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The Qur’an
History Of The Text
The Qurʿān is a unique phenomenon in religious history. It is held by its adherents to exist beyond the mundane sphere as the eternal and immutable word of God, “a glorious Qurʿān [preserved] in a well-guarded tablet” (85: 21–22). It is also an earthly book whose history is intimately tied to the life and history of an earthly community.
Although it was shaped by the Muslim community, the Qurʿān in fact created that community and remains the foundation stone of its faith and morality. Some of its verses were circumstantially determined by the social and religious conditions and questions of the Prophet’s society, yet the Qurʿān is believed to transcend time and space.
Revelation
The Qurʿān is for Muslims the literal word of God revealed to the prophet Muḥammad through the archangel Gabriel. As was customary for some Arabs, known as ḥanīfs, who rejected the idolatrous and immoral ways of their people, Muḥammad periodically left his home for solitary prayer and meditation (taḥannuth) in a cave on Mount Ḥirāʿ near Mecca. During one such retreat in his fortieth year the awesome angel Gabriel appeared to Muḥammad while he slept in the cave after one of his meditations. Taking hold of him, the angel pressed Muḥammad so hard that he thought he was dying. This Gabriel repeated three times with the command “Read” (iqrāʿ ). Muḥammad finally said, “I cannot read.” The angel then recited the first verses of sūrah96, which are traditionally considered to constitute the first revelation of the Qurʿān:
Read in the name of your Lord, the one who created, Created a human being from a clot.Read, and your Lord is Most Generous He Who taught with the pen Taught a human being that which he did not know.
Frightened by the appearance of Gabriel, Muḥammad went home and asked his wife, Khadījah, to cover him up. It was to that state of fear and trepidation that some of the next revelations made reference, ordering him to “rise and warn” (74:1–2). After a period of uncertainty lasting from six months to two years during which revelation was temporarily interrupted, the Prophet was reassured that the revelations he was receiving were from God and that the spirit he encountered was an angel and not a demon. Thereafter revelation continued without interruption until his death in 632 C.E. The formative history of the Qurʿān was therefore coterminous with the Prophet’s life.
Qurʿān And Prophet
Tradition reports that when revelation came to the Prophet, he fell into a trancelike state. During such times he is said to have seen Gabriel either in human guise or in his angelic form. According to some reports, at the beginning the Prophet found the experience overwhelming and the voice, he said, sound-ed loud and hard like that of the ringing of a bell. The words he remembered and communicated to others. The normal mode of revelation, however, was direct communication (waḥy) by the angel Gabriel.
During the Prophet’s life many of his companions, as well as some of his wives, had their own partial collections (maṣāḥif; sing. muṣḥaf) of the Qurʿān, which they used in their prayers and private devotions. Other collections were made by the Prophet’s amanuenses, known as the scribes of revelation.
These early collections differed in important respects, such as the number and order of the sūrahs and variant readings of certain verses, words, and phrases. With the spread of Islam outside Arabia, private collections and hence variant readings multiplied. Furthermore, as different codices gained popularity in particular regions of the expanding Islamic empire, the need arose for an official codex. According to classical Muslim sources, the variations dealt with subtleties of pronunciations and accents (qirāʿāt) and not with the text itself which was transmitted and preserved in a culture with a strong oral tradition. According to Muslim tradition, memorization of the Qurʿān was a central practice in the early community and with the decline in the number of people of the early community who knew all of the Qurʿān by heart, the need for an actual text arose. In the Muslim tradition, tawātur means the great accuracy in recitation through which a text is transmitted with minimal changes as it is memorized by many and hence preserved in form and word. This concept is central in the history of Qurʿānic authenticity and extends to certain sayings by Muḥammad, referred to as ḥadīth, which places them in strength and validity among other reports of ḥadīth.
Collection Of The Qurʿān
The crystallization of the Qurʿān as a written text was a long process, and its early stages were shaped by political, theological, and juristic exigencies. Each of the four rightly guided caliphs has been credited with initiating or forwarding this important process. Historians and traditionalists are, however, unanimously agreed that an official codex was adopted under the aegis of the third caliph, ʿUthmān (r. 644–656), within twenty years of the Prophet’s death.
The difficult task of eliminating rival codices was gradually but never fully achieved; many peculiarities of the early codices have survived in the official variant readings of the Qurʿān. By the ninth century CE a universally accepted orthography and system of vocalization of the ʿUthmānic codex was fixed. This helped to reduce a multitude of variant readings to seven equally valid ones. Among these, the reading of ʿĀṣim (d. 744), transmitted by Ḥafṣ (d. 805), predominates in most areas of the Muslim world today. The royal Egyptian edition of 1924, which follows this reading and has itself become a standard text has further contributed to its popularity. Most historians agree with the mainstream Muslim belief that despite differing readings, the integrity of the text survived, given the cognitive nature of memory and language in an orally based culture, and the Qurʿān as Muslims know it today is one text with variant readings pertaining to pronunciation and accents only.
