The Reformation of Islam
Containing the Revised Texts of
A New Kind of Muslim
And
Brief Thoughts about a New Islam
By
Lorin Sandor Jenis
A New Kind of Muslim
Preface to the Second Edition
In the second edition of this work Lorin Sandor Jenis appended his legal name to the text; he no longer used a pseudonym nor his spiritual name Amin Ahmed Khalil. It was either courage or foolhardiness that inspired Mr. Jenis to sign this work with his ordinary name. The Muslim world will certainly label him a heretic because of what he wrote---and Islam has always been quick to imprison and kill its heretics. Lorin Jenis nonetheless believes that it is necessary to be completely honest in the presentation of this tiny book. Anyone who reads it will immediately understand why, for it is a work of great inner conviction and fearlessness.
Preface to the First Edition
Islam requires its followers to believe that the Qur’an contains the unerring word of Allah and must not be criticized. In fact, Sharia law specifically states that a Muslim who criticizes the Qur’an may be sentenced to death; and heresy and apostasy are likewise subject to the death penalty. Lorin Sandor Jenis knows intuitively and instinctively that such laws were not derived from God.
A careful reading of his essays will reveal that Mr. Jenis has only the welfare of Islam at heart. The problem is that Islam is still a medieval religion. Mr. Jenis is a new kind of Muslim because he does something very simple, something commonplace in Judaism and Christianity---he evaluates his religion’s sacred text and finds that it is a fallible work, divinely inspired but human in its execution.
There certainly must be a way to go beyond an imperfect Qur’an to find an individual, unmediated relationship with Allah. Sometimes Islam helps, and sometimes it hinders us as we search for that relationship.
Salat in the Vernacular
Muslims have always valued and praised the language of the Qur’an. The classical Arabic in which it is written is thought to be the very language of Allah, and is noted for its expressiveness and beauty. There has always been a reluctance to translate the Qur’an into local languages, and a time-honored convention prescribes that salat, Islam's formal prayers, be recited in the original Arabic. Converts to Islam are accordingly expected to memorize these prayers in a language that might be foreign to them. Muslims generally believe that a uniformity of liturgical practice throughout Islam unites the faithful in a common religious culture. The use of the original language also prevents the errors that might result from faulty translations from entering Islamic thought and practice.
There may be some Muslims who are not familiar with the history of the Protestant Reformation of Christianity. In Germany the medieval era ended when Martin Luther successfully defied the authority of the church in Rome; he then proceeded to translate the Bible from the original Greek texts into the common German of his day. The German Bible that he produced became pivotal for the development of the German language and German literature. It is widely thought to be a masterwork comparable to the King James Version of the English Bible. Martin Luther’s Bible prepared the way for the King James Bible and all subsequent translations.
The Reformation inspired by Martin Luther ended an age of relative uniformity in Christian liturgical language and practice. In the Eastern Church the Bible had retained its original language, Koine Greek. The Western or Roman Church used a Latin translation of the Bible. The scholar who translated the original Greek into Latin was the Church Father Jerome, officially a saint. St. Jerome made his translation in order that the common people would be able to read the book. “Ignorance of the scriptures,” he wrote, “is ignorance of Christ.” What is ironic is that the Latin Bible itself became unintelligible to the common people when northern tribes destroyed the Western Roman Empire, and several different languages replaced Latin. If the principle enunciated by St. Jerome had prevailed, the Latin Bible would have been translated into Old English, Old French, and Old German in the early middle ages.
But the Roman Church did not translate the Latin text because Latin was believed to be a sacred language. The text was thought to be inerrant, even though it was merely a translation of the Greek text. A somewhat similar situation prevailed in the Eastern Church, because with the passage of centuries the common people ceased to speak the Koine Greek of the original Greek Bible, and the Bible became difficult for them to read.
It is interesting that both Greek and Latin were thought, in the Middle Ages, to be the language of God, although the original language of the Old Testament, at least, was Hebrew. The Jewish people also considered the language of their scriptures to be the language of God. Supposedly God spoke to Adam and Eve in Hebrew. But the phenomenon of the “language of God” predates the earliest Hebrew texts. A language that was older still than written Hebrew, Sanskrit, was considered sacred in ancient India.
Sanskrit remained the liturgical language of Hinduism until the modern age, when the British made their language the official language of the subcontinent. Certain ancient Sanskrit texts were never translated into English, but many were. The subsequent loss of “authenticity” in the Sanskrit scriptures actually enabled Hinduism to journey out of India into the West. The first guru to teach in the West, Swami Vivekananda, undoubtedly spoke and wrote English far more fluently than Sanskrit, and he wrote his books in English. When he arrived in America in 1893 he lectured to his audiences in perfect, eloquent English.
We can see, therefore, that the British accomplished what the Mughal kingdoms, and before them, Gautama Buddha, failed to do. The Buddha refused to speak to his followers in Sanskrit and used only the common language of his time and country, Pali. The Buddha was in effect the St. Jerome and the Martin Luther of his day insofar as he anticipated their concern for the spiritual welfare of the common people. But once again, we find that the language which the original teacher shared with the unlettered masses eventually became a sacred language known primarily to monks and scholars. The Pali scriptures became a “canon” of texts similar to the body of Sanskrit scriptures. Pali became sacred just as Koine Greek and Latin were to become sacred in a later age.
The Prophet Muhammad was not educated in any institution of higher learning, and when he recited the verses of the Qur’an, the classical Arabic that he spoke was simply the common language of that time and place. The emissary of God, the angel Jibril, naturally had no choice but to employ the language that Muhammad understood. After the compilation of the Qur’an this language became the language of God.
By now my reader will begin to see the parallels between the history of Islamic civilization and the ancient and medieval Indian civilization, and the medieval European civilization. The earliest sages of ancient India taught in Sanskrit because it was the common language of their time. The Buddha taught in Pali because it was his country's everyday language. Moses taught in Hebrew because it was his people's native language. Jesus taught the people in Aramaic because it was their native language, and the evangelists wrote the gospels in Koine Greek because it was the lingua franca of the eastern Mediterranean. St. Jerome employed Latin in his translation of the Bible precisely because it was a common language of his time and place. The Prophet Muhammad taught in classical Arabic because every poor person in Mecca and Medina spoke Arabic. And finally Martin Luther translated the Greek texts of the Bible into German because German was the native language where he lived.
In every case the language that began as the language of unlettered people eventually became a sacred language known primarily to scholars, monks, and priests or imams. The pattern is consistent, that is, except in the case of the German Bible and the other vernacular Bibles that were created in the Reformation. Soon after the Reformation of northern Europe the Enlightenment practically succeeded in replacing religious culture with a scientific, secular culture. There are people even today who believe that God spoke the King James English,