There are moments when you realize that something you once moved through daily has become distant — not because it disappeared, but because the way you were taught to see it changed.
What unsettled me was not a single moment, but repetition.
Each time I heard the voice of a child from Gaza — Maria Hannoun — I felt the same interruption. A four-year-old speaking with clarity, composure, and moral gravity. Not once, but again and again. Each time, the same question returned: where does this language come from, and what kind of education produces it?
She is not the only child I have heard speak this way. There are other children, other voices. But hers returned to me, again and again, with a particular insistence… with ongoing inspiration.
In the school systems I come from, the Qur’an was never confined to religion classes. I was educated in a Christian school, and even there the Qur’an was part of Arabic education. Students memorized it, analyzed its grammar, learned its rhetoric, and encountered it as language and history, not belief. This was institutional, not exceptional. The Qur’an functioned as a linguistic canon — a stabilizing high register of Arabic — a shared reference point rather than a tool of conversion.
What I did not appreciate when I was young was the depth of that formative role. At the time, I experienced the presence of the Qur’an in Arabic education differently. I read it as pressure, even as an assertion of superiority. That interpretation felt plausible then, shaped by age, identity, and the way authority often speaks without explanation. I now think that reading was wrong. What was being offered was not belief, but access — access to a linguistic and rhetorical inheritance that structures Arabic itself. Confusing exposure with coercion obscured the educational logic at work.
This realization did not come early. It came later, when I studied Islamic philosophy. That encounter mattered because it exposed me to polemical texts — moments where Islam defines itself through argument, boundary-making, and debate. For a time, this hardened my reading. I found myself angry, almost resentful, not at the text but at us. I came close to believing that Islam was a coincidence rather than a living tradition, sustained only through external revival, emptied of its own creative force.
That moment was intense, but it did not last.
What disrupted it was reading — not apologetics, but dissent. Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, Faraj Fuda, Abdelwahab El-Messiri, Ali al-Wardi, al-Jahiz, al-Ma‘arri. I did not agree with all of them, and agreement was never the point. What became visible was a system of selection: who is remembered, who is excluded, which narratives are allowed to stand in for the whole. What looked like absence was often erasure. What looked like stagnation was frequently curation. The tradition had not been empty; it had been narrowed.
It matters to be precise here. Maria is not reciting the Qur’an. She is speaking Arabic — sometimes poetry, sometimes public address, sometimes language shaped by loss and insistence. What struck me was not quotation, but register. The seriousness of her speech pointed not to a single text, but to a linguistic formation in which certain canons, including the Qur’an, have long structured how Arabic carries moral weight.
There is another source of alienation that must be named alongside orientalist polemics. It comes from the everyday situatedness of Islam as it is lived and performed. When verses are recited without ethical weight, when prayer and speech are disconnected from conduct, language begins to collapse under repetition. There is a moment many recognize: you raise a question and you are blocked with a verse. Not invited into meaning, but shut down by citation. In that moment, the Qur’an ceases to open thought and becomes a barrier against it. One does not turn away from the Qur’an itself; one turns away from its instrumentalization.
This, too, produces estrangement. And it explains why returning to the Qur’an required distancing it from performance, authority, and everyday coercion. It was this repeated encounter with Maria Hannoun’s voice — not argument, not theory — that finally pushed me to open the Qur’an again and read it differently. The return could only happen through language — through reading the Qur’an as a pedagogical and linguistic text rather than an ideological one. What emerged was striking: repetition that teaches pattern recognition, roots that unfold meaning rather than define it, contrasts that train moral reasoning, rhythm that educates the ear before the intellect.
As language, the Qur’an is neither accidental nor coercive. It is generative.
The eloquence of Maria and other children is not miraculous. It is historical, tragic, and instructive. They are speaking a language that still remembers how to carry meaning, even when institutions collapse.
What unsettled me most was not her age, but what her voice revealed.
It exposed the extent to which our education systems have thinned language — stripping it of seriousness, memory, and moral weight.
Hearing those capacities still intact in children makes that failure unmistakable.