?A half-baked mullah is a danger to your faith. But, unfortunately, bin Laden doesn?t seem to strike enough people as half-baked.? And so, given a leadership vacuum in the Muslim world, many take his reading of the Koran seriously.

MUCH talk these days is about the real meaning of the Koran, and who is entitled to interpret it; about the real Islam and who is authorised to speak for it. All over the world Muslims, and also students of Islam from outside the tradition, find themselves wanting to say, But that?s not really Islam. The Koran doesn?t permit this kind of violence. Or, alternatively, something like, Osama bin Laden is a true Muslim. He is acting according to the clear dictates of the Koran.

We might have hoped that the Koran itself would offer us some guidance on the subject of interpretation, given that it speaks so much about the processes of its own revelation and reception. The verse that addresses the question most directly, however (3:7), has itself been interpreted in various ways over the centuries. It tells us that the Koran contains some verses that are straightforward, clear or definitive, and others that are ambiguous, metaphor-ical or allegorical, but it doesn?t tell us which category any particular verse falls into. That is ultimately left to the reader to decide, and those who know the gospels will well understand the difference between reading a verse about cutting off hands in a metaphorical way rather than as a straightforward command.

The Koran warns against those who use interpretations of the metaphorical verses to create division and goes on to say that no one knows the interpretation except God. Or perhaps it says that those well-versed in religion also know. A key difference which, even in Arabic, depends on how you divide the sentences in the verse.

Though many Muslims might say the Koran is not supposed to be interpreted at all, what they tend to mean is either that the text is not just to be explained away (as they think many Christians do with Genesis, for example) or that it should not be manipulated contentiously so that it divides the community. Actually, the Muslim tradition has created an impressive body of interpretation and commentary ? libraries-full ? as it has wrestled with the text. The practice of the Prophet and the law and culture that have been developed by the community are effectively interpretations of the Koran ? they are the putting into action of what Muslims consider God means in the Koran.

One of the main tools of interpretation is context. The Koran generally does not spe-cify one, because it does not have a narrative structure like most biblical books. It has a shifting speaking voice rather like the Psalms, in which at one moment the psalmist is addressing God, then the people; at another it is God speaking, or perhaps the people themselves. The Koran can be understood as God?s running commentary on the situation faced by the Prophet: sometimes addressing Muhammad, sometimes the people; speaking of Himself now in the first person plural, now in the third person singular.

We can perhaps get a feel for it if we think of the difference between a cricket commentary on radio and one on television. The radio commentator has to explain precisely the context of his remarks, describing each ball and each shot. The tele-vision commentator can let out an exclamation or a criticism, confident that his audience has seen the same things as he and so knows the context of his remarks. If you can?t see the picture, you?re in the dark. In the case of the Koran, with God as the commentator, the context has to be provided from outside the text, which, of course, affects the interpretation. Was God speaking in this verse of the polytheists or the Christians? Was this verse from early in the Prophet?s career, and therefore perhaps superseded by a later revelation?

One must remember that the vast majority of Muslims cannot understand Arabic ? even many Arabs, who are a small percentage of Muslims, do not understand Koranic Arabic well. Those Muslims who know part or even all of the text by heart do not necessarily know what a particular part of the text means. Reciting the Koran is more akin to what Christians would think of as a sacrament. By making the sounds in Arabic, even without understanding, a Muslim is participating in God?s act of speech. God caused those sounds to be made, and reproducing them links the believer to that primal moment of revelation. It creates a relationship with God, one that guarantees that you will be guided to the straight path. In one sense the information the sounds contain is less important than the sacramentality of the sound. A Muslim is someone who lives, as it were, immersed in the sound of the Koran, the sound of God?s speaking.

Wilfred Cantwell Smith, one of the past century?s most influential contributors to the history of religion, has wisely observed that the meaning of any scripture is, in fact, the history of its meanings. The Koran means not only what it once meant in the original context ? something we can no longer determine ? but also what it has meant over the centuries to those who accept it as coming from God. So a religiously valid interpretation of the Koran will take place from within the history and tradition of the community that has been living immersed in this text for so many centuries. In the course of that time a certain wisdom accumulates and a consensus emerges as to what is essential and what is peripheral.

