Premodern Muslim Research Articles

Testimony, Lying and Calumny at the Interface of Islamic Law and Arabic Poetry

Abstract The significance of the concept of ‘testimony’ permeates Islamic jurisprudence and it is invoked in Arabic literary texts as well. Truthfulness and lying (kaḏib) were a preoccupation of many Arabic literary critics and authors in assessing literary works, while the notion of ‘testimony’ could be used figuratively in poetic texts. On the other hand, Islamic law emphasises the crucial role of trustworthy testimony in legal proceedings and has developed a sophisticated system of ascertaining the integrity of witnesses. Within this context Muslim jurists sometimes explicitly discuss poets and poetry, not surprisingly in view of the fact that the Quran characterises poets as mendacious, and some ḥadīṯs also denounce poetry. Certain literary genres in particular (especially hiğāʾ and ġazal) could be interpreted by jurists as cases of calumny that substantiate legal charges of false testimony (qaḏf). Offering a copious source of intertextual references at the interface of law and literature, legal discussions of the problem of potential qaḏf in poetry are the focus of this paper and can help clarify the peculiar ways in which premodern Muslim jurists would view and assess literary texts.

From Imminent Threat to Metaphor: Gog and Magog in Modern Sunnī Sources

Abstract Gog and Magog are portrayed in the Quran as two malevolent forces that once wreaked havoc on earth and will reappear near the end of time. Hadiths elaborate their natures and actions and served as the principal source for premodern Muslim treatment of the two. In the modern period, Gog and Magog have, besides remaining objects of Quran exegesis, received considerable attention from apocalyptic writers. This article contributes to current scholarship on the modern Muslim discourse on Gog and Magog by examining the views of some notable Sunnī Quran commentators, which have thus far been almost entirely neglected. I show that they adopt either a literal interpretation, whereby Gog and Magog are understood as certain humans, or a metaphorical interpretation, whereby they are conceived as symbols of various phenomena. I also survey, in contrast to most previous researchers, the ideas of several non-Arab writers, especially the Trinidadian Imran Nazar Hosein (b. 1942), author of several apocalyptic works, including a book on Gog and Magog and their dominance in today’s world. My discussion highlights the remarkable diversity of perspectives among Muslim scholars as well as the tendency to demythologize Gog and Magog by either avoiding hadiths or understanding them in light of contemporary circumstances.

“To Collect Information, Not to Deduce Law”: Al-Biqāʿī’s (d. 1480) Argument for Interpreting the Quran with the Bible

This paper investigates how premodern Muslim intellectuals understood and utilized Biblical materials in their written works. While some studies have highlighted Muslim use of the Bible for polemical and apologetic purposes, this study shows that medieval Muslim interaction with Biblical passages was not confined to those two approaches, illustrating the complexity of their engagement with the Bible. Taking the fifteenth-century Mamluk Quran commentator Burhān al-Dīn al-Biqāʿī (d. 1480) as a case study, this paper discusses how al-Biqāʿī sought to quote relevant Biblical passages to offer a more comprehensive narrative of figures and events mentioned only briefly in the Quran. Criticized by his contemporaries, al-Biqāʿī wrote his Apologia to defend his approaches. Analyzing al-Biqāʿī’s Apologia reveals the central argument that, for him, interpreting the Quran with the Bible is permissible for narrative and admonitory purposes but not for determining articles of faith and Islamic laws. In the end, he underscores the significant difference between taḥrīf (falsification) and naskh (abrogation), which should be appropriately understood in dealing with pre-Islamic revelation. Although he implied that certain Biblical passages were safe from textual falsification based on their conformity with the Quran, he supported the concept of abrogation, a widespread idea in medieval times across various religious traditions.

Al-Asrūshanī’s Jāmiʿ aḥkām al-ṣighār as a Source for the History of Childhood in Muslim Societies

A comprehensive compilation of legal rulings about children, one of particular historical utility and yet largely overlooked, is Muḥammad al-Asrūshanī’s Jāmiʿ aḥkām al-ṣighār. It offers a rather holistic view of the legal status of Muslim children and, more importantly, insight into common concepts of childhood and attitudes to children in premodern Muslim societies. Moreover, although drawing on the written heritage of middle-class urban scholars, the normative yet multilayered text of Jāmiʿ provides many precise details on children’s lives and their social environment. This article introduces al-Asrūshanī’s unique work—its structure, contents, and sources—and offers, as a case study, an analysis of the chapter the author dedicates to enslaved children. While al-Asrūshanī intended some, or even the majority, of instances discussed in this chapter to address theoretical legal debates, others, particularly those drawn from fatwas, mirror the real experiences of enslaved minors, concubines, and enslavers. Together they provide a picture of a moderate form of domestic slavery in the Islamic world, particularly in Central Asia of the Mongol period.

