Iʿjāz al-Qur’ān is a dare. This doctrine of the miraculous “inimitability” of the Qur’an emerges out of the “challenge” verses that ask any doubters of the Prophet Muhammad’s message to attempt to write just one sura that could match the Qur’an. 1 In its emergence and development in the premodern period, iʿjāz al-Qur’ān retained the subjunctive sense of challenge and daring, and it retained the possibility that someone would find the curiosity, purpose, desperation, or arrogance to risk castigation if not damnation by matching the voice of God in style and rhetoric. For many of the doctors of iʿjāz al-Qur’ān, the very marvel of the Qur’an emerged from the potential of a challenger who would fail. The possibility of imitation, therefore, was a horizon against which could be seen the Qur’an’s distinction as an act of divine language.
Iʿjāz al-Qur’ān is a dare that was answered, unsurprisingly. Despite the asserted impossibility of Qur’anic imitation, I argue that we can find dozens of imitations in multiple languages, some attributed to the time of the Prophet himself and others continuing to emerge into the twenty-first century. Among many examples, we find the fragments of Musaylima, the fuṣūl of al-Maʿarrī, the rhymes of the Roshaniyya, the multilingual effusions of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, the audaciously Qur’anic structures of Naguib Mahfouz’s Children of the Alley and Ḥasan Ṭilib’s Ayāt jīm, the Christian evangelical efforts of The True Furqan, and even the modernist punning of Joyce’s “mother of the book”: Finnegans Wake. We can reject these as failed imitations, if we choose, and, indeed, contemporary critics have critiqued these imitations as heretical, as stylistically impoverished, and as vulgar and offensive. Nevertheless, despite their rejection by mainstream theological traditions, there have been mimetic literary efforts that – I will argue – paradoxically invigorate our approach to the Qur’an as the source for a literary hermeneutic.
How so? To begin with, these imitations inevitably wrestle with the same questions that drove celebrated doctors of iʿjāz al-Qur’ān such as al-Bāqillānī (1993), al-Jurjānī (2007), and Sayyid Quṭb (2009): What makes the Qur’an the Qur’an? What in the rhetoric and style of God’s language grants it a revelatory effect? Or, in blunter terms: what’s the recipe of the Qur’an? If nothing else, these imitations pluralize our understanding of how various actors from various theological positions across history have understood and located the revelatory quality of the Qur’an. How have different ears heard that timbre of the Qur’anic language that marks its divine connection?
More importantly, when considered collectively, these imitations invite us to break away from “scripturalist” frameworks that have shaped – and often constrained – the academic study of the Qur’an in European and American universities. Among others, Angelika Neuwirth has argued that Qur’anic Studies bears the imprint of Biblical Studies in that the Qur’an’s emergence is reduced to “parthenogenesis”: to the production of a “consummate book intended as such” (2019: 12). Or, Neuwirth adds, the Qur’an is cast as an epigonal surrogate of the Bible (2019: 14–15). The very idea of scripture emphasizes the writtenness of the Qur’an and its canonized completion. A “scripturalist” lens suggests that the Qur’an is the fixed, transcendent, heteronomous point from which we derive interpretations, theologies, laws, and ethics. That concept of the Qur’an, however, is a theological achievement and not a reflection of its social and moral life in history (Graham 1987; Tannous 2018). While we can of course find intimations of the Qur’an as a completed “scripture” in the notion of Muhammad as the “seal of the prophets” and of the Qur’an’s self-presentation as a written kitāb (Madigan 2001), the scripturalist understanding of the Qur’an does not exhaust the spectacular breadth of affective, material, occult, and otherwise non-normative engagements with the Qur’an (Zadeh 2009; Osborne 2020). As Ayman El-Desouky has argued, rather than as a scripture, other Muslims have met the Qur’an as a kerygmatic proclamation that calls forth a “radical subjectivity” in the listener (El-Desouky 2013: 17). The imitations under consideration in this article may be heretical when spotted against the horizon of most formations of Islam, but, pace previous comments on Qur’anic imitations (Boullata 2013), I want to argue that these are not merely offensive parodies or unserious and decadent literary jests. Some are parodies, some are anti-Muslim polemics, but others are daring invitations to see the Qur’an and revelation as something alive, ongoing, and frothing over the boundaries of the ʿUthmānic recension. They draw our attention to possibilities of hearing Qur’anic language and divine voices beyond the muṣḥaf, beyond Arabic, and beyond the boundaries of Islam. They are literary experiments in the rhetorical techniques for puncturing material language with a sense of a transcendent beyond, for layering sempiternity and repetition onto new words, and for annihilating authors in their own works so that God is left as the only voice.
In short: these imitations are worth thinking about. They not only pry us away from an approach to the Qur’an as a heteronomous scripture, but they also engage in rich, if implicit, theorization on the capacity for language to convey divine meaning. In that sense, my argument extends beyond taxonomy and beyond the simple claim that we can describe a group of texts as “Qur’anic imitations”. More than this, we can draw these implicit theories of revelatory language into sharper relief and thus find a way to read for imitation – thereby finding a literary hermeneutic apparatus to read the Qur’an into other words and uncover otherwise elusive aspects of works such as Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, the Circle 7 Koran of the Moorish Science Temple, and Naguib Mahfouz’s Children of the Alley among many others. 2 “Qur’anic imitation” begins as the response to the dare of iʿjāz al-Qur’ān but becomes the pivot point for something else. Imitation extends an invitation to new theoretical directions in which the Qur’an is not subject to the latent Eurocentrism of a comparative scriptures model nor limited to philological origins or Western literary theory but is an extraordinary act of language and literature that ever renews a subjunctive verve for finding the revelatory in the human use of words.
