A Review of Isra Yazicioglu, Understanding the Qur’anic Miracle Stories in the Modern Age, University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University, 2013.
How are believers supposed to understand and respond to miracle stories in the Qur’an today? It is this question that Isra Yazicioglu grapples with through a sweeping survey of premodern Muslim and modern Western intellectual history. The book frames myriad related questions expertly: What function do miracle stories perform in scripture? How does the Qur’an itself frame the role of miracles in history? What is the difference between witnessing miracles directly and reading or hearing about them in absentia? Are miracles foundational for belief in prophets, or do they merely serve as supporting evidence after belief has been affirmed? If it is that latter—which indeed it turns out to be—then why are miracles narrated in the first place?
The title of the book, Understanding the Qur’anic Miracle Stories in the Modern Age, further begs the question: are believers to understand miracle stories today differently from the way they have been understood in the past? Beginning with an anecdote that inspires her to investigate the question—a casual conversation with an aunt, whom one imagines to be a common elderly woman having trouble accepting the virgin birth of Jesus—Yazicioglu proceeds with a philosophical investigation into the views on nature, causality, and epistemology of Ghazali (Iran and Iraq, d. 1111), Ibn Rushd (Spain and Morocco, d. 1198), Hume (England, d. 1786), and Peirce (America, d. 1914), culminating ultimately with the insights of Nursi (Turkey, d. 1960), who reconciles their divergent views as a “refreshing exception” to the failure of modern Muslim thinkers to meet the challenge of modern science.
As an introduction to these various thinkers and the common set of questions that they entertained, the book is excellent. In relatively simple language, Yazicioglu presents brief biographies, key texts, and sophisticated philosophical ideas. It is unlikely that experts on any of these thinkers will find much to critique; they may also not find much that is original. However, what is original is the manner in which the thinkers are brought into conversation with each other. Ghazali leads the way both chronologically and intellectually with his critique of causality. His position creates problems for Ibn Rushd, who fears that if taken to its logical conclusion, Ghazali’s position will result in a breakdown of all rationality.
Hume echoes Ghazali’s philosophical views on purely empirical grounds, but falls into contradictions in order to avoid the pitfalls that Ibn Rushd had cautioned against. Enter Peirce, who identifies an act of the mind—neither deduction nor induction, but abduction—so subtle and intuitive that it has been missed by all previous thinkers and logicians. At each step of the analysis, Yazicioglu grapples with miracle stories. Since causality is unproven, for Ghazali, miracle stories may be taken literally as instances of God’s creative power that is operative anyways at every moment. For Ibn Rushd—who distinguishes between the interpretation of scripture by elites and masses according to their own intellectual capacities—miracle stories may be taken literally by the masses but not necessarily by philosophers. Hume rejects the possibility of miracles because they rely on unverifiable reports and go against common sense, even though in a very abstract way, they cannot be ruled out as impossible.
Peirce emerges as the hero of the narrative leading up to Nursi for adopting the middle ground. For Peirce, although causality may not be provable, the mere ability of our minds to perceive it and discern replicable patterns is indicative of its correspondence to reality. Yet, we can never be sure that our understanding is complete or that the “laws of nature” are stable or final; hence, the possibility of a spontaneous departure from predictable events always remains, the door to the occurrence of miracles thereby staying open. Nursi, embodying the best of Ghazali and Peirce, flips the miracle phenomenon on its head: the wonder is not in the rupture of nature that miracles produce, but rather, the wonder is in miracle is all around us at every moment in every aspect of creation.
Although one suspects it all along, Yazicioglu puts her cards on the table in the final chapter. Her exposition on Nursi exposes her normative commitments perhaps more than she would like, and leaves the impression of the entire book as having been a scripted journey to a predetermined climax. One wonders whether it may have served her purpose better if the book had been about Nursi alone, keeping to a close reading of his texts, bringing in other thinkers as relevant. If not about Nursi alone, then perhaps about Nursi and Peirce, both near contemporaries, one Muslim and the other Western, each providing a window for telescoping backwards into their own respective lines of intellectual history of which they are presented as the culmination.
Such a move may have prevented the contextual dissonance from premodern to modern, essentialism to nominalism, materialism to spirituality, which the book neither fully acknowledges nor resolves. Hume departed from a very different set of metaphysical assumptions than Ghazali. Although their positions on causality apparently have much in common, they are incommensurable because of their divergent starting points. This does not mean that they cannot be brought into meaningful conversation; it does mean that a more nuanced contextualization of each is required.
Similarly, Nursi’s approach to miracle stories through the lens of a Qur’anic ethos appears to be an entirely different activity than that pursued by philosophers of science or rational theologians. This divergence becomes most apparent when Nursi’s views on specific miracles are discussed, which include his positing that there may be naturalistic explanations for miracles that are yet to be discovered, or that the stories serve as prompts for believers for scientific research and discoveries. Yazicioglu mentions several examples of this, including the miracle of Solomon mentioned in the verse: “And [We subjected] the wind to Solomon,” which Nursi understands as Solomon traveling through the air, “and, by telling this story, the Qur’an is indirectly encouraging the reader to discover those means.” (p. 155) Other than the fact that the verse was never read this way until after flying had already been discovered elsewhere, how does this view mesh with the criticisms of causality we see throughout the book?
Another approach for the study could have been to catalog the various miracle stories in the Qur’an, and then to investigate interpretations of them across the ages. The epistemological vantage of these interpretations could then have been extrapolated with the aid of philosophers, past and present, including but not limited to the ones treated in the book, as relevant. This approach may have eased the task of comparison; it may also have masked the normative agenda from surfacing so strongly. In the end, it might also have kept one from wondering whether all the philosophical musings of Ghazali, Ibn Rushd, Hume, and Peirce would ultimately help the poor aunt struggling with miracle stories mentioned in the introduction.
In conclusion, one could argue that the “pragmatic hermeneutics” that the book proposes is merely a new name for an age-old task: that of interpreting scripture for relevance in varying contexts. These remarks notwithstanding, one shouldn’t underestimate the power of new names for old things. It may be that the very act of renaming brings one closer to relevance. As a work of constructive theology, Yazicioglu is blazing a trail: the set of questions, the depth of engagement with major thinkers of the past and present, and the presentation of a serious Muslim scholar in conversation with modern Western thought. For all that, the book is certainly worth reading. I am sure that it will be both instructive and inspiring for anyone trying to make sense of religion in the modern world.
Mahan Mirza is a Teaching Professor at Notre Dame University and Executive Director of the Ansari Institute for Global Engagement with Religion.