A Historical Rereading of the Qur'an

Formulation of the claim

The author calls for rereading the Qur’an within a historical horizon that connects the formation of early Arabic with a critical inventory of documents.

Explanation

The author links linguistic history and documentary history when he calls for rereading the Qur’an within the time of the formation of early Arabic and its written material. For him, meaning is inseparable from the conditions of its emergence and circulation.

Its place in the book’s argument

This atom represents a shift from closed interpretive reading to a historical reading that examines language, document, and context together. It is one of the places where it becomes clear that history here is a tool of understanding, not merely a backdrop.

What the atom does not say

It does not say that history cancels the text’s religious value, nor does it reduce reading to historicization alone; rather, it makes historicization one of the conditions of understanding.

Brief evidence

It should be noted that these two dates are nothing more than hypothetical inferential points that research can later confirm or revise. They are by no means definitive and absolute. There is no doubt that there is abundant literature on the Arabs before Islam and during its emergence, that is, in the phase of revelation, but it must be examined and sifted to distinguish what is sound from what is unsound. We must carry out a documented critical inventory of all this literature and the historical documents that we will use as a basis for determining the nature of the Arabic contemporary with the Qur’an and its characteristics. Such an inventory should not concern itself only with the positive elements on the topic; rather, we must also, to the same degree, attend to the negative data accompanying every modern rereading of the Qur’an

Nearby links

• A Critical Historical Reconstruction of Tradition
• Four Presuppositions Governing Traditional Exegesis
• The Impossibility of Reconstructing Early Islam