God’s Feminine Shadow: Fatema Mernissi’s Political Theology of Territory

Abstract At the close of the Cold War, the Moroccan feminist Fatema Mernissi joined intellectuals from around the world in analyzing the place of religion, culture, and civilization in the “new world order.” This article analyzes how Mernissi developed psychoanalytic, sexual difference feminism from within Muslim sources to critique this emergent form of territoriality. It shows how she attacked Muslim states, particularly Morocco, for appropriating premodern Muslim political theology to narrate their sovereignties in a world dominated by US-led militarism and neoliberalism. Then, it demonstrates how she used female figures, including the pre-Islamic goddess al-ʿUzza and the Moroccan spirit Haguza, to reveal how sexual difference would undermine exclusive claims to territorial sovereignty. Finally, it turns to Jonathan Z. Smith’s rejoinder to Mircea Eliade. Mernissi’s theory helps us to understand that Smith identified an important relationship between religion and territory but in a way that was androcentric and culturally specific.

Norms and Values in Islamic Legal Reasoning: The Case of Listening to Music (Samāʿ)

This essay examines the ways in which pre-modern Muslim jurists adapted their legal methods to accommodate the complexity of the act of listening to music. I classify those methods from the least to the most inclusive of underlying notions of moral value. This study shows that models on opposite ends of the spectrum function in similar ways. Whether, as in Ibn Ḥazm’s work, the scope of legal norms is confined to the immediate textual meaning, or, as in Ibn Taymiyya’s thought, the formulation of norms corresponds to an underlying moral aim, the result is a broad treatment of all phenomena that relate to music (samāʿ). By contrast, Ghazālī’s discussion of samāʿ is guided by the need to attain conviction of the appropriate course of action rather than the pursuit of an objective truth about the legal-moral status of the act of listening to music, resulting in a subtle case-by-case evaluation, rather than an overarching judgment. While this study does not attempt to give a comprehensive historical account of how and why scholars of Islamic law attempted to restrict or permit certain musical experiences, we can ultimately see how the sharīʿa, a legal system that is fundamentally concerned with moral behavior, purported to advance reasonable models for the assessment and regulation of complex social phenomena.

An Appraisal of Schoolmasters’ Status in Pre-Modern Muslim Societies

Medieval Muslim sources convey two extremely opposing pictures of schoolmasters. Alongside the official, aspirational image of the virtuous providers of knowledge, another subversive stream of literature lampoons them as despicable charlatans (although the main subject they taught was the Qur’ān). This provocative enigma raises many questions and calls for in-depth investigation to clarify its reasons, implications, manifestations, and repercussions. The present article sets out to spell out the dichotomy noted in the sources vis-à-vis the stature of schoolmasters in pre-modern Muslim societies. In particular, it tries to identify the source of this paradox and contextualize the conundrum of a transmitter of sacred knowledge (i.e., the Qur’ān) being ridiculed in a presumably religion-centred community. It also analyses the reasons behind the satires against schoolmasters by notable Muslim informants in medieval times. While so doing, the article tries to give answers and identify nuances concerning a number of related and more inclusive questions.

Reinterpreting the Tension between Dīn and Dunyā: The Naqshbandī Ṭarīqah as Experienced and Shaped by its Mujaddidī and Khālidī Shaykhs

