In In the latest installment of the Review of Qur’anic Research (Vol. 7, no.7), Devin J. Stewart (Emory University) reviews Sarah R. bin Tyeer’s The Qur’an and the Aesthetics of Premodern Arabic Prose (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
In the review, Stewart writes “I have attended several presentations by Islamic art historians in which they purported to present an Islamic theory of aesthetics that drew on the Qurʾān. These talks were characterized by sweeping generalizations about the qurʾānic text, an appalling absence of concrete examples, and great leaps from the text to rather vague aesthetic principles. In contrast, Sarah R. bin Tyeer, writing from the perspective of comparative literature, has produced an antidote of sorts: a good-faith effort to detect a theory of aesthetics in the Qurʾān and to apply it to concrete examples of Arabic literature. In this complex book the author adopts a bold approach, shows a willingness to take some risks, and undertakes a lively engagement with the material, and these merits more than make up for a few technical issues and some heavy-handed opinionating…”
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