On what a scriptural community becomes when it has walked with its Book for nearly fifteen centuries, on what Jesus (peace be upon him) found among his own at a comparable distance from Moses, and on what the Quran warns us not to become.
These pages continue a series of reflections devoted to Quranic anthropology: the way a revealed Book works upon the human form, and the way that form, once communal, historical, juridical and institutional, may itself begin to work back upon the Book it received.
Previous essays set out from the Quran itself, from its internal architecture, from the order in which it builds a certain kind of human being and a certain kind of relation to God. This essay takes a detour. It sets out, for once, not from the Quran first, but from the Gospels.
Why this detour? Because a question remains difficult to pose from within. What becomes of a scriptural community when it has walked with its Book for nearly fifteen centuries? One does not easily see what one is inside. A community does not see itself, by the very structure of its situation. The outside view is missing by necessity, and no inner work wholly fills that absence. A mirror is required.
The Gospels offer us this mirror with rare density. They preserve a prophetic gaze cast, from inside Israel itself, on the pathologies of a community of the Book that has reached long maturity, at a temporal distance comparable to ours. That gaze is the gaze of Jesus son of Mary (peace be upon him), of whom our own Quran tells us that God taught him the Book, Wisdom, the Torah and the Gospel (5:110), that he is a word from God and a spirit from Him (4:171), that he is a sign for the worlds (21:91). What the Gospels have preserved of his passage among Israel is not a neutral transcript, for these are situated and theologically oriented texts, and that limit will be kept in view throughout. But it is a diagnosis that no other document gives us in quite this form and with this force.
The ambition is therefore twofold. First, to read, for what it says, the critique Jesus (peace be upon him) addresses to the scriptural community he finds among his own at a long and comparable distance from Moses. Then, without forcing the analogy and without hiding it, to draw lessons for our own community, nearly fifteen centuries after the descent of the Quran. Not to assimilate two histories that are not the same, but to identify, if it exists, a general mechanism that affects any community having received a Book and having walked with it long enough to forget, at moments, its freshness.
A caution must be stated at the outset, and it must be kept present throughout. What follows is not the Jews were like this, the Muslims are the same. That would be a triple insult: toward first-century Judaism, which cannot be reduced to the polemical portrait given by certain Gospel passages, and whose Pharisees, to name the group most targeted by the polemic, were also among the most innovative, spiritually intense, people-oriented movements of their time; toward Jesus (peace be upon him) himself, who was Jewish and spoke from inside his tradition; and toward an immense umma whose sociology no one here pretends to draw. Something else is being done here. We receive Matthew, Mark, Luke and John as the deposit of a diagnosis, situated, yes, but rare, upon a reproducible mechanism. That mechanism is not Jewish, not Christian, not Muslim; it is human, and more precisely, it is scriptural. It affects any community that has received a Book from God and walked with that Book for centuries. The Gospels captured it with particular clarity, because this diagnosis runs through Jesus (peace be upon him)‘s mission as they narrate it. And it is what we seek to recognise, if it concerns us, in the situation in which we find ourselves.
Let us state, from the opening, the thesis that will govern the whole path. The drift of a community of the Book culminates in a crisis of recognition. One can err for a long time and return, that is the ordinary condition of any religious life. But at a certain stage, the drift reaches a point where the community can no longer recognise: not its own sterility, not the truth when it presents itself, not the signs of its visitation, not even, ultimately, the Messiah for whom it was waiting. This inability to recognise is not moral, it is architectural. It is the accumulated result of pathologies which, taken in isolation, seem minor, but which interlock across the centuries to produce a heart and an institution that have become incapable of receiving what they claim, all the while, to be awaiting.
Behind this crisis of recognition stands a more fundamental mechanism still, which must be named now: duration turns reception into administration. A revelation is received, in the beginning, with trembling. It breaks open, it opens, it reorders. Then comes the time of transmission. The community must last. It builds forms. These forms are legitimate and necessary, and this must be insisted upon, because nothing in what follows is to be read as an anti-institutional or anti-liturgical charge. Form carries memory, disciplines the will, inscribes faith in the body and in the city, transmits from one generation to the next what no individual could reinvent alone. Without forms, nothing would last.
But as duration lengthens, the living relation to the origin can convert, imperceptibly, into a regime of conservation. One no longer receives what continues to descend, one administers what has been received. And administering is not receiving. The first joy, which was the colour of the event, fades beneath the gravity of management. The heart, which was soft earth, becomes stone through accumulation. The word, which was irruption, becomes recitation.
No one can date the shift, because there is no shift, only a continuous slope of which the community only becomes aware too late, or never. The problem is not the forms; it is the ever-open possibility that they silently substitute themselves for what they were meant to serve.
The danger is not only that a scriptural community may stop reading its Book. It is that it may continue reading it in a way that protects it from being read by it.
I. An Observation That Should Stop Us
Let us start by placing a fact that is not generally placed. When Jesus (peace be upon him) arrives in Palestine in the first century, he does not arrive in an apostate Israel. He does not arrive in a people that has abandoned the Torah. He arrives in an Israel that is, on the contrary, at a moment of intense scriptural, institutional and ritual density. The Temple is active. The sacrifices prescribed by Moses are offered daily. The priesthood functions according to the order of Aaron (peace be upon him). Bodies such as the Sanhedrin sit. The schools of Hillel and Shammai are in full flower. The Pharisees extend the practice of the commandments well beyond the priestly circle and seek to make the household an extension of the Temple. The scribes develop intense halakhic activity. Synagogues are numerous, even in modest villages. Many children learn Torah from an early age. The Shema Yisrael is recited twice a day in many homes. The tefillin are worn, the tsitsit are visible, the mezuzot are fixed to doors. The pilgrimage to Jerusalem draws enormous crowds three times a year.
This does not mean, of course, that the Torah was measurably “more present” than in every other era; such a totalisation would be both unverifiable and unjust. It means, more precisely, that Jesus (peace be upon him) arrives in a world where the saturation of signs of piety, the sophistication of the institutional apparatus and the scriptural fervour reach a point that no contemporary observer could qualify as deficient. If one asked a first-century traveller where is the Torah served with the greatest seriousness?, one plausible answer would have been: there, in Israel, among this people, with a density that impresses.
And it is in this context, precisely this context, that Jesus (peace be upon him) comes. And what he says of what he finds is the scandal from which we must set out.
Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead men’s bones. (Matthew 23:27)
This people honours me with their lips, but their heart is far from me. (Matthew 15:8, citing Isaiah 29:13)
You nullify the word of God by your tradition. (Mark 7:13)
You tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice, mercy, and faith. (Matthew 23:23)
These are not marginal critiques. They are addressed to those seated on the chair of Moses, that is, to the legitimate doctors of the Torah, those whose function is precisely to transmit and protect it. Jesus (peace be upon him) is not critiquing the ignorant. He is critiquing, on the contrary, men among the most learned, the most observant, the most conscientiously pious of his generation. And his verdict, on those he targets, is that knowledge of the Torah itself can coexist with deep distance from what it demands.
That sentence must give us long pause, because it overturns an intuition that governs us without our being aware of it. We spontaneously think: the more one knows a Book, the closer one is to it. Jesus (peace be upon him) shows that, at a certain stage of the life of a scriptural community, this equation can invert. Study can become the very form of distance. Knowledge of the Book can become the means of no longer having to obey it. Visible piety can become the whitewashed tomb beneath which interior piety has died.
And this inversion, when it occurs, is not occasional. It is structural and temporal. It is one possible product of what happens to a Book when a community has had it for centuries. Time hardens. Each generation lays down its layer. What begins as service may end by becoming substitution. What begins as protection may end by becoming possession. And the institution, because it may believe it has much to lose if the Book speaks directly to someone, may end up placing itself between the Book and hearts, convincing itself that it serves them.
This is not a thesis I impose on the Gospels. It is what Jesus (peace be upon him) himself says, in a formulation worth taking literally:
You have taken away the key of knowledge; you did not enter yourselves, and you hindered those who were entering. (Luke 11:52)
You have taken away the key. The doctors have not destroyed the Book. They have not burned the scrolls. They have not forbidden study. They have done something finer and more destructive: they have taken the key. They have placed themselves between the text and those who wished to enter it. They have become the guardians of a door they no longer cross themselves. And this guardian position has ended by mattering more to them than the door itself.
For a Muslim who looks at himself honestly, this observation poses a question we are not in the habit of posing. Is it possible that nearly fifteen centuries after the descent of the Quran, those of us who know the Quran most are, like certain doctors of Israel in their time, among the most distant from it at heart? Not by conscious hypocrisy. Not by bad faith. But by the very mechanism of centuries of study, codification, institutionalisation, which may have constructed, perhaps without our seeing it, a growing distance between what is recited and what is received?
I do not say that this is the case. I say that this is the question Jesus (peace be upon him) poses to a community in our position. And I say that a community that refuses to pose this question to itself begins to resemble, structurally and not morally, what Matthew 23 reproaches in the Pharisees it targets. Because the capacity to ask the question of one’s own drift is part of the porosity that keeps a heart alive. When that capacity is lost, the drift settles in, and the community can no longer easily perceive it from within.
Hence the need for the outside eye. Hence the need for Jesus (peace be upon him), for us too. Not as a figure of another religion. As a borrowed mirror, offered to anyone willing to look into it.
II. The Barren Fig Tree
There is, in the Gospels, a scene that condenses everything I wish to unfold in this essay, and I want to place it at the centre before any other. It is brief. It is disconcerting. Many commentators have stumbled over it, because it seems arbitrary. To my eyes, it is the architectural key of Jesus (peace be upon him)‘s mission in Israel.
On the following day, when they came from Bethany, he was hungry. And seeing in the distance a fig tree in leaf, he went to see if he could find anything on it. When he came to it, he found nothing but leaves, for it was not the season for figs. And he said to it: “May no one ever eat fruit from you again.” And his disciples heard it. (Mark 11:12-14)
This scene has shocked generations of readers. Jesus (peace be upon him) is hungry, he sees a fig tree, he expects to find fruit. He finds none. He curses the tree. And the evangelist adds a precision that seems to exonerate the tree and render Jesus (peace be upon him)‘s act inexplicable: it was not the season for figs. How can one reproach a tree for not bearing fruit out of season?
