Illuminations

6 Ramadhan, 1446

Whilst I've been galloping through his Muhammad For Beginners, my progress through Ziauddin Sardar's Reading the Qur'an: The Contemporary Relevance of the Sacred Text of Islam has been a good deal more leisurely and even more rewarding. When I first read it, probably a decade ago at a guess, I found myself very much in agreement with its basic positions on quite a few issues. But I didn't then grasp quite how deeply illuminating Sardar's analysis of the faith is. On this reading I find myself gripped by the explanatory power of his readings, and the precision of detail involved.

In his reading of the opening passage of Sura Al-Baqara, for example, his observation on what he terms the distributive nature of the Islamic worldview, in relation to the phrase spend of what We have provided them and the subsequent reference to prospering captures the essence of what the sacred text brings us to understand of a healthy relationship with money. The notion of a sense of generosity being central to the genuine prosperity of a person or nation is deeply sane, yet undercuts entirely the shabby paradigms concerning wealth that imprison us.