Preface
This essay is the first in a new series where I, as a somewhat agnostic Ojibwe thinker, approach the Qur’an in a Borgesian style: relational, mytho-philosophical, and guided by imagination. These writings are not traditional commentaries but experiments in listening across traditions, weaving together voices from Indigenous, Islamic, and Western thought. My aim is not to resolve but to explore — to let stories speak, to enter into relation, and to see what emerges in the telling.
I. Opening – The Relational Text
The Qur’an begins in relation. It does not speak as a solitary voice but as an echo of voices — prophets remembered, angels half-glimpsed, deserts filled with older stories. Like the Christian Bible, it insists on its singularity, yet every surah leans upon another text, another myth, another telling. To read it is to enter a labyrinth whose walls are made not of stone but of recited words, forever shifting.
By relation I mean that stories live not in isolation but in their ties — to land, to people, to older voices they echo. In Ojibwe traditions, a tale of a fox or a river is never only entertainment: it tells us how to live, how to stand in relation to the beings around us. The Qur’an’s myths — the sleepers in their hidden cave, the voices of the Jinn, the lamp whose light pierces glass like a star — serve a similar purpose. They summon imagination to the edge of the unseen and then fold that vision back into the ordinary: patience, humility, justice.
Borges once imagined an infinite library where every book already exists, waiting. The Qur’an might be one such volume, and yet it is like and unlike the others: it claims to be the final word, but it reads like a beginning, an endless invitation. Each verse is both command and parable, fragment of myth and law, poetry dissolving into ordinance. To read it is to wander in a mirror-maze of stories, each reflecting not only the divine but the reader who dares to enter.
II. The Cave (Surah 18)
They are sleepers who do not die, dreamers who do not wake. The Qur’an tells of the People of the Cave, youth who fled kings and persecution, hiding in darkness where time bent around their slumber. To some, they are saints of patience; to others, a myth of endurance.
Edith Hamilton, the ghostly librarian, files them beside Sleeping Beauty and Rip Van Winkle. In her catalog, they are another universal dream of enchanted rest, proof that myth is the same everywhere.
Vine Deloria Jr. interrupts. “Sacred places are not chosen, they choose” (God is Red). For him, the cave is not a metaphor only but a dwelling of survival. The sleepers are not timeless archetypes; they are rooted in place and history, proof that community can endure empire’s violence by dreaming differently about time.
Basil Johnston agrees. “Stories are not told to be believed; they are told to be true” (Ojibway Heritage). The cave, like Indigenous stories, is not a fanciful tale but a truth carried forward. It speaks of how people endure, how they survive through relation with land and spirit.
Jung leans in with his interpreter’s voice: “The cave is an ancient dwelling place of the soul” (Symbols of Transformation). To him, the sleepers embody the psyche’s archetypal need for retreat, transformation, renewal.
Viola Cordova concludes with quiet insistence: “All things are related. Nothing stands alone” (How It Is). The cave is not only symbol or archetype: it is relation, a place that holds bodies as much as souls, a story that binds communities across centuries.
The Qur’an does not ask us to choose between metaphor, psyche, or history — it lets all three breathe in the cave’s darkness. And so the cave remains unsettled: part archetype, part history, part relation. Its shadows shelter all three.
III. The Jinn (Surah 72)
From the stillness of the cave we step into motion — the world not of sleepers, but of beings unseen, listening, whispering, speaking back.
The Qur’an tells us of the Jinn: beings of smokeless fire, neighbors who cannot be seen, relations who refuse the boundaries of the human.
Hamilton catalogs them briskly, placing them beside hobgoblins and brownies. To her, they are quaint superstitions of the East, curiosities for a Western bookshelf. Hamilton appears here not to be dismissed entirely but to embody a way of reading that turns living presences into neat catalogues.
Cordova interrupts. “All things are related. Nothing stands alone.” The Jinn are not curiosities but participants in reality, kin in a wider cosmos. Hamilton’s neat filing erases relation; Cordova restores it.
Edward Said clears his throat from the shadows. “Knowledge of the Orient, because generated out of strength, in a sense creates the Orient, the Oriental, and his world” (Orientalism). Hamilton’s dismissal is not innocent; it is Orientalism in action — reducing the living myth of Jinn into exotic ornament. Hamilton’s library seeks Truth with a capital T; its dwellers are neat little stories, each pinned and ordered, drained of their unruly life.
Jung steps forward: “The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality” (Psychology and Religion). He sees in the Jinn projections of our hidden forces, the psyche’s shadows given voice.
But Johnston offers another word: “The world was alive with the Manitous, with powers and spirits who influenced all things seen and unseen” (The Manitous). The Jinn, like the Manitous, are not mere projections of psyche but presences that inhabit the cosmos. To deny them is not only to flatten myth but to deny the fullness of relation.