This article only sketches the possibilities of what a study of Qur’anic imitations might reveal about the imaginations of the Qur’an and a Qur’anic literary hermeneutic. It begins by considering the theory of iʿjāz al-Qur’ān and its challenge to our understandings of language and literature. From there, we move to an abbreviated history of Qur’anic imitation before considering two examples in more detail. The first example – Bāyazīd Anṣārī’s The Best Exposition – exemplifies many of the patterns found across Qur’anic imitations; the second example – James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake – is our concluding “test” of whether a literary hermeneutic based in the Qur’an and its imitation can offer us new avenues of literary analysis.
Iʿjāz Itineraries
In search of a Qur’anic hermeneutics of its own language event, Ayman El-Desouky has read the iʿjāz al-Qur’ān tradition as a theology in support of the literary – a theology that emanates out of the “discontinuous naẓm” of God’s Qur’anic language (El-Desouky 2013). As he notes, this is a theology of the extra-literary and the post-poetic that breaks and reshapes typical approaches to aesthetics and genre. El-Desouky’s pursuit goes in numerous, generative directions, but, for our purposes, we can echo one aspect of his argument: discontinuity is among the stylistic traits that renders the Qur’an miraculously inimitable. Given that the Qur’an’s language overflows any single genre or style, the task for the doctor of iʿjāz al-Qur’ān becomes an exceedingly challenging one that draws them into a paradoxical convergence with the imitations we will soon explore.
Let us back up a moment. As noted above, the Qur’an includes a number of verses of “challenge” that serve as a key departure point for Sunni theological discussions on the nature of this inimitability. But how is the Qur’an inimitable? This question is key to understanding the role that a study of imitations might hold in our approach to the Qur’an more generally. Among others, Margaret Larkin, Sophia Vasalou, and Lara Harb have drawn into light the difficulties in answering this question (Larkin 1988; Vasalou 2002; Harb 2015, 2020).
One possible answer would be that the Qur’an contains knowledge of mysteries (ghuyūb) unattainable by human beings alone: stories of the distant past, descriptions of heaven and hell, apocalyptic foresight of the future, and so on (Vasalou 2002: 31). Would the Qur’an be miraculously unique in this regard, however? Would not other books with divine revelation such as the Torah, the Psalms, and the Gospel contain a portion of the ostensibly unique inimitability found in the Qur’an? More alarmingly, many passages of the Qur’an do not seem to contain ghuyūb: are those passages imitable? Another possible answer would be found in the concept of ṣarfah: the act of “turning” any possible challenger away from his or her task. Here, however, the miracle is not the inimitable Qur’an itself but the miraculous prevention of challengers (Vasalou 2002: 30). The same problem appeals to the Prophet Muhammad’s illiteracy or the deliverance of the Qur’an by the angel Jibrā’īl. As Vasalou notes, al-Bāqillānī’s position was that the Qur’an is unique in its very discontinuity and generic transformation: nothing like it had ever come before, so who but God could have so beautifully fashioned a whole new genre (or set of genres) from the literatures that preceded it? (Vasalou 2002: 34). As Vasalou continues, however, al-Bāqillānī’s proposal does not explain the inimitability of the Qur’an after its revelation, and, indeed, he ends up leaning on an argument similar to the appeal to ṣarfah. On top of the issues just noted, theorists of iʿjāz al-Qur’ān wanted to preserve the potential of a mimetic attempt. Would the challenge verses truly be extending a challenge to humankind if humans obviously had no chance of rising to that challenge? For certain theorists of iʿjāz, the miraculousness of Qur’anic inimitability cannot rest in ṣarfah, ghuyūb, or the medium of delivery because those shut down the very possibility of a challenger before he has a chance to fail.
For these and other reasons, theorists such as al-Jurjānī persisted in locating the inimitability of the Qur’an in its form (Harb 2015: 313; Kermani 2015). We circle back to the striking multifariousness of Qur’anic expression, however. In a kaleidoscope of forms, which constellation of words is inimitable and why? Qur’anic inimitability is not obvious (Vasalou 2002: 32); it is a miracle that needs elaboration and explication. An attempt to identify the transcendent quality of Qur’anic naẓm necessarily involves, therefore, its recognition – even its capture – by a decidedly human theorist who recognizes something that others do not. Paradoxically, for a figure such as al-Jurjānī, this involves revealing the inimitability of the Qur’an through comparison with Arabic poetry. Despite proclamations to its inimitability, the result is nonetheless the formation of a literary aesthetic rooted in the Qur’an but extending to other examples of literature (Harb 2015). Followed to its logical end by figures such as al-Jurjānī, theologies of iʿjāz al-Qur’ān provide a style guide for potential imitators that is presented as something that cannot actually be followed. These are attempts to touch something without being touched back: immanent expressions of a language declared transcendent.
