Review of Andrew Bannister, An Oral-Formulaic Study of the Qur’an
The relationship between “the oral” and “the written” is one of the most fertile and unresolved questions in the study of early Islam, and one that often remains latent even in different sets of research questions and debates—from the reliability of early historical accounts to the development of Islamic legal practices, to the study of “semi-literary” papyri, and others. Andrew Bannister’s An Oral-Formulaic Study of the Qur’an has the merit of bringing that complex relationship into the focus of Qur’anic studies by searching the Qur’anic text itself for signs of oral diction. This fascinating book has the potential of reviving the debate regarding orality and literacy in the late antique Near East. This seems an important achievement in itself: While scholars have often mentioned the importance of orality in the “Qur’anic milieu,” the concrete practices of orally composing and transmitting texts and information in late antiquity remain elusive, nor do we know the precise extent and impact of oral materials travelling between different regions. One of the central questions of Bannister’s book is: Does the Qur’an bear any traces of the technique by which shared narratives—for example, stories about the creation of mankind—were reused by different religious groups?
Review of Michel Cuypers, La composition du Coran
Michel Cuypers is known to many students of the Qurʾan from his influential 2007 study of Sūrat al-Māʾidah: Le festin, later translated into English as The Banquet.[1] In Le festin Cuypers analyzes Sūrat al-Māʾidah using a method (which I will refer to as ‘Semitic rhetorical analysis’) meant to uncover the particular structure of qurʾanic passages. The Qurʾan, Cuypers holds, is written with rhetorical structures common in Semitic languages yet foreign to Greek rhetoric and, hence, to much of the western tradition. For this reason, Cuypers contends, western scholars (and for that matter traditional Muslim scholars, who were likewise influenced by the principles of Greek rhetoric) have often failed to recognize their presence in the Qurʾan. The present work, La composition du Coran, is meant to be a handbook for those who would like to understand (and perhaps apply) the method of Semitic rhetorical analysis. La composition du Coran is scheduled to appear in an English translation by J. Ryan,[2] but the present review is based only on the original French version.
Review of John A.C. Brown, Misquoting Muhammad
Misquoting Muhammad is a compelling read. It is an ambitious and well-conceived effort by Jonathan A.C. Brown to explore the rich intellectual and legal tradition of Sunni Islam. The work demonstrates that Brown is one of the few contemporary scholars capable of working comfortably with both the pre-modern juristic tradition and the modern Islamic world and of navigating its many contentious debates. Although he analyzes a period extending over 1400 years, Brown’s writing remains engaging and accessible throughout, although a stronger concluding section may have enabled the reader to appreciate the work’s central arguments or observations. His methodology, in which he takes a set of case studies focusing on particular legal questions, allows the reader to better understand the mechanisms and parameters of the Sunni juristic tradition. This approach also enables Brown to acquaint the reader with both the classical juristic discourse and modern debates on specific topics, thereby presenting the continuities and ruptures between pre-modern and contemporary scriptural hermeneutics.
Review of Anne-Sylvie Boisliveau, Le Coran par lui-même
Among the recent rash of publications on the Qurʾan, the work of Anne-Sylvie Boisliveau stands out as much for its scientific quality as for its originality. It is true that the question of the auto-referentiality of the Qurʾan—“what the Qurʾan says about itself”—has already been treated partially, notably by Daniel Madigan,[1] Stefan Wild,[2] and several others, but this is the first time that the subject is studied in all its fullness, precision, and depth to the point that it leads the reader to a renewed vision of the Qurʾan both globally and in its details. The work is the fruit of a two-part doctoral thesis: the first part treats the subject from a synchronic perspective, taking the Qurʾan as a whole; the second part adopts a diachronic viewpoint and takes into account the chronological development of the constitution of the qurʾanic text. Only the first part appears in this book; the second is reserved for publication in a near future. This book, therefore, is deliberately situated within the current of synchronic studies of the qurʾanic text which goes back to the ancient exegetical principle of explaining the Qurʾan by the Qurʾan, but here the subject is treated with all the rigor of the modern critical method.
