The objective of this special volume is to dialogically and critically engage varied facets of the study of the Qur’an with important conceptual threads and conversations of the Humanities. It seeks to offer explorations of the Qur’an that highlight its hermeneutical, lived, material, and sensorial complexities. The conceptual orientation of this special volume as a contribution to a “post-Orientalist” theorization of the Qur’an does not refer to undermining or deprivileging textual and philological approaches to Qur’anic studies as most articles in this volume do conduct textual analysis. Rather, the post-Orientalist purchase of this volume lies in its attention to opening and navigating less explored problem spaces in Qur’anic studies that go beyond Orientalist preoccupations with the origins of the Qur’an, its borrowing of earlier scriptures, or with the valorization of the Late Antique context as the fount of Qur’anic authenticity only to be sullied by the later commentarial or tafsir tradition. This volume also includes articles that explicitly venture beyond the ambit of Sunni Arabic engagements with the Qur’an that have dominated Western scholarship on the Qur’an. It does so not only by considering Shiʿi voices but by also examining the Qur’an through a range of methodological perspectives, geographic sites, and categories of analysis. By bringing together scholars from varied fields of specialization and disciplinary backgrounds, this volume aspires to show and highlight the intellectual avenues and possibilities that open up through a decisively post-Orientalist approach to Qur’anic studies that draws on while also substantively contributes to key questions, problems, and debates of the Humanities. In short, the intention of this special volume is to showcase the significance of a purposefully multidisciplinary examination of the Qur’an and its myriad dimensions as a way to firmly situate Qur’anic studies as an integral part of the Humanities, beyond specific silos of technical specializations. Thus, though the immediate audience for this volume primarily comprises scholars of Islam and the Qur’an, the theoretical concerns presented in the seven articles of this volume should profit scholars of Religion and the Humanities more broadly. Before further describing some of the major themes and arguments that inform the individual articles of this volume, let me say a bit more about its contribution to a post-Orientalist approach to Qur’anic studies, which also renders this volume particularly well-suited to ReOrient as its venue of publication.
With roots in methods of Biblical studies, the field of Qur’anic studies in the Western academy has primarily centered on philologically oriented pursuits of uncovering the meaning, context, and structural properties of scripture (Reynolds, 2008: 1-26). Another key debate that has dominated the field hovers over the contest between historical-critical and commentarial approaches to studying the Qur’an (Neuwirth et al., 2010). Should the academic study of the Qur’an focus on historicizing and situating the Qur’an in its Late Antiquity context and thus strive to establish its interconnections with prior scriptural texts, or should it take with equal if not greater seriousness the tradition of Qur’an commentaries (tafsir) as the most prominent articulation of Muslim scholarly understandings and interpretations of scripture? (Hamza, 2014; Zadeh, 2015; Lumbard, 2022) These two enterprises are of course not mutually exclusive. But they do signal two major strands of Western academic scholarship on the Qur’an and capture a debate on method and sources that has loomed large over the field of Qur’anic studies (Caeiro, Stefanidis, 2018; Rizvi, 2021).
The controversy over the work of John Wansbrough serves as an important backdrop to the stakes and contours of this debate. Almost fifty years ago (in 1977), the US historian who taught for most of his life at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, published the book Qur’anic Studies: Sources and Methods of Scriptural Interpretation (Wansbrough, 1977). In this and his next book Sectarian Milieu: Content and Composition of Islamic Salvation History, published a year later in 1978 (Wansbrough, 1978), Wansbrough had infamously argued for dating the Qur’an and other early Muslim textual traditions more than a century after Muhammad’s prophetic career in the early seventh century. Other than the obvious theological implications of this thesis, as Devin Stewart has shown elsewhere, a foundational assumption that sustained Wansbrough’s engagement with the Qur’an was that the redaction and compilation of the Qur’an “closely resembles that of the New Testament” (Stewart, 2016: 21). Inspired and informed by early twentieth-century German Biblical form criticism, Wansbrough assumed that “the Qur’an was edited and constructed” on the same pattern as the redaction of the Christian gospels (ibid., 2016: 22). In other words, in textbook Orientalist fashion, for Wansbrough, the Qur’an and by extension Islam, was but an embryonic imitation of Christianity that thus called for a method of study and analysis also borrowed from studies of the Bible.
