The first meeting in the group produced an atmosphere of curiosity. Maria (African-Norwegian, Catholic and Lutheran background) said at the end of the meeting that she felt that the participants were characterized by openness, which made her feel that people had been saying what they really meant. Nine of the ten participants were present. They all spoke for about twenty minutes about themselves, their background, their work, and family life, and their personal reflections on religion. The group also decided on two matters of methodological procedure in the process. First, there was a mutual agreement not to share personal information revealed at the meetings to outsiders, although it was acceptable to share reflections on the process itself. Second, it was agreed that to hold a group meeting at least two Christians and two Muslims had to be present.
Some of the participants shared views on the Bible and/or the Koran at the first meeting.
These views were often rooted in their experiences as readers. Inger (Norwegian, Lutheran) stated that she preferred not to read the Bible by herself in private but to listen to others explaining and preaching on the text in a church setting. Susanne (Norwegian. Lutheran) concurred with this. Rima (Arab-Norwegian, Roman Catholic) stated that she had started to read the Old Testament as a young woman, and then stopped reading it because she found it depressing. Eva (Norwegian, Lutheran) distinguished between the Old and the New Testaments and claimed that the Old Testament was “not to be recommended for sensitive souls,” whereas she, on the other hand, embraced the New Testament because it was about Jesus Christ. Maria emphasized that her favorite story in the Bible was the narrative about Jesus and Mary Magdalene.
Senait (Pakistani-Norwegian, Sunni Muslim), Aira (Pakistani-Norwegian, Sunni Muslim) Shirin (Iranian-Norwegian, Shia Muslim) and Fouzia (Pakistani-Norwegian, Sunni Muslim) said that they read the Koran regularly, since it was an important part of their lives. They displayed differences in how they related to the Koran: Fouzia emphasized the usefulness of the Koran in practical matters, as a concrete guide for everyday life. Senait focused on how the Koran could help women obtain their rights. Shirin stated that her experience of reading the Koran was that her understanding of the texts was changing all the time. Aira took the Islamic perspective of
“the people of the book”104 to say that she believed that, although there were differences, the
104The Islamic tradition refers to Jews and Christians as “the people of the book” (Waines 2003: 14 ).
three religions all had texts. Her suggestion of a joint challenge was “to see how texts can help us, rather than hinder us.”
This short introduction to the broader discussion on the canonical scriptures seems to reflect the difference between the status of the Bible in the Christian tradition (represented by Lutherans and Roman Catholics) and the position of the Koran in Islam. The Christians, both Lutherans and Roman Catholics, appeared to be rather reluctant and selective in their use of the Bible, and most of them said that their religious practice was not based on individual Bible reading. Eva and Maria were the exceptions: they explicitly valued parts of the biblical text and claimed that they were important to them. The Muslims, on the other hand, stated that they feel a strong connection with the Koran and used it as a guide, as a communicative link to the canonical scripture of the religious traditions of all “the peoples of the book,” as a text that could be interpreted and reinterpreted and as a possible aid in improving the situations of women.
At the second meeting I asked the participants to share brief reflections on their experiences of reading the Bible and the Koran.105 My question was not specified in such a way that I asked the Christian participants to talk about the Bible and the Muslim participants to talk about the Koran. Even if this was the pattern that would unfold through the shared reflections, I wanted to open the group up to cross-reflections if they occurred. The intention behind my question was twofold: to map existing general views on the Bible and the Koran so that it would be possible later to see how and if they were applied to actual texts, and to start a process of sharing knowledge and reflection within the group to prepare for later work on specific texts.
Later in this meeting the conversation moved on to discussing the Hagar/Hajar narratives in the Bible and the hadith.
A complex conversation took place in the further discussion of the theme in the second meeting. The conversation went in different directions. For some of the participants, the most important matter turned out to be how to discuss rather than focusing on matters related directly to the Bible/Koran and the relation between them.
Is it OK to Leave the Bible on the Floor? Different Understandings of Materiality and Respect for the Bible and the Koran
The physical aspect of the holiness of the Koran and the ritual dimension of reading it were thematized by Fouzia’s contribution.
Fouzia1: Ok. Let’s take a look at how…
105The question was also formulated in the invitation to this second meeting.
Fouzia2: We have a lot of respect for the Koran.
Fouzia3: We need to prepare ourselves mentally when we are going to read it.
