New Trends in Qur’anic Studies: Text, Context, and Interpretation

Abstract

New Trends in Qur’anic Studies: Text, Context, and Interpretation includes research undertaken by an international team of qur’anic scholars who participated in the first biennial conference of the International Qur’anic Studies Association, held in 2015 at the State Islamic University (UIN Sunan Kalijaga), Yogyakarta (Indonesia). Edited by Mun‘im Sirry, the work provides a good introduction to a number of contemporary trends, issues and approaches. Sirry pens an introductory overview of some recent international trends in the study of the Qur’an and its commentaries (tafsīr). The first part explores specific issues in qur’anic studies. Fred M. Donner reflects on some historical trends in the Western study of the Qur’an since the beginning of the twentieth century: scholarship vs. polemic, rationalist tradition, contextualizing afforded by historical-critical approaches, the critical edition of the Qur’an project, revisionist wave (since the 1970s), new discoveries (the Ṣan‘a’ Qur’an and the Corpus Coranicum project), renewed contextualizing, literary and structural analyses, and the way the Qur’an is experienced. Yusuf Rahman details how Indonesian Muslims have responded to non-Muslim Western qur’anic studies scholarship, notably to the more controversial revisionist theses. The responses are either apologetic (Western scholarship being based on prejudice and scepticism) or reformist (attempts ‘to identify different streams of Western scholarship’ and ‘adopt a critical attitude’ towards the different approaches), the former being represented by scholars trained at the International Institute of Islamic Thought and Civilisation (ISTAC, Malaysia), and the latter by Western trained lecturers at UIN state universities in Jakarta and Yogyakarta (60). Adnane Mokrani provides a ‘brief introduction’ to Michel Cuypers’s Semitic rhetorical analysis (SRA) of the Qur’an. He sets out to explain how Cuypers’s SRA works by presenting components of the various levels of the text and of figures of composition of Semitic texts, showing various types of total and partial symmetries. The presentation, though highly technical, remains accessible to those unfamiliar with Cuypers’s SRA (cf. Farrin). Emran El-Badawi examines the possibility of dialogue between the Arabic Qur’an and Syriac religious literature (Acts of the Apostles, New Testament) by focusing on the issue of rabbinic and priestly authority in Late Antiquity, thus providing an interesting intertextual analysis of the shift from clerical (qur’anic condemnation) to scriptural authority. David Penchansky provides an interpretation of the two Moses stories contained in Sūrat alKahf (Q 18.60–82): Moses and his servant andMoses the student of a stranger. A presentation and analysis of each story illustrates how two distinct voices ‘respond to suffering’: the voice of piety and the voice of Moses, an illustration of ‘qur’anic theodicy’. Seyfeddin Kara presents the less known contemporary Shi‘i approaches of Abū al-Qāsim al-Mūsāwī al-Khūʾī (d. 1992) and Muḥammad Hādī Maʿrifat (d. 2007), two eminent Shi‘i Qur’an scholars, to debates arising from the study of the collection of the Qur’an and ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib’s Codex. Adam Flowers delves into the new field of digital humanities with his ‘extended’ appraisal of two computerized analyses of the Qur’an: Behnam Sadeghi and Andrew G. Bannister. His assessment remains statistical in nature (considering the frequency with which terms