Elizabeth Alexandrin's Review of Nasr et al. (ed.), The Study Quran

Die Welt des Islams, 2017

Welt des Islams 57, 2017

The Muslim World, 2007

Middle East Studies Association Bulletin, 1984

Australian Journal of Islamic Studies, 2022

Various Muslim commentators have contributed to Qur’ānic exegesis (tafsīr) from the Eastern to the Western regions of the Muslim world. Besides the Middle East, other regions were also influential in the literature and scholarship of tafsīr, such as Khorasan and Transoxiana. Another example is Istanbul, the libraries of which hold examples of most of the surviving tafsīr works and supercommentaries. We do not have an extensive body of scholarship on tafsīr knowledge/production in other parts of the Muslim world in English as such studies are of particular significance for the full history of tafsīr. For this reason, this article focuses on tafsīr production in modern Turkey with reference to the Diyanet (the Turkish Presidency for Religious Affairs) Qur’ān commentary Kur’an Yolu (Path of the Qur’ān). First, the article provides a brief overview of tafsīr production and culture in the Ottoman period (1299–1922) and in the period of the Republic of Turkey (since 1923) to contextualise the Diyanet commentary. Then, it analyses the Diyanet Qur’ān commentary Kur’an Yolu as official/institutional tafsīr, its major characteristics and methodology. A particular focus is devoted to the commentary’s Introduction (pp. 13-51). The article holds the view that, while the Qur’ān commentary Kur’an Yolu follows the classical mainstream Sunni framework and paradigm, it includes innovative perspectives, selections of alternative options along with critical engagement with the classical tafsīr and Islamic scholarship.

Muslim World, 2018

The book under review, The Qur'an (Norton Critical Editions), hereafter referred to as The Norton Qur'an, marks a new highwater mark in efforts to explore Qur'anic scholarship, and to offer fresh insight into the levels of meaning of the Qur'an itself. The author, Jane McAuliffe, is one of the leading North American authorities on all branches of Qur'anic interpretation, as evidenced by her editorial work on The Encyclopaedia of the Qur'an (Leiden: 2001-6), and Cambridge Companion to the Qur'an (Cambridge: 2006). The centerpiece of The Norton Qur'an is a revised, updated version of the 1930 rendition by Marmaduke Pickthall: The Meaning of the Glorious Koran, regarded by many as the best available English translation of the Qur'an, despite its several competitors, to be discussed below. But what exceptionalizes The Norton Qur'an is the cornucopia of original essays-at once provocative and productive-that are included as the template within which to consult McAuliffe's revised rendition of Pickthall. They are arrayed as four supplements. Supplement 1 explores Origins in two subsets: Muhammad and the narrative matrix of the Qur'an. Supplement 2 offers Interpretations and Analysis, in five subsets: classical and modern commentary, intellectual amplification, the spectrum of contemporary scholarship, literary studies, and finally Qur'an and Bible. Even more far reaching is Supplement 3, where the reader is challenged to absorb Sounds, Sights, and Remedies within a Qur'anic worldview marked by 3 subsets: learning, reciting, and memorizing; pharmacology and fortune-telling; manuscripts, monuments and material culture. The final, and shortest, Supplement 4 looks at The Qur'an in America, from two perspectives, a 19 th century slave account and a recent book on Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an, the 18 th century rendition of Englishman George Sale, The Koran (1764). The myriad details, and acute analysis, of these several essays should not distract the reader from their underlying, and guiding, principle: in the long history of Qur'an interpretation, spanning centuries, continents and languages, there have emerged two paral

The Qur'an and Adab The Shaping of Literary Traditions in Classical Islam Edited by Nuha Alshaar, 2017

Though there have been many studies on the Qur’an’s import ance in tafsīr (Qur’anic comment ary), there are compar at ively few which look at the recep tion of the Qur’an in other forms of liter at ure. This volume seeks to rectify the gap in the schol ar ship by placing the Qur’an in its broader cultural and liter ary contexts. It explores the rela tion of Arabic (and Persian) clas sical liter ary tradi tions (adab) to the Qur’an from pre-Islamic times until the fifteenth century CE, focus ing on the various ways in which the clas sical liter ati (udabāʾ) engaged with the Qur’anic text, linguist ic ally, concep tu ally, struc-tur ally and aesthet ic ally, to create works that combined the sacred with the profane, thereby blur ring the bound ar ies between formal tafsīr and adab. Through a detailed intro duc tion and a series of case studies, the volume rethinks the concept of adab and the rela tion of scrip ture to human istic tradi tions in clas sical Islam and ques tions the general clas si fic a tion of adab as belles- lettres. It explores the reli gious aesthetic found in differ ent types of adab works – poetry, liter ary criti cism, epistles, oratory tradi tions, antho lo gies, ‘mirrors for princes’, folk lore and mystical/Sufi liter at ure. The key themes of the contri bu tions are the inter tex tu al ity between pre- lslamic poetry and the Qur’an, and the innu mer able approaches to the Qur’an by clas sical authors and poets. Discussed here are the various cita tion tech niques employed in the udabāʾ’s borrow ing of Qur’anic language, concepts and stories. The chapters explore how the use of these tech niques reflect a hermen eut ical involve ment with the Qur’an and how the choice of these tech niques was deter-m ined by the liter ary conven tions of the partic u lar genres and contexts within which the udabāʾ were working, as well as by their authorial inten tion, and theo lo gical and ideo lo gical outlooks. Also high lighted here is the link between the func tions ascribed to Qur’anic quota tions in a specific text and the need to convey a partic u lar message to specific audi ences. Collectively, these contri bu tions by leading schol ars offer a new, inter dis cip lin ary approach to under stand ing the inter ac tion of the liter ary tradi tions of clas sical Islam with the Qur’an. Conversely, the analysis of these liter ary works enhances the under stand ing of the Qur’an’s recep tion during the period studied. Students and special ists in the field of Qur’anic Studies, Literature and Religion will welcome this volume.

American Journal of Islam and Society

With The Blackwell Companion to the Qur’an,Andrew Rippin, an illustriousscholar in the field of Qur’anic studies, presents yet another impressivecontribution to previous collections of articles on the Qur’an that he hasedited: Approaches to the History of the Interpretation of the Qur’an (OxfordUniversity Press: 1988); The Qur’an: Formative Interpretations (Variorum: 1999); and, with Khaleel Mohammed, Coming to Terms with the Qur’an: AVolume in Honor of Issa Boullata (Islamic Publications International: 2008),just to name a few. Gathering the works of scholars from leading universitiesthroughout the world, Rippin has constructed a volume that is designednot only for the general reader “who may have little exposure to the Qur’anbeyond a curiosity evoked by the popular media” (p. x), but also to scholarsspecializing in the Qur’an. The overall aim of this large volume, which comprisesthirty-two articles, is to guide the reader to “a well-advanced state ofunderstanding the complexities ...

ReOrient Journal , 2020

This essay presents a broad overview of certain key works and intellectual trends that mark traditional scholarship on the Qur’an in South Asia, from the late medieval to the modern periods, roughly the fourteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Far from an exhaustive survey of any sort, what I have attempted instead is a preliminary and necessarily partial outline of the intellectual trajectory of Qur’an commentaries and translations in the South Asian context—in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu—with a view to exploring how shifting historical and political conditions informed new ways of engaging the Qur’an. My central argument is this: in South Asia, the early modern and modern periods saw an important shift from largely elite scholarship on the Qur’an, invariably conducted by scholars intimately bound to the imperial order of their time, to more self-consciously popular works of translation and exegesis designed to access and attract a wider non-elite public. In this shift, I argue, translation itself emerged as an important and powerful medium of hermeneutical populism pregnant with the promise of broadening the boundaries of the Qur’an’s readership and understanding. In other words, as the pendulum of political sovereignty gradually shifted from pre-colonial Islamicate imperial orders to British colonialism, new ways of imagining the role, function, and accessibility of the Qur’an also came into central view. A major emphasis of this essay is on the thought and contributions of the hugely influential eighteenth-century scholar Shah Wali Ullah (d. 1762) and his family on the intellectual topography of South Asian Qur’an commentaries and translations.