Sayyid Quṭb Conception of Jihād against the Ṭawāġīt of the NewJāhiliyyah
Sayyid Quṭb Conception of Jihād against the Ṭawāġīt of the NewJāhiliyyah
Riccardo Amerigo Vigliermo, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia (UNIMORE), FSCIRE, Italy
IQSA International Conference 2021 “Giorgio La Pira” Library, Palermo, Italy
Panel 9. Striking Back at the Empire: Anti-imperialism in Contemporary Qur’anic Exegesis
Colonialism and European nation-state ideology generated a strong cultural dependency that caused the gradual loss of national independency and consciousness, but also the general Islamic radicalization process of society and religion. Sayyid Quṭb’s thinking has been developed in a context of retreating colonialism and national identity building; a period of transition from the British protectorate to the building of a new Egyptian modern state. Through Qur’anic exegesis of jihād verses as commented in his Fī ẓilāl al-Qur’ān (1951–9), and then used in Maʿālim fī al-ṭarīq (1964), Quṭb conceptualizes the jihād as the instrument intended to eradicate the newly formed Arabic political systems, which he considers non-Islamic and similar to the pre-Islamic idols (ṭāġūt, plur. ṭawāġīt). This conception is explained for example in his tafsīr of surat al-Baqarah where two main points are analyzed: the relationship with Jews and the spread of Islamic message (daʿwah) in Medina. In the Medinan phase, theory becomes practice in a dynamic fashion (ḥarakiyyah) where the Book is considered the real soul of the early Islamic community. So, the early ‘Ummah moved away (from Mecca) to establish a divine system (manhaj) on earth by using jihād after a complete detachment (insilāḫ) from jāhiliyyah system. Jihād in Quṭb’s view is then considered in the context of a continuous struggle against the cyclic revival of the jāhiliyyah period which places the human being in a condition of constant subordination to other humans diverting themself from the path of establishing the word of Allah and his sovereignty (ḥākimiyyah).
Reclaiming Islamic Tradition: Modern Interpretations of the Classical Heritage
Edited by Elisabeth Kendall, Ahmad Khan
Recent events in the Islamic world have demonstrated the endurance, neglect and careful reshaping of the classical Islamic heritage. A range of modern Islamic movements and intellectuals has sought to reclaim certain concepts, ideas, persons and trends from the Islamic tradition. Reclaiming Islamic Tradition: Modern Interpretations of the Classical Heritage profiles some of the fundamental debates that have defined the conversation between the past and the present in the Islamic world. Qur’anic exegesis, Islamic law, gender, violence and eschatology are just some of the key themes in this study of the Islamic tradition’s vitality in the modern Islamic world. This book will allow readers to situate modern developments in the Islamic world within the longue durée of Islamic history and thought.
Table of contents
Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
Introduction, Elisabeth Kendall & Ahmad Khan
1. Modern Shiʿite Legal Theory and the Classical Tradition, Robert Gleave
2. Muḥammad Nāṣīr al-Dīn al-Albānī and Traditional Hadith Criticism, Christopher Melchert
3. Islamic Tradition in an Age of Print: Editing, Printing, and Publishing the Classical Tradition, Ahmad Khan
4. Reaching into the Obscure Past: The Islamic Legal Heritage and Reform in the Modern Period, Jonathan A. C. Brown
5. Reading Sūrat al-Anʿām with Muḥammad Rashīd Riḍā and Sayyid Quṭb, Nicolai Sinai
6. Contemporary Iranian Interpretations of the Qur’an and Tradition on Women’s Testimony, Karen Bauer
7. Ibn Taymiyya between Moderation and Radicalism, Jon Hoover
8. The Impact of a Sixteenth-Century Jihad Treatise on Colonial and Modern India, Carole Hillenbrand
9. Jihadist Propaganda and Its Exploitation of the Arab Poetic Tradition, Elisabeth Kendall
10. Contemporary Salafi Literature on Paradise and Hell: The Case of ʿUmar Sulaymān al-Ashqar, Christian Lange
Index
Read, Write, and Share Commentaries on Q Tawbah 9:29-32
The Qurʾan Seminar invites you to add your own commentaries on a new selected passage of the Qur’an: Q 9:29-32. The Qurʾan Seminar, organized by IQSA, is dedicated to collaborative study of selected passages that are significant for understanding major themes and structures of the Qur’anic text. Contributors are encouraged to address the Qur’an directly and to not rely on classical exegesis as a lens through which to view the text. Of particular interest to the discussion are the following questions:
The structure of the Qur’an (its logical, rhetorical, and literary qualities, or naẓm)
The Qur’an’s intertextual relationships (with both Biblical and other literary traditions)
The Qur’an’s historical context in Late Antiquity
Access to Qur’an Seminar is open to IQSA members only. To become a member, click HERE. Once you are a member, you can access the Qur’an Seminar website:
The Qur’an Seminar website has two principal elements. First, the website includes a database of passages of the Qur’an with commentaries from a range of scholars. This database is meant to be a resource for students and specialists of the Qur’an alike. The commentaries may be quoted and referenced by citing the corresponding URL.
