Making Meaning Of The Hagar/Hajar Narratives
Discussion 2 Related to the Hagar/Hajar Narratives
Eva: “How could Hagar/Hajar abandon Ishmael in the desert?”
Eva also introduces the next discussion initiated by reading the Hagar/Hajar narratives. The question Eva poses that dominates the following discussion is: How could Hagar/Hajar leave Ishmael in the desert and walk away?
Eva46: And there is one thing I find very strange in both texts. It is that both Hagars, I would almost say, Hagar in the biblical text and Hajar in the koranic text, abandon their child.
Eva47: I don’t believe that.
Eva48: This … they can’t stand him screaming or watching him die, so they abandon him.
Eva49: And the child lies under a bush there somewhere, and then the mother abandons her child.
Eva50: Do you know what? I don’t believe that.
Eva51: This must have been written by a man.
(Laughter among the participants)
Eva52: I don’t believe it for a minute.
Eva53: So, if I had a small child who was crying, would I leave him under a bush and walk away?
Eva’s statement that the narrative was obviously written by a man makes everyone laugh.
This shared laughter that also occurs on later occasions in the group and may be interpreted in different ways.128 It is not obvious that Eva is trying to be funny, and it is not necessarily so that the other participants find what she says funny either. It can be interpreted as the result of a surprise, to indicate that Eva’s suggestion is unexpected. The laughter could be a way to relieve tension or simply to express a mode of absurdity. However the laughter is interpreted, it is a shared and spontaneous expression without words in the group, even if the laughter itself could carry more than one meaning.
What troubles Eva is that she is not able to make meaning of the narrated event of Hagar/Hajar abandoning Ishmael in the desert. She refers explicitly to both texts and relates to parts of both narratives where they share the same plot, while still relating to them as distinctively different texts. The parts of the narratives that deal with Hagar/Hajar and Ishmael in the desert have significant similarities, and she identifies Hagar’s abandonment of Ishmael as a point in common.
In Eva47 Eva states that a possible way of making meaning of this particular shared part of the narratives is to label it as “not true.” She repeats this remark twice afterwards, in Eva50 and Eva52. But in what way does Eva mean that this narrated event could be called “not true”?
There are different possibilities that would challenge the texts at different levels. She may mean that she does not believe that a historical event with a mother and a child alone in the desert is likely to have played out like this. This implies that the event of Hagar/Hajar abandoning Ishmael is not regarded as trustworthy historically, in the sense that what it narrates is unlikely to have taken place, historically. If this is Eva’s interpretive step, it suggests that she wants to explore the plausibility of the narratives’ historical reference.
But Eva is reading a written narrative and relating to a text, not a historical situation. She is interacting with the narratives in the present and not in the past time. Even if she addresses a problem concerning the historical plausibility of the narratives, she interacts with textual narratives, and with the other participants in the group – all situated in the present. Her struggle
128I will elaborate more on this in the analysis of the meaning making of the prescriptive texts; cf. Chapter 6, p.
232-233.
to make meaning of the narrative is situated in the here and now, as a contemporary reader “in front of the text.”129 When Eva accuses the text of being “not true” on this specific point, the accusation is directed toward the narratives in the present, since both the historical contexts of the texts and the narrators/authors are unknown and out of reach.
The above reflections do not, however, exclude the possibility that Eva means to address a historical situation, even if it is out of reach. According to Mieke Bal, the need to address moral dilemmas in the past by using contemporary approaches cannot be avoided if one takes the past seriously. At the same time it is necessary to be aware of the contextual difference and to accept the limited access of a present reader to the past (Bal 2008: 48). Eva’s approach, if it uses Bal’s criterion of taking the past seriously by addressing contemporary moral dilemmas, definitively does so.
Eva expresses rejection of the information from the narrative that Hagar/Hajar abandons her son three times in this sequence. This rejection includes a moral evaluation of Hagar/Hajar’s act of abandonment. The dilemma of leaving her son might be a moral dilemma for Hagar/Hajar in the narratives, but it now becomes a dilemma for the reader of the text, for Eva, when she tries to make meaning of the story.