In many ways, our consideration of Qur’anic imitation makes a similar wager: these imitations are gestures – sometimes deeply sincere, sometimes apocalyptically fervent, or sometimes derisively mocking – that suggest that something of a revelatory miracle inhabits the form of the Qur’an. For the Qur’an to be a form suggests the possibility of language molded by that very form. Here, then, we find the paradoxical meeting of iʿjāz al-Qur’ān and imitations of the Qur’an in the shared pursuit of a theology of form, rhetoric, and literature. The purpose of iʿjāz al-Qur’ān and imitation may be diametrically opposed, but the premises and theological imagination are shared. Like al-Jurjānī, these Qur’anic imitators face the task of stylistically forming their imitation around the miraculous stylistic discontinuity of the Qur’an (El-Desouky 2014: 16). As we will see, the imitations respond to this challenge in different ways – and thus I must be clear that there is no “genre” of Qur’anic imitation but rather various attempts at replicating the “anti-genre” that characterizes the miraculous discontinuity of God’s language. Indeed, there is no single Arabic/Persian category but rather a variety of terms used by aesthetes and polemicists: muʿāraḍa, istihzā’, muḥākāh, and, frequently, texts that follow the madhhab-i musaylima (“the path of Musaylima”), among others. Though rhetorical patterns can be traced across many of these imitations (such as the use of oaths, chiasmus, and kerygmatic calls), there is not a stable genre that binds these imitations together. Rather, it is their response to the challenge of the Qur’an that connects them.
As a brief aside, we can note that al-Jurjānī’s approach to iʿjāz al-Qur’ān has been challenged by recent developments. Against this history of locating the Qur’anic miracle in its form – against this “theology of the literary” – recent efforts in iʿjāz al-Qur’ān have developed a discourse known as iʿjāz ʿilmī: “scientific inimitability”. Exemplified by the French physician Maurice Bucaille, iʿjāz ʿilmī suggests that the Qur’an’s inimitability is found in its miraculous (and non-human) understanding of natural phenomena that have been confirmed by modern science (Bigliardi 2017). For example, the Qur’an contains an intimate understanding of embryology that we have only recently been able to confirm as accurate, or so the claim goes (Guénon 2019). Regardless of the accuracy of such claims, iʿjāz ʿilmī represents a reiteration of positivist logics of truth and a disavowal of the literary as the site of the miraculous. In other words, iʿjāz ʿilmī works with ideologies that associate the very category of literature with secular distinctions between fact and truth on one side and imagination, enchantment, meaning, and beauty on the other (Josephson-Storm 2017). El-Desouky and, in a recent illuminating monograph, Hoda El Shakry have sought to salvage and re-form conceptions of literature as bound up with revelation – conceptions that are not easily named and analyzed by secular logics of language, imagination, and truth (El-Desouky 2013, 2014; El Shakry 2019). Imitations of the Qur’an, I suggest, represent another florescence of the Qur’an as divine literature even if the imitators are cast aside as frauds and heretics.
A Brief History of the Impossible
How might we begin to trace a history of Qur’anic imitation? This is merely a provisional answer because the seeming impossibility of this (anti)genre has largely foreclosed this question. There have been incisive studies by Devin Stewart (2017), Josef Van Ess (1981), Todd Lawson (2012, 2017), Shawkat Toorawa (2005), István Kristó-Nagy (2013), and others on discrete examples of “imitation”, but a comparative project yet awaits us. If we were to trace a history of the imitable Qur’an – a Qur’an that is not a text protected as a heteronomous inscription of laws from a transcendent God nor the ʿUthmānic recension but rather a linguistic event capable of generating formal imitations – it might look something like the following. It would be a history that begins with the seventh-century figures of Maslamah ibn Ḥabīb (Musaylima), Sajāḥ bint al-Ḥārith, and al-Aswad al-ʿAnsī (Donner 1993; Kister 2002; Makin 2010). Rather than self-apparent heretics, they might be cast as those responding to the reinvigoration of prophetic models exemplified by Muhammad. This seems to have been the response of Ṣāliḥ ibn Ṭarīf (d. 744 CE) who reputedly wrote a series of Berber revelations in the style of the Qur’an (Fierro 2020). Shi’i intellectuals of the Fatimid era likewise presumed that revelation persisted and that it had a form demonstrated in (but not necessarily restricted to) the Qur’an (Velji 2016, 2017). As the Mongols’ conquests and other events of the late Abbasid period shattered the ability of certain Islamic institutions of learning to control the discourse on the Qur’an, messianic groups such as the Mushaʿshaʿiyya and Ḥurūfiyya offered revelations that – at least in part – formally mimicked the Qur’an (Kasravi 1999; Bashir 2001, 2003; Mir-Kasimov 2015). These are messianic Qur’anic imitations that place their bids for revelatory language in a recursive temporality – in the pursuit of linguistic forms and techniques that reveal the repetitions of prophetic and millenarian time. Are they imitations at all or merely the cyclical re-opening of the Qur’an itself?
This notion of an imitable Qur’an persisted in other ways. Often, it developed as a means of localizing and vernacularizing Muslim communities across the globe. As noted, Ṣāliḥ ibn Ṭarīf’s revelations were said to be in Berber (Fierro 2020); Bāyazīd Anṣārī imitated the Qur’an in Pashto (Anṣārī 1988); Shah Isma’il Safavi wrote revelatory poetry in Azeri (Gasimova 2015; Gallagher 2018); Sultan Sahak received the Kalām-i Saranjām from an angel along with the Gorani script (Mir-Hosseini 1994; Ghaderi 2017); and the Azar Kayvani Zoroastrians of Mughal India presented their claims of revelation to a Muslim audience in a heavenly variety of Persian (Sheffield 2014). These millenarian and vernacular imitations of the Qur’an evoke a central tension of the imitable Qur’an: where is the line between a revelation too universal and one too particular? Cast boldly as the revelation, a Qur’an of aggressive universalism has led some to seek to ground that revelation with vernacular instantiations that moor the putatively universal Arabic of a distant Allah in the vernacular of a more proximate God. To the list above, we can add the Circle 7 Koran of the Moorish Science Temple and aspects of Clarence 13X’s catechisms for the Five Percent Nation of Gods and Earths (Miyakawa 2005; Gallagher 2014; Weisenfeld 2018; Dew 2019). Though the stylistic connections between some of these “imitations” I have mentioned and the Qur’an are difficult to find, they are nevertheless efforts by self-identifying Muslims who approach the Qur’an as a universal and translatable model of divine disclosure that nevertheless needs a vernacular iteration.
On the other hand, certain imitations suggest that the Qur’an is too narrow rather than too universal – a Qur’an in need of expansion rather than vernacularization. While Bāyazīd Anṣārī’s Qur’anic imitation found vernacular form in Pashto verses, his Pashto verses are inextricably tangled with Persian, Arabic, and Hindawi phrases in an effort to transcend a single language through an anti-Babel bricolage. The revelations of the Bāb (Sayyid ʿAlī Muhammad Shirāzī) dance the line between expansive commentary on Arabic suras and claims of divine revelation themselves (Lawson 2012). In a fascinating transformation of the characterization of Muhammad as ummī or illiterate, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad attempted to prove his role as a prophetic channel by occasionally practicing revelation in a language he claimed not to know, and so he produced English words inscribed in an Urdu alphabet (Khan 2015). These para-English revelations join his Urdu and Persian texts in a multilingual prophetic career. More recently, Riza Ahmed Gohar Shahi has used Urdu revelations to create a bricolage of prophetic claims – a drawing together of Qur’anic imitation, American Christian messianism, and identification as an avatar of Vishnu (Shahi 2012). I understand these Qur’anic imitations as seeking to expand the perceived limitations of the Arabic Uthmanic-recension through multilingualism and other combinatory practices. The result is an imitable Qur’an that attempts to exceed rather than particularize or re-iterate the Qur’an.
Alongside these overlapping instincts of messianism, vernacularism, and multilingual bricolage, we find Qur’anic imitations motivated by aesthetic rivalry and fascination. Ibn Muqaffaʿ, al-Mutanabbī, and al-Maʿarrī demonstrated the heights of their Arabic rhetoric by composing imitations that sought to equal or surpass those aspects of Qur’anic form that enchanted so many (Heinrichs 1990; Larkin 2012; Stewart 2017). We have large portions of the imitations attributed to al-Mutanabbī and al-Maʿarrī, and they clearly take aim at an imitable Qur’an characterized by its rhythms of oath-taking and its sajʿ rhymes. Al-Maʿarri was not the last poet or writer to endeavor to “capture the code” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 10) of the Qur’an’s revelatory form. I presume that this was a project that many artists began, but the next work I have found to deliberately imitate the Qur’an as part of an aesthetic project is James Joyce’s perplexing and seething Finnegans Wake of 1939 (which will be discussed below) (Joyce 2012). After Joyce, we find Naguib Mahfouz’s 1959 Awlād ḥāritinā (or Children of the Alley): an allegory for the human being’s repeated – and failed – interactions with the divine, told across 114 chapters to match the 114 suras of the Qur’an (Mahfouz 1996 and 2015). Other examples of modernist Arabic literature, especially Ḥasan Ṭilib’s divan Āyat Jīm (1992), have imitated aspects of Qur’anic rhetoric in explicit ways. Āyat Jīm, for instance, not only uses the terms of āyah and sura but includes an entire section anchored in the Arabic dual in direct imitation of the fifty-fifth sura of the Qur’an, al-Raḥmān.
Finally, joining these poets, these messiahs, and these prophets of the vernacular, we find imitations of the Qur’an produced by non-Muslim polemicists. As certain Christian and ex-Muslim polemicists have taken seriously the doctrine of iʿjāz al-Qur’ān, some have concluded that a successful imitation could unravel the very texture of the Qur’an’s sacrality. The first Christian imitation I have encountered belongs to Ramon Llull (d. ca. 1315), a Franciscan Catalan mystic whose Christian writings have been cast by the Catholic Church as sublime works of apology and/or as rank heresies (Bellver 2014). Among his eclectic productions is an effort to directly mimic, generally, the rhetoric of the Qur’an and, specifically, the discourse of the “ninety-nine names of God” while bending these names toward the proof of Christianity’s superiority over Islam (Sari 2020). In more recent decades, Arabic-speaking Christians and ex-Muslims have written books, published blogs, and recorded YouTube videos that aim to imitate the Qur’an and thus drag its putative divinity into the realm of human linguistic capacity. The most serious of these efforts is a work known as al-Furqān al-Ḥaqq (The True Furqan) which was written in 1999 by two anonymous authors called al-Ṣāfī and al-Mahdī (Shorrosh 1999). Banned in India and “disproven” countless times on YouTube, it seems that few Muslim readers have considered The True Furqan a serious challenge to the Qur’an.
To be clear, the list above is neither exhaustive nor does it aim to suggest any verve of success or felicity in the texts’ acts of Qur’anic imitation. In the way that these mimetic efforts often strain and seethe and unsettle, many scholars of the Qur’an would deem these imitations not as threats but as further proof of the Qur’an’s miraculous quality, just as Musaylima’s lampooned prophetic fragments circulated in early formations of Sunni orthodoxy.
As is evident, these works are wildly disparate efforts, even if they are all shadows cast on the wall by the Qur’an. There is no single genre of imitation; there are responses – often with shared rhetorical techniques – that follow in the wake of the Qur’an’s challenge to human language. There is, moreover, no shared intent in these imitations. Some are decidedly pious efforts by self-identified Muslims, others are rakish aesthetic ventures, and still others are openly hostile to Islam. While the absence of a stable genre and of shared intent are challenges for reading these works together, it is also the very absence of shared intent that offers the potential of finding alternative paths to theorizing literature through the Qur’an and its imitations. What does a literary theory look like when generated by the responses to the Qur’an and by the circulation of Qur’anic forms across linguistic and confessional boundaries and without concern for authorial control?
Revelation Itself
Read collectively, there are patterns in these imitations. Despite the miraculously discontinuous naẓm of the Qur’an and despite the variety of mimetic motivations behind the works listed above, there are key repetitions in technique and rhetoric. Notably, many of the imitations in Arabic focus upon rhymed prose, dual subjects and verbs, and oath-taking. In such instances, these imitations make the determination that it is the early Meccan apocalyptic suras that present the revelatory form that can shape their own bids for divinity or parody. Imitations in other languages often stake their mimetic claims in the context for the imitation’s emergence: claims of illiteracy, divine commandments to recite, and the presence of angels accompany many of these mimetic texts. Others – such as the Circle 7 Koran of the Moorish Science Temple – do not stylistically imitate the Qur’an beyond the sheer invocation of the term itself. The Circle 7 Koran could not be a mere book nor a “bible” (weighed down by the particularities of American white supremacy, as the term was for many in the Moorish Science Temple); rather, it was a “Koran” precisely because it was a revelation that spoke to “Moors” and “Asiatics” around the globe beyond the lexicon of the Bible.
What shapes the logic of so many of these imitations, however, is not adherence to a specific stylistic feature and certainly not to a particular propositional message. Rather, it is the raw and brute fact of divine communication itself that attracts the efforts of these imitations: the first message of revelation is the fact of revelation (Levinas 2007: 127; El-Desouky 2014: 24). In other words, these imitations seek to mimic that God speaks and not what God speaks. We can see this more clearly by turning to an example: Bāyazīd’s The Best Exposition (“Khayr al-Bayān”).
In the mid-sixteenth century among the Afghan highlands, a Sufi by the name of Bāyazīd Anṣārī taught a community of poor laborers, overtaxed nomads, orphans, and widows that God continues to speak – and God does so in a multilingual blend of Arabic, Persian, Pashto, and Hindawi (Rizvi 1965, 1967; Andreyev 1999; Khaṭak 2005). This revelation, known as The Best Exposition (composed ca. 1570) imitates the Qur’an in formal ways: the frequent use of ring structure, the attribution of the text to the direct word of God, the use of oaths and questions, and the adoption of a sajʿ prose that rhymes with Sūrat al-Raḥmān. In Pashto, God commands Bāyazīd “to write Khayr al-Bayān according to the melodies of Sūrat al-Raḥmān (Aw bayazid wakaṣha khayr al-bayān pah hagha alḥān chihay bih sūrat al-raḥmān)” (Anṣārī 1988: 143). The predominantly Pashto but doggedly multilingual verses of The Best Exposition all maintain the final -ān rhyme despite the need to contort and twist Pashto grammar in loyalty to this mimetic sajʿ. Moreover, The Best Exposition echoes the Qur’an’s recurrent self-referentiality by frequently referring to itself (i.e., The Best Exposition) as a dhikr, a kitāb, and a bayān sent so that Bāyazīd may “write for the benefit of people in every language (wakaṣha hagha ḥurūfana chih pah hara zhabah sāzayẓhī da fā’iday da pārah da ādamiyānū)” (Anṣārī 1988: 132–3). In these various ways, each verse of The Best Exposition carries the rhetorical form of the Qur’an. Thus, The Best Exposition becomes two things at once: itself as well as the rhymed reiteration of a revelation from a previous moment.
It is The Best Exposition’s use of chiasmus, however, that exemplifies this pursuit of the notion that God communicates with humankind. Throughout The Best Exposition, it is difficult to parse the direct voice of God from the responses of Bāyazīd (the presumed and attributed “narrator” of The Best Exposition). The use of chiasmus intensifies this entanglement of divine and human voices. God’s cry of “O Bāyazīd” marks the beginning of most new sections throughout The Best Exposition, and the exclamation of “O Glorious One (Aw subḥān)” draws the sections to a conclusion. Within these echoing invocations, we usually find a Qur’anic verse followed by an aphorism of the “the guide” (hādī) that echoes closely the themes of the Qur’anic verse. (The hādī was among the titles of Bāyazīd, and so this is an act of self-citation with these verses.) We then encounter the words of the Prophet Muhammad. Following the words of God, the hādī, and Muhammad, The Best Exposition then includes an unattributed passage that continues the discussion initiated by God. These passages in the center of the chiasmus primarily consist of Pashto explanations of topics found in the Qur’an and throughout the Roshani literary corpus. For instance, one passage discusses tayammum ablutions while another offers an elaboration on the traits of a perfect master. This is the propositional content. After a sufficient discussion of the topic at hand, The Best Exposition reverses the polyvocal unfolding. A saying of the Prophet, an aphorism of the hādī, and a verse of the Qur’an follow one upon the other before we reach Bāyazīd’s final word on the subject and his conclusive, “O Glorious One!”
