chicago, served as a "fairly neutral" contrast to the more bla-tantly ideological Interpretation of the Meanings of the Noble Qur’an in the English Language, the work of two professors at the Islamic University in Medina, Saudi Arabia. Hammad's rendering of verses 1:6-7 -- "Guide us along the straight way -- the way of those upon whom You have bestowed grace, not those upon whom there is wrath, nor those astray" -- was more or less mirrored in the Saudi version, except for the insertion of two parenthetical clarifications: "those who have earned Your anger (such as the Jews), nor those who went astray (such as the Christians)." Verse 2:62, which stood in Hammad as a statement of tolerance for other monotheistic religions ("whoever among them truly believes in God ... shall have their reward with their Lord"), was similarly clarified in the Saudi translation with a more stringent reading: "This Verse (and Verse 5:69) mentioned in the Qur’an should not be misinterpreted by the reader ... the provision of this verse was abrogated by the Verse 3:85: ‘And whosoever seeks a religion other than Islam, it will never be accepted of him, and in the Hereafter, he will be one of the losers.’"

The Saudi translation, Sells said, was fairly unique in the de-gree to which it attempted to shape the reader's understanding of the text with insertions. But it has enjoyed great popularity over the past decades, owing to free world-wide distribution by the Saudi government. Though its readings are rooted in tradition, hadith (extra-Qur’anic teachings of the prophet), and tafsir (commentary), the translators drew on the particular constellation of these sources that bolstered their perspective.

But, Sells noted, there are many ways to read the Qur’an. Over the centuries of Islamic history many commentators have chosen to select more tolerant readings of interreligious po-lemics, situating anti-Jewish or anti-Christian sentiment in Muhammad's experience in Medina, and thereby de-emphasizing its universal applicability. These exegetical tradi-tions, however, have been marginalized over the past two hundred years as the Islamic world has felt its identity threatened by the incursions of Western colonialism. Interpre-tations reinforcing a "conflict identity" -- a sense of us against them -- have been ascendant, the Saudi translation being a prominent example of this phenomenon.

Sells emphasized the need to maintain a "comparative per-spective" when studying sacred polemics, noting that all religions participate to one degree or another in "conflict identities," constructing the congregation of the faithful in opposition to unbelievers. The real danger arises, however, when these identities are mapped onto real-world conflicts, transforming the theoretical "other" into a flesh-and-blood enemy. Such is increasingly the case in the current era, with religious identities serving ever more often as the subtext of global conflict. It is therefore all the more critical that we recognize that violent confrontation does not necessarily flow from confrontational texts, but is rather a product of inter-pretive selection.