Iranians at UIN Yogyakarta: readers of sacred texts creating meaning

Friday 18 October I participated in a rather exceptional seminar in Yogyakarta: a meeting on Scripture and its readers: theory of hermeneutics. A mollah and professor from Teheran (Dr. Mohammed HosseinMokhtari, a Ph.D. in Durham, Chancellor University of Islamic Denominations) with two female academic colleagues gave the lectures in the morning.

Mokhtari gave a lecture where the philosophy of Gadamer was leading: different understandings of a text are natural because the meaning comes from a fusion between reader and text. I asked  him whether he knew Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd and he smile understandably. He had been already in Yogyakarta before and was apparently on good terms with organiser Shafaatun al-Mirzana. Some quotes: 'We have not the duty to discover the meaning of the text, but to give meaning to the text. The text is a dead phenomenon. We must give new life to the text through meaning.'
Mokhtari was followed by a lady from Iran, Jamila Alamanhuda, who spoke in Persian, which was sentence after sentence translated into English. She based her talk on Molla Sadra, a philosopher who was very important for Khomeiny as well as for Ali Shariati and Tabataba'i. Christians and Muslims are part of the Millet Ibrahim.We all want to surrender to God. Why then are only 'Muslims' called Muslims and not Christians as well? This reminded me of Nurcholis Madjid about Muslim with and without a capital letter.

The other Iranian lady (Prof. Rayhan Sadat) was not so liberal as Jamila. She only complained that the present generation was not so piousandobedient as the first generation, the sahabat.

There was more remarkable this day. Dr. Daniel Listijabudi of the Protestant Duta Wacana University gave a nice report from an experiment where Protestant and Muslims read texts form the other religion and gave interpretation. That was not the philosophical argument on hermeneutics, but a concrete experience. Dr. Sahiron Syamsuddin gave a fiery talk about the debate on Ahok's use of the word wilayah that had brought  him for two years in prison. My talk on Surat  Maryam will be put in Academia.edu. Shafaatun herself gave lively recordings of her cross-religion reading of scripture. A book was ready with all the papers: Kitab Suci dan para pembacanya, with many papers in English too. Thank you Syafa for organizing this!