Another foundational assumption of Wansbrough’s that continues to shadow Western Qur’anic studies in varied forms involves his underlying bifurcation between history and what he called “salvation history”. According to Wansbrough and his later resuscitators, as a text of “salvation history”, the analysis of the Qur’an and its commentarial tradition demands methods of literary criticism rather than historical or theological inquiry (Berg, 1997: 3-22). This distinction between literature and history, corresponding with the distinction between scripture and historical text, is authorized by an underlying secular assumption. That assumption is this: a text with theological claims and moral arguments cannot possibly be regarded as part of history proper, and that thus calls for a method of analysis that takes as its object of study a work of literature significant and decipherable primarily on account of its linguistic features. The articles in this present volume demonstrate the limitations and futility of such an approach to Qur’anic studies that presumes implicitly or relies on the binaries of history and salvation history, historicism and theology, scripture and literature. A rigorous examination of the Qur’an can hold under a shared canopy of analysis of its various literary, theological, and historical facets, without recourse or compulsion to secularize the Qur’an as a literary text alone. Collectively, this is a central argument advanced in this volume.
Also, while acknowledging the importance of the debate over the historicity and the historical context of the Qur’an, the current volume instead aims to navigate and present possible alternate themes and avenues of inquiry. In particular, this volume is interested in questioning an approach to the Qur’an that views it as a text primarily meant for the interpretation and decipherment of its meaning. As Sajjad Rizvi puts it while presenting his agenda for a decolonial approach to the study of the Qur’an, “One has to consider whether the text speaking directly to the self and as a series of symbols bearing meanings that need to be deciphered in the inscribed text may betray a Protestant, colonial epistemology of scripture” (Rizvi, 2021: 131). Rizvi’s proposal can be fruitfully combined with Talal Asad’s pithy but potent reminder that “‘Language’ is not separable from ‘the message’ conveyed in it, and the message is not simply cognitive” (Asad, 2018: 96). Building on Rizvi and Asad, among the central questions that inspires this volume is this: in what ways can research in Qur’anic studies contribute to broader theoretical conversations and perspectives in the wider Humanities on questions of language, hermeneutics, affect, orality, gender studies, and material studies? As a way to generate such a conversation, this special volume features scholars working in multiple disciplines and brings together articles on varied themes. These include literary approaches to the Qur’an, the Qur’an, gender and queer studies, the Qur’an, orality, and cultivation of moral publics, and the Qur’an, affect, and the body. Collectively, the articles in this volume seek to showcase and further Carl Ernst’s conception of a post-Orientalist approach to Qur’anic studies that he describes as viewing the Qur’an “in terms of broad humanistic and social-scientific issues, so it can be integrated into the curriculum of knowledge rather than isolated as an exotic item” (Ernst, 2011: 9).