The enigma dissolves, I believe, as soon as one steps out of literalism. This scene can be read as a parable in act, and that is the reading I propose here. The fig tree is not only a tree; it figures Israel. And what is reproached to the tree is not simply the absence of fruit out of season. It is bearing leaves without bearing fruit. In botanical readings often proposed for Mark 11, foliage can announce early figs, or at least fruit in formation. A tree covered in leaves then becomes a tree that promises something. That is what makes the tree of Mark 11 especially accusing: it is covered in leaves, visible from afar, impressive in its foliage, and it carries nothing. The promise of the foliage is contradicted by the sterility of the tree. It promises without giving.
And Jesus (peace be upon him) curses it precisely for that. Not because it has no fruit, many trees do not, but because it bears every appearance of abundance and is sterile at heart. He curses the tree that promises without giving.
Mark frames this scene, with remarkable compositional skill, by another episode that bears the same meaning at another level. Between the cursing of the fig tree (11:12-14) and the observation that it has withered to its roots (11:20-21), he inserts the cleansing of the Temple (11:15-19). Jesus (peace be upon him) enters the Temple, drives out the merchants, overturns the tables of the money changers, and cites two prophets: my house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations (Isaiah 56:7) but you have made it a den of robbers (Jeremiah 7:11). The Temple, like the fig tree, bears every appearance of religious vitality: it is full of people, of activity, of the smoke of sacrifices, of recitations. And yet, according to Jesus (peace be upon him), it does not bear the fruit for which it exists. The fig tree is covered in leaves, the Temple is covered in the faithful, and both are sterile with regard to what they were supposed to produce.
Here is what Jesus (peace be upon him) finds, in this reading, on arriving among his own at a long distance from Moses. Not an apostate people. Not a religious desert. But a landscape saturated with outward signs of piety, a dense foliage, intense cultic activity, an imposing institution, and, to his gaze, a structural sterility. The promise the tree had borne, from Moses, from the prophets, from the psalms, is not honoured. The fruit is not there. The leaves have taken the place of the fruits, and at a certain moment, by the very logic of the tree, they have become their substitute.
The leaves, among us too, are innumerable: recitation, memorisation, institutions, visible signs, expansions of the religious apparatus. The question is not whether the leaves are there. They are. The question is: where is the fruit? If a first-century traveller arrived in our world with a single grid of reading, has this people kept what was given to it?, what would he find? I do not answer the question. I pose it, and leave it open. Because the answer, if it comes, cannot come from a polemicist or from a lover; it can come only from the reader himself, facing himself, in silence. But I note that the image of the barren fig tree is not an image one can dismiss with a wave of the hand. It was chosen by Jesus (peace be upon him) to say something precise about a community that stood at the distance where we stand. And what it says is that the density of the foliage is not, in itself, an indicator of health. It may sometimes be the inverse indicator, the sign that the tree has diverted its sap toward what is visible, and has ceased to direct it toward what is essential.
There is still something in this parable that must be named. The fig tree’s sterility is not only the absence of edible fruit. It is the loss of what a tree gives to those who approach it: the simple joy of gathering, of tasting, of sharing. A fig tree without fruit is not only an unproductive tree, it is a tree that can no longer be a source of joy. And this point, which seems marginal, is central to the diagnosis Jesus (peace be upon him) carries. What seems to be missing, at heart, in the part of Israel he confronts is this: not the Torah, not the Temple, not the priests, not piety, not study, but joy. The joy that the gift of a Book revealed by God should produce in the one who truly receives it. The joy of treasure found. The joy of the father seeing his son return. Jesus (peace be upon him) sees everything, the magnificent Temple, the broadened phylacteries, the subtle halakhic debates, and sees a single thing missing that nothing replaces: the joy of God present to his people. And that absence becomes, in this reading, a decisive symptom. Because a scriptural community without deep joy is a community in which the living relation may have been replaced by a regime of conformity. It may keep every form; it has lost what made form inhabited.
We shall return to this. But it had to be placed here, at the foot of the fig tree, because it is at the foot of the fig tree that Jesus (peace be upon him) stops, disappointed and hungry, not only for fruit, but for the joy that the fruits were meant to bring.
There is, however, a decisive difference between the fig tree of Mark 11 and any existing human community. The fig tree is a tree. It cannot repent. A scriptural community, by contrast, is made of persons who can, at any moment, begin again to receive the rain.
This is why Mark’s fig tree must be read together with Luke’s fig tree.
In Luke 13, a man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard. He came seeking fruit on it and found none. He said to the vinedresser: for three years I have come seeking fruit on this fig tree and find none; cut it down. Why should it use up the ground? But the vinedresser answered: sir, let it alone this year also, until I dig around it and put manure around it. Then if it should bear fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.
Mark gives us the fig tree judged. Luke gives us the fig tree still interceded for.
This second fig tree is necessary to complete the first. Jesus (peace be upon him) does not only diagnose sterility; he also reveals the patience that still works around sterile things. He shows that when fruit is absent, the first work is not always cutting, but digging. To loosen the earth. To expose the roots. To add what may still nourish. To wait, not with indifference, but with a final seriousness.
The Quranic community must therefore not read Mark 11 as a sentence pronounced upon others, but together with Luke 13 as a delay granted to itself. The question is not only: are there fruits? It is also: what are we doing with the time before the axe falls?
The Book, for nearly fifteen centuries, continues to descend like rain into our hands. The question is not whether the text is still offered to us. It is. The question is whether our soil is still able to absorb it, or whether the crust has grown so thick that the rain slides off without entering.
Here the parable of the sower gives the simplest anthropology of revelation. The problem is never the seed. The same word is sown, but the soils do not receive it in the same way. Some are hard, some shallow, some choked, some open. The word does not fail because it is weak; it fails to bear fruit where the human form has become unable to receive it.
A Book may therefore be preserved perfectly and received poorly. The preservation of the seed does not guarantee the porosity of the soil.
What follows is the examination of this porosity, and of the hardening that destroys it.
III. The Hardness That Produces the Form
I want to stop on the central paradox, because it is the key to everything that follows.
Jesus (peace be upon him)‘s diagnosis of Israel in the first century is not this people has forgotten its Torah. It is finer and more terrible: this people lives at a moment when the Torah is intensely present, and it is precisely this presence which may construct, for a part, its interior absence. The density of the outer presence and the thickness of the inner absence are not necessarily opposed forces. They can be two sides of the same force.
How is this possible? The answer rests on a word. A word Jesus (peace be upon him) himself pronounces, and which the Quran uses in a deeply analogous register. That word is hardness of heart.
It was because of the hardness of your hearts that Moses allowed you to divorce your wives; but from the beginning it was not so. (Matthew 19:8)
Sklērokardia, in Greek. Qaswat al-qalb, in Arabic. Both traditions, from their origins, recognise a comparable phenomenon and name it with kindred precision. And the Quran situates it in a space very close to where Jesus (peace be upon him) situates it: not as a simple original moral defect, but as the result of a process of hardening that unfolds over time, in a community that has received the Book and that, with the generations, may lose the capacity to be reached by it.
﴿ثُمَّ قَسَتْ قُلُوبُكُمْ مِنْ بَعْدِ ذَٰلِكَ فَهِيَ كَالْحِجَارَةِ أَوْ أَشَدُّ قَسْوَةً ۚ وَإِنَّ مِنَ الْحِجَارَةِ لَمَا يَتَفَجَّرُ مِنْهُ الْأَنْهَارُ ۚ وَإِنَّ مِنْهَا لَمَا يَشَّقَّقُ فَيَخْرُجُ مِنْهُ الْمَاءُ ۚ وَإِنَّ مِنْهَا لَمَا يَهْبِطُ مِنْ خَشْيَةِ اللَّهِ﴾
Then your hearts hardened after that; they became like stones, or even harder. For indeed, there are stones from which rivers burst forth; there are those which split open and water flows from them; and there are those which fall down for fear of God. (2:74)
The verse is addressed to the children of Israel. It tells them: you had received the Book, and your hearts hardened. Stone, the Quran says, is more yielding than your hearts in that state, it can still split and let water through. A hardened heart cannot. It has become impermeable to what descends.
And another verse, of almost prophetic scope for our own situation:
﴿أَلَمْ يَأْنِ لِلَّذِينَ آمَنُوا أَنْ تَخْشَعَ قُلُوبُهُمْ لِذِكْرِ اللَّهِ وَمَا نَزَلَ مِنَ الْحَقِّ وَلَا يَكُونُوا كَالَّذِينَ أُوتُوا الْكِتَابَ مِنْ قَبْلُ فَطَالَ عَلَيْهِمُ الْأَمَدُ فَقَسَتْ قُلُوبُهُمْ﴾
Is it not time for those who have believed that their hearts should humble themselves at the remembrance of God and what has descended of the truth? And let them not be like those who received Scripture before, upon whom time grew long, and whose hearts hardened. (57:16)
Reread this slowly. The Quran warns us, us, the community that has received the final Revelation, not to be like those who received Scripture before us, upon whom time grew long, and whose hearts hardened. The mechanism is explicitly named: lengthened duration, then hardening of the heart. That is very close to what Jesus (peace be upon him) diagnoses in his contemporaries. And the Quran tells us, with no possible detour, that this diagnosis can apply to us too, that our time has been lengthening for nearly fifteen centuries and that it can produce, if not actively fought, an analogous result.
What, precisely, is hardness of heart? It is not wickedness. It is not intellectual obstinacy. It is a deeper anthropological state: no longer being reached. A hardened heart is no longer pierced by what should pierce it. It is no longer moved by what should move it. It is no longer softened by mercy. It is no longer instructed by the suffering of others. It is no longer corrected by the text it recites. It has become compatible with all that it receives, compatible in the sense that nothing any longer forces it to change. It listens, it recites, it assimilates, and it remains, in essence, what it was before. The word slides over it without entering.
Now observe the link with the initial paradox. Forms are necessary, I have said it and I repeat it, because they carry memory, discipline the body, transmit faith across generations. They become pathological not in themselves, but when they cease to serve the opening of the heart and begin to replace it. The harder a heart becomes, the more external apparatus is needed to compensate for what it no longer receives directly. If the word no longer penetrates by itself, dispositions are needed that recall it from outside. Rules. Procedures. Specialists. Institutions. Visible forms that give, to the heart become impermeable, the illusion of a piety that the heart alone no longer bears. The excessive formalisation of a community is not only a product of time; it can be the visible deposit of an accumulated hardness. It can be what the hardened heart has had to build around itself to continue functioning religiously without being really reached by the religion it practises.
