Between Hermeneutic Provenance and Textuality: The Qur'an and the Question of Method in Approaches to World Literature

Abstract

In literary approaches to the Qur'an, Qur'anic voice is relegated to the unknowability of its divine ‘provenance’, its issuing source of voice, which is implicitly taken to be outside of the text. The fundamental hermeneutic task, which is that of investigating how a text produces meaning, is principally a theological task, but it is assumed in most literary approaches to the Qur'an to be other than the literary critical task. And yet it is this latter task that is seen to reveal the religious meaning of the text. The Qur'an's textuality and unique naẓm may be differently conceived, not as that which is necessarily (and it is the comparative approaches that tend to produce such necessities) the result of the structures of language in the rhetorical and canonical sense, but as the texture of a voice that deploys singular and discontinuous modes of speech beyond the philological assumptions of textuality and the comparative literary assumptions of narrative. What vision of ‘literature’ is then projected? The theoretical move from the assumptions of textuality to the hermeneutical possibilities of voice reposits the classical Islamic approaches that viewed the Qur'an as both the eternal and temporal word of God through the projection of a fundamentally Islamic hermeneutics of proclamation. The exploration of such a hermeneutics of naẓm, it is argued here, should lead to a reconsideration of questions of the literary. As such, the Qur'an can offer a radical modality for addressing the question of crossings in the recent debates on approaches to World Literature.