Structure And Internal History
The Qurʿān is a small book, consisting of 114 sūrahs or chapters varying in length from 3 to 286 verses. The sūrahs are not arranged chronologically as they were revealed, but rather roughly by length, placing the longest, “al-Baqarah” (The Cow), at the beginning, and the shortest ones towards the end.
Very early commentators classified the sūrahs as Meccan or Medinan. On the basis of such internal evidence as change in style, idiom, and subject matter of the revelations, modern Western scholarship has divided the Meccan period into early, middle, and late periods. About two-thirds of the Qurʿān was revealed in the Meccan period, which was also the spiritually formative first thirteen years of Islam. The later Medinan period is the phase of statehood and focuses on more juristic and worldly matters, covering the last ten years of the Prophet’s life.
There is no precise chronological order to the Qurʿān because the sacred text itself provides no reliable framework for the history of its revelation. Nevertheless, knowledge of its chronology is crucial for an understanding of the early history of the Muslim community and of the variations and continuities in themes during both phases. For example, haphazard readings of issues relating to violence and warfare without a structural understanding could undermine the very ethics of Qurʿānic rules regarding when to raise arms and when to relinquish even self-defense, as the early Muslims were instructed in Mecca.
The Qurʿān makes numerous references to particular events and situations in the life of the Prophet and his society. On the basis of such allusions an important field of Qurʿānic study known as “occasions” or “causes of revelation” (asbāb al-nuzūl) was developed. This subject is closely related to another field, the study of the abrogated and abrogating verses of the Qurʿān. Both fields are, moreover, of great significance for the development of law and theology. But because law and theology have been inexorably bound to the political and sectarian realities of Muslim history, the study of the chronology of the Qurʿān has likewise been deeply affected by political and sectarian considerations.
In itself, the Qurʿān has been a closed book since the death of the Prophet, but the Qurʿān has continued to interact with the history of the Muslim world. From the beginning, Muslims have dedicated their best minds, voices, and musical talents to the exegesis and recitation of the Qurʿān. Due to the metaphorical, lyrical, and circular nature of the Qurʿān, Muslim scholars over the centuries produced many commentaries and exegeses, leading sometimes to highly political and spiritual contentions. For example, during the ʿAbbāsid period, a debate over the nature of the Qurʿān arose between what was then known as the school of Muʿtazilīs—who were influenced by Greek philosophy and who placed an emphasis on reason and rationality—and the schools of orthodoxy known the Ashʿarīyah. The debate was over whether the Qurʿān was the Word of God (kalām Allāh), uncreated, or according to the Muʿtazilīs “created” (makhlūq). The debate became so intense that it led to political rivalry and to the imprisonment of scholars on both sides. The implications were significant for both sides, and the debate continues today, if in somewhat different terms. For the schools of orthodoxy, the Qurʿān was the Word of God and is therefore eternal and immutable, while for the schools of Muʿtazilīs, the Qurʿān was “created” which meant that it was subject to human understanding and reason and that some of its temporal content was subject to change. Both sides found abundant support in the Qurʿān for their views, as the Qurʿān repeatedly describes the Qurʿān as the Word of God but also in some verses refers to solid (muḥkam) verses and obscure (mutashābih) verses.
These disagreements can be viewed as part of a larger debate in Muslim culture, arising from the fact that the Qurʿān deals with both universal matters and with temporal and specific historical incidents. Muslim scholars have varying opinions on the issue of abrogation which is raised in the Qurʿān itself, and on the terms and conditions where this applies. For example, Umm Salamah, the wife of the Prophet, is reported to have questioned why the Qurʿān addressed only males, after which most revelations became gender-inclusive, addressing both male and female believers. (Nouns and pronouns take different masculine and feminine forms in Arabic.)
Of over 6,200 verses, only about 400 deal with juristic matters, and excluding those dealing with ritual, there are not more than two hundred dealing with rules governing matters such as inheritance, divorce, business interactions, and a few other themes. The Qurʿān leaves many worldly matters (e.g., political organization) open while emphasizing general concepts of justice and equity. Yet, given the formation of a state and the expansion of Islam into different cultures, the Qurʿānic tradition tended to focus mostly on juristic matters, with a resulting rise in jurisprudence and the formation of many schools over the centuries, despite the relatively few verses dealing with these issues. The mystical (Ṣūfī) tradition, however, focused more on themes of spirituality and connectedness to God and humanity, which can be seen in commentaries like that of the philosopher, Muḥyī al-Dīn ibn al-ʿArabī. The Ṣūfīs, with their emphasis on spirituality and mystical practices, played a prominent role in the spread of Islam to many parts of the world, but their influence decreased with the increase in more orthodox and juristic schools of Islam. There are several classical commentaries on the Qurʿān in the Sunnī tradition, such as those of Ibn Kathīr and al-Ṭabarī, and in the Shīʿī tradition, like that of ʿAllāmah Muḥammad Ḥusayn Ṭabāṭabāʿī Qummī. During the modern period, the Qurʿānic tafāsir (exegeses) of scholars like Muḥammad Rashīd Riḍā and Sayyid Quṭb impacted collective Muslim consciousness in new ways, raising questions about the challenges facing Muslims in reconciling faith and reason and about the political role of Islam.
