Q & A with Dr. Toronto: A discussion on Written Knowledge

This past week I was able to interview Dr. James A. Toronto about the significance of written knowledge in the Middle East. Dr. Toronto has a Ph.D from Harvard in Islamic Studies and currently teaches at BYU. 

Q: Why do you think it's important for civilizations, particularly in Islam, to have a written language?

Written languages unite cultures in that it provides a way for
civilizations to get to know one another. Each society is
fighting to be understood. Written knowledge helps us achieve
that understanding.

A: It's a way to be able to preserve and transmit and share ideas. Otherwise, they're lost. And so it's an opportunity to think in abstract ways and symbolic ways that you can't do otherwise, and then to have them preserved and passed on and shared across barriers of geography and time and space. It's essential to the growth of civilization.

Q: With emphasis on Islam, what is the significance of having a written language?

A: It's the same for any other religion for the same reasons I just explained- Muslims just like Christians and Jews and Hindus and Buddahists and even those who don't have a religion need to be able to express themselves, their experience with spiritual things, and then to be able to share that with other people and have it preserved over time.

Without written language and understanding,
civilizations develop misconceptions of one
another, leading to hate and war.

Q: Beyond religious purposes, what is the need for Middle Eastern cultures in particular to have a written language?

A: It's hard for me to separate out whether it's Middle Eastern or whether it's Islamic, but the purposes of writing are the same whether it's American or Mexican or Chinese or Egyptian. The purposes all seem the same to me. It allows us to understand another culture, and we certainly need to understand the Middle East better because there's lots of prejudice and lots of hostility that sometimes is created, but I don't think the actual purposes of writing as I described them earlier are any different from one culture to another or one religion to another.

Q: How do you think having a written system has impacted Islam as opposed to just spreading knowledge orally?

A: Islam, like most religions, has a tradition of having a recited body of literature, poetry, but also of scripture. Religions began in oral tradition long before these things are written down. And so it was the only way to really preserve the written tradition, that is the scriptural tradition. It was being recited, but people were dying off that had memorized the scripture, and so it needed to be written down to be preserved over time. There were mistakes that were entering into the recitation of the scripture, the Qu'ran, and so putting it down in writing helped to preserve and then share the scripture over time. It was a question of preservation and of the accuracy of the scripture.

Q: How do you see Islam's writing system continue to affect its people in the future?

A: Writing is key to the survival of a society in my view. I think it's the reason that civilizations that are advanced can make contributions to the world- in the first place they rise because they're able to create and innovate and to share these ideas in writing. If they can't preserve this and pass it on to the next generation and teach it, propigate it, the civilization can't survive. I think it's just crucial.

In connection with the in class discussions we've been having on the university, I began to wonder as I was transcribing the interview if this sort of ask-and-answer atmosphere was similar to the atmosphere in the first universities where professors and students freely shared ideas. As I talked with Dr. Toronto, I found myself making new discoveries. I also found strength in my ideas about written knowledge as he and I shared many of the same views on the significance of written knowledge. For example, over the course of the Oral Knowledge Unit, I started to realize the need for a written language in order to preserve a culture. Oral knowledge is just too easily lost. Even this interview would have been lost were it not for written and digital knowledge, as I first recorded the interview using my webcam and later typed out Dr. Toronto's responses as I listened to them. If I had to simply memorize his responses over the course of the interview, they definitely would have transformed in my brain and my recollection of them would be inaccurate- just what Dr. Toronto pointed out as one of the problems of oral knowledge alone!

Another point of Dr. Toronto's that I would like to highlight: written knowledge unifies cultures. He specifically mentioned how a written language helps us better understand Islam, reducing prejudice and hostility. Just as the Church releases written statements (like The Family: A Proclamation to the World) regarding our beliefs, so can Islam. If we really took the time to read their beliefs and strive to find common ground, I think we would find we're not so different from Muslims.  It need not matter who believes in what god and which prophet is the prophet.We are all people. We are all children of God. And we are all here for the same reason. Let's reach out.