The modern age is rooted in the ‘People of the Book’. Ibrahim Lawson has used the term ‘learning community’ for any formal or informal, gathering and configuration of people for the sake of learning together, in person or online, not necessarily led by a charismatic figure or ‘teacher’, but on a model of shared or distributive leadership, and whether for a brief or longer period of time. The monastery is possibly an example of that, although because of its monasticism and celibacy it is not a suitable model for us. In the Middle Ages the monasteries were the noisiest of places because of reading. Then something happened:
“Silent reading is a recent invention. Augustine was already a great author and the Bishop of Hippo when he found that it could be done. In his Confessions he describes the discovery. During the night, charity forbade him to disturb his fellow monks with noises he made while reading. But curiosity impelled him to pick up a book. So, he learned to read in silence, an art that he had observed in only one man, his teacher, Ambrose of Milan. Ambrose practised the art of silent reading because otherwise people would have gathered around him and would have interrupted him with their queries on the text. Loud reading was the link between classical learning and popular culture.”
(Ivan Illich, Vernacular Values)
A new relationship to text was born, as well as a new kind of ambitious individual, someone who wanted knowledge for himself not for his brethren, whose questions on the text were experienced as an intrusion and an interruption.
More than a millennium later it was Luther (1483 – 1546) who began an utterly new age, and we say this admitting the fundamental corruption of Catholicsm, but, with all its failings, it was a tradition and a transmission. For Luther it was about text. In that sense he prefigures the wahhabis and salafis. Gadamer said:
“Luther’s position is more or less the following: Scripture is sui ipsius interpres (its own interpreter). We do not need tradition to achieve the proper understanding of Scripture, nor do we need an art of interpretation in the style of the ancient doctrine of the fourfold meaning of Scripture, but the Scripture has a univocal sense that can be derived from the text: the sensus literalis.”
(Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method)
That was inevitable given the false foundations of Catholicism in Hellenic Pauline Christianity. The Reformation was bound to happen, but it never came to grapple with the real foundational cracks.
The Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, had already brought what moved everything forward. A Book indeed, but a Qur’?n-recitation that is sung – “He is not one of us who does not sing the Qur’?n”. “Sing – yataghanna” is a wonderful word with the sense also of ‘enriching oneself’ or ‘freeing oneself of need’. And the Book/Recitation is paired with Sunnah, which saves it from becoming merely a text. It was transmitted in Companionship, the distinctive mark of our Messenger, peace be upon him. Other Prophets had followers or even disciples, but he had Companions. Not only did they accompany him, but they accompanied each other. And the tradition has been transmitted by companionship generation to generation, from that day to ours, not purely by texts and the enormous hermeneutical strategies that are then needed to deal with them, and not merely in learned institutions such as the madrasah, however noble.
Nevertheless, the world we are in is as it is, and it proves necessary not just to unlearn the mess of the modern technological world but first to learn what it is we have to unlearn. Heidegger observed:
“Especially we moderns can learn only if we always unlearn at the same time. Applied to the matter before us: we can learn thinking only if we radically unlearn what thinking has been traditionally. To do that, we must at the same time come to know it.”
(Heidegger, What is Called Thinking)
Perhaps we can modify our original thought thus: the way forward is in learning/unlearning communities.