Remarks concerning the spiritual Hermeneutics of Al-Amîr ʿAbd al-Qâdir al-Jazâʾirî

Abstract

At the turn of the Century the periodical Al-Manâr started to publish on its pages the first instalments of a tafsir (interpretation of the Qur'ân) by Shaykh Muhammad 'Abduh, compiled (and later to be completed) by his Syrian disciple Shaykh Muhammad Rashid Ridâ. This tafsir became since known as Tafsir al-Manâr. Breaking with a tradition of an exclusive circle of exegetical scholarship and discipline-specific epistemology sacred scrip tum was offered here to a lay scholarship in digestible bits. To accommo date the eternal message of Islam to the concerns of the day it was written in the vernacular and could, thereby, address a lay audience. At the heart of this break lay a new way of thinking which held that the meanings of the Qur'ân were open to any public readership on the condition that it is famil iar with 'media' Arabie, that is, has a fuzzy knowledge of early Islande his tory and epistemology and an even fuzzier knowledge of later historical periods and Islande juristic knowledge. It, furthermore, had to be able to follow the rational arguments put forward by 'Abduh and Ridâ to authenti cate their interpretations. Within a Century, through the demise of the tra ditional methods for the dissemination of religious knowledge, through the ever-growing accessibility of ever-cheaper publications of Qur'ân tafsirs and pocket-book Qur'ân editions with their multi-functional indices and glossaries, and through online websites offering more and facile explana tion, Qur'ân tafsir has become the staple fodder of ail factions from which they seek to find justification for their beliefs, biases, and actions. This is particularly so with the growing appeal of the neo-Salafi literalist call to go back to the pure original sources of the Qur'ân and to a limited number of historically accredited hadith corpus, the Sunnah akidak, as the only legiti mate and authentic sources of religious knowledge, which goes hand in