Second, the website includes an active forum in which additional Qur’anic passages are discussed. At regular intervals the material on the forum will be saved and moved to the database, and new passages will be presented for discussion on the forum. As a rule, the passages selected for discussion are meant to be long enough to raise a variety of questions for discussion, but short enough to lend that discussion coherence.
CLAIMING TRADITION: MODERN REREADINGS OF THE CLASSICAL ISLAMIC HERITAGE
Organisers: Elisabeth Kendall, Ahmad Khan, Christopher Melchert, Nicolai Sinai
Venue: Pembroke College, Oxford. OX1 1DW
Date: 27-28 September 2013
Both the resurgence of Islamist politics and the political, social, and intellectual upheaval accompanying the Arab Spring challenge us to reconsider the interplay between the pre-modern Islamic tradition and modern proponents of continuity, reform, and change in the Muslim world. The colloquium therefore invites scholars with an in-depth knowledge of the classical Islamicate heritage to explore modern texts that stake out some sort of claim to pre-modern traditions in disciplines as diverse as Islamic law, hadith, Qur’anic exegesis, politics, and literature. The colloquium will encourage specialists to embark on a hermeneutically sophisticated exercise that avoids some of the extremes to which an examination of how the classical heritage functions in the modern Islamic world has often been subjected. The colloquium aims to move beyond works that contain the tacit assumption that modern Muslims are subconsciously steered by the Islamic tradition, without exerting any sort of agency or control over it, and studies that suggest that modern Muslim thinkers arbitrarily distort elements of the tradition to which they lay claim. Instead, we invite scholars to consider modern re-appropriations of pre-modern concepts, texts, persons, and events, and thereby to transcend an increasing bifurcation between classical and contemporary Islamic studies.
Participants:
Carole Hillenbrand (University of Edinburgh), Robert Gleave (University of Exeter), Christopher Melchert (University of Oxford), Ahmad Khan (University of Oxford), Nicolai Sinai (University of Oxford), Islam Dayeh (Freie Universitat Berlin), Karen Bauer (Institute of Ismaili Studies), Elisabeth Kendall (University of Oxford), Marilyn Booth (University of Edinburgh), Jon Hoover (University of Nottingham), Christian Lange (Utrecht University)
Acknowledgement:
This colloquium has been made possible thanks to the generosity of Brian Wilson, a long-standing benefactor of Arabic studies at Pembroke.
Fragmentation and Compilation : The Making of Religious Texts in Islam A Comparative Perspective II (30 septembre – 1er octobre)
Workshop
30 September–1 October 2013
The Institute of Ismaili Studies, London
2nd Floor, Room 2.3
Convenor : Asma Hilali
Abstracts
Fragmentation and Variation in the First Islamic Graffiti (1st–2nd century AH)
Frédéric Imbert, Aix-Marseille University, France
The latest research in the field of Islamic graffiti in the first two centuries AH in the Middle East is uncovering new information about Muslim society at the dawn of Islam. Most of this information concerns the Islamic faith, the place of the Qur’an and the figure of the Prophet Muhammad, but the oldest graffiti also allow us to reflect on the status of writing during the same period. Thousands of Arabic Kufic graffiti recently discovered in Saudi Arabia and in the wider Middle East reflect an extreme fragmentation due to the quantity of inscriptions scattered all over the area. These Arabic graffiti, which were not subjected to any kind of censorship, are the expression of variation and repetition at the same time : variation of the Qur’anic text and of the attitude of people towards the new religion and the Prophet, and repetition of the religious prayers and invocations. The picture of early Islam emanating from the first Islamic graffiti is one of fragmentation.
Repetitions and Variations, and the Problem of ‘Qur’anic Variants’
Asma Hilali, The Institute of Ismaili Studies, London, UK
The field of Qur’anic Studies has been greatly influenced by the medieval reception of the Qur’an text manifested in the exegetical literature and by the theories related to the ‘Qur’anic variants’. The concept of ‘Qur’anic variants’ is deeply rooted in the history of the canonisation of the Qur’an and in the various assumptions made about scribal errors and falsification. My paper will provide a critique of the conceptual tools used in Qur’anic Studies in the last two decades and will propose a new perspective in the study of the textual features interpreted by the medieval and modern scholars as ‘Qur’anic variants’. The new perspective takes the fragmented aspect of the text to be inseparable from the history of its transmission.
