Qurʾan and Contemporary Analysis

Abstract

Contemporary analysis of the Qurʾan is marked by a significant turn from source- and historical-critical into textual analytical approaches, allowing more than ever before for the literary and linguistic components of the text to be uncovered using systematic applications of the methodology derived from contemporary literary theory and linguistics. Such textual approaches existed in the classical Islamic period, such as in works of Ibn al-Anbari, ar-Rummani, Abu Bakr al-Bāqillānī, ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī, and al-Shāṭibī. While maintaining the Islamic theological principle of the Qurʾan’s divine inimitability, those authors analyzed the text from their contemporary literary and linguistic viewpoints. Alternatively, early Western works, dating back to the earliest translations of the Qurʾan into Latin in the 12th century by Robert of Ketton, were marked by polemical attitudes and attention to debating the message of the Qurʾan from Christian theological viewpoints. In the early 20th century, while reformists Muḥammad ʿAbduh and Rashid Ridda in the Middle East called for moving the stagnant waters of Islamic scholarship at the time to produce relevant modern interpretation of the Qurʾan, Western scholars continued to build on the efforts of 19th-century scholars such as Geiger, Hirschfeld, Weil, and Nöldeke, among others, to establish the sources of the Qurʾan’s Judeo-Christian materials through philological and biblical research, and to reproduce a revised Qurʾan based on the chronological order of revelations. However, in the second half of the 20th century, a considerable shift in approach took place, with contemporary scholars such as Montgomery Watt (b. 1909–d. 2006), Kenneth Cragg (b. 1913–d. 2012) and others calling for a change in Western academic attitudes in writing about Islamic topics. While older diachronic source- and historical-critical approaches did not entirely lose their appeal in the postmodern era, which can be seen particularly since the 1980s in the works of Griffith, Reynolds, Neuwirth, Sinai, Witztum, Crone, and Zellentin, the new more text-oriented synchronic approaches analyze the text of Qurʾan as used by Muslims from thematic, structural, linguistic and literary points of views. On the way to a more objective and increasingly systematized approach to the study of the Qurʾanic text, several complementary and competing theories are utilized, either developed within Qurʾanic studies or borrowed from linguistics, literary criticism, and critical discourse analysis approaches. Also, many scholars adopted a combination of historical and textual approaches in attempts to reach deeper and more contextualized understanding of this complex text. Areas such as the thematic unity of the text, coherence and textual relations, and literary analysis of various aspects of the text and its language and linguistics are gaining increasing popularity in recent publications among scholars both in the East and in the West.