Review of Holger Zellentin, The Qur’an’s Legal Culture
In The Qurʾān’s Legal Culture, Holger Michael Zellentin takes up an old but live question in qurʾanic studies: what role did the religious traditions of late antiquity play in shaping the qurʾanic text and dispensation? While the question is familiar, Zellentin’s approach and answers are new. Many scholars will be acquainted with analyses that consider the Qurʾan in light of rabbinic law or Christian theology. Zellentin’s innovative, well-argued, and very readable work, however, suggests that these established scholarly foci overlook one of the principal traditions to which the Qurʾan responds and against which it shapes itself: a specific strand of Christian law current in the late antique Syriac churches. In Zellentin’s view, this is not the high ecclesiastical law of bishops’ synods and canonical legislation. Rather, the Qurʾan is conversant with a tradition of ritual and purity observances that were based on the prescriptions of the Torah, modified for Gentile Christians, and practiced by believers within the Christian communities of the late antique Near East. This “Judaeo-Christian lawcode” is best exemplified in the discourses on pious practice found in the Syriac version of the Didascalia Apostolorum, a church order attributed to the apostles that took shape between the third and seventh centuries CE. Through a comparative analysis of the Didascalia and the Qurʾan, Zellentin concludes that the legal tradition evident in the former was a key element of the “legal culture” of the Qurʾan’s seventh-century milieu. Most significantly, the Qurʾan’s own conception of a prophetically delivered, divine law for Gentiles emerged both in conversation with and against that precedent.
Review of Abdullah Saeed, Reading the Qur’an in the Twenty-first Century
Methodological concerns about approaches to qurʾanic exegesis are not new, but while debates about specific elements and tools for interpreting the Qurʾan continue to occur, certain paradigms dictating the traditional approach to the text were established relatively early and have successfully remained dominant for centuries. Chief among these paradigms is a framework of what can be termed the “textualist position,” characterized by a fixation with the literal meaning of the text. In his book Reading the Qurʾan in the Twenty-First Century, Abdullah Saeed (Sultan of Oman Professor of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Melbourne) criticizes the textualist exegetical paradigm and highlights certain texts for which the textualist approach falls short of providing satisfactory interpretations in the modern age. Saeed promotes, instead, a contextualist reading of the Qurʾan, which he claims will better serve the exegetical and ethico-legal needs of the modern Muslim community (though he cautiously does not call for a complete rejection of the textualist paradigm). This method of reading is not unique to Saeed, a fact that he is quick to acknowledge: “I do not claim that most of the ideas in the book are new: indeed, many have already been circulating in the literature for a long time” (p. 12).[1] However, his project gathers the many disparate thoughts, exempla, reading strategies, and principles into a single text and, hence, produces a useful and easily-accessible resource.
Review of Taiq Jaffer, Rāzī
Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 606/1209) is one of the greats of the late classical Muslim scholarly tradition, and Tariq Jaffer’s contribution comes at a time of renewed interest in al-Rāzī’s intellectual contributions, spearheaded most prominently by Ayman Shihadeh, among others. As Jaffer demonstrates in the useful bibliographical introduction to his study, al-Rāzī’s pervasive influence on late Sunni and Shiʿi theological and philosophical discourses from the thirteenth century CE to the present day is an indisputable fact. Taking a cue from Michel Lagarde’s monograph on the al-Tafsīr al-kabīr (also known as the Mafātīḥ al-ghayb),[1] al-Rāzī’s major work of qurʾanic exegesis, Jaffer strives to flesh out more fully how al-Rāzī’s approach to the Qurʾan in that work embodied pivotal intellectual developments in the Islamic scholarly milieu of his time.
Review of M. Brett Wilson, Translating the Qur’an in an Age of Nationalism
For a long time, Qurʾan translations have attracted little scholarly attention. There were a few bibliographical overviews, a small number of studies dealing with premodern manuscript translations, several papers discussing ways to produce a philologically sound and/or dogmatically acceptable translation; but there was hardly any effort to treat Qurʾan translations as an exegetical genre that is situated in a specific historical, social, and scholarly context and can be fruitfully examined in order to elucidate this context. Or, as Wilson puts it, “the interesting choices made by translators are often lost amid compulsive evaluations of accuracy, which is an elusive concept” (p. 5). Moreover, qurʾanic studies had a tendency to neglect regional and linguistic diversity; the focus was on Arabic and, at most, English. Fortunately, this is starting to change. With Travis Zadeh’s The Vernacular Qurʾan (Oxford: Oxford University Pres, 2012), the first extensive study of early Persian exegesis has been published, and now Brett Wilson has presented us with a highly readable and compelling account of the place of the printed Qurʾan and Qurʾan translations in late-Ottoman and early-republican Turkey, as well as in the wider context of Muslim intellectual debates. His book is based upon his view of the translation of the Qurʾan as “a dynamic and crucial chapter in the history of the Qurʾan and Muslim intellectual life.” The central question, to him, is not whether the Turkish translations produced in the time span under consideration were “good” or not, but “how and why Muslims viewed translations as vital for coping with the circumstances in which they lived” (p. 5). As such, this book is an indispensable contribution to the ongoing attempt to situate the Qurʾan and its interpretation within the social and intellectual history of the Islamicate world.