While Western scholarship has subjected the Qurʿān to the full rigor of modern historical and literary criticism, contemporary Islamic scholarship has limited itself to criticism of the Qurʿānic sciences. As for the Qurʿān itself, it remains the criterion by which everything else is judged.
The Qurʿān As Scripture
The term Qurʿān, most often translated as “reading” or “recital,” has been linked etymologically to Syriac qeryānā (scripture reading, lection) and to Hebrew miqraʿ (recitation, scripture). Some Muslim commentators have also proposed that it comes from the Arabic verb qarana, “to put together” or “bind together,” thus giving the approximate translation of “a coherent recital” or “a scripture bound in the form of a book.” As a verbal noun (maṢdar) of the form fuʿlān, qurʿān carries the connotation of a “continuous reading” or “eternal lection” that is recited and heard over and over. In this sense, it is understood both as a spiritual touchstone and a literary archetype. As a title, al-Qurʿān refers to the revelation (tanzīl) “sent down” (unzila) by God to the prophet Muḥammad over a period of twenty-two years (610–632 CE). In its more universal connotation, it is the self-expressed ummal-kitāb or paradigm of divine communication (13.39). For all Muslims, the Qurʿān is the quintessential scripture of Islam.
The term “the Noble Qurʿān” (al-Qurʿān al-Karīm, 56.77) is often used to stress the extraordinary nature of this text. Since its divine source makes the Qurʿān a sacred and therefore unique form of communication, its meaningfulness is dependent on the prior acceptance of a faith claim that posits specific assumptions about its historical and metahistorical contexts. Consequently, the Qurʿān’s significance for the pious Muslim is entirely different from that seen by the non-Muslim or Islamic secularist. Because each and every written word and recited sound of the scripture is revered by believers in Islam as part of a divine lection, an interpretation of the Qurʿān solely according to the canons of literary criticism or philology can only do violence to the revelation in terms of its meaning to its audience. For this reason, many scholars in the West have ceased speculating on the “actual” origins of the Qurʿān or the historicity of its text and have devoted themselves instead to evaluating the Qurʿān’s undeniable surplus of meaning in a combination of literary, cultural, and historical contexts.
“”As a communication from God, the Qurʿān is the prime theophany of Islam. Because its text consists of divine rather than human speech (kalām Allāh, 9:6), its significance for Muslims is similar to that of the logos (divine word) in Christianity. However, unlike the normative Christian view of the Bible as a divinely inspired discourse (but closely akin to Jewish attitudes concerning the holiness of scripture), the words of the Qurʿān are regarded by most Muslims as divine in and of themselves. Although the fully divine nature of Qurʿānic “speech” is difficult for the secular reader to understand, the importance of this concept should not be underestimated. Modern Muslims still demonstrate their reverence for the Qurʿān by approaching it in a state of ritual purity. At times it may also be treated as a prized artifact—as evidenced by the production of hand-decorated, calligraphic copies (maṣāḥif) and the popularity of Middle-Period Qurʿān manuscripts in collections of Islamic art. Ṣūfīs have long regarded the Qurʿān as a paradigm for all of God’s communication with his creation. In the thirteenth century the great Andalusian mystic Ibn ʿArabī (d. 1240) organized the entirety of Al-futūḥāt al-Makkīyah (The Meccan Inspirations), his magnum opus, in conformity with the discourses and “signs” of the divine text.
Structure
The text of the Qurʿān is divided into 114 segments or sūrahs (Ar., sūrah; pl. suwār), each of which contains from three to 286 or 287 āyāt (sg., āyah). Although it has been common for Westerners to translate āyah as “verse,” this is misleading. In the first place, the biblical concept of “chapter and verse” does not fully apply to the Qurʿān. Particularly in the case of the longer segments, the surahs may not always discuss themes whose consistency is easily apparent from title to final āyah. Indeed, the names of the surahs themselves may refer only obliquely to the main point of the discourse, and in several cases they have been changed at different times in Islamic history. This process continues even today, despite the increased standardization brought about by the mass printing of official renditions. Surah 17, for example, might be called Banū Isrāʿīl (Children of Israel) in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, while in Egypt and Iran it is likely to be known as al-Isrāʿ (The Night Journey). Each of these names refers to a different theme discussed in the same sūrah. Furthermore, while it is certainly correct to view the Qurʿān as a collection of divine discourses, a single surah may contain more than one discourse. On other occasions (as in the story of Mūsā/Moses), the same discourse may be continued in two or more noncontiguous sūrahs.
The most important reason for not referring to āyah as “verse,” however, comes from the Qurʿān’s own use of the term. The words āyah or āyāt are employed nearly four hundred times throughout the text. Most frequently, āyah refers to evidences (āthār) in nature that demonstrate the existence of God. At other times it may refer to a miracle confirming the truth of a prophet’s message, a revealed message (tanzīl) in general, or even a fundamental “point” in a particular surah’s discourse. Because of its multivalency, āyah can be seen to correspond quite closely to the concept of “sign” in Saussurean linguistics. An important proof of this assertion lies in the ifact that “sign” (ʿalāmah) is the most commonly accepted synonym for āyah in Ibn Manẓūr’s (d. 1311/12) Lisān al-ʿArab and other influential lexicons of the Islamic Middle Period.