Fouzia4: I believe we need to go and wash ourselves and make ourselves clean before we touch it.
Fouzia speaks in terms of a “we,” referring to Muslims in general. She positions herself to speak on behalf of the Islamic tradition. The practice she refers to is wudu, the Islamic custom of ritual ablution before praying and touching the Koran (Esposito 2003: 341). She defines wudu as an act expressing respect. Then she shares a narrative:
Fouzia5: Several years ago I had a Christian living with me.
Fouzia6: And suddenly she put the Bible on the floor.
Fouzia7: And when I went into her room I took the Bible and lifted it above my head ….
Fouzia8: [S]he got angry with me and said: “Why do you come into my room just like that?”
Fouzia9: “But you left your Bible on the floor.”
Fouzia10: “Look at my Koran. Because I have such respect for it I don’t leave it behind me, I will not put it ….”
Fouzia11: But then she said it’s only a book. It’s only paper and texts Fouzia12: We pay respect to that.
Fouzia13: Reading the Koran gives us a lot of mental energy. I experience that when I have problems.
Fouzia14: When I am involved in a conflict, the first thing I do is to wash myself and then read.
Fouzia15: Then I feel I’m very close to God, that he’s listening to me.
Fouzia contrasts her own respect for the Koran and the Bible with what she perceived to be a Christian’s disrespect for the Bible. According to this narrative, Fouzia acted to stop disrespectful treatment of the Bible, and she used her own relation to the Koran as a model for how her housemate should treat her Bible. Fouzia’s act crossed religious lines and entailed entering another person’s private space without being invited. The question is: Why does Fouzia act like this? The narrative does not give a complete answer to that question. Does Fouzia act on her own behalf because she wanted to safeguard respectful treatment of the Bible in her surroundings? Or does Fouzia act on what she found to be in her Christian housemate’s best interest, namely to protect her from acting disrespectfully toward the Bible? If it is the former,
she is motivated by her own religious tradition to ensure that the Bible would be treated with the same signs of respect that she used to treat the Koran because of the Bible’s position in the Islamic tradition. If it is the latter, she used her own religious patterns of behavior to correct the act of a believer from a different religious tradition.
The conclusion of the narrative has the form of a testimony (Fouzia13-15). By performing the testimony Fouzia returns to the here and now of the group and leaves the time of the narrative behind.
Then Fouzia shares another narrative, which is considerably longer:
Fouzia16: I have a short story if I may …. I told it to a client.
Fouzia17: There was a woman who had come from Pakistan. This was a couple of years ago.
Fouzia18: Before she arrived here, her daughter died, sixteen years old, two days before they arrived in Norway.
Fouzia19: She did not see her daughter one last time; she was busy meeting the guests who came by.
Fouzia20: When she came here, she lived close to me, and I could hear her crying at her window every day.
Fouzia21: One day I rang her doorbell and I asked her: “What is the matter with you? I can hear you crying from my house.”
Fouzia22: Then she told me that she had lost her daughter.
Fouzia23: Then I asked her: “Why don’t you pray for her?”
Fouzia24: “I do pray. I am sitting here on my sofa praying.”
Fouzia25: Then I said: “Do you know what? Right now it’s not prayer time, but if you wait for an hour, it will be. Then, you go and wash yourself.”
Fouzia26: The doctors here in Norway had tried everything. She had … but it didn’t help her.
Fouzia27: Then I said: “I will pray, and then you can pray together with me.”
Fouzia28: Then she went and took a shower.
Fouzia29: And I said: “Now you can pray. God will listen to you. He will not hear you if you are sitting on that sofa. You have to be clean in order for God to listen to you. You have to show him respect, that you are … clean and close to God in order to speak with him. Then he will care.”
Fouzia30: She had been crying; her husband was upset because she did not take care of ….
Fouzia31: Suddenly, she started praying. She was sitting on the carpet and started to cry.
Fouzia32: Suddenly, she sat down on the sofa and said: “Now I feel more complete.
God listened to me.”
Fouzia33: Then she asked: “When is the next prayer time?” After this she started to pray five times a day.
Fouzia34: And she started to look after her children and her husband and became an ordinary housewife once again.
Fouzia35: She told me some weeks ago: “God can hear you everywhere, Fouzia It was what you told me, that God does not listen if I …. So I just have to go and wash myself, and then he will listen.”
Fouzia36: He is everywhere. Of course he is everywhere. He can hear us.
Fouzia37: It is how you think about it … the situations ….
Fouzia38: The Koran gives us an understanding of other religions. It is only the Koran that tells about other religions and other prophets coming to the world. It also tells a lot more. And I think we show respect for other prophets.
Fouzia39: There is not much about previous religions in Christianity.
Fouzia40: And the Koran gives us guidance about how to solve all our problems, solutions for everything between birth and death. So we can find … we will get answers from it.
Fouzia41: But when I read the old version of the Bible I found it a lot easier to understand, to compare it to what the Koran says about women. In the old version there are a lot of similarities. But in the new version the words and the content have been changed more.
This narrative, as told, contains multiple messages. First, Fouzia shows that she is deliberately using the narrative form to share experience and knowledge with the group (Fouzia16). She asks for permission to tell the story, showing her own awareness of the others as audience. Fouzia16 indicates that she had told the story before, to a client. The narrative is thus not any narrative but has most likely been used earlier as a means to share experience and knowledge. This suggests that Fouzia is familiar with expressing her experience and knowledge through narratives, and this seems to be the way she prefers to share her views with this group too.
The narrative has several pedagogical points, if read as an educational narrative: it emphasizes the importance of ritual ablution in Islamic religious practice (Fouzia25, 29, 35). The Islamic prayer to which the narrative refers is the ritual prayer, salah, which requires ritual ablution, and the prayer ceremony includes reading the Koran (Waines 2003: 24).106 The narrative provides an image of God as a close and caring listener if the ritual ablution is followed (Fouzia29, 35). This is exemplified by the woman Fouzia is helping in the story (Fouzia32-35).
Fouzia35-36 do, however, underline that God’s presence is not spatially limited to ritually clean spaces. God as the listener and the helper is established in the narrative through wudu and salah (including reading the Koran) but also as context-sensitive with respect to the believer’s situation. God can help when the Norwegian doctors cannot (Fouzia26).
Fouzia’s narrative ends with a conclusion about the Bible and the Koran, taking the listeners and the narrator back to the here and now (Fouzia38-41). This includes a testimony about the inclusiveness of the Koran to other faiths, and the koranic message about respecting other prophets than Muhammad. Christianity, not the Bible, is set up as a negative counterpart, according to Fouzia, without reference to other religious traditions. The Bible is mentioned in Fouzia41, where Fouzia talks about the old and new versions of the Bible. The old version is presented as having a great deal in common with the Koran, whereas the new differs more.
Fouzia’s statement about the Bible could be referring to the Islamic dogma of tahrif, according to which an originally divinely revealed text has been corrupted and changed by humans into a new text not to be regarded as divine (Muslim-Christian Research Group 1989:
78-79). According to this dogma, the original Jewish and Christian scriptures are viewed as having been tampered with by Jews and Christians (Leirvik 2006: 132-133), and could represent the new version to which Fouzia is referring.107 “The old version” would then mean the uncorrupted biblical scriptures, according to the dogma of tahrif, which are different from the Christian and Jewish scriptures as they appear today. A different interpretation of Fouzia’s reference to the old and new versions of the Bible would be that she simply means the Old and New Testaments.
Through telling this narrative, Fouzia establishes a direct position for herself as a narrator to the group. She also shows the group her position as an educator and a helper within the
106The personal prayer in the Islamic religious tradition, dua, does not require ritual ablution (Waines 2003: 92).
107The Islamic dogma of tahrif has played a problematic role in Muslim polemics on the Christian canonical scpritures, and may pose a challenge to Muslim-Christian dialogue about the Bible and the Koran. Leirvik finds the dogma of tahrif on the one hand and the inclusive teaching concerning Christians (together with the Jews) as
“people of the book” on the other as representing a tension within the Islamic tradition on how to relate to Christian canonical scriptures (Leirvik 2006:133). The challenge posed by the dogma of tahrif for Muslim-Christian relations has to do with the question of who has the right to define the canonical scriptures of a tradition as “true” or hold them to be “falsified.” This may have a parallel in the view of Muhammad in the Christian tradition: Is he to be regarded as a prophet or not?
narrative she shares. This narrative gives a message through a positive example, in contrast to the earlier story about the Christian woman who left the Bible on the floor, illustrating a point through a negative example. The conclusion of Fouzia’s narrative seems to have a certain apologetic character if she is referring to the dogma of tahrif.