And here the mechanism closes in on itself. The more the form thickens to compensate, the more the heart can afford to be hard, because the form does the work in its place. It prays in its place. It fasts in its place. It recites in its place. The heart is exempted. It can continue its hardness untroubled, because the religious apparatus revolves around it and produces everything that, from outside, resembles a religious life. At a certain degree, part of the community may be in this state, a vast apparatus functioning wonderfully, around hearts no longer touched by anything.
That is exactly what the Isaiah quotation that Jesus (peace be upon him) takes up for his contemporaries describes: this people honours me with their lips, but their heart is far from me. It is not that the lips lie. The lips really pray. It is that the lips and the heart have been disjoined. The lips continue on the momentum of the form. The heart is elsewhere, or more precisely, the heart has been hardened to the point that it is nowhere; it no longer opens to anything, including its own words.
Here is the anthropological ground from which I shall now unfold the pathologies. They are not accidents. They are what a hardened heart produces when it protects itself, through form, from the word it can no longer receive.
IV. Eight Pathologies of a Scriptural Community at Maturity
I shall now unfold, one by one, the pathologies Jesus (peace be upon him) diagnoses in Israel in the first century, drawing on precise Gospel scenes. For each, I shall name the mechanism, examine the scene, and pose the question that the mechanism forces me to ask about my own community. I do not claim that these pathologies exhaust the diagnosis. I take them to be central, and their ensemble traces an anatomy sufficient for our purpose.
1. The Silent Substitution
The first pathology is the most fundamental: the interpretive tradition, across the centuries, can substitute itself for the text it claims to serve, without anyone having willed this substitution and without it ever being recognised as such. The problem is not tradition, which is necessary, but the ever-open possibility that it silently substitutes itself for the text’s purpose.
The central scene is Mark 7:1-13. The Pharisees reproach the disciples for eating without having performed the ritual washing according to the tradition of the elders. Jesus (peace be upon him) answers in two steps. First, he names the general mechanism: you abandon the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men (7:8). Then he gives a concrete case: the qorban, the declaration of consecration of a property that exempts a man from supporting his parents. Tradition has built a device that allows one to respect tradition while violating the commandment. A man can declare a property consecrated to God and thereby exempt himself from using it to support his ageing parents. Tradition makes this legal. It has developed a whole apparatus for such situations. And the apparatus results in this: one respects tradition, and one nullifies the Torah. Jesus (peace be upon him) concludes: you nullify the word of God by your tradition.
Observe precisely what Jesus (peace be upon him) does. He does not reject the authority of the Pharisees. He will say elsewhere, explicitly, that they sit on the chair of Moses and that one should do what they say (Mt 23:2-3). He does not denounce tradition as such. He does not call for a return to the bare text. He does something more precise and more redoubtable: he shows, on a concrete case, that the traditional device, at a moment of its development, has begun to function against the Torah it was meant to serve. Not openly, but silently, in particular cases, through subtle juridical constructions, with the good faith of those who wielded them.
And what is terrifying is that the system can lose the capacity to see the problem it produces. The scribes defending the qorban, as Jesus (peace be upon him) stages them, do not see that they nullify the fifth commandment. They are inside a logic that, from within, appears coherent. An outside gaze is required, that of Jesus (peace be upon him), to say: look at what you are doing. And such an outside gaze, in their system, has no place. It does not come from another Pharisee caught in the same logic; it comes from a man who speaks with authority without being of the school, as one having authority, and not as the scribes (Mk 1:22), and whom they will reject precisely because he is not of the school.
The question for us. The honest Muslim reader will recognise without difficulty that this mechanism is not foreign to his own horizon. After nearly fifteen centuries of fiqhī tradition, there exist juridical constructions, elaborated in good faith by serious scholars, that can end by concretely neutralising clear purposes of the Quran. Ibn Taymiyya saw the problem. Shāṭibī, in al-Muwāfaqāt, developed his whole theory of the maqāṣid precisely against this drift. Ibn al-Qayyim, in Iʿlām al-Muwaqqiʿīn, devoted memorable pages to the critique of ḥiyal. These are not marginal voices, they are major voices of our tradition. And their very presence, in our heritage, proves two things that must be held together: first, that the problem exists and has been recognised by the greatest; and second, that the critical function internal to Islam has never died, and that any thesis about the “non-convertibility” of the umma must reckon with this. The question that remains open is whether we have heard these voices or cited them without listening to them, which would be the ultimate form of the drift they precisely wanted to save us from.
2. The Commandment Turned Against Its Purpose
The second pathology is kin to the first, but finer. It does not consist in replacing the text with tradition, but in applying the rule in a way that contradicts its aim. The rule is cited exactly, applied with rigour, and it produces the inverse of what it was given for.
The central scenes are the Sabbath controversies. Mark 3:1-6: Jesus (peace be upon him) enters a synagogue on the Sabbath. A man has a withered hand. The Pharisees watch to see whether Jesus (peace be upon him) will heal him, so they might accuse him. Jesus (peace be upon him) puts the question to them: is it lawful, on the Sabbath, to do good or to do harm, to save life or to kill? They are silent. Jesus (peace be upon him) heals the man. The Pharisees go out and plot together how to destroy him.
Let us see precisely what happens. The Pharisees do not commit a strict halakhic error. The rules of the Sabbath, as they had developed in the first century, did indeed forbid many medical acts that were not urgent to save life. That man’s withered hand is not a vital emergency, it could wait till the morrow. According to the dominant jurisprudence, Jesus (peace be upon him) should have waited. In healing immediately, he violates, technically, a recognised Sabbath rule.
Jesus (peace be upon him) does not contest the rule of the Sabbath. He does something else, infinitely deeper. He recalls the rule to its own origin. The Sabbath, in Deuteronomy, is presented as the memorial of the liberation from Egypt: remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there; therefore the Lord your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath day (Dt 5:15). The Sabbath is, in its essence, an act of liberation. A day for the oppressed to breathe. A day for the sick to be visited.
And now doctors of the Sabbath use the Sabbath to prevent a liberation. They cite the commandment that prescribed rest against rest itself. They invoke the rule of liberation against the liberating act. The rule is turned against its purpose. It has been so precisely specified, so framed by successive layers of jurisprudence, that it has come to say no to what it was instituted to say yes to.
Jesus (peace be upon him)‘s formula is surgical: the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath (Mk 2:27). That sentence contains no revolt against the Torah. It restores the Torah to its intention. It saves the commandment from its own jurisprudence. And it is for that, for this gesture of restoring the rule to its finality, that the Pharisees go out determined to destroy him. Because they understand, obscurely, that this man threatens not the Law, but the edifice that has grown upon the Law and lives off it.
I want to add a criterion that the Sabbath controversies make emerge with particular clarity: healing as the test of right reading. Notice that Jesus (peace be upon him) does not break the Sabbath for his own convenience. He does not go to market on the day of rest. He does not travel for comfort. The narratives show him violating Sabbath expectation in order to heal. To raise. To reopen. To restore a possibility of life where it had been closed. This is not an added supplement of compassion to his juridical doctrine, it is a hermeneutic criterion. A reading that heals serves the Torah. A reading that, structurally, no longer raises anyone, that only blocks, closes, condemns, must at least be questioned, whatever its technical rigour. That does not mean that every true word must be immediately consoling; there are words that cut before they heal. It means that a reading whose constant fruit is closure has ceased to bear what the Book was given for.
The Quran presents itself as shifāʾ (10:57, 17:82, 41:44), healing. If our reading of the Quran ceases, in its dominant fruit, to heal, if it produces more wounds than care, if it closes more doors than it opens, then we must stop and ask: is it the Quran that wants this, or is it our reading that has drifted to the point of using shifāʾ to wound? A Book given as healing, applied in such a way that it no longer heals on the whole, is a Book whose reading has turned against its finality. The Quran warns us: yurīdu-Llāhu bikumu-l-yusra wa lā yurīdu bikumu-l-ʿusr, God wills ease for you, He does not will hardship for you (2:185). Each time our application of the Quran structurally produces more ʿusr than yusr, more wounding than healing, we should stop and ask whether we have not turned the Quran against its intention.
Jesus (peace be upon him)‘s Sabbath must haunt us, because it reminds us that the correct application of the rule is not a guarantee. That fidelity to the letter can coexist with betrayal of the spirit. And that the sign a commandment has been turned against its purpose is precisely that it stands against the persons it was meant to protect, and that it has ceased to heal.
3. The Measurable That Kills
The third pathology is what I have already evoked under the name of the inversion of weights. Matthew 23:23: Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice, mercy, and faith.
I give the sequel again, because it is capital. These you ought to have practised, without neglecting the others. Jesus (peace be upon him) does not suppress the tithe on mint. He does not despise precision, minutiae, the juridical. The danger is not precision as such, which is often the friend of justice. The danger is the moment when precision occupies the centre and relegates the heavy weights to the periphery. Jesus (peace be upon him) re-establishes a hierarchy. The three heavy weights, ta-d-dīka, wa-r-raḥma, wa-l-amāna in Arabic, must be at the centre. The minutiae can be around.
Why does this inversion occur so often in mature scriptural communities? Because the measurable is easy, and the essential is difficult. One can calculate to the gram the zakat on liquid assets. One cannot calculate justice. One can verify that an animal was slaughtered according to the rules. One cannot verify that a man has been faithful to his given word. And because the measurable is reassuring, because it gives the feeling of having done one’s duty, because it allows one to evaluate another’s piety at a glance, the community glides naturally toward it. It invests its debates, its jurisprudence, its pride in the measurable. It erects cathedrals of precision on the measurable. And meanwhile, the essential, which cannot be measured, which demands constant interior work, which produces no visible satisfaction, may atrophy.
And there is worse. Measure, when it occupies the space, can become a screen that allows one not to see the heavy weights. One can be technically in order on every minutia and massively deficient on raḥma. One can wear the prescribed signs, pray at the hours, fast during the month, and at the same time humiliate one’s wife, defraud one’s partner, despise one’s neighbour. The technical apparatus does not see these failings. It is structurally blind to what it has no tool to measure. And because it gives, to the one who performs it, the feeling of being in order, it may anaesthetise conscience instead of awakening it.
This is the most terrifying diagnosis of Matthew 23. Not these men are wicked. But these men have become, by their very apparatus, incapable of seeing themselves, because the apparatus guarantees them that they are in order, and they have no criterion other than the apparatus.
The Quran gave us the three heavy weights without ambiguity: qū fī l-qisṭi (4:135), to be just even if it harms yourselves (4:135), to feed the hungry for the love of God without expecting reward or thanks (76:8-9), to forbid oneself every injustice even toward those one hates (5:8), to return deposits to those they are owed (4:58). These are the heavy weights of our Book. Are they, in our collective attention, proportioned to what the text gives them, or have we relegated them to the background?
4. The Spectacle of the Self
The fourth pathology is named by Jesus (peace be upon him) with a precision that leaves little escape.
Matthew 23:5. They do all their deeds to be seen by others. They make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long.
The tefillin are prescribed by the Torah: small boxes containing scriptural passages, worn on the arm and on the forehead. The tsitsit are prescribed, fringes at the corner of the garment, meant to recall the commandments. They are devices of memory, made to remind the one who wears them, not to signal to others. Jesus (peace be upon him) does not reproach the wearing. He reproaches the amplification: the phylacteries made broad, the fringes made long. Not to remember better, but to be seen. The object of piety has become a medium of social distinction. And in that inversion, the device of interior memory has turned into a device of exterior spectacle.
Matthew 6 amplifies this diagnosis in three parallel scenes. Alms, prayer, fasting, the three pillars of Jewish piety, the three pillars of Muslim piety as well. And Jesus (peace be upon him) says, for each, the same thing: do not do it before men to be seen by them (6:1). Then he gives the applications: for alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing (6:3), for prayer, go into your room, shut the door (6:6), for fasting, anoint your head and wash your face, that your fasting may not be seen by others (6:17).
The radicality of the statement is often underestimated. Jesus (peace be upon him) does not say avoid ostentation. He says hide. He prescribes, for each of the central acts of religious life, an active dissimulation. It is not enough not to boast of one’s fasting, one must anoint oneself so that no one suspects. It is not enough not to announce one’s alms, even your left hand must not know. Why this radicality? Because Jesus (peace be upon him) understood that public piety does not remain pure by mere intention. The presence of a spectator, even potential, even imagined, can corrupt the interior act. The eye of another, once it is felt, tends to shift the act’s centre of gravity from God to the other. And this shift is so subtle, so insidious, that the best protection is often structural concealment.
I want to name the necessary nuance: not every act of piety is required to be invisible. Prayer in common is prescribed, the call to prayer is public, the exemplarity of the righteous is a good for the community, and certain forms of piety cannot, by nature, be hidden. The Quran itself mentions that making alms visible can be good, and that hiding them is better still (2:271). The line is therefore not between visible piety and invisible piety. It runs elsewhere: where the act of piety first seeks a spectator, it begins to shift off its centre. Where it accepts being seen without having been done to be seen, it remains in place.
The Quran knows the same diagnosis. Riyāʾ is identified as a form of shirk khafī, hidden association, dangerous precisely because it is hard to detect in oneself. The famous hadith of the learned reciter, the mujāhid and the philanthropist, the first cast into the Fire because they acted to be seen, is among the most terrifying warnings in the tradition. The texts are there. The warnings are explicit. Ghazālī, in the Iḥyāʾ, devoted an entire book to dismantling riyāʾ with formidable precision.
Never, no doubt, has piety enjoyed so many structural means to make itself visible. The wisdom of Matthew 6 is not have modest phylacteries. It is hide them.
5. Piety Without Mercy Toward the Wounded
The fifth pathology is the one Jesus (peace be upon him) maps in the most famous and perhaps the most under-read parable of the whole Gospel: the parable of the good Samaritan (Lk 10:25-37).
The situation is familiar. A doctor of the Law questions Jesus (peace be upon him). He seeks to know who is his neighbour. Jesus (peace be upon him) answers with a story. A man goes down from Jerusalem to Jericho, falls among robbers, is left half-dead on the road. Three men pass. A priest, that is, a descendant of Aaron (peace be upon him), consecrated to Temple service, man of the highest religious qualification in the system. A Levite, that is, a member of the tribe of Levi, charged with liturgical functions, likewise a man of the sacred sphere. A Samaritan, that is, a man from a population whom orthodox Jews of the first century regarded as schismatic, of suspect religious purity, of altered rites.
The priest passes and does not stop. The Levite passes and does not stop. The Samaritan stops, tends to the man, sets him on his own beast, brings him to an inn, pays for his stay, promises to reimburse additional costs on his return.
It has often been supposed, not without reason, that ritual purity scruples might explain the non-intervention of the priest and the Levite: in the halakhic logic of the first century, touching a corpse, and this half-dead man might die in their hands, entailed an impurity that temporarily disqualified them from their functions. They had technical reasons to pass by. But one must note that the text precisely does not excuse them. It shows them passing, without giving them a voice to justify themselves. The narrative judges them by their gesture, not by their presumed intention.
Here is the exact trap into which Jesus (peace be upon him) makes his interlocutor fall. The two men who passed on were the most pious of the narrative by external criteria. And yet it is the Samaritan who is neighbour of the wounded man. It is the religiously suspect man who has fulfilled the Torah, while the religiously irreproachable have passed beside it.
The lesson is unbearable for whoever receives it fully. It is possible to be technically in order with every religious device and to have completely missed what religion asks. It is possible to spend one’s whole life in the Temple, in the minutiae of ritual purity, and to pass by the first duty, which is to see the wounded man on the road and care for him. And worse: the religious apparatus itself can be the obstacle. The system that identifies you as holy may be what prevents you from being merciful. Your religious position may be the closed door through which pity no longer passes.
And Jesus (peace be upon him), in choosing a Samaritan, drives the nail with calculated violence. He tells his listeners: this man, whom you hold to be deviant, has fulfilled the Torah better than your priests. Because the Torah, at bottom, is not first ritual purity. It is mercy toward the wounded. And a community that has forgotten this, even the most orthodox, has forgotten the essential.
The question for us. Do we still see the wounded man on the road? The Quran is of cutting clarity: it defines the mukadhdhib bi-d-dīn, the one who belies religion, not as the one ignorant of dogma, but as he who repels the orphan and does not urge the feeding of the poor (107:1-3). That is the Quranic criterion. That is Jesus (peace be upon him)‘s criterion. And that is the criterion by which we shall be measured, regardless of the external regularity of our practices.
6. The Neighbour as Category Rather than Becoming
This point is, technically, a continuation of the preceding one, but it merits being isolated because it touches on a particular deformation, the categorisation of charity.
The parable of the Samaritan begins with a precise question. The doctor of the Law, wishing to justify himself, asks: who is my neighbour? (Lk 10:29). The formulation reveals a mentality. He seeks a definition, a perimeter, a list of categories included in the obligation of charity. Whom, precisely, must I love as myself? Another Jew? Only a pious Israelite? A resident foreigner? How far does the obligation extend? Where does it begin to cease? The doctor wishes, with the minuteness of his trade, to circumscribe his duty. Because a circumscribed duty is a manageable duty. A manageable duty is a duty one can accomplish and declare discharged. And a duty declared discharged is the tranquillity of conscience.
Jesus (peace be upon him) refuses the question. He tells the parable, then returns the question: which of these three, do you think, proved to be a neighbour to the man who fell among the robbers? (Lk 10:36). He does not answer who is my neighbour?. He answers who becomes a neighbour?. The neighbour is not a category included or excluded according to objective criteria. It is an active becoming. One does not have neighbours by identity; one becomes a neighbour by stopping. The Samaritan becomes the neighbour of the wounded man by his act. The priest and the Levite cease to be neighbours by their passing.
This inversion is vertiginous, because it dissolves part of the logic of categories that allows a mature religious community to manage its obligations. One must be fair to law: it needs categories, it lives by them, and it is its work to construct them. The problem is not categorisation in itself. The problem is when mercy lets itself be enclosed within the categories built by law, to the point of no longer seeing what overflows those categories. If the neighbour is no longer category but becoming, then one can no longer say I have fulfilled my duty toward my neighbours. One can no longer circumscribe. Every encounter, every wounded man on the road, is a test, and the test is not to know who is neighbour, but to become neighbour of the one who presents himself.
Religious jurisprudence, by its nature, seeks categories. That is its work, and it is necessary. But categorisation carried beyond a certain point can close the door mercy was to keep open. When a community has precisely codified who has a right to its zakat, who is to be supported, who enters the lists, it has built a useful device, but it has also built a machine of exclusion. What is not in the category is not a duty. What is not a duty is not urgent. And while one reflects on categories, the wounded man dies on the road.
The Quran is without ambiguity: it speaks of the orphan without specifying his religion (93:9), of the prisoner of war (76:8), of the jār, the neighbour, who is not qualified by his faith (4:36), of the ibn as-sabīl who is never categorised. The question, for each one, is not who enters my category of obligees?, it is am I able to stop when I pass before the wounded?
7. The Authority That Closes
This pathology is perhaps the gravest, because it touches the very possibility of any internal correction. It is incarnated, in the Gospels, not in an isolated scene but in a dynamic that traverses the whole narrative and culminates in Jesus (peace be upon him)‘s trials.
When Jesus (peace be upon him) begins his public teaching, the religious authorities do not reject him immediately. There is a phase of observation, of interrogation, sometimes even of interest. Pharisees invite him to dine with them. Nicodemus comes to see him by night and asks serious questions (Jn 3). A scribe asks him which is the first commandment, approves his answer, and Jesus (peace be upon him) replies: you are not far from the Kingdom of God (Mk 12:34). The relationship, at the beginning, is open.
But as Jesus (peace be upon him)‘s preaching advances, and as he more precisely touches the points of drift in the religious establishment, the relationship freezes. Interrogations become traps. Questions become tests. And progressively, the institution as a whole swings from a posture of questioning to a posture of defence. It stops listening. It begins to protect what it is against what he says.