When inscribed in a written Qurʿān or recited on a believer’s tongue, āyah is best understoodq as “a statement in the speech of God.” The totality of these statements, along with a number of non-Qurʿānic inspirations known as ḥadīth qudsī (holy reports), constitute the divine “speech” (parole) as revealed to the prophet Muḥammad. Yet each statement of the Qurʿān was also revealed as a “remembrance” or “recollection” (dhikr or dhikrā, 38:8), whose purpose is to awaken human beings and cause them to look up from the written or recited text, so that they may see the existence of God through his creation. In this case, each āyah of the Qurʿān is also a sign—in the symbolic or semiotic sense—that points to another level of reality that in turn reaffirms the message of revelation. The believer who seeks to develop a sense of the sacred must thus learn two distinct levels of “language” (langue) at the same time—the Arabic text of the Qurʿān itself and the “language” of nature, which is also a manifestation of the speech of God. God created the world as a book; his revelations descended to Earth and were compiled into a book; therefore, the human being must learn to “read” the world as a book. This aspect of spiritual intellection is exemplified in the Qurʿān by the figures of Ibrāhīm/Abraham, who discerned the One God in the multiplicity of heavenly phenomena (6:75–79), and Sulaymān/Solomon, who was inspired to understand the “discourse of the birds” (manṭiq al-ṭayr, 27:16).
Theology And Anthropology
As an expression of theology, the Qurʿān is first and foremost a demonstration (bayān) of the existence of God. In this guise it acts as a criterion of discernment (furqān or mīzān): “And We gave Moses the Book and the furqān so that you might be guided” (2.55). This discernment—the same as that given to Muḥammad, Abraham, Jesus, and all the other biblical and non-biblical prophets mentioned in the Qurʿān—leads humankind to perceive a single, absolute truth (the only noncontingent reality) that transcends the world of phenomena. This truth is God, whose essence, being unique and exalted, lies beyond the limits of human imagination: “Say: He is Allāh the Only; Allāh the Perfect beyond compare; He gives not birth, nor is He begotten, and He is, in Himself, not dependent on anything” (112). This purely monotheistic expression of divine simplicity is complemented, however, by a more monistic image of a complex deity who is immanent in the world by virtue of being the source of existence itself: “He is the First and the Last, the Outward and the Inward; And He is the Knower of every thing” (57:3). Between these two poles of monotheism and monism stands tawḥīd, the recognition of transcendent oneness that constitutes the theological premise of Islam and the fundamental message of the Qurʿānic discourse.
Despite the radically monotheistic nature of Islamic theology, the discourse about God in the Qurʿānfluctuates repeatedly between transcendence and immanence, the abstract and the concrete, the logical and the analogical: God is one and not a trinity (5:75); lord of the east and the west (55:17); he sends rain and revives the earth (29:63); his “face” will abide forever (55:27). Out of these distinctions arises the tradition of the ninety-nine asmāʿ Allāh al-ḥusnā or “excellent names of God” (7:180), which for later Muslim thinkers expressed the discursive field in which tawḥīd was conceptualized. The central or medial figure who straddles these perspectives (and in Sufism actualizes the excellent names according to his or her ability and destiny) is the human being (insān, masc. pl. nās, fem. pl. nisāʿ). The Qurʿān’s use of this generic term demonstrates that both men and women are rational and ethically responsible creatures who occupy an intermediate position in respect to all the oppositions (e.g., true and false, necessary and contingent, or real and unreal) that characterize the Qurʿānic discourse. As such, the most meaningful duty in the life of every person is to submit the ego and intellect to the criterion (furqān) of manifest truth as given in the divine revelation. This act of choice, in turn, is the furqān that separates islām (surrender and submission to the one God) from kufr (“covering up” or denying the reality and moral implications of islām).
Human accountability is epitomized in the Qurʿān by a generic covenant (33:72) in which preexistent humanity, despite its creaturely limitations, assumes responsibility for the heavens and the earth. This moral and ecological commitment constitutes another furqān by which human actions are assessed. Also called “God’s covenant” (ʿahd Allāh, 2:27), this pact was created to distinguish male and female hypocrites (munāfiqūn) and those lost in contingent reality (mushrikūn) from the believers (muʿminūn) who maintain their trust in the absolute (33:73). The human being who trusts in God and is true to God’s trust by not breaking this covenant in thought, word, or deed actualizes God’s vicegerency (khilāfah, 2:30–33), through which one is able to exercise choice and maintain covenantal responsibility. The society made up of such believing individuals thus constitutes a normative or “axial community” (ummatan wasatan), which acts collectively as a witness to the truth (2:143). This society appears in history as a “community in a state of surrender to God” (ummah muslimah, 2:128) and is exemplified in its penultimate form by the paradigmatic ummah created by the prophet Muḥammad and his companions in Medina (622–632 CE).
