Well, here we are again,

and as you've got to Level 5 it's unlikely that you are a child any more,

but it is in childhood that most muslims do most of their Qur'an reading.

I suppose that's because the way that it is usually taught,

it is seen as more of an obligation than a pleasure.

So why keep reading it after childhood?

Because as you grow, the Reading grows with you.

Now part of that growth can come from its association with a deeper spiritual link with God,

or a more subtle appreciation of the beauty of the sounds,

but mostly the Qur'an grows in personal meaning with greater understanding.

So understanding of the Reading is crucial,

especially with regard to the particular problems met by those living in a minority in Scotland and the western world in general.

Muslims face encounters with western thought on a daily basis.

Whether it be the formal intellectual challenges of academic orientalism,

or the less formal challenges met in everyday life,

muslims are going to have to deal with ignorance, misunderstanding and prejudice.

To face up to these challenges, however, it must be recognised that these characteristics can be found on both sides.

There are problems in reconciling traditional Islamic teachings with the modern world.

This has been a problem for centuries.

As traditionalists rejected any attempt to renew Islamic understandings,

the subsequent loss of critical ability and suppression of imagination, left the muslim world so weak that it was eminently colonisable,

and the muslim world was overwhelmed.

And while muslim countries showed little ability to stand up to the European intellectual and cultural challenge,

many of those colonised chose to move to live amidst the greater academic and economic opportunities in the west.

And some of them chose to come to Scotland.

So young muslims living here have to find their own way

to reconcile muslim culture with Scottish culture.

They have to disentangle the local culture that surrounds them,

their Scottish historical context,

from their family culture and faith understandings,

with their roots in places far away.

And to do that it is important to be able to distinguish between

personal faith understandings and those of a tribal collective.

But if you got here to Level 5 you are one of those who are going to have to work it out for yourselves

and the muslim children that follow you.

You need to agree with your peers what constitutes Scottish Islam,

and as you consider Islam in Scotland, it will also be necessary to consider what you can find of Scotland in Islam.

Knowledge of the Qur'an can help with this,

but rebuffing criticism requires honest self-examination.

Do muslims you know segregate and exclude women, and impose unequal restrictions on them?

In Islamic matters are they present in equal numbers to men?

Is Islam really equal opportunities?

Is the Islam that we practice truly Islamic?

To combat ignorance we need knowledge,

but clearly the first place we need to apply that knowledge is not to the behaviour of the ignorant, but to ourselves

Unfortunately, ignorance is also often allied with arrogance,

such as the prejudice to be met in everyday life from those who feel tribally superior,

and in academic life from the arrogance of orientalists.

Of course, not all academics have closed minds,

though it is quite hard to achieve much academically without one.

But we must recognise that from a non-muslim point of view the Qur'an is strange and barely readable,

and it is tragic that many muslims feel they have little alternative but to agree.

The peculiar construction of the content of the Suras,

their order from longest to shortest, but not quite,

means that academics can mock the inability of the early muslims to get it right,

and try to rearrange it.

But those that experienced it understood the need

to remember and record the words and their order precisely

when gathering and writing the text.

If a Sura seems out of order that is because it was meant to be that way,

and the numerical, rhythmic and thematic patterns in the text bear that out with greater study.

But probably the biggest challenge to the essential nature of the Reading is that of the atheist,

with no belief in God,

and no belief in miracles.

In response to their intellectual colonisation by the west,

many muslim academics decided to accept that western framing,

and although not going so far as to suggest that God does not exist,

they suggest that God is constrained by what science currently considers to be natural laws that are built into the creation.

Like their western counterparts, they respond to the question “Do you believe in miracles?”

in the same way that they would respond to Tinkerbell in a pantomime version of Peter Pan,

asking children if they believe in magic.

But the Qur'an is magic.

It has a miraculous nature in itself,

and deals with the nature of the miraculous throughout the text.

It describes itself as a confirmation of the stories of previous Messengers,

when then as now, those who witnessed their miracles had no problem denying their Divine causation.

But the fire was cooled for Abraham, the waters parted for Moses, and the sick were healed for Jesus.

They are not just fairytales of long ago, but were events where God spoke to humanity and displayed transformative creative power.

The laws of creation are not binding on the Creator.

God simply needed to say “Be” and it was.