The Qur’ān and Modern Arabic Literary Criticism: From Ṭāhā to Naṣr 9781474254267, 9781474253260, 9781474253253

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Contents
Series Foreword
Acknowledgments
A Note on Transliteration and Translation
Introduction
1. A Cartesian Backfire? Ṭāhā Ḥusayn, the Qur’ān, and the Cogito
2. The Return to Philology and the Unmasking of Traditionalism in Amīn al-Khūlī
3. Muḥammad Aḥmad Khalafallāh: The Art of Narrative in the Qur’ān
4. Bint al-Shāṭi’: Literary Significations in the Qur’ān
5. Reclaiming Qur’ānic Exegesis: Naṣr Ḥāmid Abū Zayd between Traditionalism and Postsecularism
6. On Metaphor: Abū Zayd and the Ideologies of majāz in the Qur’ān
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

The Qur’ān and Modern Arabic Literary Criticism

Suspensions: Contemporary Middle Eastern and Islamicate Thought Series Editors: Jason Mohaghegh and Lucian Stone This series interrupts standardized discourses involving the Middle East and the Islamicate world by introducing creative and emerging ideas. The incisive works included in this series provide a counterpoint to the reigning canons of theory, theology, philosophy, literature, and criticism through investigations of vast experiential typologies—such as violence, mourning, vulnerability, tension, and humor—in light of contemporary Middle Eastern and Islamicate thought. Continental Philosophy and the Palestinian Question, Zahi Zalloua Gilles Deleuze, Postcolonial Theory, and the Philosophy of Limit, Reda Bensmaia Hostage Spaces of the Contemporary Islamicate World, Dejan Lukic Iranian Identity and Cosmopolitanism, Lucian Stone On the Arab Revolts and the Iranian Revolution, Arshin Adib-Moghaddam The Politics of Writing Islam, Mahmut Mutman Remaking Politics, Markets, and Citizens in Turkey, Ebru Kayaalp Sorcery, Totem, and Jihad in African Philosophy, Christopher Wise Transgression and the Inexistent, Mehdi Belhaj Kacem The Writing of Violence in the Middle East, Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh

The Qur’ān and Modern Arabic Literary Criticism From Ṭāhā to Naṣr Mohammad Salama

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2018 This paperback edition published 2020 Copyright © Mohammad Salama, 2018 Mohammad Salama has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. x–xi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image: Anita Chowdry, Classic Shamsa, mineral colours and gold on Gampi paper, private collection. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Names: Salama, Mohammad, author. Title: The Qur’a¯n and modern Arabic literary criticism : from Taha to Naòsr / Mohammad Salama. Description: New York, NY : Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. | Series: Suspensions: contemporary Middle Eastern and Islamicate thought | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017051424| ISBN 9781474254267 (hardback) | ISBN 9781474253277 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Qur’a¯n as literature. | Qur’ān–Criticism, interpretation, etc. | Criticism–Egypt–History–20th century.Classification: LCC BP131.8 .S245 2018 | DDC 297.1/226–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017051424 ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-5426-7 PB: 978-1-3501-4159-9 ePDF: 978-1-4742-5325-3 ePub: 978-1-4742-5327-7 Series: Suspensions: Contemporary Middle Eastern and Islamicate Thought Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

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َ ُ ‫اس فَيَ ْم ُك‬ "‫ض‬ َ َّ‫"فَأ َ َّما ال َّزبَ ُد فَيَ ْذهَبُ ُجفَا ًء ۖ َوأَ َّما َما يَنفَ ُع الن‬ ِ ْ‫ث فِي ْالر‬

(‫ اآلية السابعة عشر‬:‫)سورة الرعد‬

“As to the froth, worthless it shall go; and as to what benefits people, it shall remain on the earth.” Qur’ān (13:17)

Contents Series Foreword Acknowledgments A Note on Transliteration and Translation Introduction 1 A Cartesian Backfire? Ṭāhā Ḥusayn, the Qur’ān, and the Cogito 2 The Return to Philology and the Unmasking of Traditionalism in Amīn al-Khūlī 3 Muḥammad Aḥmad Khalafallāh: The Art of Narrative in the Qur’ān 4 Bint al-Shāṭi’: Literary Significations in the Qur’ān 5 Reclaiming Qur’ānic Exegesis: Naṣr Ḥāmid Abū Zayd between Traditionalism and Postsecularism 6 On Metaphor: Abū Zayd and the Ideologies of majāz in the Qur’ān Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

viii x xii 1 17 37 51 65 77 97 115 119 145 155

Series Foreword Poets, artists, theologians, philosophers, and mystics in the Middle East and Islamicate world have been interrogating notions of desire, madness, sensuality, solitude, death, time, space, and so on for centuries, thus constituting an expansive and ever-mutating intellectual landscape. Like all theory and creative outpouring, then, theirs is its own vital constellation—a construction cobbled together from singular visceral experiences, intellectual ruins, novel aesthetic techniques, social-political-ideological detours, and premonitions of a future—built and torn down (partially or in toto), and rebuilt again with slight and severe variations. The horizons shift and frequently leave those who dare traverse these lands bewildered and vulnerable. Consequently, these thinkers and their visionary ideas remain largely unknown, or worse, mispronounced and misrepresented in the so-called Western world. In the hands of imperialistic frameworks, a select few thinkers of the Islamic world remain grossly silenced, misrepresented, spoken on behalf of, or rather about. Their ideas are simplified into mere social formulae and empirical scholarly categories. Whereas so-called Western philosophers and writers are given full leniency to contemplate the most incisive or abstract ideas, non-Western thinkers, especially those located in the imagined realms of the Middle East and Islamicate world, are reduced to speaking of purely political histories or monolithic cultural narratives. In other words, they are distorted and contorted to fit within hegemonic paradigms that steal away their more captivating potentials. Contributors to this series provide a counterpoint to the reigning canons of theory, theology, philosophy, literature, and criticism through investigations of the vast experiential typologies of such regions. Each volume in the series acts as a “suspension” in the sense that the authors will position contemporary thought in an enigmatic new terrain of inquiry, where it will be compelled to confront unforeseen works of critical and creative imagination. These analyses



Series Forewordix

will not only highlight the full range of current intellectual and artistic trends and their benefits for the citizens of these phantom spheres, but also argue that the ideas themselves are borderless, and are thus of great relevance to all citizens of the world. Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh and Lucian Stone

Acknowledgments I cannot think a “book.” This academic artifact, this patient and cumulative investigation of a particular topic or group of related topics, is beyond me. This “book,” therefore, would never have been written without the help, support, and advice of many colleagues, friends, cohorts, teachers, and students. The birth of this study and its title took place on a beautiful New Orleans morning stroll in the Fall of 2013. I vividly recall the heart-warming chat and breakfast with my dear colleague and most admirable and insightful scholar of Islamic Studies: Nasser Rabbat. Without Nasser’s illumination of the path with the majestic genius of his architectural mind, I would have missed the glimpse of the thread that connects these authors together “from Ṭāhā to Naṣr,” exactly as Rabbat suggested the title of the book to be. Ellen McLarney’s insightful work on Bint al-Shati’s role as a mighty “soft force” in Egypt’s Islamic awakening and Mervat Hatem’s scintillating analysis of her heroic biographies on the women in the prophetic household have both made the task of writing a complex chapter on this revolutionary exegete feel like a warm and thought-provoking endeavor. Walid Salih’s brilliant work taught me how to read the field and urged me to think and rethink the complexities of Qur’ānic Studies in Western academia and beyond. Jeannie Miller’s remarkable examinations of al-Jāḥiẓ, Lara Harb’s cutting-edge work on majāz and Qur’ānic inimitability in al-Jurjānī, and Alexander Key’s important study on maʿná and old Arabic theory in theology (ibn Fūrak) and in logic (ibn Sīnā), among others, have all been a source of great inspiration. Muhsin al-Musawi inspired me with his ever-renewable passion for Arabic literature, criticism, and Islamic Studies. I am grateful for his continued support and friendship. Many people have read the manuscript and I have benefited from their feedback. I must thank the anonymous readers for their valuable comments and generous input. I must also convey my gratitude for the following colleagues and friends. I am thankful to Dustin Cowell, who patiently checked my translations of Arabic texts in earlier versions of this manuscript. I am deeply indebted to Zailig Pollock, who generously read the



Acknowledgmentsxi

manuscript and provided me with invaluable suggestions and pushed me to improve my argument and polish my thought. I cannot find the words to thank Zailig enough. Anna Cruz patiently checked my writing and always reminded me of the imaginary reader who yearns for simplicity and straightforwardness. I have been immensely fortunate to have Benjamin David Palmer as my initial editor. His meticulous attention and careful reading made my argument cogent and forceful. Lucian Stone and Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh reviewed and edited the manuscript for Bloomsbury’s Suspension Series. Their editorial insight and intellectual generosity are proof that academia is still bi-khayr. I am equally grateful to the anonymous copy editor who worked diligently to check the diacritical consistency throughout the manuscript. Her timeliness and efficiency in meeting the submission deadline were simply remarkable. Thanks are also due to Bloomsbury’s Commissioning Editor Lalle Pursglove and editorial assistant Lucy Carroll for their availability, their commitment to nursing this project to fruition, and their flexibility when I needed more time. Many colleagues and friends in San Francisco, where most of this book was written, as well as Egypt and beyond, provided me with support and encouragement. I am grateful for the continued friendship and lasting support of Nuraini Abd Zabar. I am also thankful for the heartfelt conversations with Ferial Ghazoul and Ebtehal Younes. My gratitude extends to Caterina Marriotii and Ayan Jiggetts. As well, I would be remiss not to thank the following colleagues and friends: Hanadi al-Samman, Gretchen Head, Nizar Hermes, Michael Cooperson, Aamir Mufti, Yomna Saber, Muhammad Nassar, Abdlkarim Alamry, Samer Ali, Pamela Vaughn, Hisham Khairy Issa, Maya Yazigi, Yasser Chaddad, Michael Hammer, Edwin Williams, Alladin Mahmoud, Chris Wen-chao Li, Berenice Le Marchand, Larry Hanley, Mary Soliday, Charles Egan, Ilona Vandergriff, Ana Luengo, Mohammad Azadpur, Dane Johnson, Mahmood Monshipouri, Dina Ibrahim, Mike Lunine, Maxine Chernoff, and the unmatchable Paul Sherwin. Kelly McGuire has provided me with a wealth of warm feelings and lexical brilliance. She always has the right word and the right idea as she muses over the Latin and Greek origins of every word she shares with me. I am thankful for her beautiful mind, her noble soul, her steadfast support, her companionship, and her love. My deepest gratitude is by far owed to her.

A Note on Transliteration and Translation This book follows a specialized diacritical system for Arabic for all scholarly purposes. I use the standard Western spelling of terms that have entered the English language such as “Arab,” “Islam,” and country names. I use the standard Library of Congress transliteration system for all other Arabic terms, with a few exceptions. In Arabic words such as ‘Ā’isha, the (‘) symbolizes the Arabic letter (‫‘[ )ع‬ayn], while the (’) symbolizes the glottal Arabic (‫[ )ئ ؤ إ أ ء‬hamza]. An accented (á) symbolizes the alif maqṣūra (‫ )ى‬at the end of an Arabic word, as in (‫‘ )على‬alá. The definitive (‫ )ال‬is fully transcribed as (Al-/al-) regardless of whether the following letters are ḥurūf shamsiyya or ḥurūf qamariyya. In genitive iḍāfa constructions, the pronounced (‫ )ة‬is transcribed as a -t- between two nouns. Full case endings are added to Qur’ānic and poetic quotations only. When a full case ending is necessary, in cases of (‫[ )تَ ْن ِوين‬tanwīn], or nunation, the sign (-un) indicating the nominative case, (-an) indicating the accusative case, and (-in) indicating the genitive case are all superscripted. Dagger alif (‫[ )أَلِف َخ ْن َج ِريَّة‬alif khanjarīyya], which is also known as symbolic alif, small alif, superscript alif, or historical alif, and which appears in Arabic script as a short vertical stroke on top of a consonant, is symbolized as a long /ā/ sound. For example: (‫[ ) ٰه َذا‬hādhā] or (‫[ ) َرحْ مٰ ن‬raḥmān]. The (‫ )ه‬at the end of a transcribed Arabic word such as the possessive pronoun in ‫[ كتابه‬his book] refers to Arabic words ending in an (h) (‫ )ه‬and not with a (‫ )ة‬as commonly practiced. The final (‫ )ة‬is not transcribed, as in ‫كتابة‬ [kitāba]. The Prophet’s name is transcribed as Muhammad and he is referred to either by his first name or as the “Prophet.” Written without a capital, the word “prophet” retains its common meaning. Unless otherwise noted in the text or notes, all approximations of verses from the Qur’ān are my own. I shy away from calling them translations



A Note on Transliteration and Translationxiii

or interpretations. These approximations are for context and explicatory matters only and are therefore not to constitute a basis for further scholarly investigations without consulting the original Arabic text, which may include different meaning(s) than I am able to capture in English. All translations from Arabic and French are my own.

Introduction

Nowhere is the need for historical research in Arabic more pressing for understanding the present than in studying the Qur’ān. Over the centuries, the Arabic language has experienced morphological and phonological mutations that render the most erudite Arabist dependent on dictionaries and cut off from the past linguistically. As a result, the breach between classical Arabic and contemporary writings is the widest in the history of Arabic thought. This breach explains much of the intellectual poverty found in challenges to “new” approaches to Qur’ānic exegesis—academic approaches of some of the most discerning twentieth-century scholars in the Arab world. Their work, which marks a sharp departure from so-called “right thinking,” demonstrates that a fresh and unmediated look at Islamic sources can render tradition itself an impetus for a long-overdue change in approaching tafsīr (Qur’ānic explication). This book investigates modern counter-hegemonic approaches to Qur’ānic exegesis in twentieth-century Egypt, outlining five influential authors whose work had a tremendous impact on the field of modern Arabic and Qur’ānic Studies. Beginning with Ṭāhā Ḥusayn (1899–1973), passing through Amīn al-Khūlī (1895–1966), Muḥammad Aḥmad Khalafallāh (1916–98), ‘Ᾱ’isha ‘Abd al-Raḥmān (Bint al-Shāṭi’) (1913–98), and concluding with Naṣr Ḥāmid Abū Zayd (1943–2010), From Tāhā to Naṣr gives detailed analyses of texts, genres, and events that have, over the decades, inflamed the debate on the validity of literary criticism in approaching the Qur’ān. A key theological difficulty that comes with rethinking Qur’ānic exegesis in the twentieth century is the closure of all borders that demarcate so-called correct readings or interpretations of the Qur’ān. This ideology, to use a common metaphor, confuses a tree with its surrounding bushes by guarding those bushes, and not the tree, against all that is new and foreign. The best way to describe this condition is to view it as a parasitical relationship in

2

The Qur’ān and Modern Arabic Literary Criticism

which derivatives become substance—to put it more bluntly, in which the host human text metamorphoses into a God while God’s original word is relegated to a condition of silence, accessible and mediated only through the lens of those “guarding texts” that claim to protect it against all enemies. This explains the outcry of intolerance that authors like Ḥusayn, Khalafallāh, and Abū Zayd faced when seeking to reach the tree dūn waṣāṭa (sans médiation), thus provoking the bushes that have become the newly acquired divinity. In the words of the epigraph to this book, “the froth” has come to replace “what benefits people.” Partly because of this critique of intolerance, the ideas that the audacious and risk-taking scholars, who are the subject of this study, bring to the considerations of Qur’ānic explication are fresh, innovative, and worthy of renewed attention by contemporary and global readers. Of these scholars, Ṭāhā Ḥusayn (known as the doyen of Arabic literature), one of Muḥammad ‘Abduh’s first intellectual inheritors, confronts both the Arabists and Qur’ānic scholars with the strong postulate that there could be no such thing as pre-Islamic poetry, that most of it was forged after the Qur’ān was revealed. Although Ḥusayn does not attempt an interpretation of the Qur’ān per se, the questions he raises concerning the very existence of preIslamic poetry, and hence its relationship to the discourse of Qur’ānic i‘jāz (apologetics/inimitability), have created a contested terrain. In turn, a great divide has emerged between apologists and dissenters in the field of modern Arabic literary thought and Qur’ānic Studies. Yet scholarship in English on Ḥusayn’s significant contributions to the understanding of classical Arabic has been limited.1 Ḥusayn’s controversial book On Pre-Islamic Poetry (1926), one of the most important texts of Arabic literary criticism in the last century, has not been translated; thus, his argument and its ramifications have remained unexplored in recent scholarship. The great divide in modern Arabic criticism that followed the publication of Ḥusayn’s work has also been largely neglected. The putative links between the public discontent and uproar that the works of Ḥusayn (1926), Khalafallāh (1948), al-Khūlī (1954), and Abū Zayd (1995) have encountered not only reveal the continuity of violence in Islamist Egypt over the last century, but also pull back the curtain on a robust, yet largely unexplored, anti-mainstream current of literary Qur’ānic Studies. The shortlived school of al-Bayāniyyūn (Rhetoricians) in the 1940s and 1950s, which included al-Khūlī, his wife ‘Ᾱ’isha ‘Abd al-Raḥmān (Bint al-Shāṭi’), and his

Introduction

3

student Khalafallāh, is a case in point. Indeed, there is hardly any study of this anti-fundamentalist school of Qur’ānic exegesis available in English.2 And yet, although their work remains untranslated, it is doubtless that these (university-educated) authors will continue to attract future scholarship on Qur’ānic exegesis. Abū Zayd closes the century with what has come to be known as the most controversial case in modern Arabic and Qur’ānic Studies. The media’s focus, local and international, on the legal aspects of Abū Zayd’s case, including the denial of his promotion, the question of academic freedom, the accusation of apostasy, the forced divorce from his wife imposed by the Egyptian court, and his subsequent exile to the Netherlands, have all drawn attention away from his scholarly contributions. Abū Zayd’s masterful revisiting of the classical Mu‘tazilite–Ash‘arite debate on Qur’ānic interpretation, and his fresh approach toward transcending the positions of both schools, makes his intervention informative of practices that bear on borders—textual, intellectual, and political—today. The common thread that weaves through Ḥusayn, the Rhetoricians, and Abū Zayd in the context of Qur’ānic Studies is, I believe, unique. This group of anti-essentialist Egyptian reformists comes together by way of the double punch of their critique: first, in opposition to the orientalist agenda of colonial modernity and its Eurocentric historical positivism in approaching Islamic history, the reformists offer a philological appreciation of the classical Arabic and Qur’ānic tradition. Second, and concomitantly, they write against an ultraconservative Islamist discourse that may have crystallized at the very encounter with that colonial modernity. It is crucial to emphasize that Ḥusayn and his intellectual inheritors promote a theory of linguistic and rhetorical literariness that finds its basis in the historical debates on Qur’ānic apologetics and on the linguistic marvel and stylistic inimitability of the Qur’ān. This return to language provides a philologically and aesthetically informed approach to the Qur’ān, both textually and contextually, with a view toward opening up a new discursive space in Qur’ānic Studies; it emphasizes an urgent need for an alternative assessment of tradition beyond the vapid essentialisms of orientalism and Islamism, with their respective biases and selective epistemologies. As the chapters of this book reveal, while this disparate group of reformists, scattered throughout momentous events in twentieth-century Egypt, traces its