Qurʿān And Bible
References in the Qurʿān to the stories of biblical and extrabiblical prophets and their communities must be viewed from the perspective of the ummah muslimah in order to become intelligible to the Western reader. The historical discourses of the Qurʿān are linked together thematically rather than chronologically, and thus the revelatory concept of the book or divine communication (kitāb) employed in this text has more in common with the genre of wisdom traditions (cf., al-Kitāb al-Ḥakīm[X, 1]) than with that of European historiography or Aristotle’s Poetics. For this reason students of Islam whose view of scripture is based on Judeo-Christian models are likely to be confused or even put off by what at first seems to be an incoherent scattering of biblical accounts and apocrypha. If, however, the text of the Qurʿān is read according to its own instructions to Christians and Jews—as a reminder (dhikr) and reaffirmation (muṣaddiq) of universal truths and the essential points of biblical discourse (5:44–48)—its lack of historical detail becomes less of a problem, and the logic of the Qurʿān’s self-described complementarity to previous revelations (41:43) is easier to understand. As with every other sign, the purpose of a biblical reminder is to stimulate intellectual awareness, not to provide an exhaustive discussion of a particular person or topic. In the Qurʿān these reminders revolve around the quintessential unity of the Abrahamic tradition and include exemplary and cautionary narratives detailing humanity’s acceptance or rejection of the divine message.
Despite the Qurʿān’s apparent advocacy of an inter-textual approach to scriptural analysis (5:47–51), a later preoccupation with abrogation (naskh) made the comparative study of revelation more difficult at precisely the time (ninth century CE) when the vocalization of the consonantal text of the Qurʿān fixed its discourse so that a true hermeneutic could become possible. The jurist al-Shāfiʿī’s (d. 820) insistence that the Qurʿān was the primary source (aṣl) for Islamic law meant that its prescriptive (muḥkam) āyāt abrogated similar statutes in the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Gospels. Subsequent scholars expanded on al-Shāfiʿī’s comments and claimed that the words of the Qurʿān constituted a blanket abrogation of the texts of all previous holy books. This opinion was reinforced by the doctrine of the “inimitability of the Qurʿān (iʿjāz al-Qurʿān). Originating as part of a debate over the Qurʿān’s challenge to unbelievers to produce a work of comparable eloquence and substance (2:23), by the time of the theologian al-Bāqillānī (d. 1013) this concept had evolved into the idea that the Qurʿān was completely unlike anything that had been revealed before. As a result, contemporary Muslim arguments against the doctrines of other “peoples of the book” (ahl al-kitāb) still tend to recycle earlier polemics against Christianity and Judaism that are found in the Qurʿānitself or in the works of Middle-Period theologians. Only rarely does a Muslim exegete overcome the influence of tradition and undertake a serious study of modern Judaism or post-Reformation Christianity. This is even more the case in regard to polytheistic or nontheistic scriptural traditions, such as those of China and India.
Translations
A hallmark of twentieth-century exegesis (tafsīr) is the translation of the Qurʿān into local and regional vernaculars. As early as the eighth century the jurist Abū Ḥanīfah (d. 767) claimed that it was permissible for non-Arabic speakers to recite al-Fātiḥah, the opening surah of the Qurʿān, in Persian. Although other jurists disputed this view as contradicting the Qurʿān’s own assertion of its Arabic linguistic identity (cf. 12:2, 16:23), a nativist (shuʿūbī) cultural revival on the Iranian plateau led to Persian translations of the complete text by the eleventh century. These works, however, did not have ritual value. The consensus of ʿulamāʿ has long held that a direct translation of divine speech is impossible. Vernacular editions of the Qurʿān are thus classified as commentaries or interpretations (tafsīr or tafhīm) to distinguish them from the Arabic original. This monadist opinion was authoritatively reaffirmed in the present century by the Syrian Pan-Islamist Muḥammad Rashīd Riḍā (d. 1935), who strongly rebutted Kemalist attempts to make Turkish a language of worship in the 1920s.
Important contemporary translations of the Qurʿān include those of the Indian modernist ʿAbdullāh Yūsuf ʿAlī (in English), the Pakistani reformer and politician Sayyid Abū al-Aʿlā Mawdūdī (in Urdu), and the Indonesian scholar, poet, and independence activist Hamka (in Bahasa Indonesia). In each of these cases the purpose of translation was twofold: to promote the related causes of Islamic preaching (daʿwah) and reform by making the text of the Qurʿān accessible to non-Arabic-speaking audiences, and to counteract translations of the Qurʿān in vernacular or European languages by non-Muslim missionaries and orientalist scholars working for colonial regimes. Of the translators mentioned above, Yūsuf ʿAlī is the least inclined to believe that rendering the words of God into another language implies a decisive departure from the original text. Although he asserts that his desire is to provide an “English interpretation” (tafsīr) of the Qurʿān, the final product (variously entitled The Glorious Qurʿan, The Holy Qurʿan, or The Holy Qur-an, 1934) is more commonly thought of by Muslims as an annotated translation rather than an exegetical work per se. This is primarily because the commentaries are introduced as footnotes or bracketed additions to the translated text. In fact, Yūsuf ʿAlī’s avowed goal of making “English itself an Islamic language” has very nearly been realized. His work is at present the most widely available Qurʿān translation in English and forms the basis of the semiofficial Muṣḥaf al-Madīnah al-Nabawīyah printed in Saudi Arabia in 1990.