Let us consider a brief example (in which the -ān/-ām rhyme is noted):
[In Pashto] O Bāyazīd! It is upon you to fear Our torment and to love and recollect Our repose for all people (ādamiyān).
[Arabic verse of the Qur’an] Surely there is a sign in that for the one who fears punishment in the world to come; that is a day when humankind will be gathered to witness, and We will not postpone it beyond its time. [Pashto] In the Qur’an there is evident manifestation (ʿayān)
[Arabic] It is necessary for the human being to be between fear and hope. [Pashto] The hādī – may the mercy of God be upon him! – said those words (kalām).
[Arabic] “The seeking of God is a duty prior to all other duties”. [Pashto] The Prophet – peace be upon him! – said those words (salām). (Anṣārī 1988: 171–2)
In this particular example, the text then moves to a Pashto discussion of the role of dhikr in sharpening the intellect into an organ that guides the believer toward the dual effects of fear and love that God has named as necessary. After this discussion of dhikr, fear, and love, the section concludes with statements attributed to the Prophet, the hādī, and the Qur’an. Finally, Bāyazīd addresses God and reiterates “the necessity of following your command, o Glorious One!”
This pattern repeats throughout The Best Exposition. Schematically, we might present it as such:
God: O Bāyazīd! – Qur’an – Hādī – Muhammad
Central Discussion
Muhammad – Hādī – Qur’an – Bāyazīd: O God!
The chiasmus of this passage – a rhetorical pattern that persists through much of the text – is indicative of The Best Exposition’s mimetic relationship to the Qur’an. Analyses of the literary structures of the Qur’an have flourished in recent years, and the work of Raymond Farrin and Michael Cuypers, for example, point to the deeply chiasmatic spine of many Qur’anic suras and units of revelation (Farrin 2014; Cuypers 2015). Beyond this, however, chiasmus is decidedly metalinguistic. As scholars of semiotics have argued, chiasmus is a structure that reinforces a notion of a felicitous and completed act of communication (Yelle 2012). Portrayed in the structure of the language itself is an exemplary act of communication in which Bāyazīd successfully receives and acknowledges the disclosures of God. Chiasmus is a full conversation: an al-salām alaykum paired with a wa alaykum al-salām.
Chiasmus is also about exchange. Robert Yelle has argued in a recent comparative study of the semiotics of religion that chiasmus works to “establish reciprocity and symmetry” (Yelle 2012: 48–50). Given the repeated arrangements of the chiasmi in The Best Exposition, the order of the nesting of the sources gains immense importance in the established lines of reciprocity. The chiasmus draws our attention to the relationship between God calling “O Bāyazīd!” and Bāyazīd responding “O Glorious One!” In this structural reciprocity, The Best Exposition casts Bāyazīd’s call to God through God’s call to Bāyazīd, and, in such a way, seeks to entangle divine and human voices. While The Best Exposition is distinct in the Roshaniyya corpus as an imitation of the Qur’an, other sources of Roshaniyya attest to their desire to elevate their merely human tongues to organs of angelic and divine capacity. By using linguistic techniques such as Qur’anic imitation and the chanting of particular dhikr phrases, the Roshaniyya sought to journey a spiritual path that culminated in a stage of spiritual dwelling in God (called sukūna) and in the capacity for revelatory language shaped by the revelatory sakīna of God (Anṣārī 1976). In describing the literary effect of the Qur’an, El-Desouky has written that revelatory language presents “a radical language experience, signaling or calling forth the possibility of a radical subjectivity” (El-Desouky 2013: 17). We see such a phenomenon in The Best Exposition. In its imitation of the Qur’an, it strives for a radical infusion of divine language for the purpose of a transformed human subjectivity. It is an effort to instantiate in language the radical claim that God speaks and let that remake the human.
We cannot hold up The Best Exposition as a clear example of the “genre of Qur’anic imitation” because, to re-iterate, there is no such genre but rather disparate efforts at imitating miraculously discontinuous Qur’anic language. Nevertheless, The Best Exposition exemplifies a pattern found among these imitations: the stylistic features of the Qur’an that are most commonly imitated are precisely those that call attention to the act of communication. It is the semiotically dense language, the metalinguistic language, and the recursive and reflexive language in the Qur’an that serves as a departure point for these imitations: the oaths, the use of divine names, the commands to recite, the chiasmatic structures, the hyper-visible rhymes of prose, and so forth. The imitable Qur’an – the Qur’an as we might understand it solely through this constellation of various imitations – is a Qur’an that focuses less on theological proposition, ethical instruction, or prophetic narrative. The imitable Qur’an orients around the sheer possibility that God speaks to humankind.
Fanā’ fī Finnegans Wake
In Hoda El Shakry’s recent monograph, The Literary Qur’an, she engages a series of novels to tease out a Qur’anic literary hermeneutic. El Shakry does not trace the “influence” of the Qur’an on modern Maghrebi authors nor merely identify Qur’anic references in their works; rather, she examines how the Qur’an’s form and rhetoric offers a new, critical way to theorize the very act of reading literature as a matter of spiritual cultivation, self-fashioning, and participation in an intertextual ethical community (El Shakry 2019).