4

The Qur’ān and Modern Arabic Literary Criticism

starting point back to ‘Abduh’s Tafsīr al-Manār (The Lighthouse [of Qur’ānic] Explication), it surely finds its spark in Ḥusayn’s Fī al-Shi‘r al-Jāhilī, and continues throughout the century up to Abū Zayd’s Mafhūm al-Naṣṣ (The Concept of the Text).3 Their focus is methodological and academic rather than political or ideological—the latter is seen, for example, in Sayyid Qutb’s Fī Ẓilāl al-Qur’ān (In the Shades of the Qur’ān).4 Because their methodological focus accounts for their somewhat detached and scientific tone, one has to take this pivotal point into consideration while reading the chapters of this book. In addition, whereas Ḥusayn writes On Pre-Islamic Poetry as a lone wolf, al-Khūlī, Bint al-Shāṭi’, Khalafallāh, and later Abū Zayd saw themselves as part of Ḥusayn’s (and to some extent ‘Abduh’s) anti-mainstream work, whose central concern is the professional and scholastic relationship between literary criticism and the Qur’ān. In engaging with their work, one is not just reading the writings of a group of aestheticians or rationalist synthesizers of tradition, or modernity-produced critics with Cartesian or positivist edges, or even pure epistemic theorizers. One is, above all, reading the work of superior specialists of Arabic grammar, rhetoric, literary criticism, and Qur’ānic explication, specialists who make significant contributions to topics in the broader field of modern Arabic criticism and Qur’ānic Studies. The call for a vigorous investigation of this group of literary historians and academic exegetes is not necessarily an invitation to make them adoptable or applicable, but rather an attempt to show that contemporary concerns in Egypt’s Islamic discourse are best understood in light of Ḥusayn’s instrumental work. The aforementioned lack of study of this anti-fundamentalist school does not mean that the writings of these scholars have gone largely unnoticed. In fact, a number of authors have begun to reassess the work of ‘Abduh and Ḥusayn in light of a continuity thesis.5 In these writings, ‘Abduh is credited with a core reformation and a theological emancipation of Islamic thought, in addition to his eloquent advocacy not for Islam’s compatibility with modernity but, rather, for modernity’s consistency with Islam. Islam, ‘Abduh contends, is a religion whose liberal and progressive principles are already subsumed under its very tenets.6 Ḥusayn is also cautiously perceived as an inheritor of ‘Abduh’s legacy7 and as l’enfant terrible of classical Arabic who upsets the applecart of traditionalism, especially in the pre-Muslim Brotherhood context of colonial Egypt. Scholarship on Ḥusayn, however, has been largely negligent

Introduction

5

of the great divide his work represents for the generation of Qur’ānic exegetes who followed him. These studies also have not engaged sufficiently in Ḥusayn’s debunking of Eurocentric systems of thought in favor of a more radical and historical cosmopolitanism. I track the divide of Ḥusayn’s work through philology in particular, as well as through the emergence of the majaddidūn (Renovators) or bayāniyyūn (Rhetoricians) at the hands of al-Khūlī, Bint al-Shāṭi’, Khalafallāh, and later Abū Zayd. The so-called “rationalist” approach to Qur’ānic explication that brings these authors together is more commonly referred to in twentieth-century Egypt as tayyār al-tajdīd (Renovation Current); together, the authors are dubbed the mujaddidūn (Renovators), bayāniyyūn (Rhetoricians), or al-Mu‘tazilūn al-Judud (Neo-Mu‘tazilites).8 The label tajdīd is an aporia of opposites. On the one hand, tajdīd means renewal, just as when someone renews a passport or a document that had previously been issued but has subsequently expired. In that sense, tajdīd carries a somewhat pragmatic connotation of continuity or of using tradition to reinvigorate the present, however controversial that tradition might be. On the other hand, tajdīd, which denotes renovation, carries a negative connotation of ibdā‘/bid‘a (invention, or the creation of something new, ex nihilo). While nothing is inherently wrong with the creation of something out of nothing, in hegemonic Islamist discourse, ibdā‘ is perceived as an act of transgression, namely, a blasphemous attempt to destabilize theological norms by adding to, altering, or criticizing the course of divinity which is already perceived to be complete in itself.9 Any attempt to add, modify, or reconsider this given tradition has come to be perceived as an act of deviation from the divine course and is met with fierce opposition from Islamists. In other words, in the eyes of religious fundamentalism, there has been no discernable distinction between someone who denies the existence of God, someone who is uncertain of God’s existence, and someone who is agnostic or has a different understanding—not necessarily an atheist or a denier—of tradition. Thus, any tampering with the status quo puts the mujaddid—notwithstanding his or her level of knowledge, versatility, or status in society—at a grave risk of turning a whole nation, with all of its legal and social machinery, against him or her in no time. This misplaced anathema, which befell all of the authors I discuss in this book in varying degrees, not only rejects a vigorous tradition that