Mawdūdī’s Tafhīm al-Qurʿān (1942–1979), although superficially similar to Yūsuf ʿAlī’s work, is indisputably an example of tafsīr. In both his rendering of the original Arabic into Urdu and his extended discussions of each surah, the author’s explicit intent is to amplify and clarify a unitary “Islamic message” for daʿwah purposes. Part of this clarification entails transforming the structure of the Qurʿān into paragraphs rather than leaving its text (either in Arabic or Urdu) in the traditional single-āyah format. This innovation is coupled with an analysis of the divine revelation according to the doctrines of the Jamāʿat-i Islāmī, which Mawdūdī founded in 1941. According to this party’s point of view, the Qurʿān is both a revolutionary manifesto and a manual for missionaries; its message calls for the reconstruction of human society into an ideologically motivated community of virtue and social activism. As such, its text provides a blueprint for transcending sectarian and legalistic divisions and uniting humanity into a single brotherhood. As an implicitly political work, Tafhīm al-Qurʿān has much in common with Fī ẓilāl al-Qurʿān, an equally influential tafsīr in Arabic by the Egyptian ideologue Sayyid Quṭb (d. 1966).
Vernacular translations of the Qurʿān in Southeast Asia first appeared in the 1920s but did not become fully accepted until the 1960s. In most texts the vernacular rendition (in Bahasa Melayu, Indonesian, Sundanese, or Javanese) follows or is parallel to the Arabic original of each āyah and is referred to as an “interpretation” (Malay, terjemah, tafsīr). Prefatory discussions are commonly added, and exegetical material is usually found in the form of extended footnotes, as in Yūsuf ʿAlī’s and Mawdūdī’s translations. Tafsīr al-Azhar, the translation and exegesis by the West Sumatran scholar and Indonesian independence activist Hamka (Hadji Abdul Malik Karim Amrullah, d. 1981) is notable because of its nationalistic tone. Written in Bahasa Indonesia, this important work is a semi-official tafsīr of the Indonesian Muhammadiyah organization and has been widely disseminated throughout the Malay-speaking world. Hamka is distinctive among Southeast Asian commentators for his use of interlineal exegesis (a technique common in the Arabic tradition) and his reliance upon recent Indonesian history to illustrate specific points in the Qurʿānic discourse.
Qurʿān And Modernism
In recent years the Qurʿān has become a touchstone for controversy as well as piety. Nowhere has this been more the case than in modernist polemics, many of whose practitioners view the Qurʿānthrough the lens of ideological precommitment. Particularly prominent is the debate over the empowerment of Muslim women, who have become both combatants and prize in the struggle between Western critics of Islam and their Muslim opponents. A recent discussion of the Qurʿānfrom a womanist point of view is Amina Wadud’s Qurʿān and Woman (1992). First published in Malaysia, it is presently used as a manifesto by the “Sisters in Islam” movement in that country. In her approach to the Qurʿān the American Wadud attempts to lay the groundwork for nontraditional tafsīr from a scripturally legitimate perspective. Borrowing heavily from the semantic analyses of the Japanese Qurʿānic scholar Toshihiko Izutsu and the modernist exegesis of the Pakistani Islamicist Fazlur Rahman (d. 1988), she postulates a distinction between the historically and culturally contextualized “prior text” of the Qurʿān and a wider metatext that conveys a more tolerant and universalistic worldview. Her conclusion is that while the Qurʿān indeed acknowledges functional gender distinctions based on biology, it does not propose essential or culturally universal roles for males and females. In fact, the assignment of gender distinctions based on early Arabian precedent would eliminate the transcendental nature of the Qurʿān by reducing it to a culturally specific set of discourses. Wadud argues her point by demonstrating the Qurʿān’s stress on the “primal equality” of men and women, examining the issue of equity in the afterlife, and semantically analyzing Qurʿān-based legal terminology relating to women and the family.
Another use of the concept of “prior text,” although with very different results, can be found in Al-risālah al-thāniyah min al-Islām (The Second Message of Islam) by the radical Sudanese modernist Maḥmūd Muḥammad Ṭāḥā (d. 1985). Essential to Ṭāḥā’s doctrine is a distinction between two categories of the prophet Muḥammad’s followers—the muslim (one who submits himself fully to God) and the muʿmin (one who acknowledges the truth of the Qurʿān and the Prophet’s message). During Muḥammad’s lifetime the Prophet himself was the only true muslim, since he alone could submit himself to God completely. For this reason the community that the Prophet created in Medina was composed only of muʿminūn—those who followed the historically and culturally contextualized example of Muḥammad. This early stage of faith (īmān) is exemplified by the Medinan surahs of the Qurʿān and constitutes the “first message of Islam.” As a formal religious tradition, it is characterized by the sharīʿah. Because it reflected its era and culture, however, the resulting “nation of believers” was unsuited to modern social and intellectual conditions.