Imitations of the Qur’an invite us to a similar exploration: they invite us to read the Qur’an into works whose mimetic engagement we can amplify as part of our hermeneutic. Or, put differently, the Qur’an is not the object of our literary theories but becomes the source of our literary hermeneutic, guiding our attention to the ways that the divine voice may shimmer in human language. Bāyazīd Anṣārī’s The Best Exposition is quite explicit in presenting itself in a mimetic relationship with the Qur’an, given that it features God commanding Bāyazīd to recite according to the melodies of Sūrat al-Raḥmān. Most imitations, however, place the burden on us to read for imitation once we have identified an initial mimetic gesture (e.g., titling the work Koran, using the dual subject, breaking the work into 114 chapters, etc.).
Joining El Shakry, I want to suggest by way of conclusion that we can adopt a Qur’anic literary hermeneutic and read the Qur’an’s particular literariness into works that would typically fall well outside the ambit of Qur’anic Studies and the Islamicate world. When we read for Qur’anic imitation, we examine those textual gestures and rhetorical turns that seek to crack open our assumptions of the author as the creator, of the forward march of calendrical time, and of the language as the arbitrary code that rests above the world but does not sink into it. The Qur’an represents a language event in antithesis to those assumptions: timeless, directly sutured to the cosmic stuff of creation, and the word of God delivered by Gabriel through the voice of Muhammad rather than created by a single author with specific intent. As Talal Asad has recently argued, whatever we mean by “revelation” must involve a notion of language that is not entirely under our instrumental use but rather escapes us, alludes, and uses us (Asad 2018). A literary hermeneutic rooted in Qur’anic imitation reads various texts for how they pursue a version – however heretical, at times – of the divine word anew that cannot be pinned down by our efforts to categorize genre or to determine intent. In the process, we can open the boundaries of Islamic Studies and further shake the Qur’an free of the parthenogenetic and scripturalist approaches identified by Neuwirth (2019).
Let us consider one final example: Finnegans Wake. James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is not the only modernist work to include aspects of Qur’anic imitation. For instance, Mohamed Shoair’s recently translated The Story of the Banned Book offers a striking history of how Naguib Mahfouz’s Children of the Alley became a focal point of religious and secular debate in Egypt (Shoair 2018 and Shuʿayr 2021). In part, the controversies and assassination attempts that accompanied Children of the Alley are found in the novel’s Qur’anic structure (Netton 2012); Mahfouz’s story of humankind’s jaundiced response to transhistorical prophetic intervention is told across 114 chapters. Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, though, offers a more surprising example of how a Qur’anic literary hermeneutic – beckoned and shaped by Qur’anic imitation – can prove generative in reading the Qur’an into an Irish novelist far outside the traditional purview of Islamic Studies.
As a recent edited volume has argued, there is no single plot, no single way to summarize, nor even an obvious way to begin reading Finnegans Wake (Devlin and Smedley 2015). Each reader must wade around, seeking some foothold among the “plurabilities” of Joyce’s work and finding some glimpse of a pattern that offers meaning before it is snatched away again. Our foothold lies with the moments of Qur’anic imitation in Finnegans Wake. Unlike Bāyazīd’s The Best Exposition, Finnegans Wake is not structured by Qur’anic form. Even if we just examine the mimetic qualities of Finnegans Wake, it is as much an imitation of Hamlet, The Book of Genesis, and Giambattista Vico’s New History as it is of the Qur’an (Atherton 2009; Verene 2016). Nevertheless, there are hundreds of references to and imitations of the Qur’an, and a Qur’anic literary hermeneutic proves useful in understanding Joyce’s beguiling novel (Yared 1998). Consider the following passage:
What then agentlike brought about that tragoady thundsday this municipal sin business? Our cubehouse still rockes as earwitness to the thunder of his arafatas but we hear also through successive ages that shebyy choryush of unkalified muzzlenimissilehims that would blackguardise the whitestone ever hurtleturtled out of heaven. Stay us wherefore in our search for tighteousness, O Sustainer, what time we rise and when we take up to toothmick and before we lump down upown our leatherbed at the fading of the stars! … There extand by now one thousand and one stories, all told, of the same. (Joyce 2012: 5)
The Wake finds the state of the world as fallen into the “sin business” and continuously falling again and again. As becomes clear throughout Joyce’s tome, it is not the depths of the world’s muck that the novel presents as corrosive to a full sense of humanity; rather, our human “sin business” emerges from the delusional insistence on attempting to climb out of the glorious muck in order to leave behind the dirt, the smells, the sweat, and the ribaldry that makes human existence worth living. The end of the passage above skewers those who valorize purity and righteousness. In this case, Joyce draws upon Islamic terms to describe those who are overly devoted to purity: the “unkalified muzzlenmissilehims” seeking the Sustainer’s support in a search for “tighteousness” (a combination of uptight and righteousness?) through the performance of daily purity rituals such as the taking up of a “toothmick”. Though the “cubehouse still rockes as earwitness to the thunder” and though some sense of the sacred cosmos shakes our existence, it is the vainglorious acts of purity that dominate the day.
