Re: Why women are converting to islam at an unprecedented scale
Reply #503 - April 03, 2011, 09:19 PM
The problem with interpretations is that they are subjective by definition and influenced by one's (theological/philosophical) background hence the tropes get misunderstood. Have you perchance read The tailor's explanation why Quran call itself 'clear'?
"All I mean is that, basically, each sign is a sort of opaque glass container or vessel. Inside that vessel is a bit of Truth. But its glass is all muddied and dark, so we just see an "obvious" sign with an "obvious" meaning. You see a chair, it's a chair, no big deal. Reading the Qur'an in the Tailorite fashion is meant to clear that glass away so you see the inside, "esoteric" meaning transparently, clearly. You look "through" the surface, now that it's clear ... and instead you see something that really throws you, it's so surprising (and so good)."
But the interpretation is not mine - it was made by a theologian G.K. Chesterton (who was himself a Christian):
"God says, in effect, that if there is one fine thing about the world, as far as men are concerned, it is that it cannot be explained. He insists on the inexplicableness of everything; "Hath the rain a father? . . . Out of whose womb came the ice?" He goes farther, and insists on the positive and palpable unreason of things; "Hast thou sent the rain upon the desert where no man is, and upon the wilderness wherein there is no man?" God will make man see things, if it is only against the black background of nonentity. God will make Job see a startling universe if He can only do it by making Job see an idiotic universe. To startle man God becomes for an instant a blasphemer; one might almost say that God becomes for an instant an atheist. He unrolls before Job a long panorama of created things, the horse, the eagle, the raven, the wild ass, the peacock, the ostrich, the crocodile. He so describes each of them that it sounds like a Monster walking in the sun. The whole is a sort of psalm or rhapsody of the sense of wonder. The maker of all things is astonished at the things He has Himself made. This we may call the third point. Job puts forward a note of interrogation; God answers with a note of exclamation. Instead of proving to Job that it is an explicable world, He insists that it is a much stranger world than Job ever thought it was."
The message here is not "I am up here; who are you (Job) to even question me? You cannot possibly understand my reasons etc" but rather "What are you complaining about? It's all a big mess, I have no control ..."
In other words god (as a meaning giver) is saying that there is no meaning guaranteed. We shouldn't trust him. He trust us.
Why is it a critique of ideology?
Because it lays bare the basic discursive(and obnoxious) strategies of legitimizing suffering:(to quote Zizek)"Job's properly ethical dignity resides in the way he persistently detects the notion that his suffering can have any meaning, either punishment for his past sins or the trial of his faith, against the three theologians who bombard him with possible meanings—and, surprisingly, God takes his side at the end, claiming that every word that Job spoke was true, while every word of the three theologians was false." It is an assertion of the meaninglessness of Job's suffering.
Contrary to the usual notion of Job, he is NOT a patient sufferer, enduring his ordeal with the firm faith in God—on the contrary, he complains all the time, rejecting his fate (like Oedipus at Colonus, who is also usually misperceived as a patient victim resigned to his fate). When the three theologians-friends visit him, their line of argumentation is the standard ideological sophistry (if you suffer, it is by definition that you MUST HAVE done something wrong, since God is just). However, their argumentation is not limited to the claim that Job must be somehow guilty: what is at stake at a more radical level is the meaning(lessness) of Job's suffering. Like Oedipus at Colonus, Job insists on the utter MEANINGLESSNESS of his suffering—as the title of Job 27 says: "Job Maintains His Integrity."
The almost unbearable impact of the "Book of Job" resides not so much in its narrative frame (the Devil appears in it as a conversational partner of God, and the two engage in a rather cruel experiment in order to test Job's faith), but in its final outcome. Far from providing some kind of satisfactory account of Job's undeserved suffering, God's appearance at the end ultimately amounts to pure boasting, a horror show with elements of farcical spectacle—a pure argument of authority grounded in breathtaking display of power: "You see all what I can do? Can you do this? Who are you then to complain?" So what we get is neither the good God letting Job know that his suffering is just an ordeal destined to test his faith, nor a dark God beyond Law, the God of pure caprice, but rather a God who acts as someone caught in the moment of impotence, weakness at least, and tries to escape his predicament by empty boasting. What we get at the end is a kind of cheap Hollywood horror show with lots of special effects—no wonder that many commentators tend to dismiss Job's story as a remainder of the previous pagan mythology which should have been excluded from the Bible.
Topic: Why women are converting to islam at an unprecedented scale