The unfolding drama about the potential burning of copies of the Qu’ran tomorrow throws up some very very interesting issues. The wonderfully-tached Terry Jones has named 9/11 ‘International Burn A Koran Day’ but the event appears to be on hold for a while while he fields calls from high-ranking government officials and leading Muslims. Not bad for a pastor of a church of 50 people.

The question I’d like to ask him is this: what does he think he is going to achieve by this? Historically, public burnings like this have been about destruction of harmful material in a display of corporate rejection. Albums by The Beatles were burned in 1966 in the deep South of the US – presumably to rid the area of the devilish music they were playing, and show them that they were not more popular than Jesus.

What confuses me about this Qu’ran burning is that I would wager that everyone who is going to get involved in the event will actually have to go out and buy a copy of the book in order to burn it. Sales of the Qu’ran will thus rise, and in no way will the number of copies of this ‘corrupting material’ decrease in the general populus. Jones’ burning then must be about pure symbolism, rather than purifying combustion, and thus must be designed to stoke the fires of anger.

He is thus reducing himself to the mob-mentality of flag-burners we see on our television screens: stamping on a barely smouldering stars and stripes as an act of media-focused hatred. Achieving nothing.

More importantly though, Muslims have a very different relationship to the Qu’ran as a physical text than Christians do to the Bible. Far more Muslims know long passages of the Qu’ran off by heart. As one scholar put it recently:

‘the Quran cannot be burned; the text of the Quran is just ink and paper’

In other words, you can burn as many of these physical objects as you like – the Qu’ran will remain inscribed on the heart. This seems to be a far more healthy relationship to a holy book than the hefty, leather-bound, Jesus-words-in-red fetish many Christians seem to have with their ‘swords.’ Jones’ burning will achieve absolutely nothing other than fuelling hatred. It will not convince anyone of the ills he perceives in Islam, nor of the love that Jesus is meant to show.

Despite the enflamed preaching of the hell-raisers and sin-friers, God is not interested in fire or burning. I think Jones would do well to read 1 Kings 19:

“After the earthquake came a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper.”

[ Mash Up 1 ] [ Mash Up 2 ]

In the previous two posts I’ve been trying to explore what our relationship is to text, especially when the text we are reading is ‘too comfortable’. David Shields has been trying to shock people into re-thinking what next for literature in his manifesto, Reality Hunger, which includes hundreds of quotations from other sources, none of which are attributed.

I’ve suggested that this has something to say to us as some of the ‘people of the Book’ and want to reflected a little on a passage from the Psalms:

I will sing of the LORD’s great love forever; with my mouth I will make your faithfulness known through all generations.
I will declare that your love stands firm forever, that you established your faithfulness in heaven itself.
Glory be to him and exalted be he in high exaltation.
You said, “I have made a covenant with my chosen one, I have sworn to David my servant,
‘I will establish your line forever and make your throne firm through all generations.’”
The seven heavens declare his glory and the earth, and those who are in them; and there is not a single thing but glorifies him with his praise.

As you may have suspected, the verses above are actually a mash-up themselves, taking lines from Psalm 81 and mixing them with some lines from the Qur’an too.

Perhaps you spotted it a mile off. Perhaps you know which the ‘rogue’ lines are. I’ll be honest – I don’t think I would have batted an eyelid had this been read in church. So what does this suggest about our relationship to our ‘holy texts’?

Firstly, and most obviously, anyone with even the smallest knowledge of Islam will know that the Qur’an contains many many passages which are similar in theme and content to the Bible. So no surprise there.

But secondly, I think this does, in a small way, present a challenge to us in our too-comfortable reading of any too-familiar text. Exactly what are we saying is the essential part of it? How much would it be possible to change the King James Version before it became ‘too corrupted’? To reflect on that is to question the extent to which we consider Scripture to be perfect revelation: if we can’t spot when lines from another holy book have been inserted, are we being careful enough in our guarding of what we read, or should we be so uptight about it anyway?

What I love about Shields’ book is that it has challenged me to reconsider my relationship to text, and my relationship to the internal process of translation and comprehension that goes on when my eyes fall over the characters: who exactly is saying this, and how can I tell? And this goes for whatever I am reading or hearing. It’s the internal process, the spiritual ear, that needs to be in tune, because no text can quite be trusted.

In the previous post I raised the issue of reality in our reading of texts. David Shields’ latest book Reality Hunger forces the reader to think carefully about what is true, what is original and what is stolen by virtue (or otherwise, depending on your point of view) of it’s lack of referencing of other works.

This same issue of reality has to be faced by us as ‘people of the Book’ – or one of the peoples of the Book. Why? Because we are too comfortable with the text. And in this comfort – the same comfort that comes from a too-easy reading of any familiar work – we no longer actually read the text as if it impinged on our reality.

Instead, we read it almost as a fantasy. It’s this possibility of fantasy and unreality within our reading of texts that interests me, as the claims that are being made of these texts are so great. Whatever our viewpoint, the Bible is not simply ‘another novel’ – the claims made over the course of history don’t leave us that option, even if we might personally reject any greater claims of the text.

