Allah and Structuralist Semiotics by Azfar Hussain

But our conversation that day took a weird turn. The person I talked to was trying to make a case. I provide here some of his high points. So the very first word Allah uttered to humanity via the prophet Muhammad is "Iqra." It means "Read." And "read," then, is the foremost categorical imperative here. But what should we read? The Quran itself tells us rather repeatedly, so his argument goes, that humanity should carefully read the signs and symbols Allah has infinitely sprinkled and scattered about across the universe so as to be able to make sense of who He is and what we are. Sounded interesting! But when he said he'd soon advance in his essay a "Saussurean-Barthesian-Ecoian (mark the mouthful here!) semiotic reading of the Quran" to make the point that the foundations of structuralist semiotics were all laid in the Quran itself, I had to let out a loud guffaw!

And I'm not at all against studying and exploring what are called "foreign" theories, and I admit I myself do study--and sometimes even "teach"--those theories. But the incurable penchant for mechanically applying every goddamn foreign theory to every goddamn thing reminds me of what Gabriel Garcia Marquez said once: "The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary."