The case of Abu Zaid

Abstract

THE POLITICS of the interpretation of the Quran lie at the heart of the Abu Zaid case. In the eyes of orthodox Islam, the Quran is the eternal word of God. As it always existed, it was never created. That this eternal text should have been revealed to the Prophet Mohammed in seventh-century Arabia has no bearing on the meaning of the Quran, which is a book to be read literally and holds true for all times. Consequently there is no tradition of textual criticism of the Quran analogous to those for the Hebrew Bible and New Testament. However, this orthodox view has been challenged by Islamic scholars over the centuries. A rationalist school emerged in the ninth century under the Abbasid Empire, known as the Mu'tazilites, whose doctrines fused notions of social justice with a purified, spiritualised monotheism. They argued for a created Quran by distinguishing between God's essence, which they held to be eternal and beyond human understanding, and His word, which is created and accessible to reason. While the Mu'tazilites were marginalised after two decades, their thought remained influential down to the present, as evinced in the writings of Abu Zaid himself. Here he sets out the evolution of his scholarship from the beginning of his career as a graduate student to his most recent scholarly works. Abu Zaid has applied contemporary methods of textual criticism to his study of the Quran, contextualising the book in its historical setting. This challenge to orthodoxy, he argues, has been used as a pretext by those who perhaps had more personal reasons to seek his downfall.