The most terrifying scene of this shift is John 11:47-53. Jesus (peace be upon him) has just raised Lazarus. The event is public, verifiable, striking. The Sanhedrin meets in emergency. Here is what John reports of their deliberation:
What are we to do? For this man performs many signs. If we let him go on thus, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and destroy both our holy place and our nation.
Observe the reasoning. They do not deny the miracles. They recognise them. They do not contest the reality of what Jesus (peace be upon him) does. They say: if we let him continue, our position is threatened, the Romans will react, the Temple will be destroyed, the nation will be lost. The question is no longer does he speak the truth? but what does his truth do to our power?. And the answer, pronounced by Caiaphas the high priest, is of glacial logic: it is better for us that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation not perish (Jn 11:50).
This is the moment where religious authority, in the Johannine narrative that relates it to us, has ceased to be at the service of truth and has become at the service of itself. It protects its own edifice against what could make it totter, even when what could make it totter is the truth that edifice was meant to serve. From this moment on, everything the institution does serves to preserve the institution. Procedures are followed, scriptural citations are mobilised, legal framework is respected, and all of it issues in the condemnation to death of the Just One. The apparatus functions perfectly. It functions against what it was made to serve.
I want to add a more interior dimension of this closure. Matthew reports, at the moment of trial, a penetrating note: Pilate knew that it was out of envy that they had delivered him up (Mt 27:18). Dia phthonon. Out of envy. That word changes the colour of everything that precedes. It is not only that the chief priests defend their position. It is that they cannot bear that God seems to act through another than through the channels they control. The presence of a closeness to God that does not pass through their mediation wounds them in a zone they would never name publicly, the zone of certainty that they are the place where God speaks. When that certainty is contested in fact, when a carpenter from Galilee, without ordination, without school, without accreditation, brings down the divine presence in a way they themselves have never produced, the wound becomes unbearable. And it turns into rejection.
When a religious body has controlled an apparatus for centuries, it may end by believing, without saying so, that God passes through it. Not by explicit pride, simply by habit. And any manifestation of the divine that does not take its channels becomes suspect, not because it is false, but because it escapes it. The little ones to whom the mysteries are revealed, the margins where truth finds refuge, the unexpected ones whom God sometimes chooses to speak, all this can be felt as an anomaly to correct, not as a sign to receive.
This is the scandal to which I wanted to come since the beginning of this essay, and which I now formulate with the precision I should have given it sooner: it is not the Book that becomes dead, it is the reading that ceases to be living, and the dead reading can then arm itself with the Book against what it seeks to say. The chief priests and scribes, at Jesus (peace be upon him)‘s trial, cite the Torah. They invoke Leviticus 24:16 on blasphemy. They apply the procedures prescribed by the halakha. They are, down to the last line, technically compliant. And they execute the one whom the Torah, in its deep truth, had announced. They kill with verses in their mouths the one the verses designated. They instrumentalise the Book against what the Book sought to say, not because the Book is fallible, but because their reading has gone dead to the point of being able to serve as the framework for a crime.
This is the drift arrived at its logical achievement. A scriptural community can attain such a degree of sophistication in the technical management of its Book that it becomes able to use it against its own truth. And no one, in the chain, is conscious of betraying. Caiaphas thinks he protects the people. The scribes think they apply the law. The soldiers think they execute a legitimate sentence. Pilate thinks he maintains order. And yet, together, they crucify the one whom, according to the Christian reading I invoke here as a mirror, their own Scripture announced.
Every honest reader will recognise analogous forms in his own religious world. The sign to watch is this: when the institution invokes the Book to protect the institution against what the Book seeks to say, something has turned.
8. The Disposition of the Heart, and the Refused Joy
To close this cartography of the first eight pathologies, I want to return to the most interior, the one that grounds all the others, and which Jesus (peace be upon him) diagnoses in the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector (Lk 18:9-14).
Two men go up to the Temple to pray. The Pharisee stands and prays thus: O God, I thank you that I am not like the rest of men, robbers, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector; I fast twice a week, I give tithes of all I get. The tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying: O God, be merciful to me, a sinner. And Jesus (peace be upon him) concludes: this man went down to his house justified, rather than the other.
I want to insist on a point often omitted. The Pharisee does not lie. When he says he is not like robbers and the unjust, he is probably telling the truth, he is technically in order. When he says he fasts twice a week and pays all his tithes, he is telling the truth, he really does. There is no factual hypocrisy in his prayer. Everything he declares, he performs. And yet, it is he whom Jesus (peace be upon him) rejects.
Why? Because the problem is not the content of his acts, but the posture of his heart. He prays standing, self-sufficient. He prays in comparison. He prays in balance-sheet, here is what I do, here is what you owe me. He is inside the Temple, before God, and he exhibits his acts like a dossier to be filed in his own cause. His heart, in this very act of prayer, appears closed to mercy, because he has no need of it, he is in order. His piety, which he believes he presents to God, can be read as a piety he presents to himself to reassure himself of his own identity as just.
The tax collector, for his part, has nothing to present. He can only ask. And his request, be merciful to me, a sinner, is the only posture that leaves room for what God can give. He is not justified because he has done less than the Pharisee. He is justified because he has not closed the door of mercy upon himself by the fullness of his own satisfaction.
The parable lets glimpse, to my mind, a piety become incapable of receiving mercy as gift, and therefore incapable, perhaps, of the joy that is born of a gift. Look at the Pharisee’s prayer: it is a balance-sheet. An accounting audit presented to God. Not a single moment of joy is found there, not an instant of wonder at being in the Lord’s presence, not a second of savouring mercy as an unmerited gift, not a breath where his heart exults at existing before God. He enumerates his performances as an employee does his annual report. The tax collector, by contrast, is closer to possible joy than the Pharisee, because at least he knows he can receive something he cannot produce. The Pharisee has closed himself to joy by closing himself to mercy: he needs nothing he does not already have, therefore nothing can any longer surprise him, therefore nothing can any longer rejoice him.
This observation brings me to what is, I think, one of the most underestimated symptoms of a religious community at advanced maturity: the possible loss of true joy.
I want to nuance this at once. A deep religious life also knows dryness, fear, the night, and many mystics, including in Sufism, which remains a living proof of the persistence of joy in Islam, have testified that there are seasons where joy withdraws, where God seems to fall silent, where the faithful is carried only by bare fidelity. Joy is not a permanent affect, and the absence of joy at a given moment is not necessarily a symptom of drift. But there is a difference between inhabited dryness, which remains a form, however painful, of the desire for God, and the structural loss of taste, which is something else entirely. It is of this second loss that we speak here.
In the Gospels, the Kingdom is announced again and again as a joy. A treasure found, a man goes off, sells everything, and buys it in his joy. A pearl of great price. A wedding banquet to which guests are invited. A found sheep that the shepherd bears upon his shoulders with rejoicing. A returned son for whom the father has the fattened calf slaughtered. The Kingdom is joy, finding, reunion, feast. And the entry into the Kingdom is recognised, among other signs, by its being joyful.
But Jesus (peace be upon him), among the doctors he confronts, does not always find this joy. He finds gravity, competence, precision, rigour, observance, but true joy, the one that lets God be tasted as presence rather than as rule, seems rare to him. And when it does manifest, when the sinful woman pours the perfume (Lk 7:37-38), when Zacchaeus comes down quickly from his sycamore (Lk 19:5-6), it scandalises a part of the doctors. They can judge, distinguish, analyse, contest, but the joy that bursts forth from where they did not expect it troubles them instead of winning them.
A religion can reach a degree where it produces many faithful men and women who pray, who fast, who give, who observe, who do not transgress, and who have lost, without realising it, the capacity to rejoice in God. Their religion becomes a grave duty, an anxious accounting, a demanding performance. They await judgement with worry, they hope for salvation with calculation, they hold the form with application. But joy, faraḥ, this simple and deep joy that the Quran promises to believers, qul bi-faḍli-Llāhi wa bi-raḥmatihi fa-bi-dhālika fal-yafraḥū (10:58), say: in the bounty of God and in His mercy, in that let them rejoice, that joy may become foreign to them. It would seem to them even suspect. One does not rejoice, one performs.
This is a major diagnostic symptom, which Jesus (peace be upon him) allows us to see. Because a community that has lost the joy of the Kingdom has lost something more fundamental than joy itself: it has lost the taste of God. Religion becomes for it rule, frame, belonging, fear, duty. But what there is of God in religion, the living contact, the taste that makes one say this is it, yes, this is what I exist for, this contact becomes impoverished. And where contact is impoverished, the form must thicken to compensate; but the thickened form does not restore the lost joy, because joy is not produced by form, it is produced by the porosity of the heart to what descends.
If deep joy is no longer there, we must pose the hardest question: do we still encounter God, or do we manage His worship?
V. The Ninth Pathology: The Incapacity to Convert
I come to the pathology that crowns all the others, and which gives them their real gravity. Because here we change register. Taken in isolation, the eight pathologies I have described are partial drifts, all potentially correctable. A community can slide into substitution, measurability, spectacle, and come back. It can, at any moment, hear a call and turn around. As long as the capacity of return is preserved, nothing is lost.
But there is a stage where this capacity itself grows fragile. Where the drift becomes quasi-incapable of being corrected without major shock, not because God no longer wills to forgive, but because the community has lost, unknowingly, a part of its power to let itself be corrected. That is the threshold. And it is, to my mind, the central point of the diagnosis Jesus (peace be upon him) bears on a part of the religious elites of Israel. What he sees in them is not only a series of errors; it is a structure that struggles to turn around.
The Gospels document this phenomenon with a precision we must weigh. At the beginning of Jesus (peace be upon him)‘s mission, there are still conversions. Pharisees question sincerely. Nicodemus comes by night. A scribe hears and approves. At this stage, the institution is not totally closed. There are breaches. There are souls that can pass.
Then, as time advances, something locks. Questions become traps. Miracles, instead of opening, produce decisions to eliminate. When Jesus (peace be upon him) raises Lazarus, a public, verifiable, massive event, the Sanhedrin does not convert. It decides to kill. And John adds a precision that is the heart of what I am trying to name:
Many of the rulers believed in him, but because of the Pharisees they did not confess it, lest they be put out of the synagogue; for they loved the glory of men more than the glory of God. (John 12:42-43)
Observe the structure. Men believe. Intellectually, spiritually, they recognise. But they cannot confess it, because the institutional apparatus would exclude them. And they prefer, not out of hatred of God but out of attachment to their position, not to recognise publicly what they have recognised interiorly. Faith is there, and it cannot become conversion, because the structure in which it appears has become such that every conversion is costly beyond what individuals can bear.
