Notes on the Literature of Sufi Prayer Commentaries (MSR XVII, 2013)

The interpretation of religious texts has a long and strange history. Although the practice itself is ancient, systematic reflection on its method and procedure has only become more complex over time. Parts of the Hebrew Bible recount narratives from earlier parts of the same book— an exegetical connection that ties both narratives nicely into a single scripture. Later, the Christian revelation would largely define itself against its Jewish roots. Interpretation, often with the sense of a “new” reading of the scriptures, was the basis here for a new religion, a messianic version of Judaism embodied in the hagiography of a minor Jewish preacher. The Islamic tradition too, one might say, found itself by rereading its Abrahamic antecedents. Central to its own self-image, the Quran repeatedly asserts corrective interpretations of these earlier “books.” Often the Islamic revelation calls upon its readers to take it as a rereading of the earlier Christian and Jewish books. With all of this reading across epochs and traditions, along with the rereading taking place within texts themselves, where does interpretation start? Should we ask ourselves where “reading” ends and where “interpretation” begins? As modern thinkers we are necessarily, if often unconsciously, indebted to contemporary ideas and debates on the matter. But of course exegesis, like any other great cultural enterprise, has a history to it. The medieval Scholastics largely agreed upon a four-fold schema of textual interpretation, which located meaning in the literal, the allegorical, the moral, and the esoteric senses of a text. In contrast, for us as moderns, one compelling idea is the widely held notion that reading and interpretation are not easily—if at all—disentangled. Whether we like it or not, for example, the idea of authorial intention (at least the most naïve versions of it) has been deeply shaken. Further, debates over reading communities and textual reception have greatly complicated our notion of “reading.” It was two generations ago in a famous essay that Rudolph Bultmann asked if it is possible to read