6

The Qur’ān and Modern Arabic Literary Criticism

the present Arabic-Islamic world has been in dire need of revisiting, especially since the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of colonial modernity and consequent postcolonial diasporas, but also reflects a dangerous epistemology in which the blinding nationalism of hegemonic religious discourses turns into the ‘aṣabiyya (blood solidarity) that Ibn Khaldūn warns us against, a rigid and heartless nativism that mistakes renovation for aberration, and confuses renewal with thought corruption, intellect with apostasy, and enlightenment with ungodliness. The situation becomes more complex with al-Khūlī’s mid-century school of tajdīd, a word that al-Khūlī does not shy away from as he even includes it in the title of his seminal work Manāhij Tajdīd (Methods of Renovation).10 Such a title underscores the need for systematic tools of research in Qur’ānic Studies and classical traditions. Of all the mujaddidūn, al-Khūlī in particular has not been studied rigorously enough in Arabic or in English and as such has fallen through the disciplinary cracks of Qur’ānic Studies. A main reason for the neglect of this important reformer is that anti-hegemonic readings of the Qur’ān in twentieth-century Egypt have always turned into major events. While his work does not draw attention to itself in the same way the work of a polemical Islamist like Sayyid Qutb does, al-Khūlī has undoubtedly laid, or, to be fair, polished and revived, a solid foundation for scholastic research on the Qur’ān. An influential thinker and a mid-century advocate of both antiEurocentrism and anti-traditionalism, al-Khūlī’s main goal, which he outlines in Manāhij Tajdīd, is to create a radical restructuring of Islamic thought through a rigorous epistemic methodology that decolonizes the study of the Qur’ān and classical Arabic, freeing it from the recalcitrant mythologies of a hegemonic religious discourse. Confronting political, traditionalist, and Eurocentric tools of knowledge production, al-Khūlī’s philological rationalism makes him one of the most revolutionary anti-colonial intellectuals in the Arab world; thus, he challenged al-Azhar, the Muslim Brotherhood, Nasserism, and European modernity, all in a single blow. Al-Khūlī’s work calls for an investigation into the grand context of colonialism and modernity. The intellectual legacy of the mujaddidūn still raises a number of important questions. Is al-Khūlī’s desire to deconstruct a reified and radicalized religious discourse itself a boomerang reaction to colonial modernity, that is, a critical and scientific return to foundational

Introduction

7

sources in order to liberate the “Islamic mind” from the shackles of mythology à la Ibn Khaldūn? Or does this theoretical undertaking simply fall under a Fanonian or Bhabhan theory rubric of colonial mimicry? If so, is it therefore nothing but a Manichean transfer of la mission civilatrice from a colonizing self to a colonized other? Is it a self-surgical look backward—with Eurocentric eyes—at a convoluted and archaic tradition that needs to be “refined”—that is, reified and thereby rendered compatible with the so-called liberal, progressive, and secular practices of institutionalized European modernity? In other words, are we facing a retooling or a retailoring of Qur’ānic exegetic tradition in twentieth-century Egypt? There is no singular or simple answer to these questions. But no matter how we choose to approach them, what must be historically recorded is that the tenuous thread that brings these centennial revolutionaries together is that they share one stance: a pronounced rejection of essentialism in all of its forms. Essentialism is the cancer of theory, the condition where theory morphs into dogma and forms its own autoimmune cells of malicious thought to the point where a specific structure in analyzing a text, the Qur’ān in this case, is followed “religiously,” meticulously, blindly, and relentlessly to the detriment of all other approaches. For example, Ḥusayn and Abū Zayd’s nonessentialist co-adoption of French philosophical and linguistic concepts as well as Arabic philology in approaching the Qur’ān is reminiscent of a lost era of hybrid intellectual fertilization that characterizes classical Islamic philosophy specifically, with its incorporation of Aristotelian logic, and the Greek tradition more broadly. Yet both scholars are perceived as anathemas to modern contemporary Islamist discourse. One of the key issues this book takes up is the resurfacing of the question of ta’wīl (interpretation), which becomes more prominent in Abū Zayd’s approach to the Qur’ān. Al-Ta’wīl, in its etymological Arabic sense, is a critical practice or exercise geared toward deciding meaning in the Qur’ān. Much like the interpretation of literary texts, albeit with more gravity, al-ta’wīl posits that there is an anteriority or a primary meaning to be deciphered or arrived at, thus postulating a hermeneutical function for the understanding of the Qur’ān. This hermeneutical inevitability is bound to trigger yet another set of extratextual questions regarding the historical validity and the truthvalue of the text itself. Here lies the conundrum of all hermeneutics: one reads

