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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.