Through her comments and statements Eva constructs a position for herself regarding the narratives/canonical scriptures: She relates to the narratives as written texts by positioning herself as a subject in relation to the text. As a subject, she defines her possibility and mandate to be critical of the texts, which entails asking critical questions, implying the possibility of abandoning the texts or parts of them. She does not establish this position only in relation to the text of her own tradition but also in relation to the text from the Islamic tradition as well. Her subjective position is not static and distanced regarding the texts: she is involved in the dilemma she derives from the narratives so that her own associations, reactions, and reflections are involved in exploring and challenging the narratives.
Her interaction with the text, substantial in her meaning making, occurs through analogical thinking. This is how Eva finds a basis for constructing a meaning of the problem she identifies in the text, as demonstrated when she states what she would have done in a situation analogous to the situation of Hagar/Hajar, shown by her rhetorical question in Eva53. She claims that she herself would never leave a child under similar circumstances. In addition, through her statement in Eva51, she widens the analogy based on her own presupposed acting to include all
129The expression “in front of the text” is usually connected to what is called reader-response criticism in literary theory. Kwok states that biblical interpretation has become more and more located in interpretative communities (another term from the reader-response school, which was founded by Stanley Fish; see Chapter 2), and that this is now a collectively dominant emphasis in interpreting the Bible. The former dominant paradigms, i.e. “behind the text,” connected to historical criticism, and “in the text,” influenced by literary criticism (Kwok 2005: 103).
women, not only herself, by a negative expression eliminating all female as writers of the texts.
Eva constructs a narrator/author who is to be held responsible for the appearance of the moral dilemma (Eva51) as a solution. The only and decisive attribute she gives the narrator/author is the male gender. The implication is that the gender of the author/narrator is important for how the text should be interpreted. The gendered limitation of experience has given the narrative of a mother and child in the desert a distorted content. Behind this reasoning is a view of women’s and men’s experience as profoundly different.
These interpretative steps suggest that she operates with a gendered hermeneutics that is based on analogical interpretation130 and on a particular anticipation of the relationship between the genders and between experience and gender. Eva leans on reasoning where women and men are viewed as having different experiences and thus writing the story differently and in addition she equals being a women with motherhood. Eva thus enters into a specific form of gendered hermeneutics related to so-called second-wave feminism (Cudd and Andreasen 2005: 7-8), where women’s experiences are universally categorized as different from men’s and bases a feminist critique on an anticipated unity based on gender.131
In Eva46 and 48 Eva refers to Hagar/Hajar as “they,” i.e. in the plural. Ishmael is still referred to in the singular (Eva50). Doubling the person that leaves the child behind may have the effect of making the event even more dramatic: the child is abandoned by not only one but two mothers. In Eva49 Eva returns to the singular, talking about one “mother.” It seems that Eva’s alternation between the plural and the singular shifts in line with her view of the intertextual relation between the two narratives as fluid. She moves between relating to the narratives as one merged story at some points, and keeping the stories distinct at others.
Eva suggests two answers to her own question: The first is to reject the historical plausibility of the event of Hagar/Hajar’s abandonment in the texts and see the author or the narrator as a man without the necessary knowledge of what he is writing/narrating. But when Eva searches for an answer to her own question within the framework of the narratives, she suggests an answer connected to her impression of Hagar/Hajar’s emotional state (Eva48):
Hagar/Hajar left Ishmael to avoid the emotional pain of watching her son die or to escape the sound of his screaming. In both answers Eva is deeply involved in the moral dilemma she describes as the obstacle to her relating to the text at all.
Rima and Aira suggest a different answer to Eva’s question:
130See the section in Chapter 2 on Analogical Reasoning and Moral Enrichment/Critique, p. 48-50.
131So-called “third wave” feminism, usually considered as having started in the late 1980s, is influenced by poststructuralism and criticizes the notion of universal experiences for women. Instead, this is seen as “essentialism”
and criticized for not taking diversity among women seriously and for constructing the categories men-women as binary opposites (Cudd and Andreasen 2005: 8 ).
Rima8: She walks away from him to find water, doesn’t she? She walks away in order to find water?
Eva54: No.
Rima9: Yes.
Eva55: Wait. Look here…
Aira34: Yes, yes.
Rima and Aira both look for an answer within the frames of the two narratives. Rima finds an immediate meaning in Hagar/Hajar’s act of abandonment: She leaves Ishmael to find water in order to rescue the both of them from dying of thirst. This does not rule out an emotional engagement on Hagar/Hajar’s part, but the emphasis is on a different aspect of the action: she did not leave Ishmael primarily to protect herself emotionally. Rather, her action was directed toward a goal, i.e. to find water.
What is the basis of the difference in the meaning making of this act? It may be caused by different positions taken toward the texts as readers, or it may go back to different experiences as a reference framework for analogical meaning making. To take the first possibility: Rima and Aira may have greater confidence in the text and in the narrative from the beginning because it was already well known to them. Their analogical reference, to take the last possibility, may include different experiences of existing interpretations of the narrative. I will return to this later when Aira shares her meaning making of the texts.
In the further discussion, none of participants pay much attention to distinguishing between the two Hagar/Hajar narratives. The narratives have now merged – in the discussion.
Eva56: Here it says in the biblical text:
Eva57: “Then she went and sat down opposite him a good way off, about the distance of a bowshot: for she was thinking: I cannot watch the boy die.”
Eva58: That’s why she leaves.
Eva59: And it says: “She could not watch him … she went … and looked for people.”
Aira35: I cannot watch the boy die without doing anything; I will go up and find him some water.
Eva60: It doesn’t say that.
Aira36: Yes. That’s what it really is.
Rima10: She’s going around in circles, isn’t she.
Eva61: It says: “She could not endure looking at him.” “Safa was the nearest mountain to her.” “She stood on it and started looking at the valley keenly so that she might see somebody, but she could not see anybody.”
Inger2: She was looking for help.
Eva62: She did.
Eva63: But she cast him away … she couldn’t look at him.
Inger3: And you could carry a baby even if you went out.
Eva claims repeatedly that Hagar/Hajar abandons Ishmael in order to protect herself emotionally. She bases her argument on both texts and quotes directly from the texts to legitimize her view (Eva57 and 61). The two narratives are quoted separately but face the same challenge from Eva. Inger and Aira relate to a common plot and do not differentiate between the narratives. Both interact with a merged narrative and suggest alternative answers to the puzzle of Hagar/Hajar’s abandonment of Ishmael.
Aira keeps emphasizing what Hagar/Hajar is going to do (trying to find water) and not what she had done (leaving Ishmael). Inger1 is a contribution to the practically focused reasoning suggested by Rima and Aira earlier, still within the interpretative frame of the narratives. But in Inger2 Inger suggests a practical solution for the figure of Hagar/Hajar in the narratives, and thus she moves, as Eva did earlier, to a reading position that interacts closely with the narratives by suggesting an alternative plot to solve what Eva and now Inger see as the moral dilemma: Hagar/Hajar could have carried the boy with her when looking for water. This is an attempt to establish a contrafactual narrative, a “what if” question to bring in other premises for the narrative in order to change the plot. Inger uses analogical reasoning to do so, based on the
presupposition that anyone in Hagar’s situation could carry a baby with her/him. This is presumably addressed to both texts but as a merged plot.
Eva64: She left him, and a mother doesn’t do that.
Aira37: No, for me it’s because she cannot let him die of thirst.
Aira38: Because he doesn’t have water, so she has to do something.
Eva64 does not follow up on Inger’s attempt to establish alternative premises for the story to solve the moral dilemma. Nor does she substitute her focus on the act of abandonment for a focus on the act of providing water. Eva64 may be interpreted in different ways. She could be criticizing Hagar/Hajar for being a bad mother, which would be a moral judgment on the Hagar/Hajar figure as a mother in the narratives (the mothers once again having merged in Eva’s statements). If so, the problem of the abandonment becomes a moral dilemma in relation to the Hagar/Hajar figure. Or she might be indicating that the act of abandonment has to be dismissed as a trustworthy part of the narratives, because the texts clearly situate Hagar/Hajar as a mother, and a mother simply does not act this way. If this is the content of what Eva says in Eva64, the reason why this event is narrated like this is, Eva has suggested earlier, because the narrator is a man. In the latter case the problem of the abandonment moves from the figure of Hagar/Hajar to a dilemma in the interpretative interaction with the text.
Aira, as the only Muslim participant taking part in this discussion, repeats her understanding of the reason for Hagar/Hajar abandoning Ishmael: It is of a practical, literally life-saving character. This is not necessarily a rejection of imagining Hagar/Hajar to be less emotionally stressed, but the emotions would, according to this interpretation, have a practical outcome. Aira’s comments relate to the debate about what a mother should or should not do as a moral dilemma (Aira38). According to Aira, Hagar’s duty as a mother is not primarily, perhaps, to stay with her son but to do something to meet his life-threatening need for water, even if this means leaving him alone.
Eva65: You are interpreting something that is not in the text.
Aira39: Then it is written wrongly … somebody has translated it from Arabic, this is not the actual text.
Eva66: So the translation is wrong?
Aira40: Yes.
Eva67: All right.
Aira41: I will claim that one hundred percent. Because the meaning is that she had to do it out of necessity.
Aira42: We who perform hajj ….
Eva68: Yes, because it is written here: “She could not endure looking at him.”
Eva69: She went away and found Safa to be the nearest mountain.
Aira43: Yes, because she would be standing at the top of the mountain searching for someone who could help her.
Inger4: She was looking for water.
Eva70: Because … You put that meaning there; it doesn’t say so.
Aira44: The translation is wrong.
Aira45: Because if you understand it … she went there to find water, and she looked in that direction many times.132
Aira46: I will tell you that, when we perform our pilgrimage then, as it says here, this is sa’y.
Aira47: This is why one performs sa’y.
Aira48: Sa’y means that one runs back and forth between Safa and Marwa, the two mountains.
Aira49: And then she runs really fast at certain points in order to watch the child
… in between the places where she was not able to see the child.
Aira50: So there are many women and men who are running quickly between the mountains … to follow the tradition, in remembrance of her struggle.
132Aira commented on this when reading the final text, stating that what she meant was to emphasize that, in the narrative from the hadith, Hajar could see Ishmael from the mountain top.
None of the written Hagar/Hajar narratives explicitly mention that the Hagar/Hajar figure leaves Ishmael to seek for water. This makes Eva accuse Aira of “interpreting something that is not in the text” (Eva65). Again, the two narratives are treated as one by Eva. Aira’s answer, however, is limited to the text from the Islamic tradition (Aira39), and she states that the reason why it appears as if she interprets outside of the texts is confusion in the translation process from Arabic. Aira39 shows one possible strategy to apply to a problem of making meaning of a translated text: the translation could be proven wrong, inaccurate, or contested, so that going back to the original text and critically evaluating the translation might solve or transform the problem. This may make the problem vanish, or make it appear easier to solve in a satisfactory way.
Although the narrative from the hadith does not explicitly say that Hagar went away to look for water, it does state that she went to look for other people to get help, and that the problem is Ishmael’s and her own thirst. Eva65 may then be concerned mostly with the Genesis narrative, reflecting that Eva thinks Aira does not include the biblical narrative of Hagar in her representation of the narrative. Aira’s answer in Aira39 clearly reflects only the text from the hadith. In this particular elaboration of the narratives’ contents, it seems as if the two participants limit their perspective to the text from their own tradition.
One of Eva’s comments (Eva65) is highly critical of Aira’s way of interacting with the narratives so far. When Eva quotes from narratives as a basis for her critique of Aira, this may seem contradictory to her own earlier criticism of the texts, questioning their validity. Eva can thus be said to take more than one position. On the one hand, she is ready to dismiss the text if she cannot accept it as consistent with her own analogical interpretation, but, on the other hand, she engages closely with the expressions and wording of the texts. In both positions she remains critical. Aira, on the contrary, takes a position where she defends the narratives as well as the acts of Hagar/Hajar. In this position she tries to argue for consistency and the existence of an acceptable solution to the moral dilemma Eva poses.
The question in this sequence is still: Why did Hagar/Hajar abandon Ishmael in the desert? It seems to be of utmost importance to find a satisfactory answer to this question for all parties in the discussion. Eva has stated earlier that her whole relation to the narratives is at stake here and that she may be ready to dismiss them if she does not find a meaning in the narratives at this particular point.
Aira elaborates on her answer to why she believed Hagar/Hajar left Ishmael to find water.
This particular text and narrative is the origin in the Islamic sources for the later developed ritual of sa’y during hajj (Esposito 2003: 103). The performance of sa’y is modeled after Hajar’s struggle to survive and rescue Ishmael in the desert, and the central act of sa’y, which is running between Safa and Marwa, is interpreted as an imitation of her struggle to find water. The ritual of