The coming age of islām, by contrast, will be characterized by humankind’s readiness to comprehend fully the universal message of the Qurʿān, which appears in the Meccan revelations. Not limited by an outdated “prior text” like the Medinan surahs, which modern conditions have abrogated, the Islam of the Meccan period is open-ended and subject to further elaboration. Consequently, the “nation of Muslims” born under the influence of this era will be one of tolerance, gender equality, social democracy, and a science-oriented approach to knowledge. Not content to be bound by the sunnah, Ṭāḥā, the “teacher” (ustādh) of this “second message of Islam,” affirms the continuity of divine guidance by proclaiming himself a post-Muḥammadan “messenger” (rasūl): “one to whom God granted understanding from the Qurʿān and is authorized to speak” (p. 42).
Surprisingly, given the radical and even heretical nature of Ṭāḥā’s doctrine, it still reflects exegetical issues that have occupied practitioners of tafsīr since the very beginnings of the genre. Although the universality of the prophetic sunnah is seldom debated, the question of its applicability to contemporary conditions has always been important. The historical study of Qurʿān exegesis continually reveals how much the discipline of tafsīr depends on prior methodologies. Muḥammad ʿAbduh’s and Sayyid Quṭb’s reliance on tafsīr bi al-raʿy, for example, reprises the approach utilized by the influential Middle-Period commentator al-Ṭabarī (d. 923). Even Amina Wadud’s undeniably modern use of semantic and “prior text” analyses echoes more mystically minded commentators such as Ibn ʿArabī and al-Qushayrī. Undoubtedly certain methodologies, such as translation and intratextual hermeneutics, have become more prominent in recent times; this is only natural given the increasingly non-Middle-Eastern demographic profile of the Muslim world and the resulting demand for a crosscultural discourse. Yet the very fact that many new commentaries recall previous approaches highlights the authority of tradition in Islam and the continued self-referentiality of Muslim exegesis. After all that has been accomplished, one threshold of Qurʿānically legitimate exegesis remains to be crossed—a systematically comparative approach to scriptural analysis.
Apart from the approaches to the Qurʿān referred to above, the late twentieth century has seen the flourishing of a variety of new ideas in the area of Qurʿānic interpretation. One of the broad trends associated with such ideas is what we may refer to as “contextualist” (as opposed to “textualist”). The “textualist” trend remains the most widely adopted approach by the interpreters of the Qurʿān to this day. Textualists rely on a referential theory of meaning to determine the meaning of the Qurʿān, drawing mainly on linguistic rather than social or historical analysis. Scholars who follow this trend often believe that the language of the Qurʿān has concrete, unchanging references, and therefore the meaning and relevance that a Qurʿānic text had upon its revelation still hold for the contemporary context.
The contextualist trend, broadly speaking, adopts the view that the textual study of the Qurʿān must be accompanied by knowledge of the social, cultural and political conditions of the time of revelation. Contextualists engage not only in linguistic analysis, but also adopt approaches from alternative fields such as hermeneutics and literary theory. In general, the scholarship of contextualists is often associated with a form of Islamic reformism. For many contextualists, meaning is dependent upon the socio-historical, cultural, and linguistic contexts of the text. Contextualists further argue that subjective factors will always intervene in our understandings, that is, the interpreter cannot approach the text without certain experiences, values, beliefs, and presuppositions influencing their understanding (Esack, pp. 73–77). This approach appears to be more relevant in relation to the interpretation of the ethical-legal texts of the Qurʿān. In the following we will briefly look at four scholars who could be considered part of such a trend (although they themselves might not use the label “contextualist” to refer to their work): Fazlur Rahman, Mohammad Arkoun, Mohamad Shahrour, and Khaled Abou El Fadl.
Fazlur Rahman (d. 1988), a Pakistani-American scholar, spent most of his adult life studying and teaching in the U.K., Canada, Pakistan, and the U.S. Rahman firmly believed that one of the primary purposes of the Qurʿān was to create a society based on justice. He saw the prophet Muḥammad as a social reformist who sought to empower the poor, the weak, and vulnerable. He viewed the Qurʿān as a source from which ethical principles could be derived rather than a book of laws. For instance, Rahman argued that the practice of family law in Islamic history had not accorded females the equal rights to which they appear to be entitled based on the Prophet’s example and teachings of the Qurʿān.
Rahman’s primary contribution to the debate on the Qurʿān in the twentieth century was his position that in order to understand the Qurʿān, Muslims must move away from reductionist and formulaic approaches to the Qurʿān, which do not recognize its social, historical, and linguistic context. His emphasis on the context of revelation has had a far reaching influence on contemporary Muslim debates on key issues such as human rights, women’s rights, and social justice. Rahman argued that without being aware of the social and political conditions of the society in which the Qurʿān was revealed, one could not understand fully its message. Thus the emphasis on the “context.”