In his article “Did Premodern Muslims Distinguish the Religious and Secular?,” Rushain Abbasi convincingly demonstrates how pre-modern Muslim thinkers had made an array of meaningful distinctions between dīn (‘religion’) and dunyā (‘the world’) approximating the religious-secular dyad. This paper explores a fourth typology, a latent opposing attitude toward the dīn-dunyā binary, by expanding Abbasi’s analytical trajectory to include both a discursive and pragmatic framework – the former involving scrutiny of the content and substance of rationally thought-out arguments, the latter demanding a closer look at how ideas have informed and shaped practical forms of reasoning and their application in the real world. Therefore, beyond the conceptual and epistemological signification of the dīn-dunyā binary in Islamic thought as surveyed by Abbasi, an attempt will be made to show how Muslims have also reasoned in both theoretical and practical terms to bridge the tension between the two spheres. The overarching objective is to consider how the dīn-dunyā binary fares in the Islamic mystical tradition through a case study analysis of five prominent Naqshbandī shaykhs: Aḥmad Sirhindī, Khālid al-Shahrazūrī, Aḥmad Gümüşhānevī, Zahid Kotku, and Mahmud Esad Coşan. The dialectical method developed by Shmuel Eisenstadt, which supposes a basic tension between the transcendental and mundane orders, will be applied to examine how each individual shaykh experienced, interpreted, and bridged the opposition between dīn and dunyā in both their doctrinal teachings and life-practices. The study aims to show how the shaykhs applied certain ethico-mystical principles like khalwat dar anjuman (‘solitude within society’) in a way that saw them engaging in a constant and concerted effort at bridging the unbridgeable in their worldly and other-worldly pursuits.

The book of women's rituals: the Central Asian adaptation of the ʿAqāʾid al-nisāʾ

AbstractThis article explores the Central Asian adaptation of the ʿAqāʾid al-nisāʾ which has survived as a single copy within a manuscript codex located at the Beruni Institute of Oriental Studies in Tashkent (Uzbekistan). Not only does the Central Asian adaptation of the ʿAqāʾid al-nisāʾ lift ‘the iron curtain’ from the little-known world of rituals and customs practised by women in early modern Central Asian societies, it also serves as an important source to balance the androcentric view of gendered history of the early modern Persianate world, while challenging the preconceived notions of women's agency and authority in pre-modern Muslim societies.

Abortion Laws in Muslim Countries: Modern Reconfiguration of Pre-modern Logic

Abstract In most countries where Islam is acknowledged as a, or the, source of legislation, abortion is permitted under certain conditions and at certain stages of pregnancy. This article examines some of these laws and argue that they represent a continuation of the logic that governed the views of pre-modern Muslim jurists on abortion, that is, harm aversion. However, these laws also add a ‘modernist’ twist to that logic – rather than repealing that logic altogether, modernist views on ‘rights’ and the advancement of medical knowledge and technology have influenced the priorities of Muslim jurists and lawmakers as far as abortion and the issues associated with it are concerned. This influence has furthermore been possible by a conscious selection and blending of pre-modern views to serve modern concerns. In all this, however, harm aversion remains the centrifugal principle, even when the abortion discourse in Muslim countries appears couched in the modernist discourse of rights.

The Study of Religions in Premodern Muslim Civilization: Some Distinctions Concerning Its Disciplinary Status

Scholars have made contesting claims about the nature and scale of works on religions by Muslim scholars before modern times. The present paper explores various primary and secondary sources, especially the classical bibliographical indexes that the scholarly tradition under scrutiny itself produced, and classifies these works into three types: (a) polemics, (b) works that present authentic knowledge about various faith traditions or introduce methodological novelties but carry some degree of apologetic undertone, and (c) descriptive writings on religions which resemble the modern-day academic study of religion. Based on these distinctions and an assessment of the number of works in each type, the paper maintains that a sprouting tradition of descriptive studies of religions existed in the pre-modern Muslim societies, which introduced certain methodical novelties such as comparative method, historiography, and, last but not least, textual criticism, which seems to have heralded the modern biblical studies in some respects. However, this tradition could not mature into a full-fledged discipline at par with many other branches of knowledge that flourished in the heyday of Muslim civilization. These findings imply that the descriptive study of religions other than one’s own is not necessarily a modern Western phenomenon. It can take root in multiple cultural settings.