In doing so, the articles in this volume especially seek to bring into view previously less traversed Muslim scholarly actors, archives, and sites that collectively disrupt majoritarian (sectarian or otherwise) notions of knowledge traditions associated with the Qur’an. Ash Geissinger’s article seeks to reformulate our understanding of gender in the Qur’an. Geissinger undertakes this task by connecting the historical archive of Hadith transmission that establishes the role of prominent women in early Islam in memorizing and preserving the Qur’an to the discussions and representations connected to them in the text of the Qur’an itself. Through this exercise, Geissinger makes a compelling case for approaching the question of gender, the Qur’an, and religious authority through non-historicist and non-empiricist methods, focusing instead on critical dynamics and dimensions of intertextuality connecting the Qur’an to other knowledge traditions in Islam. Walid Saleh in his article connects questions of chronology in the Qur’an with larger problems to do with processes of identity formation in early Islam. He does so by proposing a new division of the Medinan Qur’anic period by identifying and closely analyzing Chapter 16 of the Qur’an that Saleh demonstrates was revealed after the migration to Medina but before the Battle of Badr in 623 AD. By attempting to reorient our understanding of the Qur’an’s chronology, this article tries to break new ground in how we imagine the limits of Muslim identity during the Prophet’s time, especially in relation to Muslim/non-Muslim relations and encounters. By pivoting its focus on the relationship between the chronology of the Qur’an and the malleability of Muslim identity in early Islam, this article presents an excellent model of how philological work can be rescued from the reductionist juggernaut of Orientalist assumptions regarding the interaction of scripture and religious identity as seamless, predictable, and predetermined. Emanuelle Stefanidis continues the themes of the Qur’an’s chronology but from a very different perspective than Saleh’s. She draws on tools of literary theory to examine the stakes involved in offering competing chronologies of the Qur’an by Western scholars. Building chronologies of the Qur’an, Stefanidis argues, relies on particular “networks of meaning” that we as scholars inherit and construct in our engagement with the Qur’an, and that are both facilitated and complicated by the textual characteristics of the Qur’an. In her analysis, Stefanidis is particularly interested in exploring the implications of approaching the Qur’an as an “open text” the interpretive possibilities of which sit in productive tension with the project of demarcating its chronology.
William Sherman shifts the focus of the volume toward an exploration of the doctrine of the Qur’an’s inimitability (iʿjaz al-Qur’an). Rather than focusing on the theological debates and principles underlying this doctrine, Sherman instead turns his attention to instances of attempts on the part of a range of actors, Muslim and non-Muslim, who have attempted to produce Qur’anic imitations. Through this exercise, he develops a literary hermeneutic of the Qur’an through which one can read the Qur’an into various literary texts and linguistic philosophies. Next, my (Tehseen Thaver) article asks and addresses the question of how we might theorize the relationship between Qur’an exegesis, ritual practice, and the formation of religious identities and communities. Through a close reading of important fragments of the first Persian Qur’an commentary composed by the Twelver Shiʿi preacher and scholar, Abu al-Futuh Razi (d. 1131), I examine the mutually reinforcing dynamic between text and ritual in the curation of premodern Muslim publics. I aim to show the interaction of Qur’an exegesis, Shiʿi rituals of remembrance and the cultivation of distinct sensorial reactions and capacities.
In Lauren Osborne’s article, the key theme pivots on the importance of sound, orality, and listening to the study of the Qur’an. She argues that the Qur’an presents and highlights an epistemology that intertwines orality and textuality, thus entangling knowledge and embodied experience. Osborne makes a case for rethinking the exclusive privileging of textual interpretation as the touchstone of scholarship on the Qur’an. Moreover, Osborne’s analysis reveals the intimate relationship between the often-assumed separability of orality and textuality, and modern scripturalist conceptions of religion that are founded on the more general separation of knowing and sensing. And finally, Devin Stewart’s article sets its gaze on the question of the relationship between the Qur’an and the Biblical tradition, and more specifically the absence of much interest in this question in European scholarship on the Qur’an in the latter half of the twentieth century. Through a focused intellectual history and analysis, Stewart uncovers the multiple political, institutional, and disciplinary factors that might explain this odd absence, an absence that in Stewart’s view has a lot to do with dominant Orientalist understandings of what counts as scriptural studies. More specifically, by reversing the gaze from European interrogations of the authenticity and origins of the Qur’an-the linchpin of Orientalist conceptions of the Qur’an to the historical and intellectual factors informing twentieth-century European scholarly neglect of interreligious scriptural encounters, Stewart’s article presents an instructive articulation of post-Orientalist Qur’anic studies, especially with regards to the Qur’an’s relationship with other scriptural traditions.
Though operating in disparate discursive spheres, all seven articles of this volume seek in their own way to identify and chart novel frontiers in Qur’anic studies with the three-fold goal of a) adding depth to our knowledge about the Qur’an as a revealed and embodied text, b) interrogating and reorienting the conceptual grounds of Western Qur’anic studies, and finally c) charting and suggesting new methodological pathways for future scholarship in this field.