Fouzia’s two narratives marked the start of an intense discussion between some of the participants. Susanne and Eva immediately ask for a clarification of what Fouzia said about the old and new versions of the Bible: Did she mean the Old and New Testaments? After some questions, Fouzia says that she was talking about the Old and the New Testaments, but she still makes the point that the new version has been changed compared to the content of the Koran.
Both interpretations mentioned above thus seem to be possible.
Eva is the one who is most provoked by Fouzia:
Eva1: Yes, I can see that we have quite different understandings about the holy book … because the Bible is holy for me too, in particular the Gospels
… they are about Jesus Christ.
Eva2: I can leave the Bible on the floor; it’s not very practical, but I can do it, and it has nothing to do with my respect for the Bible.
Eva3: There is one thing I am very afraid of, and I think most Christians are, and that is magic.
Eva4: So when you say that if you wash your hands, Allah will listen to you … I’m almost provoked by that
Eva5: because I think that a person who is devastated does not need to wash her hands first and only then will Allah listen.
Eva6: This is a kind of external gesture that almost becomes like magic Eva7: because God is there all the time. I can pray to God without a prayer mat
and I think I could be made dirty by anything, and God will hear me.
Eva8: The more miserable I am, I would almost say, the less money I have for buying carpets, and the less opportunity I have to wash myself the closer God is to me. Because then I am a poor human being in need of God’s help.
Eva’s statement in Eva2 reveals a difference between her notion of respect and Fouzia’s.
Eva dissolves the connection established by Fouzia between holiness, respect, and the physical treatment of the Bible (and of the Koran). For Eva, respect is primarily connected with inner thoughts and feelings. Eva articulates that the most holy part of the Bible for her is the gospels in the New Testament because “they are about Jesus Christ” (Eva1). The content is decisive in her
evaluation of the texts as holy or not, and she does not talk about the holiness of the Bible as a physical book.
Eva proceeds by directly criticizing Fouzia. She accuses her indirectly of arguing for a magical relation between religious practice and achieving a wanted result (Eva3-4). She views the religious ritual of wudu, or Fouzia’s representation of it, as a magic ritual, followed by stating a warning against magic.
While Fouzia expresses herself mostly through narratives, Eva communicates in an argumentative manner. The pedagogical points in Fouzia’s narratives are criticized (Eva4-6, Eva8), and Eva speaks partly on behalf of “most Christians” (Eva3) and on behalf of the Islamic tradition when in Eva4 and 5 she makes claims about Allah. The group, both Christians and Muslims, usually uses the word “God,” as Eva usually does as well. The use of “Allah” could be an act of distancing and a way of making it obvious that she is referring to Fouzia’s presentation of the Islamic image of God with which she disagrees.
Eva acknowledges that different views of what she calls “the holy book” (in singular) exist within the group (Eva1). It is not clear if she is referring only to the Bible or to “a holy book” in a more general sense. Eva does not explain what she believes the differences to be nor does she evaluate them. But through her contribution as a whole, she contrasts Fouzia’s narratives with her own belief in a God and Allah who listens without paying any attention to rituals, that respect and holiness have nothing to do with outward gestures, and that her own religious practice is based on the opposite correlation: the more the external frames are absent, the more God listens.
But Eva7 and Fouzia36 give almost the exact same image of God: omnipresent, listening to people everywhere and in all situations. Eva does not comment on this aspect of Fouzia’s contribution. In Eva’s verbal response, it is the differences between the two that are highlighted and accentuated. Both Fouzia and Eva are polemical in their communication, making a statement on behalf of the religious other or the other religious tradition in order to make things “right”
according to their own standards. Fouzia does this indirectly through the message of her first narrative when she rescues the Bible from the floor where a Christian has put it, and Eva does it when she states that Fouzia’s presentation of the Islamic godhead is wrong.
Eva continues:
Eva9: About the Bible, to me, the Old Testament … it is not for me as a Christian, it is the background for Jesus and very interesting to read.
Eva10: But I see very clearly what it is that is new about Christianity, and that is when Jesus, for instance, says that the Sabbath is there for humankind and not humankind for the Sabbath,