Distinguishing Companions: Mixed-Confession Education, Assimilation, and Islamic Thought

In this paper, I consider controversies over the question of mixed-confession education in late-19th century Beirut and contrast the assumptions behind them with those that governed educational and mixed spaces in the premodern Muslim world. The paper has two parts. In part one, I examine how Muḥammad ʿAbduh (1849–1905), a scholar who wanted to inspire Muslims to engage a changing world with generous confidence, theorized mixed education. By contrast, Yūsuf al-Nabhānī (1849–1932), believed modernity and cross-confessional schooling threatened the distinctiveness of this community. In part two, I present a formative work on educational theory Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī’s (1058–1111) formative educational theory and a text by Taqī al-Dīn ibn Taymiyya (1263–1328) on that tells Muslims how to preserve their distinctiveness from non-Muslims. Ghazālī’s text describes how Muslims are to cultivate themselves and fellowship among Muslims, and Ibn Taymiyya’s instructs them how to preserve themselves and their community in a world of others. The premodern texts clearly delineate different kinds of spaces that are put together in modern education, in which the question of difference provokes considerable anxiety and instability. Throughout I draw on the work of Saba Mahmood, who troubles modern understandings of inclusion and exclusion, subjects and their worlds, and ethics and politics.

Bureaucratizing Sharia in Modern Indonesia: The Case of Zakat, Waqf and Family Law

This article examines the “bureaucratization” of Sharia in Indonesia, giving special attention to zakat, waqf and other aspects of family law. The bureaucratization of Sharia aims to modernize the legal system for Muslims in order to provide certainty and justice in solving legal disputes. While some scholars view the incorporation of Sharia into state law as an attempt at Islamization, this study argues that this process reflects increasing bureaucratization rather than Islamization. The incorporation of Sharia into state law is a project of formalizing a state-defined brand of Islam and Sharia legislation. This phenomenon has precedence in premodern Muslim governance and can be traced from the colonial period. In contemporary Indonesia, the Ministry of Religious Affairs and religious courts have played a central role in bureaucratizing Sharia. To support the argument, this study will explore Indonesian family law, including zakat and waqf.

Prefatory Notes on Persian Idioms of Islamic Jurisprudence: Reasoning and Procedures of Law-Making in Premodern Islamicate India

The essay elaborates on the manuscript tradition of transmission, commentary, and glossing of fiqh or "Islamic jurisprudence" texts in medieval and early-modern juridical culture from the Indian sub-continent. Premodern Muslim jurists composed doctrinal treatises primarily in Arabic, the shared theological language of the 'ulamā' or "learned scholars". However, in the Indian context, Persian too had acquired the status of a language of Islamic law. From the fourteenth century, fatāwā compilations were made in Persian. By seventeenth-century Mughal rule in northern India, sharḥ or "commentary" and ḥāshiya or "super-commentary" in Persian were deployed as a mechanism for pedagogical transmission. Analyzing two extant Persian manuscripts pertaining to the Ḥanafī madhhab or "school" of juridical thought, Fatāwā-i fīrūzshāhī (fourteenth century) and 'Abd al-Ḥaqq Sajādil Sirhindī's Sharḥ-i hidāya (seventeenth century), the essay appraises the nature of textual and manuscript practices involved in generating Islamic juridical norms and practices. Examining philological and textual features exhibited internal to these two texts, I argue that fiqh doctrinal writing in the age of post-classical Islamic sciences (twelfth to eighteenth Centuries) had become "hybrid" in style. Rather than indicating tendencies towards a phase of "decline" due to "orthodox" adherence to tradition, such texts of legal genre portray a complex culture of Islamic law-making in the premodern period.

A Christian Shīʿī, and Other Curious Confreres: Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr of Córdoba on Getting Along with Unbelievers

ABSTRACTHow did medieval Muslims think that they, as Muslims, ought to conduct their social interactions with non-Muslims? Modern scholars have usually sought answers to this normative question in Islamic legal sources. Yet premodern Muslim authorities also treated it in genres other than those that are usually considered part of “Islamic law”. This essay considers a passage in which the renowned Córdoban scholar Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr (d. 463/1071) addressed the issue: the chapter in his literary anthology entitled “Fraternizing with Someone Not of Your Religion”. That chapter, like much premodern Arabic literature, displays considerable moral complexity. It advances a distinctly Islamic, morally ambiguous normative vision of social relations between Muslims and non-Muslims, one that contrasts with the relatively dour and formulaic treatment of the same subject in Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr’s juristic writings. This ambivalent treatment reflects the breadth of Islamic thought concerning how Muslims should interact with unbelievers. It also tracks with historical social realities at least as well as do treatments of the topic in the Islamic juristic discourses on which modern historians have focused. In its use of Eastern Mediterranean proof texts to intimate that Muslims have moral licence to maintain amicable relations with non-Muslims, it reflects the thoroughly trans-regional quality of premodern Muslim normative thought.

