How Examining Centuries-Old Copies of Religious Texts Situates Us within the Vast Expanse of Time and Human Experience
Last fall, on a random October afternoon, I found myself sitting in UW–Madison Special Collections with two ancient artifacts in front of me: a beautifully preserved manuscript with flowing calligraphy and a deteriorating book with worm-eaten pages. The dichotomy between these two objects was opposed by a simple fact: they were the exact same text, down to the individual letter and diacritic. The moment that I noticed this, I was suddenly taken back to a term I had accidentally stumbled upon months ago: sonder.
A term created by John Koenig in 2012 with his The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, sonder is “the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own,” derived from German for “special” and French for “to dive down.” Imagine walking down the street on your way to work or school and seeing someone with a coffee stain on their white shirt, a wrinkled collar, or bags under their eyes. Sonder is the moment you understand there was a complex chain of events that led to their unfortunate appearance that morning. Sonder is the moment you grasp that this individual had a whole life’s worth of complex interactions—happiness and sadness, joy and sorrow—that placed them in this exact moment in front of you. Sonder is the moment you appreciate that their life will continue to be just as complex going forward, with or without your influence. Indeed, sonder is when you realize that every single person you pass on the street is similarly complex.
However, the definition of sonder provided by John Koenig can be misleading. The mention of a passerby implies that people must be physically present for our appreciation. But this understanding lacks the element of time: billions of people lived before you, enjoyed their complex lives, and passed away centuries before you were conceived. A more accurate interpretation of sonder should take this into account.
This profound feeling of sonder, transcending time and circumstance, is what I felt looking at the two opposing copies of the Qur’an in the special collections archive at UW–Madison.
A Background on the Qur’an
The Qur’an is the focal religious text of Islam, first penned in early 600 AD. The work is organized into 114 chapters (Sūrah) of varying length. It is written in formal Arabic, known generally as Fuṣḥā or Classical Arabic, which originated in the early 600 AD. Unlike English, which is almost incomprehensible in both script and speech earlier than 1000 AD, Arabic script has changed negligibly over one and a half millennia. The Quranic structure of the language is no longer spoken but still easily understood by modern speakers of the language, a continuity that can mostly be attributed to the immense cultural importance of the Qur’an, serving as a metaphorical stake to hold the language in place. In addition to
unchanged language, an important aspect of the Qur’an as literature is its unchanged content. Every Qur’an published in the nearly 1,500 years of its existence is the same.
Manuscripts in the Archive
That previous statement can be difficult to accept: surely hundreds of years have changed such a widespread text to some degree. However, working in the archives has provided some evidence to support the constancy of the Qur’an. At Special Collection, I focused on a manuscript of the 41st sentence of the 29th chapter, titled The Spider, from Persia during the 1600s.
The manuscript is penned in calligraphic black ink and written on paper, which has yellowed over time but remains in remarkable condition. Illumination in red and blue ink as well and the frequent presence of gold leaf points undoubtedly to an illustrious history and creation. This lavish production suggests that the manuscript was commissioned by a wealthy aristocrat who found inspiration in the written lines.
The 41st sentence compares those who find protection in entities other than God (i.e. idols or people) to a spider. The spider, it suggests, is the one who builds fantastic webs that it believes to be indestructible, only for them to be easily removed by weather or humans. Read by an affluent individual, the line could serve as a warning to remain humble in this world, to not let their accumulated wealth blind them to the ephemerality of life.
Regardless of the religious implications of the line, the irony in relation to the manuscript is fitting. Paper, just like the previously mentioned spider web, is fragile and would rarely be expected to last even a century, much less five. One would expect weather, war, or any other combination of forces to obliterate a free-floating sheet of paper over such a long time. However, this manuscript sitting in front of me in the archives has not only lasted five hundred years, but is still in pristine condition. This realization cannot be fully appreciated outside of the archives—one cannot experience the flimsy paper, crisp lines of the calligraphy, and the undulled shine of the gold leaf that proves the extraordinary nature of this piece, traveling across centuries and leagues from an aristocrat’s hands to my desk.
However meticulously crafted and ornately decorated the aristocrat’s manuscript is, the text is nonetheless the exact same as the Qur’ans owned by the less fortunate. Weathered and with browned pages, the other Qur’an on my desk at Special Collections likely has a different story, one without wealthy hands or golden adornment. The pages are thinner and patchier, and the once-pristine margins are stained and frayed. Even though the words may be the same, their presentation in a book of this condition begets a different meaning. In this context, the parable of the spider might have represented hope to the less fortunate, a promise that the wealth of this world pales in relation to the next.
This is the beauty of works such as the Qur’an, which transcend classes and times. People from vastly different contexts and times can derive different meanings from precisely the same words. Wherever the aristocrat may have been in their life, and wherever you may currently be in yours, reading this text is a shared experience transcending time, place, and circumstance.
What We Can Gain from the Archives
Working hands-on with the physical manuscript opens the door to understanding the history of the piece itself and the interactions others would have had with it. We recognize, only then, that reading literature is not a solitary act; different readers from diverse backgrounds together weave the rich fabric of interpretation. This is the beauty of literature, one we so rarely take a moment to reflect upon.
The world contains innumerable sentences from dozens of media formats, spanning millennia and beyond. Yet, amidst this vast expanse, texts like the Qur'an stand as pillars of constancy, gathering us in a sea of change. Reading this one sentence from the Qur’an instantly connects a metaphorical thread from you to hundreds of millions of others, most of whom have already passed or have not yet been born. Each of their lives up until the creation of this thread were just as rich and meaningful as yours or mine, and they will continue to live their complex lives, never to touch our threads again.
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Funding for this series—which allowed HH to pay student writers and editors—was generously provided by the Friends of the UW-Madison Libraries. Special thanks are due, as well, to the staff of Special Collections, and especially to Lisa Wettleson, who guided students through the process of learning how to conduct original research in rare book and archival libraries.
About the author: Farhan Adnan is a first-year student at UW–Madison majoring in Math and Computer Science. His interests include Machine Learning, Statistics, and Data Analysis. He is currently employed at a hedge fund, working on derivative strategies and backtesting. Farhan also enjoys exercise, choral music, and reading excessively long books. He is a firm believer that curiosity not only spared the cat but led it to fascinating adventures which he hopes to embark upon too.
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I've not known the word "sonder" but have experienced it's meaning as early as age 20 when I would imagine the lives of those riding the train across the Mississippi and all those who had done so many decades before. Now I'm 78 and that sense of the person checking my groceries having a life and history as complicated as mine as well as the writer of that manuscript in their time is an amazement to me. Thank you for the reminder.