And so the Jinn remain, slipping between shelves, resisting all attempts to be cataloged. They are shadows and presences, archetypes and neighbors. In the Qur’an, they speak for themselves — a reminder that commentary is only overhearing, never possession.
IV. The Light Verse (Surah 24:35)
From the shadows of fire, the Qur’an turns to radiance. If the Jinn slip unseen through the dark, here light itself becomes a parable.
God is described as Light: a lamp within a glass, shining like a brilliant star, neither of East nor West. For centuries commentators have turned this jewel in their hands, each seeing another facet. This single verse has been called one of the most beautiful in the Qur’an, a passage where theology becomes poetry and imagery becomes law.
Hamilton slips it among “beautiful images” from the world’s myths, polishing it until it gleams as ornament. In her ledger, the lamp is decoration, a curiosity of the poetic East.
Spinoza steps forward with his geometric calm: “God is the indwelling and not the transient cause of all things” (Ethics I, Prop. 18). For him, the light is not metaphor but substance itself, shining through the natural order. The Qur’an’s lamp is immanence — the world illuminated from within.
Basil Johnston offers another truth. “Stories are not told to be believed; they are told to be true” (Ojibway Heritage). Light, too, is not only symbol but presence — fire that warms, flame that guides, brightness that protects. In Ojibwe teachings, spirit often comes as light, not to be analyzed but to orient, to sustain. The Qur’an’s lamp shines in this way: as a lived truth, a light that orders relation.
Jung murmurs: “A symbol is the best possible expression for something unknown” (Man and His Symbols). For him, the lamp is a threshold, pointing beyond the ordinary toward the imaginal. Its glass, its oil, its flame are the psyche’s attempt to hold what cannot be fully grasped.
And Said, flickering again, reminds us of the danger of reducing presence to representation. “Knowledge of the Orient … in a sense creates the Orient.” The Qur’an’s lamp is not ornamental. It is both sign and presence, both metaphor and lived relation — light that sees as much as it is seen.
V. Closing – The Infinite Reader
To study these myths is not to fix them in place but to join the chain of readers who have reimagined them: sleepers who resist empire, Jinn who speak from shadow, lamps that shine beyond metaphor. Hamilton tries to catalog them into timeless curiosities, but Cordova, Deloria, Johnston, Spinoza, Said, and Jung all return them to their relations — cosmic, historical, psychic, philosophical.
To read myth this way is not to resolve contradictions but to live with them, letting each voice sharpen the other. The Qur’an becomes, in this ghostly library, not a closed book but a relational one: infinite commentary, endless invitation. To read it is not to solve it, but to enter into relation with its images — to imagine, to tell, to be told.
VI. Afterword – On Reading and Writing This Way
This essay has not been an attempt to offer tafsīr — Qur’anic commentary in the traditional sense — nor to flatten a sacred text into literature alone. What I have tried to do is create a conversation: between the Qur’an’s mythic passages, my own commitments to relationality and storytelling, and the voices of thinkers who have shaped how I understand story.
Edith Hamilton was cast as the ghostly librarian because she represents a way of reading myths that reduces them to polished ornaments, severed from place and relation. Against her stand Cordova, Deloria, Johnston, Said, Spinoza, and Jung — not because they always agree, but because together they remind us that stories live only in relation: to land, to community, to psyche, to history.
I wanted to show how a Native, agnostic reader might encounter the Qur’an not as a closed book of doctrine but as a living text of images and signs. The cave, the Jinn, the lamp — each invites imagination while also grounding us in the mundane: endurance, humility, guidance. Storytelling is not escape from life but a way of inhabiting it more fully.
My agnosticism is not the agnosticism of indifference alone, nor the agnosticism of total commitment deferred. At times, I practice a suspension of disbelief in order to let another tradition’s stories live, to honor them as true within the dialogue. At other times, indifference returns — a coolness, a distance — because I cannot or do not wish to collapse myself entirely into belief. Both stances are real for me. I move between them, depending on the relation. This tension is not a flaw but a practice: a way of approaching traditions respectfully, imaginatively, without pretending to solve once and for all what must remain open.
As Black Elk once said: “This they tell, and whether it happened so or not I do not know; but if you think about it, you can see that it is true.”
This is the first in what I hope will be a series of essays on reading the Qur’an as a somewhat agnostic Ojibwe Native American thinker, guided always by the triad of relationality, imagination, and storytelling.
Bibliography & References
- Black Elk. Black Elk Speaks. As told to John G. Neihardt.
- Cordova, Viola. How It Is: The Native American Philosophy of V. F. Cordova.
- Deloria, Vine Jr. God is Red: A Native View of Religion.
- Hamilton, Edith. Mythology.
- Johnston, Basil. Ojibway Heritage; The Manitous: The Spiritual World of the Ojibway.
- Jung, C.G. Symbols of Transformation; Psychology and Religion; Man and His Symbols.
- Said, Edward. Orientalism.
- Spinoza, Baruch. Ethics.
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