Review of Shady Nasser, The Transmission of the Variant Readings of the Qur’an
Shady H. Nasser’s recent volume, The Transmission of the Variant Readings of the Qurʾān, makes an important contribution to our understanding of early Muslim scripturalism. Nasser argues that the question of verbal canonicity, of the acceptable recitations (qirāʾāt), moves from the realm of jurisprudence to that of transmitted tradition in the early period. His book lays out the processes whereby certain readings of the Qurʾan were deemed canonical while others were deemed deviant (shādhdh; pl. shawādhdh) by the early tradition.
Review of Angelika Neuwirth, Scripture, Poetry, and the Making of a Community
The volume under review is the first thorough collection of Angelika Neuwirth’s scholarship in English, and, as such, its publication is nothing short of a momentous event in the field of Qurʾanic Studies. The fact that the book is not a monograph with an integral frame but a collection of fourteen articles that were published in varying contexts over twenty years hardly diminishes its strength—not least because Neuwirth has prefaced it with a skillful introduction that knits the chapters into one seamless whole. The book closes with a comprehensive bibliography, which should be celebrated as an invaluable source for the student of the Qurʾan, and with a detailed index that facilitates the navigation of the text. The eye that sets out to search for typographical errors in the book returns “languid and weary (khāsiʾan wa-huwa ḥasīr)” (Q Mulk 67:4) probably thanks to a superior editing effort. All I was able to catch are the following: p. 267, “Decologue” instead of “Decalogue”; p. 371, “Hebrew nabhī” instead of “Hebrew nabī” unless Neuwirth preferred an archaic Hebrew transliteration that became obsolete after the beginning of the twentieth century.
Review of Haggai Mazuz, The Religious and Spiritual Lives of the Jews of Medina
Although many of the ideas of the so-called revisionist school still meet with resistance from some quarters, their most lasting impact upon the study of the Qurʾan and the career of Muhammad has been to cast doubt on the reliability of the traditional sources for reconstructing Islamic origins. Some of the most radical aspects of the revisionists’ arguments have been critiqued severely – sometimes fairly, sometimes not. But the enduring legacy of those scholars who first turned a skeptical eye towards the sīrah, ḥadīth, and other sources – Wansbrough, Crone, Cook, Hawting, Burton, Calder, Rippin – is the infusion of a pervasive sense of caution into historical research into the proto- and early Islamic periods. While revisionists have sometimes been tarred by allegations that they seek to discredit and disparage Muslims by questioning the integrity of the tradition, the real target of the revisionist critique was the established tradition of Western scholarship, which had failed to recognize that Muslim sources on the revelation of the Qurʾan and the life of the Prophet serve primarily as Heilsgeschichte and not as objective history. Thus, as Crone famously put it, much of the research done on Islamic origins in the decades preceding the advent of the revisionists’ critical reorientation of the field served simply to translate classical Islamic sources and repackage them for consumption by a Western audience – “Muslim chronicles in modern languages and graced with modern titles.”
Review of Navid Kermani, God is Beautiful
Navid Kermani’s God Is Beautiful: The Aesthetic Experience of the Quran is a unique and fascinating contribution to Qurʾanic Studies. The volume is an English translation of Gott ist schön: Das ästhetische Erleben des Koran (2007) by Munich publishing house C.H. Beck, which is in turn a revision of Kermani’s 1997 dissertation conducted at the University of Bonn. In this book, Kermani argues that aesthetic experience of the Qurʾan has, since the time of early reports about its initial reception, been inextricable from the text as a whole. In focusing on aesthetic reception, Kermani studies the relations between the Qurʾan and its listeners, “[seeing the Qurʾan] as a structure—not as a concrete object but as a system of relations. The relations discussed in this book are those between the text and its recipients. No text exists … except in such relations” (ix). In doing so, Kermani brings an innovative hermeneutic strategy to the field of Qurʾanic Studies, recentering the understanding of the text, in addition to providing a new method for reading reports of qurʾanic reception in the early tradition.