This is the stage of non-convertibility. Men, taken individually, are not all wicked. Many see. Some understand. A part even believes. But the apparatus in which they are engaged has reached such a degree of closure that individual belief no longer suffices to permit conversion, because to convert would be to break the belonging that structures their whole life. And belonging has become heavier than truth.
Here is what I want to name with all the gravity it deserves. The ultimate problem of a scriptural community at advanced maturity is not that it errs. It is that it becomes very difficult to correct from within. Not because correction would be impossible in theory, it remains possible at every instant, as long as a heart is alive, but because the entire apparatus has stiffened to the point that every internal correction is felt as an existential threat by the institution, and the individuals who would see the correction needed cannot, without destroying themselves socially, carry it publicly.
This non-convertibility manifests in the refusal to recognise evidence. Miracles are accomplished, visible, public. Some Pharisees, facing the most manifest signs, do not draw the expected conclusion. They draw the opposite: this man does not cast out demons except by Beelzebul, the prince of demons (Mt 12:24). Rather than accept that God acts through Jesus (peace be upon him), they prefer to attribute his works to the devil. Jesus (peace be upon him) calls this the sin against the Spirit, the only one he qualifies as unforgivable (Mt 12:31-32), not because God cannot forgive, but because the one who has reached this stage has lost the very capacity to ask forgiveness. He has hardened his heart to the point of calling evil good and good evil. And one cannot forgive a heart that no longer distinguishes the two, because such a heart can no longer receive forgiveness as forgiveness.
It manifests in the neutralisation of the word. Matthew 13:13-15 cites Isaiah to name this phenomenon: you will hear with your ears and not understand; you will see with your eyes and not perceive. For this people’s heart has grown dull; they have closed their ears and shut their eyes, lest they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart and turn.
The formula is of redoubtable precision. Lest they should turn. The closure is preventive. The hardened heart protects itself against the possibility of conversion, because it knows, obscurely, that conversion would be a vertiginous loss. So it closes the eyes not to see, hardens the ears not to hear. Non-convertibility is not an accident, it can become an active function of the psychic and institutional apparatus. A self-protection against the truth.
At this degree of closure, the word itself, even prophetic, ceases to produce its effect. The text is still there. The reminder is still pronounced. The verses are still known. But they no longer open, they slide. The heart hears them without their producing any rupture. The sign of an advanced drift is not the absence of true word, it is its systematic neutralisation. The apparatus of reception may have been so well locked by generations of apologetics, gloss, framing, that the word which could correct is absorbed as already classified, already understood, already framed, before it has produced its effect.
This is, to my mind, the ultimate pathology. A living error can be corrected. A dead fidelity corrects itself with more difficulty. Because it believes itself in order, and that certainty forbids reopening. Because it has built itself around an apparatus that guarantees it serves God, and that apparatus absorbs every correction as hostility. Because it has unlearned joy, and without joy, the desire for God that could motivate conversion is missing.
I must, however, name here a risk that concerns this essay itself, and which I want to face rather than sidestep. A thesis on the “non-convertibility” of a community can become self-immunising: every serious objection can then be reread as a sign of the non-convertibility it describes, which makes the thesis untestable. I refuse this move. If a reader judges that my diagnosis overdraws, that it exaggerates closure, that it underestimates the persistent vitality of the tradition, he may be right, and his critique is not, in principle, the symptom of what it contests. The reforming voices internal to Islam, from Shāṭibī to our contemporaries, precisely prove that the critical function is not dead among us. The very existence of this essay, written by a Muslim, read by other Muslims, is a further proof. The non-convertibility thesis therefore does not say Islam is incapable of correcting itself, it says: after nearly fifteen centuries, every scriptural community must actively watch the possibility that its mechanisms of reception become locked, because the history of Israel shows us that such closure is possible, and because the Quran itself warns us that our time may produce this result if we do not fight it.
The question for us. Do I still hear, when a verse troubles me, a verse that could force me to change something fundamental in my life? Or do I listen to it through a filter that has already classified it before it arrives?
VI. The Disappointment of Jesus (peace be upon him), or the Side We Forget
I have unfolded the pathologies Jesus (peace be upon him) diagnoses. I now wish to dwell on a dimension often forgotten yet central: the Gospels show a Jesus (peace be upon him) wounded at not being received by his own.
This wound is explicit in the Gospels, and repeated. It is not a passing mood. It is one of the fundamental tonalities of his public mission in Israel. And it matters to us, Muslims, for a precise reason: because Islamic eschatology tells us that Jesus (peace be upon him) will return. And if his first coming among his own was marked by a massive wound before a scriptural community that had reached long maturity, we must honestly consider that a return today among us, at our own historical distance, may carry an analogous dimension.
Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killing the prophets and stoning those sent to you, how often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you would not! (Matthew 23:37)
This is not a threat. It is a cry. Jesus (peace be upon him) weeps over the city. His preaching to the people of Israel is traversed by a pain, that of a prophet who expects to be received, who has come for his own, who knows what they await better than they themselves, and who finds a closure he cannot force. How often would I have. The will is there, on God’s side. What is missing is the yes of his own.
And this disappointment is a disappointment of love. I want to insist on this, because without it one misses the tone. Jesus (peace be upon him) does not diagnose coldly, as an observer. He diagnoses while healing what he loves. He weeps over the city he is about to leave (and when he drew near and saw the city, he wept over it, Lk 19:41). He expects fruit because he planted the vineyard, through all the prophets who preceded him. He is wounded by the parody he finds because the parody is not what he wished to produce. His wound is not that of a judge. It is the wound of a father who returns to his garden and sees that the fruit he hoped for has not grown.
He came to his own, and his own received him not. (John 1:11)
The Johannine formulation is abyssal. Those who were his, through the whole history of salvation, through the Torah, through the prophets, through the psalms, through long centuries of elaboration, those precisely are the ones who do not receive him. The most prepared people can become, in part, the most closed people. The most learned community can become, in part, the deafest community. And this inversion is not moral; it can be the result of the very preparation. They have learned to await something so precise, so codified, so institutionalised, that they have lost, in part, the capacity to recognise what they were awaiting when it presents itself otherwise than expected.
And this wound culminates in the parables. I go through them quickly, but I want at least to name them together, as a corpus.
The murderous vinedressers (Mt 21:33-46). A master plants a vineyard, equips it, entrusts it to vinedressers, and departs. In season, he sends servants to fetch the fruits. The vinedressers beat them, kill them, stone them. Finally, he sends his son, thinking they will respect my son. The vinedressers say among themselves: this is the heir, let us kill him, and the inheritance will be ours. They kill him. And what is terrifying is the vinedressers’ logic: they know he is the heir. They do not kill him out of ignorance. They kill him because they have confused keeping the vineyard with owning the vineyard. They have become so attached to their position as keepers that they can no longer return the vineyard to its master.
The guests of the feast (Mt 22:1-14). A king prepares a feast for his son. He invites the guests. They decline, each under a pretext, I have bought a field, I have bought oxen, I have married. The king, angered, sends his servants into the streets and roads, and brings the lame, the blind, the poor. The first invited, those who had the Book, who were prepared, decline. And it is the last, those not in the category, who eat.
The prodigal son (Lk 15:11-32). I want to dwell on this parable more slowly, because it carries the heart of what I wish to say about joy. It is usually read as a parable of mercy, and it is. A son leaves, squanders, falls low, returns. The father sees him from afar, runs, embraces him, has the fattened calf slaughtered, organises the feast. He was dead and is alive again. This is the part everyone knows.
But there is a second panel rarely read with the seriousness it deserves. The elder son returns from the fields. He hears music and dancing. He asks what is happening. It is explained to him. And then, the text is precise, he was angry and refused to go in (Lk 15:28). The father comes out, pleads with him to enter. The elder son answers: for so many years I have served you, and I never disobeyed your command, and yet you never gave me a young goat that I might celebrate with my friends. But when your son came, who has devoured your living with prostitutes, you killed for him the fattened calf. And the parable ends without telling us whether he enters.
I want to weigh this elder son. He is faithful. He stayed. He served. He never transgressed. He is technically in order from every point of view. But when the feast comes, he is outside. And he is not outside by circumstance, he is outside by interior construction. His anger is revealing: I have served you, and you never gave me. He has counted his service. He has kept a register. And in that register, mercy shown to the other, to the prodigal who did not deserve it, is felt as an injustice done to him. The elder son has unlearned gratuity. He is no longer capable of receiving the joy of the house as joy, he reads it as wages, and wages he has not received while another, less deserving, has received them. His religion has become accounting. And accounting cannot rejoice in a feast for which it has not issued an invoice.
This parable is, to my mind, one of the most precise descriptions of what can happen to a religious community in duration. The elder son is not a sinner. He is a faithful one, a faithful one who served so long that he began to invoice his obedience. And in that shift, he lost what made service joy: the gratuity of being son, the continuous presence of the father, the unconditional participation in the house. He kept the work and lost the home. He is employee and no longer son. And when the home becomes feast, he can no longer be there, because an employee does not take part in the master’s feast, he counts his hours.
These parables, read together, draw a tableau. The community that was to receive the master struggles to receive him. Vineyard keepers have believed themselves owners. Feast guests have their own affairs to manage. An elder son, in his very fidelity, has lost the capacity to rejoice in mercy. And all this culminates in one and the same prophetic wound: Jesus (peace be upon him) expected to find ripe fruit. He found, in part, leaves. He expected a prepared wedding. He found, in part, absorbed guests. He expected vinedressers doing their work. He found, in part, keepers become masters. He expected brothers who would rejoice in the return of the lost. He found, in part, accountants wounded by generosity.
