Lot and His Offer: 2016 IQSA Presidential Address
The Lot narrative has received significant attention in qurʾānic scholarship and tafsīr literature, both as part of the genre of qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ (stories of the prophets) and as the foundational narrative informing Muslim ethics on homoeroticism, sodomy, and, more recently, homosexuality. However, Lot’s offer of his daughters to a mob of would-be rapists (Q Hūd 11:78; Ḥijr 15:71) has received precious little attention in early and—more surprisingly—contemporary qurʾānic scholarship. While a large number of characters feature in the Qurʾān as emissaries of God, the narrative about Lot is regarded as paradigmatic for proper Muslim behavior. Lot’s offer of his daughters thus has serious implications for questions about the Qurʾān’s endorsement or recognition of sexual violence, women’s agency, and the premise that women are the property of men. The moral ambiguity of Lot’s offer is complicated by the Qurʾān’s affirmation of his status as a “trustworthy messenger of God” (Q Nūr 24:162) and, for many Muslims, by the later emergence of a largely unchallenged doctrine of the infallibility (ʿiṣmah) of all God’s messengers. In this presentation, I consider the Lot narrative, and particularly the offer of his daughters, as someone who grapples with the Qurʾān as both a scholar and a lover of the text. As an engaged scholar-lover of the Qurʾān, I am embedded in a multiplicity of identities and discourses, lodged between a refusal to ignore the contemporary ethical challenges that a linguistic and historical reading of the text presents on the one hand and a simultaneous abiding love for the text on the other, and deeply skeptical of hegemonic games masquerading as disinterested scholarship.
Response to Farid Esack’s 2016 Presidential Address
Prof. Esack, in his IQSA presidential address, discusses his discomfort with the qurʾānic depiction of Lot as a righteous prophet of God who offers his daughters up for sexual assault in order to save his male guests from sexual assault. He writes that he is further bothered by the attempt on the part of Islamic exegetes to whitewash Lot’s actions and maintain his righteousness. In this reply, I look to pre-Islamic midrashic sources for comparison and then engage in a close rereading of the qurʾānic accounts. In so doing, I show that the Qurʾān appears to present two different Lots, one a righteous messenger of God and one a flawed townsman, on the biblical and midrashic model. Since Prof. Esack noted in his talk that he turned to scholarship on biblical materials with little success, I then turn to a discussion of Louis Ginzberg’s Legends of the Jews and its use by modern scholars of Islam. The response ends with a call for scholars of the Qurʾān to partner with scholars who have familiarity with and skill in reading the scriptural and exegetical materials of other religions.
Cognate and Paronomastic Curse Retorts in the Qurʾān: Speech Genres and the Investigation of Qurʾānic Language
This study focuses on a sub-genre of the genre of curses in Arabic, the cognate or paronomastic curse, one of the many forms of regular cognate paronomasia (ishtiqāq) that have been common in Arabic usage from pre-Islamic Arabic to the modern Arabic dialects. It argues that such curses occur in several passages of the Qurʾān and that an understanding of the genre’s usage in general sheds light on its sense and rhetorical effect in those passages. Moreover, the curse qātalahu’llāhu (“may God fight him!”), one of the most common qurʾānic curses, serves as a retort to forms of the verb qāla, yaqūlu (“to say”). Overall, this investigation suggests that interpretation of the Qurʾān may be advanced by attention to such common Arabic speech genres as well as to biblical language and to high registers of Arabic such as poetry or oratory.
Destabilizing Gender, Reproducing Maternity: Mary in the Qurʾān
The Qurʾān tells Mary’s story in extended passages in Sūrat Āl ʿImrān (Q 3) and Sūrat Maryam (Q 19). These stories have been interpreted to emphasize sameness between men and women and prove qurʾānic gender egalitarianism on the one hand, and to illustrate the qurʾānic valuing of female, especially maternal, experience on the other. This essay proposes a third tack, highlighting queerness. Focusing on Sūrat Āl ʿImrān, this article suggests new avenues for thinking about gender, family, and society in the Qurʾān. In situating Mary in a semi-genealogical prophetic lineage and a believing community, qurʾānic verses by turns affirm and unsettle binary gender constructions and disrupt heteronormative reproductivity. Oscillating between highlighting Mary’s femaleness and likening her to prophetic and pious males, the text offers rich notions of gender, kinship, and power. A queer reading of Mary poses certain dangers but also offers a way out of certain feminist impasses by rejecting a totalizing narrative.