This tighteousness coincides with a weaponized, nationalized, and phallocentric use of language (“muzzlenmissilehims”) that destroys the very creative possibilities of language. Again, Joyce satirically critiques this phallocentric language by using words drawn from an Islamic lexicon:
Would that fane be Saint Muezzin’s calling – holy places! – and this fez brimless as a brow of faithful toucher on the ground, did wish it were – blessed be the bones! – the ghazi, power of his sword, his manslayer’s gunwielder protended towards that overgrown leadpencil which was soon, monumentally at least, to rise as Molyvdokondylon to, to be, to be his mausoleum. (Joyce 2012: 56)
The “protended” (protuding + pretended) leadpencil wielded by the muezzin ghazi is an overgrown gun that becomes his very mausoleum. Language – especially in its pretensions toward a symbolic ability to represent transcendent notions of nationhood and identity and especially when judged as the weaponized emission of a single author – is absurd and violent, much like the crowing muezzin and the cocky ghazi conjured in this passage. As symbolic representation, language puts “thoughts into coffins” and severs the human voice from the world in the delusional name of control (Joyce 2011: 186).
These passages are exceptions, however, for typically Joyce draws upon an Islamic lexicon not to ridicule any particularly phallocentric nature in Islam but to find a path beyond this weaponized, nationalized language of tighteousness. Indeed, as Rasha Maqableh and others have argued, Joyce’s Orientalist discourses are self-conscious even as they are broadly drawn, and Joyce often used Orientalist imagery to draw attention to the pernicious fantasies of domination that characterized English-language representations of both “the East” and Ireland alike (Ehrlich 1998; Sen 2008; Maqableh 2013).
So what is beyond the tighteousness? One answer is “inebbitation”: the prophetic nabi-quality of the ecstatic drunks who populate Finnegans Wake – such as Mr. Allaf O’Khorwan (Joyce 2012: 352) – and seek redemption in a “Youthrib city” (318) of sanctuary and creation. In these Islamic references, Joyce is staging a clash between the phallocentric violence of tighteousness and the redemption of inebbitation – a redemption of language at its most quotidian and at its most inescapably dirty and inebriated. To join Joyce in the use of puns, we might frame this as an ethics of “escatology”: the redemptive power of language that gives itself to the filth, the farts, and the tears of daily life.
For our purposes, we can note that Joyce turns to the Qur’an as a model for seeking a language beyond the pretensions of authorship, nationalism, and transcendence. The Qur’an is a language event that shatters any notion of a human author in its self-presentation and thus enables a “radical subjectivity” (El-Desouky 2013). Joyce is drawn to a language that transforms him and removes him from his own claims to authorship; he seeks a near-revelatory “radical subjectivity” that annihilates the author. The most concentrated moment of Qur’anic imitation in Finnegans Wake occurs in Chapter 1.5, which is a letter or manifesto that seeks to theorize language as a sacred, vitalizing force. This chapter is as close as we come to a Joycean explanation of what language is doing in Finnegans Wake and it opens this way: “In the name of Annah the Allmaziful, the Everliving, the Bringer of Plurabilities” (Joyce 2012: 104). The chapter continues by declaring itself a “mamafesta”, echoing its earlier self-description as “the mother of the book” that achieves the “tabularasing … obliteration” of “the Prophet” and “whoever stuck his spickle through the spoke” (Joyce 2012: 50).
For Joyce, the Qur’an is a shining example of language that annihilates its own author. As Muhammad served as a channel for the Qur’an, the Qur’an is not an authored book but is instead the mother of the book and the mamafesta. The author does not create but rather the book births. For different reasons, Joycean and Qur’anic rhetorics aim at a similar purpose: to allow language to escape its own author/reciter, to allow language to be sheer language, to allow language to be like the hum of the cosmos, the chirp of the cricket, and the very stuff of existence. Be and it was, unburdened by the pretensions of an author trying to mean something. In the Qur’anic imagination, the revelation of sheer language descends to serve as a site of divine guidance in the created world. The Qur’an represents a collapse of the high and the low, the meeting point of the Creator and the created, a coincidence of opposites, and an achievement of “Doublends Jined” (Joyce 2012: 20) – of the double-ends and the Dublins joined and made mad as a ginned-up majnūn. For Joyce, the revelation of language scrapes away the violent delusions of modern subjectivity and authorship and allows the gloriously scatological mundanity of human life to be shown in its beauty and blessedness.
By following the Qur’anic style of Finnegans Wake, we amplify those rhetorical gestures in Joyce’s literature that aim at the annihilation of the authorial self so that the language itself may take possession of the world. The important point, I would argue, is not whether or not we agree that Finnegans Wake – or any of the other mentioned texts – is a “Qur’anic imitation”, as if there were a stable genre providing consistent measures of categorization. Rather, by seizing upon those mimetic gestures and interpreting them as an invitation to read the Qur’an into the corpus of Joyce, we find a new way of interpreting the sprawling wordplay of Finnegans Wake as an act of annihilating the author (an act of fanā’?) for the sake of a redeemed literature. Moreover, as we read the Qur’an into Finnegans Wake and other texts, we reconceptualize the Qur’an as a key to an alternative literary hermeneutic that explores the value of doomed raids on the ineffable, a hermeneutic that frames language not as those arbitrary symbols that “we use” but rather those vectors of meaning that drag us in the wake and “use us” (Asad 2018), and a hermeneutic that expands the study of Qur’an beyond a subfield of Islamic Studies and beyond the limitations of a scripturalist approach.