I want to add, because to forget it would be to betray everything, that this wound is not the expression of abandonment. Even amid the pain, Jesus (peace be upon him) does not cease to remind. He does not cease to extend his hand. Come to me, all who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest (Mt 11:28). The wound in him is never closure; it is the reverse side of a love that continues, that continues to call even when it is not received. And when he speaks of the barren fig tree, he adds in Luke another parable (Lk 13:6-9) where the vinedresser asks the master: sir, let it alone this year also, until I dig around it and put manure around it. Perhaps it will bear fruit next year. The verdict of the barren fig tree is not immediate. There is a reprieve. Work is still possible, to dig around, to fertilise, to wait further. Mercy extends the reprieve, even when sterility has already been observed. That is what is infinitely precious: the prophetic wound is never despair. It keeps open the possibility of a final return. And as long as the reprieve lasts, the door is not closed.
This wound is absolutely crucial to name for our purpose, because it returns the eschatological question to us. We, Muslims, await the return of Jesus (peace be upon him). He will return, according to our faith. The hadiths announce that he will fight the Dajjāl, break the cross, kill the swine, and restore justice under the guidance of Islam. This eschatology is ours, and I do not contest it.
But what is the first thing he will do in returning? The parables I have just cited suggest an answer not always the one to which our collective imagination has grown accustomed. Perhaps he will not begin by fighting. Perhaps he will begin, as the first time, by looking at the vineyard. Looking at the fig tree. Looking at the banquet hall. Looking at the elder son. And seeing whether the vinedressers of the umma, after nearly fifteen centuries, have kept the vineyard or, in part, appropriated it. Seeing whether the fig tree bears fruit or abundant leaves. Seeing whether the feast guests have come or have their own affairs to manage. Seeing whether the elder son, facing mercy, will enter or stay outside counting his rakaʿāt.
I do not claim to predict how his return will unfold. I say that this is how his first coming unfolded, and that the analogy must at least remove from us the reassuring thought that he would find us spontaneously ready. The image that we will necessarily welcome him with open arms, where a part of Israel did not receive him, resembles precisely the image many first-century Jews could have had of themselves. They believed they would recognise the Messiah when he came. A decisive portion did not recognise him. And their failure was not first moral, it was architectural. Their image of what they awaited had made them, in part, incapable of receiving what came.
Are we sure it will be otherwise for us?
VII. Deregulated Waiting
We now reach the point that gives this essay its urgency. Because the question is not only have we read the Quran well for nearly fifteen centuries?. It is also: how do we today await what the Quran announces to us?
My thesis is that the eye that reads and the eye that waits are the same eye. One cannot read badly and wait well. The way a community awaits the Hour is the direct prolongation of the way it reads its Book. If the reading has drifted, if it has become measurable, formalist, institutionalised, ostentatious, identitarian, then the waiting will have the same features. It cannot be of another nature than the reading that nourished it.
And here is Israel’s lesson, which reaches us like a blow if we receive it honestly: a community that awaits its Messiah passionately may miss him when he comes, not through explicit rejection of the Messiah, but because its very waiting has rendered it blind to what it awaited. In several Jewish milieus of the first century, messianic expectation was intense, political, cosmological. The Zealots armed themselves. The Essenes withdrew to Qumran to prepare for the end. Some Pharisees multiplied apocalyptic calculations. They watched for the signs. They read Daniel. They scrutinised political events. They interpreted Rome as the last beast before the Kingdom.
And when the Messiah comes, according to the Christian reading I appeal to here as a mirror, many do not recognise him. Because he comes without an army. Because he comes without a throne. Because he comes without confirming the waiting. He comes against the image that had been made of him. And a part of the community, which awaited him intensely, misses him because it awaited him in that manner.
I now ask my Muslim reader to consider what certain contemporary forms of our popular eschatology have become. I am not speaking of all Muslim eschatology; there are sober, learned, prudent forms of it that are fully faithful to the tradition and that escape the critiques that follow. I speak of a dominant tendency in current popular reception, which has its own features. The waiting for the Mahdi, the Dajjāl, the return of Jesus (peace be upon him), Gog and Magog, the ashrāṭ al-sāʿa, this waiting is massively present in the religious life of a part of the contemporary umma. I do not contest that these things will come. They will come, according to our faith. I ask: do certain forms of this waiting present features analogous to those that rendered Israel, in part, incapable of recognising?
Let us observe these features, and compare them to the features of our readings.
Spectacular waiting. One awaits visible, cosmic, striking signs. Yet while the Quran does announce signs of the Hour, it warns that the Hour itself will come baghtatan, suddenly, unexpectedly (7:187, 12:107, 22:55). And several prophetic traditions also draw attention to slow degradations: the effacement of knowledge, the rarefaction of truthfulness, the diffusion of bad faith. A waiting calibrated on spectacle structurally misses the sober signs. It is calibrated for what strikes, and it lets pass what gnaws. A reading that has made of the Quran an object of spectacle naturally awaits spectacular signs. The eye formed by spectacle struggles to see anything other than spectacle.
Political waiting. Many await from the Mahdi that he restore the Caliphate, that he militarily defeat the non-Muslim powers, that he reestablish a political configuration supposed to have been lost. This waiting may be, in part, a direct transposition of the Jewish messianic waiting of the first century, which projected onto its Messiah the political liberation from Rome and the restoration of David (peace be upon him)‘s kingdom. A part of the Jews, according to the Christian reading, missed Jesus (peace be upon him) precisely because he did not fulfil this political waiting. He did not take arms against Rome. He did not restore David (peace be upon him)‘s throne in the sense they understood. He did something else, which disoriented the Zealots and won small groups in the margins. Would we be capable of recognising a coming that defied our dominant political images? I do not know. I pose the question.
Identitarian waiting. Many await an issue favourable to us, the Muslims, against them, the others. This structure resembles the one Jesus (peace be upon him) dismantles in the parable of the elder son; the elder son awaits that his obedience be rewarded by the confusion of the prodigal, and he is scandalised when mercy extends to the latter. Would we be capable of recognising a coming that implied a mercy overflowing confessional frontiers? Would we be capable of receiving a Mahdi who began not by breaking the pride of non-Muslims, but by breaking first the pride of Muslims installed in their certainty?
Chronometric waiting. One counts the signs. One numbers them. This chronometry may be the exact eschatological transposition of the mint-tithe pathology: it measures what can be measured, and it loses the essential, which is the preparation of the heart to recognise, when they come, realities that probably will not enter the prepared categories.
Exterior waiting. One awaits events that will occur outside oneself. And this exteriority can produce an interior passivity that is perhaps the most terrible of all. Since the signs will come from outside, one has only to wait. This passivity is the exact symmetry of the Pharisee’s reassuring apparatus: I am not like the others, I am in the right umma, when the signs come I shall be on the right side. And it is precisely this posture that Jesus (peace be upon him) most severely condemned.
The hardest point to receive. If all this is true, if certain forms of our waiting reflect our reading pathologies, and if these pathologies resemble those Jesus (peace be upon him) diagnosed among Israel at long maturity, then preparation for the Hour is not first vigilance over external signs. It is the correction of the reading. It is not in scrutinising world events that we prepare to recognise. It is in working, each day, on the porosity of our own heart. The eye that will see the signs when they come is the eye that has learned to see the Quran as it must be seen. And conversely: all the time spent getting excited over the signs without correcting the reading is time lost, and worse, time that reinforces the pathology, that aggravates the drift, that renders the eye even more unable to recognise what it claims to await.
I say this and I weigh it. The man who, at a long distance from Moses, saw a community await its Messiah and miss him, that man knows something about what may happen to us now. And his verdict, transposed with required prudence, is clear: if you continue to read thus, you will await thus, and you risk missing what you await.
VIII. The Scandalous Symmetry
I want to return, to dwell there, on the scene that is the point of completion of everything I have unfolded. The trials of Jesus (peace be upon him).
Jesus (peace be upon him) is arrested by night. He is led before the Sanhedrin. Witnesses are called. Charges are sought against him. Contradictions are found. Finally the question comes from Caiaphas: are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed? Jesus (peace be upon him) answers. The declaration is judged blasphemous. Leviticus 24:16 is cited: whoever blasphemes the Name of God shall be put to death. The sentence is pronounced. It is transmitted to Pilate for execution.
The Gospel of John gives a version that deepens the structure still further. The chief priests, before a hesitant Pilate, cry out: we have a law, and by our law he ought to die (Jn 19:7). We have a law. That sentence is the theological summit of the entire trial. They execute the one whom that same Law announced, according to the Christian reading, in the name of a technical application of that Law. It is not the Book that turns against itself; it is a dead reading of the Book that smothers the living word it bore.
I want to weigh this until we grasp its full reach.
In the Christian reading, this scene is the christological scandal: God rejected by his own people. But it has another, more universal dimension, which should concern every reader of a revealed Book. It shows that a scriptural community can reach a stage of drift where it uses its Book to condemn the very truth that Book bore. The apparatus functions. Procedures are followed. Verses are cited. The judges are legitimate. And yet, the whole apparatus produces a crime for which it bears responsibility, without the actors recognising themselves as guilty.
Caiaphas thinks he protects the people. The scribes think they apply the Torah. The soldiers think they execute a legitimate sentence. Pilate thinks he maintains order. Each, in his place, does his work. And together, they crucify the one whom, according to the Christian reading I mobilise as mirror, Moses had announced.
This scene is the asymptotic limit of scriptural drift. The point where inversion is total. Where the Book, reduced to the reading that has lost its meaning, can be brandished against what it sought to say, without anyone seeing the contradiction, because the capacity to see it has been lost for generations. The problem is not the Book, it remains what it is. The problem is the reading that has gone out to the point of being able to serve as the frame for a crime.
And now I turn the question on us with all the severity it merits. Does it happen to us, Muslims after nearly fifteen centuries, that we use the Quran and Sunna to smother voices that bore a truth coming from the Quran and Sunna?
Every reader who is or has been close to a Muslim religious institution will recognise, I think, that in any such institution there exists a structural temptation analogous to the one described in Caiaphas: when a disturbing truth arises, it is easier to smother it in the name of the Book than to let oneself be disturbed by it. And the smothering may be done with verses in the mouth. It may be done by rigorous application of rules. It may be done by sincere men who think they protect the community. And it may produce, at its term, the smothering of what was to vivify the community.