Law, Structure, and Meaning in Sūrat al-Baqarah
This article uses the legal passages in Sūrat al-Baqarah to index the sūrah’s themes and structure. A consideration of all the sūrah’s legal passages shows that they contribute to a narrative of covenantal succession that structures Sūrat al-Baqarah as a whole. The main legal passages in the sūrah (vv. 178-203, 215-242) form a “Neo-Covenantal Code” to govern the civil and ritual life of the qurʾānic community. Other legal passages invoke biblical law (vv. 83–84), distinguish the qurʾānic community’s ritual practices from those of pagan and earlier biblical communities (vv. 142–177), and provide specific guidance on matters of charity, finance, and commerce (vv. 261– 283). Although Sūrat al-Baqarah’s narrative arc culminates in readying the qur’anic community, as successors to the Covenant, for military conflict, the placement of passages relating to certain matters of commercial law near the sūrah’s end may indicate a secondary process of composition.
Ring Composition in Sūrat Yūsuf (Q 12)
This paper focuses on the structure of Sūrat Yūsuf (Q 12), arguing that the sūrah demonstrates the most prominent features of ring composition more intricately than scholarship has thus far acknowledged. This paper first considers guidelines for arguing for ring composition, following critical scholarship on ring composition and Mary Douglas’ Thinking in Circles. It then demonstrates that Q 12 displays an intricate structure of mirroring, concentric composition, and parallelism, and draws attention to the literary markers and correspondences between mirrored elements throughout the narrative. The final section goes beyond the form of the sūrah to address its broader argument by placing it in the context of the third Meccan phase of the Prophet Muḥammad’s mission. The themes of betrayal, treachery, exile, reconciliation, forbearance, and reunion are central to this narrative and reflect the anxiety and despair of Muḥammad in this period. This paper demonstrates the utility of analyzing passages of the Qurʾān for ring composition, while adhering to stricter criteria for this type of analysis.
Review Essay: Positivism, Revisionism, and Agnosticism in the Study of Late Antiquity and the Qurʾān
This essay examines two recent publications relevant to research into the Qurʾān’s revelatory context in late antique Arabia: G. W. Bowersock’s The Crucible of Islam and Islam and Its Past, edited by Carol Bakhos and Michael Cook. The approaches to questions of Islamic origins, the background to the Qurʾān, and the interpretation of the qurʾānic corpus in each of these volumes are strikingly different, and tell us much about the contemporary status quo in Qurʾānic Studies on these questions, or rather the abiding incoherence of the field. Despite significant advances in the field over the last ten years, a cogent, universally accepted framework for understanding the background of the Qurʾān is still lacking, as is a general synthesis of the insights yielded by different methodological approaches. Nevertheless, the approaches of more positivist and more revisionist scholarship are not wholly irreconcilable, and a basic consensus on certain fundamentals (such as the heuristic utility of the basic chronology of revelation), as well as a tacit reconciliation with major aspects of the traditional view, point the way forward for productive research in the future.
The House and the Book: Sanctuary and Scripture in Islam (2017 IQSA Presidential Address)
The killing of animals in the context of religious ritual seems to have virtually disappeared during Late Antiquity, and the development of rabbinic Judaism might suggest that a religion focused on texts and their interpretation stands at the opposite pole to one that has a central sanctuary with a sacrificial ritual at its center. How and why, then, did Islam come to maintain the fundamental importance of both institutions: of scripture (the Qurʾān and other texts) and of rituals involving animal offerings associated with its sanctuary in Mecca? This question involves both the origins and early history of the institutions, and why and how they maintained their importance and relevance later on. As for their origins, it is suggested that both need to be thought of as the result of historical developments that extended beyond the time of the Prophet and that while the sanctuary and its rituals reflect the Arabian identity asserted by Islam, the scripture responds more to the needs of Islam as it developed outside Arabia. Regarding their continuing relevance, that of the scripture does not seem problematic, whereas that of the central sanctuary and its rituals does. Two developments concerning the latter are discussed here. First, there is the way in which the ḥajj came to be, not merely associated with, but very much focused on the Kaʿbah. Secondly, it is suggested that the animal offerings involve a redefinition of the concept of sacrifice towards the maintenance of social bonds and charitable giving. Finally, it is suggested that in Islam scripture and central sanctuary may work in opposite ways to promote cohesion and identity.
Why Does the Qurʾān Need the Meccan Sanctuary? Response to Professor Gerald Hawting’s 2017 Presidential Address
In this response to Prof. Hawting’s Presidential Address, I offer my views on the centrality of the Meccan sanctuary to the message of the Qurʾān in the Meccan period, its subsequent salience in the Medinan period, and the evidence for its continued importance for the Muslims of the seventh century. Reverence for the Meccan sanctuary, I argue, was pivotal to the early community’s self-understanding as a discrete community, both distinct from the “People of the Book” (ahl al-kitāb) and as a successor community with a shared biblical lineage. I contend, moreover, that reverence for a sanctuary in Mecca and its attendant rites was regarded as a touchstone feature of the religiosity of the newly hegemonic conquerors from Arabia by the earliest contemporary observers of the conquests and their aftermath.