I’ll be reflecting on this further in the next post, in which I’ll be unpacking the following lines from the Psalms:

I will sing of the LORD’s great love forever; with my mouth I will make your faithfulness known through all generations.
I will declare that your love stands firm forever, that you established your faithfulness in heaven itself.
Glory be to him and exalted be he in high exaltation.
You said, “I have made a covenant with my chosen one, I have sworn to David my servant,
‘I will establish your line forever and make your throne firm through all generations.’”
The seven heavens declare his glory and the earth, and those who are in them; and there is not a single thing but glorifies him with his praise.

I think these lines may have something important to offer as we think further about text and our relationship to it. I’ll discuss that in the next post…

[ Mash Up 2 ] [ Mash Up 3 ]

In case you missed it, there has been something of a storm raging in some parts of the world of letters over David Shields’ new book: Reality Hunger. Why? Because in this brave manifesto, he takes on the future of literature by means of ‘some 582 aphorisms, mini-essays, provocative statements and quotations–most of them from sources other than Shields himself.’

The bone of contention? None of the sources are referenced, leaving us the reader to ponder the nature of what is original, what is inspired, what is stolen, what is… art. As my good friend Stacy has written in her excellent review of the book:

The book asks enormous questions like, `What’s next for literature?’ While some will applaud, many will take issue with Shields’ conclusions. Among them: the death throes of the novel, and a call for the end of copyright as we know it. He makes the controversial argument that fiction is on the decline… Reality – elusive, contradictory, and open to interpretation – is more interesting than made-up stories because it requires readers to struggle with the complex idea of what might be true. So what’s next for literature? Shields makes a case for the essay…

What I’ve loved about the book is the tension it forces me to deal with with every line.

107: These are the facts, my friend, and I must have faith in them.

Except we have no idea if this is Shields speaking, or someone else. It’s brilliantly unbalancing, forcing the reader to really read the text, and read again, wondering if they’ve read it somewhere before, pondering its familiarity.

And as ‘people of the Book’, this mashing up of text is precisely the tonic we need in our overly familiar and overly comfortable readings. Just how confident are you on authorship? Just how good is the translation? And just how much do we really mean sola scriptura? I’ll get to that in the next post.

In the previous post I blogged about a fascinating book review in The Believer in which the reviewer was given just the text – no author, no past publications list, no endorsements and no well-designed cover. The text had to literally speak for itself, and, as someone who is about to be published again, I know I have conflicted opinions about this.

I think this has something to say to us about ‘bible-believing’ belief too. On Monday I had lunch with a colleague and fell to talking about a programme on the previous night which had looked at creation. My colleague (a warm atheist) was telling me about two friends who both believed that the Genesis creation narrative was literally true.

My thought was this: it was not that they had read Genesis and decided on the basis of the evidence that it was literally true, rather they simply couldn’t countenance the prospect of it not being literally true, as the problems of interpretation that this would precipitate would be too big. ‘It’s a matter of faith,’ one would repeatedly say. ‘I know it seems crazy, but I just have to believe it.’

In other words, for many ‘bible-believing’ Christians the irony is this: their belief that the bible is all literally true means that it has to be gagged. Why? Because if it were actually allowed to speak, it would cause too many problems.

If we were to simply read the text, without the ‘binding’ of the stern voices that tell us we can’t doubt, without the hard covers that brow-beat us with concerns that we are back-sliders if we don’t believe it all, we might find – as the reviewer did with their text – that when the word is allowed to speak, we can be renewed.

This month’s issue of The Believer is one of the best for some time, and carries one of the most interesting book reviews I’ve read for ages.

The book being reviewed is Momus’ Book of Jokes, but what makes the review so interesting is that the reviewer was given no information about the book at all, simply the text:

Its covers, front matter, and endpages had all been stripped, and the spine blacked out with a Sharpie. I didn’t know what it was called or who wrote it or who was publishing it or when. I didn’t know if it was the author’s first or twenty-first publication. Fiction? Nonfiction? Genre? Self-published? I didn’t know anything (and at this writing, I still don’t) except that it wasn’t poetry. What could I do? I began to read.

As the reviewer notes, it’s incredible what subtle information we pick up from a book cover, from endorsements, from the quality of paper or type used. And it’s amazing how much differently we read a book when we know the author who has written it – we either trust them or desperately want them to be as good as their last book.

In other words, most reviews are bullshit, and this is perhaps the only honest and true way that a book can really be judged: stripped naked and read without prejudice.

Yet I battle against this too, and with my new book coming am already involved in a campaign to gain readers’ attentions with discussions about the cover, and requests for endorsements. I want people to read the text, and the rest to disappear, and yet know that this is impossible, and, for the most part, unwanted.

The text can never speak for itself. We won’t let it. And this is the fallicy of ‘bible believing belief’ that I want to look at in another post.

(Pic is a mock-up of the cover for the book – not quite right text yet, but liking the concept a lot)