Mohammad Arkoun (b. 1928) is culturally Berber, French, and Arabic and is a pioneering scholar of contemporary Islamic thought and Qurʿānic studies in particular. Arkoun is not generally respected by traditionalist Muslim scholars, due to his rather ‘secularist’ approach to analysis of the Qurʿānand the apparent influence of intellectuals such as Derrida, Baudrillard, and Foucault on his work (Günther, p. 137). A key element of Arkoun’s thinking is his questioning of Islamic orthodoxy, and his view that orthodoxy is equivalent to an ideology and is thus subject to a historical process. Orthodoxy involves a “learned culture,” which is steeped in writing and which is expressed through the state. This “orthodoxy” is opposed by a “heterodoxy,” which facilitates a popular (and populist) culture, which makes use of (the freer, less stable) “orality” and is present within (or creates) a segmented society (Günther, p. 141).
Mohamad Shahrour (b. 1938), a Syrian civil engineer and self-taught scholar of Islam, has written extensively on Islam and the Qurʿān. He argues that contemporary Muslims need to reconsider and question the meaning and relevance of Islam’s foundation texts. Essential to Shahrour’s thought is his differentiation between the divine and the human understanding of the divine reality. He argues that, owing to developments in knowledge, contemporary scholars are much better placed than those in the past to understand the “divine will.” As such, Shahrour seeks to create a new framework and methodology for understanding the Qurʿān, and to this end has created his own categories for approaching the Qurʿān (Christmann, pp. 267–269). He questions the established patterns of reading the Qurʿān. The method by which Shahrour proposes to do this is called “defamiliarization,” which involves “the explicit wish to undermine the well-established canon of interpretations and to suggest alternative ways of reading a text.” Shahrour wants his readers to understand the Qurʿān “as if the Prophet has just died and informed us of this book,” thus approaching the Qurʿān as if reading it for the first time. (Christmann, pp. 263–264). For him, the Qurʿān must be approached in a manner relevant to contemporary concerns and needs of Muslims today.
Khaled Abou El Fadl (b. 1958) is a leading scholar of Islamic law and a traditionally trained Muslim jurist. His major work, Speaking in God’s Name: Islamic Law, Authority and Women, seeks to address the role of the authoritative reader of religious texts, challenging the way in which self-proclaimed “scholars” of the Qurʿān, particularly in modern times, assume the role of God. He argues that in many cases, such “scholars” displace God’s authority, which he describes as “an act of despotism.” (Abou El Fadl, p. 265). Abou El Fadl highlights the importance of focusing on the interaction between the author of the Qurʿān (God) and the reader, and the authoritative reader’s responsibility, by virtue of this special position as interpreter of the text, to act as a faithful “agent” for the “principal” (God), and refrain from imposing their own subjective opinions unless they are clearly stated. The framing of a debate in this manner—which highlights the subjectivity of the reader’s position—is clearly an attack on those who “speak in God’s name” by claiming the supposed authenticity and infallibility of “literalist” or textualist approaches. He also promotes the idea that there are many possible interpretations of the Qurʿān, and opposes the views of conservative scholars who claim a monopoly on the interpretation of the Qurʿān. Abou El Fadl suggests that Muslim scholars and interpreters of the Qurʿān should use an approach that is rooted in the traditions of Islam and the Muslim experience. His recommendation is that Muslim scholars should start with the Muslim experience and consider how such discourses might be utilized in its service.
These new ideas have generated heated debates among Mulsims about the meaning and relevance of the Qurʿān and how that can be ascertained. With influences from a wide range of areas from semiotics to hermeneutics on modern scholarship of the Qurʿān, particularly among Muslims, we are more likely to see an added intensity in these debates.
The Qurʿān In Muslim Thought And Practice
Because Muslims view the Qurʿān as the very word of God, it naturally occupies the central place in their religious life. It is the one means for discovering the will of God and for measuring the success of a life lived in accordance with it. The Qurʿān has shaped the individual and collective lives of Muslims in many ways.
The Qurʿān was revealed to Muḥammad in large and small portions over some twenty-two years (610–632). Furthermore, the revelations it contains are related to the situations in which they were revealed and thus become a record of the society of Muḥammad’s time and constitute the most important source for tracing the historical development of Islam from its origins in Mecca to its maturity in Medina.
These two roles are important for understanding not only the times of the Prophet, but also much of the later religious history of Muslims. Early Islamic history—even allowing for sectarian and other differences in periodizing and interpreting it—has paradigmatic value for Muslims, and the Qurʿān is universally admitted to be central to that history. It is not surprising that all later movements, whether of radical change or of moderate reform, whether originating at the center or at the periphery of the Islamic world, have sought to ground themselves in the Qurʿān or at least to seek support from it. A typical instance is the Khārijī movement during the caliphate of ʿAlī. Displeased with ʿAlī’s decision to accept arbitration (taḥkīm) as an alternative to a military solution of the dispute with Muʿāwiyah I, the Khārijites appealed to the Qurʿān, declaring its verdict alone acceptable and that of human arbitrators invalid. For their part, the troops of Muʿāwiyah had, in order to avert imminent defeat, already impaled copies of the Qurʿān on their spears and waved them on the battlefield, practically forcing ʿAlī’s camp to accept arbitration.
The Qur’an
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