In this sense, there is a world of difference between what we might call a traditionalist interpretation and what is commonly called a fundamentalist interpretation. Fundamentalists are not traditionalists. They actually reject the lived tradition of the community in favour of a personal interpretation which condemns the tradition as either obscurantist or assimilationist. What people like to call Islamic fundamentalism could perhaps be said to be quite modern, in the sense that it stresses the immediacy of the text to the individual, and the right of the individual to interpret the text even against the tradition.

Osama bin Laden is an engineer. Like so many others of his generation, he has had what could be considered a perfectly adequate modern technological education ? the kind that carries with it a certain can do approach. With the right design and the right materials you can build just about anything ? even a new world order. The technocratic mindset is impatient with the tentativeness and endless nuancing of the humanities and the pure sciences, and believes it can fairly simply get down to the basics and achieve something.

Somewhere here lies the heart of the problem we face today. Muslims who reject tradition are claiming to speak on behalf of it. What is worse, they are being taken seriously as authorities because of a desperate lack of leadership in the Muslim world. Who appeared on virtually every television screen and newspaper front page to tell us what a real Muslim should be doing? The head of Al-Azhar University in Cairo, the world?s oldest university and Sunni Islam?s most authoritative centre of learning? Perhaps the highest-ranking members of the Shi?ite religious establishment in Iran or Lebanon? Not at all. The commiserations and denunciations of these eminent scholars are lucky to manage a column inch here and there, while an engineer-turned-warrior gives the whole world his prime-time version of what the Koran really means. And much of the world, Muslim and not, takes him seriously because he is rich, determined and ruthless.

In most of its forms the Islamic tradition has a very diffuse notion of religious authority. Sunni Islam, in particular, sees no reason to have a strictly defined and centrally controlled system. People speak loosely of Muslim clerics, but these men are not ordained. They are trained. The recognition of their authority comes first from their teachers and then from the public who seek their opinions.

The system is effectively the same as that leading to the doctorate in a Western aca-demic institution. Indeed, it has been proposed that Europe adopted its system from the model of the schools of Islamic law. There is no real way of enforcing one?s authority in the academic world ? a person gets his PhD, which is a recognition from his teachers that he is now their peer, and then starts teaching and writing, hoping to become accepted as some kind of authority in the field. So it is among scholars of Islamic law ? even among the Shi?ites, where authority has become much more centralised.

This very dispersed notion of authority, combined with a singular lack of strong leaders (though no shortage of autocrats) in the Muslim world, leaves room for a bin Laden to claim the leader?s mantle in spite of the fact that he has no standing as a religious scholar. Being able to quote scripture in support of virtually any opinion is no more to be considered profound scholarship in a Muslim than in a televangelist. In Pakistan people say: Nim hakim khatra-e-jan. Nim mulla khatra-e-iman (A half-baked doctor is a danger to your life, a half-baked mullah is a danger to your faith). But, unfortunately, bin Laden doesn?t seem to strike enough people as half-baked.

Why there should be this leadership vacuum is a very complex issue, one that probably has less to do with Islam than with post-colonial politics in the Arab world, with the wealth and geopolitics of oil, and with the creation of the State of Israel. And bin Laden has made it clear that he has many of the political regimes of the Muslim world in his sights as well. It is easy enough to see why when one considers how many countries with a Muslim majority are controlled by corrupt and entrenched elites who have signally failed to create equitable societies. These same regimes have been happy enough to encourage Islamist groups in their own countries to rail against the West, because it deflects some of the heat from them.

We also see at work in the current situation one of Sunni Islam?s fundamental options. Early in the community?s history, a violent movement called the Kharijites decided that serious sin was tantamount to apostasy and therefore punishable by death. Realising the danger to the survival of the community that such a position represented, a consensus emerged that even a serious sinner should still be considered a Muslim as long as he professed to be one. The irony of bin Laden?s case is that, although he has more in common with the rigorist and exclusionist Kharijite view, very few Muslims are prepared to disown him, even if they think him guilty of what he is accused of. This particular half-baked mullah may prove a danger to their lives as well as their faith.

Dan Madigan is an Australian Jesuit. He teaches Islamic studies and Muslim-Christian relations at the Gregorian University in Rome and is responsible for a new Institute for the Study of Religions and Cultures being developed there. His book The Qur'an's Self-image has recently been published by Princeton University Press.

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