History of the Qur'an: Historicism in the interpretation of the Qur'an

Abstract

The historical contexts of the revelation of the Qur'an have been subject of extensive analyses of numerous famous representatives of traditional scientific disciplines in Islam. However, those scholars have never believed that historical occasions of revelation from the time of Prophet Muhammad's life reduce eternal messages of the Islamic holy scripture. Moreover, they all accept that the Qur'an has a higher metaphysical reality that represents the spirit and essence of Qur'anic messages, and is be found beyond time and space. In the era of the dominance of empiricism, in the post-Renaissance West, there appears quite a different scientific guidance, with a popular name history of the Qur'an. In this particular cognitive environment, modern scientists study the Qur'an as a historical phenomenon that has to be verifiable by our sensitive experiences. All the previous intellectual approaches to understanding the primeval meanings of Qur'an were then declared non-scientific approaches, and the holy scripture of Islam, devoid of the sophisticated mysteriousness of its metaphysical reality, becomes the subject of empiricist scientific analyses. In this paper we will use the method of contents analysis of significant works by Regis Blachere, an influential representative of Noldeke's school of history of the Qur'an, and we will ground our analyses on the principles of traditional philosophical heritage of Islam. We will try to uncover hidden cognitive background of historicism in the interpretation of the Qur'an and to suggest negative philosophical consequences of the natural development of this entirely innovative model for studying the Qur'an, which is becoming popular even in contemporary Muslim societies.