Fragmentation, Compilation and Discourse : A Comparison of Three Arbaʿūn Collections on Jihād and Martyrdom Compiled in the Late Mamluk Period
Stephen Burge, The Institute of Ismaili Studies, London, UK
This paper examines the ways in which hadith scholars went about compiling hadith collections by undertaking a comparative analysis of three similar works written in the same period. The three collections are all arbaʿūn collections – short collections of around forty hadith – which focus on the themes of jihād and martyrdom. The three studied are Suyuti’s Abwāb al-suʿadāʾ fī asbāb al-shuhadāʾ (‘The Gates of the Lucky in the Occasions of Martyrdom’) and his Arbaʿūn ḥadīthan fī faḍl al-jihād (‘Forty Hadith on the Merits of Jihad’) and al-Biqāʿī’s Dhayl al-istishhād bi-āyāt al-jihād (‘The Appendix to Martyrdom in the Verses on Jihād’). I will argue that by closely analysing the material included and excluded from a hadith collection, as well as the ways in which the hadith have been arranged, it is possible to gain a deeper understanding of particular nuances within a text in which a compiler does not give his views openly to his reader. This paper will argue that the ‘hadith literature’ contains a vast, almost infinite, body of texts and the job of the hadith compiler is to fragment this wider body of texts, to reconstitute them, and then to arrange them in order to provide a specific discourse on a subject. This process can be seen in the different ways the three works under consideration in this paper respond to the subjects of jihād and martyrdom.
The Qur’an’s Fragmentation and Realignment of Gospel and Talmud
Holger Zellentin, The University of Nottingham, UK
The unique ways in which the Qur’an ‘heard’ select stories from the Aramaic Gospel tradition has been considered by generations of scholars. Yet, only the most rudimentary consensus has been established about the nature of the texts with which the Qur’an’s audience was familiar, let alone the ways in which the Qur’an used these texts. The Qur’an’s utilisation of Talmudic material has received even less attention, and a consensus is even more remote. The present paper seeks to advance, one small step, our understanding of the deployment of both corpora in the Qur’an by considering them jointly. More than occasionally, the Qur’an fragments and realigns demonstrable elements of the (likely oral) Gospel and the Talmudic traditions together in order to solidify its claim of being a correction to the shortcomings of both.
Unity and Fragmentation in the Standard Text of the Qur’an : The Prophet as First Addressee and Dialogic Argumentation. Mehdi Azaiez, CNRS/IREMAM, FRANCE
As defined in discourse analysis, first addressee (or interlocutor) is the person involved in a conversation or dialogue. The figure of the Qur’an’s first addressee is a textual phenomenon linked to the structure of the text and its argumentative dimension. In my contribution, I will define the notion of the first addressee in the Qur’an, its linguistic forms and functions within the entire Qur’an. I will explore the following questions : The variety of the notions of ‘the first addressee’ ; the double aspect of fragmentation/unity of text after its collection and the role of the first addressee in the argumentative shape of the text. My contribution aims to show (i) how the dialogic relation between a Qur’anic enunciator and its first addressee reveals one of the main aspects of Qur’anic argumentation ; (ii) how the Qur’an legitimates the status of its first addressee as a prophet.
Programme
Day 1 : Monday, 30 September 2013
12:00 Arrival of speakers at hotel and lunch
14:00 Welcome
Asma Hilali, The Institute of Ismaili Studies, London
14:00–16:00 Session 1 : Qur’anic Studies : From a Fragmentary Approach to an Approach about Fragmentation
Speakers : Stephen Burge, The Institute of Ismaili Studies, London
Asma Hilali, The Institute of Ismaili Studies, London
Holger Zellentine, The University of Nottingham
Discussant : Prof. Aziz al-Azmeh
This session will examine the state of the field of Qur’anic Studies. It will cover the following topics :
(i) Qur’anic manuscripts : A tool or an aim ?
(ii) Intertextuality : Methodological remarks
(iii) Fragmentation/Compilation perspectives on the Qur’an text in the context of the history of its transmission.
16:00 Break
16:20–17:50 Session 2 : Variation and Repetition in Qur’anic Texts
Chair : Holger Zellentin
Fragmentation and Variation in the First Islamic Graffiti (1st–2nd century AH)
Frédéric Imbert, Aix-Marseille University
Repetitions and Variations, and the Problem of ‘Qur’anic Variants’
Asma Hilali, The Institute of Ismaili Studies
19:00 : Speakers’ Dinner
Day 2 : Tuesday, 1st October 2013
9:00–11:00 Session 3 : Comparative Perspectives
Chair : Mehdi Azaiez, University of Notre Dame, Indiana
Fragmentation, Compilation and Discourse : A Comparison of Three Arba’un Collections on Jihad and Martyrdom Compiled in the Late Mamluk Period
Stephen Burge, The Institute of Ismaili Studies
The Qur’an’s Fragmentation and Realignment of Gospel and Talmud
Holger Zellentine, The University of Nottingham
Unity and Fragmentation in the Standard Text of the Qur’an : The Prophet as First Addressee and the Dialogic Argumentation
Mehdi Azaiez, LabexResmed, Paris
The 