“Their Fires shall not be Visible”: The Sense of Muslim Difference

This article examines the nexus of Islam, difference, and the senses. Amidst the diverse ethno-religious landscape of post-conquest Islam where communal boundaries often blurred, religious and state authorities defined belonging in the Muslim community through differences; they felt compelled to set apart Muslims from non-Muslims and other “wayward” Muslims by disciplining the physical body, including the sensorium. Building upon a robust theory of the senses advanced by Abbasid Muslim litterateur Jāḥiẓ (d. 868/9), I demonstrate how pre-modern (7th – 14th centuries CE) Muslim discourses and practices of difference configured the senses in specific ways, transforming body, object and landscape into material signs of collective identity in public life. Drawing upon literary and material sources, I narrate four episodes set in the pre-modern Islamic Middle East where Muslim authorities defined ritual and everyday quotidian practice along lines of communal difference. Together, the episodes highlight the multisensoriality of Muslim difference: the visibility of Christian crosses; acoustic memories of the adhān (audible call to prayer); the expensive taste of gold and silver metalware; and, finally, sensory overload at commemorative public gatherings (ʿīds)—holiday celebrations, tomb visitations, and funerals.

Islam–science relation from the perspective of post-revolutionary Iranian religious intellectuals

Throughout Islamic history, various arguments have been raised by Muslim scholars concerning how the Quran and scientific knowledge are related to one another. This paper seeks to examine how contemporary Iranian religious intellectuals (rowshanfekrān-e-dīnī) have dealt with the question of the compatibility or incompatibility between Islam and science. In particular, the paper focuses on the writings of two of the most significant reformers of the post-revolutionary era, namely Abdolkarim Soroush and Muhammad Mujtahed Shabestari, concerning the relation between science and religion. The paper also examines the extent to which the ideas of these two thinkers about the relation between Islam and science reflect those of pre-modern and modern Muslim scholars. To do so, I first examine various pre-modern and modern discourses within the Islamic tradition about Islam–science relation as well as the scientific exegesis of the Quran, and then investigate the extent to which Soroush’s and Shabestari’s perspectives are related to such discourses. The central argument of the paper is that the theories proposed by Soroush and Shabestari significantly differ from the views of those modern and pre-modern Muslim scholars who attempt to argue in favour of the dichotomous view that Islam is either compatible or incompatible with scientific knowledge.

Concubinage and Consent

In our imperfect world, rape happens frequently but nearly no one publicly defends the legitimacy of forcible or nonconsensual sex. So pervasive is deference to some notion of consent that even Daʿish supporters who uphold the permissibility of enslaving women captured in war can insist that their refusal or resistance makes sex unlawful. Apparently, one can simultaneously laud slave concubinage and anathematize rape. A surprising assertion about consent also appears in a recent monograph by a scholar of Islamic legal history who declares in passing that the Qurʾan forbids nonconsensual relationships between owners and their female slaves, claiming that “the master–slave relationship creates a status through which sexual relationsmay become licit, provided both parties consent.” She contends that “the sources” treat a master's nonconsensual sex with his female slave as “tantamount to the crime ofzinā[illicit sex] and/or rape.” Though I believe in the strongest possible terms that meaningful consent is a prerequisite for ethical sexual relationships, I am at a loss to find this stance mirrored in the premodern Muslim legal tradition, which accepted and regulated slavery, including sex between male masters and their female slaves.

Surveilling Gender through Architecture and Urbanism in Early Modern Spanish-Algerian Spaces

AbstractInfluenced by feminist perspectives on urban and architectural studies, this essay examines the relationship between premodern Muslim urbanism and gendered relations, an issue that has received little attention in Hispanic cultural studies to date. This discussion will center on two particular features of domestic architecture and city planning typical of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Algiers: the location and nature of street-facing windows and the communicable rooftops. Focusing primarily on Christian writers such as Antonio de Sosa, Miguel de Cervantes, and Lope de Vega, Velasco explores how their accounts document the ways in which women in Algiers could find unexpected and illicit ways of turning the high windows and the communicable rooftops to their advantage. Despite the constraints presented by an urban design and domestic architecture intended to segregate the sexes and control behavior, women in early modern Algiers (many of whom were recent immigrants from Spain) found ways to utilize their built environment to observe and navigate the world around them, gain access to a public domain commonly reserved for men, and sustain networks with other women in ways that might bypass traditional spatial, social, and personal restrictions and limitations. Through female-only gatherings and other forms of camaraderie that made use of traditional Islamic urbanism, Muslim women in Algiers found ways to challenge long-standing dichotomies of male/female, public/private, interior/exterior, visible/hidden, and chaste/lustful.