I do not say that our Muslim religious institutions are equivalent to the Sanhedrin as the Gospels paint it. I do not say that our ʿulamāʾ are Caiaphas. I say that the mechanism the Gospels document in the trial of Jesus (peace be upon him) is a general mechanism of scriptural communities at maturity, and that we are not, by nature, immunised against it. We must actively watch for it among us, recognise its minor manifestations before they become major, and refuse the reassuring thought that would tell us this cannot happen to us.
Because, and here is Israel’s hardest lesson, as the Christian reading transmits it to us, Jesus (peace be upon him)‘s contemporaries did not think, either, that it could happen to them. They believed themselves the chosen people, faithful depositaries of the Torah, prepared to receive their Messiah. They were, objectively, by historical preparation. And it is precisely this conviction that may have prevented a part of them from seeing, in Jesus (peace be upon him), what they awaited. The certainty of being prepared is, at a certain degree of drift, the most acute symptom of being so no longer.
Nothing automatically protects us from this. Not the fact that the Quran is textually preserved. Not the fact that our tradition is vast and sophisticated. Not the fact that we are numerous. Not the fact that our civilisation has had great moments. The Temple too was grandiose. The Torah too was there, recited, studied, surrounded. The Pharisees too formed a strong movement. And yet, according to the Christian reading, the living word of God was able to be smothered in the name of a dead reading of its Book.
That too we must remember.
IX. The Crisis of Recognition
Everything I have unfolded converges toward a single theme, which I now want to name in earnest because it unifies the entire essay: the drift of a community of the Book culminates in a crisis of recognition.
Re-read, for a moment, each of the scenes I have invoked.
The fig tree does not recognise its own sterility. It has kept its leaves, it has kept its appearance, it believes it bears what it does not bear.
The Sabbath is no longer recognised in its finality. Doctors have kept its letter and lost the memory of what it was given for.
The qorban is a device where tradition no longer recognises that it nullifies the commandment. No one sees the inversion.
The mint-tithe is a piety that no longer recognises the hierarchy of weights.
The good Samaritan stages men who do not recognise the wounded as their neighbour.
The Pharisee of Luke 18 does not recognise his own dependence on mercy.
The elder son does not recognise the joy of the house as gift of the father.
The vinedressers do not recognise the heir, or rather, they recognise him and refuse to confess it, because to confess it would dispossess them.
The Sanhedrin, according to the Christian reading, does not recognise, in Jesus (peace be upon him), what its own Torah announced. It uses the Torah to avoid recognising it.
And Jerusalem itself, in Jesus (peace be upon him)‘s cry over the city, has not recognised the time of its visitation (Lk 19:44). Because you did not know the time of your visitation. That is the densest and most terrible formula of the Gospels. Jerusalem did not recognise that she was, at that moment, being visited by God. She awaited being visited, she had waited for centuries, and when, according to the Christian reading, the visitation came, she did not know how to recognise it.
All these scenes say the same thing. The drift of a scriptural community reaches its gravest point when the community becomes incapable of recognising. Incapable of recognising its own drift. Incapable of recognising the wounded. Incapable of recognising its own dependence on mercy. Incapable of recognising joy as gift. Incapable of recognising the heir, the Messiah, the envoy. Incapable of recognising the hour of its visitation.
And what is chilling in this incapacity is that it may be correlated with the sophistication of the religious apparatus. The more the apparatus develops, the more it produces categories, criteria, precise expectations. And the more it produces categories, the more it makes difficult the recognition of what does not fit its categories. The Jerusalem that, according to the Christian reading, did not recognise its visitation was the best equipped to recognise it: it had the Temple, the Scriptures, the prophecies, the doctors, the calculations. It had everything, and, in part, it saw nothing.
The hardest thing to receive is this: the crisis of recognition camouflages itself as recognition. The community that loses the capacity to recognise may believe it recognises everything. It has names for every thing, boxes for every event, explanations for every fact. It names the Dajjāl, it has identified him. It names the signs, it has catalogued them. It names the truth, it has fatwas to certify it. And while it names, classifies, certifies, it may no longer see. Because naming is not recognising. Classifying is not seeing. Certifying is not hearing. True recognition demands an interior porosity that may have been lost beneath the rigour of classification.
One must, here, at least try to sketch positive criteria of recognition, not to let this word float as a magical concept. I propose these criteria, not as a closed list, but as a beginning of a test.
To recognise is to accept being corrected. A community that welcomes correction as grace, not as aggression, is a community that keeps the capacity to recognise.
To recognise is to maintain the primacy of mercy, without abolishing truth. Where mercy disappears in the name of truth, recognition is extinguished. Where truth disappears in the name of mercy, it is extinguished too. Recognition lives in the tension of the two.
To recognise is to feel the weight of the heavy weights. Justice, mercy, fidelity. When these three are no longer at the centre of common attention, recognition has slipped.
To recognise is to see the wounded. The first test is not doctrinal. It is on the road to Jericho. The one who no longer sees the wounded no longer recognises anything essential, whatever his doctrinal certainties.
To recognise is non-spectacular joy. Not the joy one displays, not group joy, not the joy produced by belonging, but that discreet, sometimes silent joy of the heart that knows itself received and tastes, even in difficulty, that God is. Where that joy is extinguished, recognition is extinguished with it.
To recognise is to prefer the fruit to the foliage. When a community wonders more at its own visible signs than at the interior fruits it produces in its members, it is losing recognition.
These criteria are not measures. One cannot evaluate them to the gram. But they orient. And they allow, at least, the distinction of true recognition from simple personal preference.
How, then, can a community in crisis of recognition come out of its crisis? Not by the sole effort of its institutions. An institution in crisis of recognition does not have every tool to recognise that it is in crisis. An outside gaze is needed. A mirror is needed. And this is what Jesus (peace be upon him), at a long distance from Moses, was for Israel, a mirror that a part of the institution rejected because to recognise him would have been to recognise its own failure. And this is, I believe, what the Gospels can be for us today: not another Revelation, not a Book to substitute for ours, but a mirror. The Quran, by reminding us that the Gospel bears hudan wa nūr, guidance and light, at least forbids us from despising this mirror in advance.
This mirror shows us, without flattery, what a scriptural community can become at long maturity. It also shows us, and this is essential, that there were Nicodemuses, Gamaliels, Josephs of Arimathea, men of the institution who recognised, even in the night, even against their school. The crisis of recognition is never total in all hearts. There are always, in every community, living remnants who see. And the question, for each of us, is whether he will be among them.
X. What Remains Open
I reach the end. I would rather not conclude, because to conclude would be to reproduce one of the pathologies I have described. To give an external rule in place of the inner work which alone can liberate. I shall therefore leave open what must remain open.
What remains open, first, is the question of whether my thesis is right. I do not claim to have demonstrated it in an irrefutable manner. I have proposed a structural analogy, nourished by precise Gospel scenes, turned back upon my community with a self-implication that was the only rampart against distortion. This analogy is worth what it is worth. It has its limits: the Gospels are situated texts, the reading I propose is one among others, and the comparison between two communities at long distance from their Books is not a demonstration but a meditation. If the reader refuses it, he must say why, and he must say it by confronting the texts, not by avoiding them. If the reader accepts it, he must draw the consequences, and these consequences are personal before they are communal.
What remains open, then, is the question of what may still occur.
The fig tree of Mark 11 is dead to its roots, but the parable of Luke 13 leaves a reprieve: sir, let it alone this year also, until I dig around it and put manure around it. The reprieve is a gift. The reprieve is what still makes conversion possible. And as long as the umma is in the reprieve, as long as the Hour has not come, the possibility of digging around, of fertilising, of waiting further, exists. God, in the Quran, is called al-Tawwāb, the One who turns toward the servant who turns. And this intensive form says something that must be heard: He turns even when we barely turn. He opens the door before we knock.
The pathology I have described, non-convertibility, is not a destiny. It is an advanced, redoubtable stage that some reach and others do not. As long as a single heart, in the community, remains porous, the rain has a place to enter. As long as a single voice still dares to recall the heavy weights, the reminder is not extinguished. As long as a single man recognises the wounded man and stops, the Quran is not dead in the hearts. And the work of each of us is to be, if he can, that single heart, that single voice, that man who stops. Not to save the community all by himself, no man saves a community, but to keep open, in his own life, the porosity that allows the rain to do its work.
Who knows, perhaps those hearts, those voices, those men who stop, are precisely those whom God has prepared to recognise, when he returns, the one whom our Quran tells us will return. Perhaps the umma of those who will recognise him is not the one that awaits him most loudly, but the one that has, in the silence of its heart, learned to recognise: truth when it is disturbing, mercy when it surpasses our expectations, visitation when it comes without confirming our image, joy when it surges from where it should not.
I have nothing more to say. What I wanted to do was to hold, for an entire essay, an analogy I believe to be right and that I rarely see unfolded in this form. I held it at the price of a frankness that may offend some, but that frankness was the only honest way to proceed, because an analogy bearing on the reader’s own community cannot be set down with gentleness without ceasing to be the analogy it is. The Gospel diagnosis of Jesus (peace be upon him) before Israel does not spare. And if we receive this diagnosis as a mirror, since our Quran names Jesus (peace be upon him) āya, sign for the worlds, we must accept being diagnosed in our turn.
Everything I have written is worth something only if the Quran truly has what I claim it has, this capacity to be read living, this porosity offered to the one who lets himself be transformed, this rain that continues to fall if the earth will receive it. If the Quran is that, then no drift, however ancient, is irreversible. The rain still falls. The Book is still there. And it is enough for a heart, a single one, to recover the porosity it had lost, for the water to reach the roots again, and perhaps, at the end of long work, for something to begin to grow again.
We are not a fig tree. We are men and women who have received a Book, and the Book itself does not dry up. It simply waits for someone to read it again as it was given to be read. Not to possess it. Not to make of it an identity. Not to make of it a tool. To let oneself, at last, be received by it. And to recover, through it, the first joy that was the joy of the first companions, the joy of a man who discovers that God is speaking to him, who does not deserve it, who cannot get over it, and who rejoices in it to the point of tears.
﴿أَفَلَا يَتَدَبَّرُونَ الْقُرْآنَ أَمْ عَلَىٰ قُلُوبٍ أَقْفَالُهَا﴾
Do they not meditate on the Quran, or are there locks upon their hearts? (47:24)
Wa-Llāhu aʿlam. Wa-bi-Llāhi-t-tawfīq.