The Study Qurʾan: A New Translation and Commentary by Seyyed Hossein Nasr et al.

Reviewed by: The Study Qurʾan: A New Translation and Commentary by Seyyed Hossein Nasr et al. Louis Medoff The Study Qurʾan: A New Translation and Commentary, by Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Caner K. Dagli, Maria Massi Dakake, Joseph E. B. Lumbard and Mohammed Rustom, 2015. New York: HarperCollins, lix+ 1988 pp., maps, $59.99. ISBN: 978-0-06-112586-7 (hbk) One of the most difficult and often underappreciated tasks in Islamic Studies is translating foundational and classical texts in an accessible, engaging and reasonably accurate manner. In recent years, translation of the Qur'an has received a remarkable amount of attention, and as result there are now some excellent readings available, notably Ali Qaraʾi's The Qur'an: With a Phrase-by-Phrase English Translation (ICAS Press, 2003), Muhammad Abdel Haleem's The Qur'an: A New Translation (Oxford University Press, 2004) and most recently Arthur Droge's Qur'an: A New Annotated Translation (Equinox, 2013). With so many renditions of Islam's sacred text currently on the market, it is natural, whenever another is published, to question what need it serves. This enquiry is especially pertinent when related fields, such as proper translation of Qur'anic commentaries, are still seriously neglected. The Study Qur'an: A New Translation and Commentary, written by an editorial board headed by Seyyed Hossein Nasr and assisted by Caner Dagli, Maria Dakake, Joseph Lumbard and Mohammed Rustom, is a monumental work ten years in the making that has received copious praise. Those familiar with Christian and Jewish study bibles will no doubt recognize the format of The Study Qur'an as an elegantly presented translation paired with extensive annotations, scholarly essays, detailed indices and maps printed on very thin paper. The Study Qur'an starts with introductory essays in which Professor Nasr gives an overview of the meaning of the Holy Book to Muslims and how it relates to their personal and social lives. This discussion is similar in substance and tone to Nasr's other introductory works on Islam and is clearly aimed at the non-Muslim novice. This is followed by a lengthy [End Page 367] discussion of the origins of The Study Qur'an, its aims, and the editorial board's translation and annotation philosophy. Nasr gives an important insight into the rationale of The Study Qur'an when he reveals that he stipulated with the publisher that all the contributors believe the Qur'an to be the verbatim word of God, not merely the central text of Islam. Furthermore, Nasr rejected the participation of secular Orientalists, Muslim modernizers and (that unfortunate and imprecise term) 'fundamentalists'. These strict conditions obviously leave the editors open to the accusation of not being critical enough, although such a claim seems misplaced. First, the point of a study scripture is to inform sympathetic readers about the meaning of the sacred text to its learned adherents, not to drastically deconstruct and revise that understanding. Second, as the annotations of The Study Qur'an amply demonstrate, pre-modern Muslim Qurʾanic commentary is hardly uncritical, unless criticism is arbitrarily confined to historicism and revisionism. That The Study Qur'an has received so much praise from recognized academics is a positive sign that the insider's view is increasingly becoming an integral part of Islamic Studies. The Qur'an translation of The Study Qur'an is a straightforward affair and rarely diverges from conventions established by the seminal renditions of Muhammad Pickthall, Yusuf'Ali and - especially-Arthur Arberry. Thus, the basmala is translated as 'in the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful', subḥān Allāh is rendered as 'glory be to God' and laylat al-qadr is 'night of power'. One apparently new choice is the translation of taqwā as 'reverence'. As one of the editors points out, the root w-q-y linguistically means wariness and care, while in the Qur'an it denotes 'fear, mindfulness, and a constant awareness of God's Presence and Power' (pp. 14–15). It is questionable whether translating the (admittedly difficult) phrase ittaqi Allāh as 'reverence God' expresses these ideas better than previous proposals. It is unfortunate that more novel suggestions, along the lines of...