8

The Qur’ān and Modern Arabic Literary Criticism

the text to determine its meaning precisely in order for this determination to account for a nonlinguistic value that lies outside of the text. In fact, this defensive disposition, or reading in order to prove the unprecedentedness and inimitability of the Qur’ān in the phenomenological world, has in the process belabored the discourse of i‘jāz (Qur’ānic apologetics) from its early beginnings, starting with the eighth-century Abū ‘Ubayda ibn al-Muthanná11 all the way to Abū Zayd. The extralinguistic value of the Qur’ān has been predicated on proving the text’s linguistic, and therefore theological, uniqueness—its difference from all other texts. What the mujaddidūn have contributed to this debate is an avoidance of hermeneutical or interpretive approaches and a focus instead on language and related linguistic disciplines that assume a measure of theoretical or methodological consistency. Thus, critical analysis moves with regard to both the structure and historical development of language (Ḥusayn, al-Khūlī, Bint al-Shāṭi’) and the taxonomy of stylistic patterns and their internal relationships, as we see in Khalafallāh’s division of the modes, or, as he calls them, artistic variations in the Qur’ānic narrative. The difference between this and other approaches to the Qur’ān is remarkable. To use a common example, in noting the verse that says “yadu Allāhi fawqa aydīhim” (God’s hand is on top of/ above their hands) (Q 48:10), one would surmise that God is supportive of the believers who promised not to turn their backs and run away when confronting their enemies at the al-Ḥudaybiya event.12 This is considered hypónoia, that is, a hermeneutic reading, a nonliteral interpretation of an authoritative text aimed at detecting an underlying meaning supposedly hidden under the surface of the text.13 If one opts to read the verse in Q 48:10 as a trope and surmise that God is using a figure of speech, say a metonymy or a metaphor, then one is examining the verse from a literary perspective or from a focus on the linguistic and rhetorical techniques of the Qur’ān. While the two processes appear different from one another, they are closely interlinked. In other words, the linguists must comprehend the figurative level of the verse in order to see the linguistic and stylistic functions as well as to understand that there is something different about the composition of the verse from what customarily happens in the phenomenological world.14 Likewise, the hermeneutist will have to decipher the stylistic and literary aspects of the verse in order to conclude that God is basically saying that He

Introduction

9

is supportive of or empowering the believers and not just putting His hand on top of theirs in the literal sense. This does not mean, however, that a third reading does not exist, a reading that quite readily regards the verse in its most literalist anthropomorphist sense, without figuration. Despite the fact that these different readings are so intertwined with and interdependent on one another, the subtle differences between them have led unnecessarily to heated acrimonies among Muslim theologians for centuries; indeed, they still haunt the scene of Qur’ānic exegesis today.15 In contrast to the contemporary scene, the post–Second World War current of the tajdīd faced a different set of challenges. The rise of nationalism coupled with the sociopolitical activism of the Muslim Brotherhood abetted the denigration of the liberalist discourse of the 1920s and 1930s. While Ḥusayn was still the well-recognized doyen of Arabic literature, the fashionable Cartesianism of Fī al-Shi‘r al-Jāhilī became outmoded. After losing the battle to literary and theological conservatism, Fī al-Shi‘r al-Jāhilī slowly exited, lying dormant and distant from the public intellectual scene. Ḥusayn himself gradually steered away from the Qur’ānic debate altogether, focusing more on his role as an educator, littérateur, and public intellectual. A few faithful followers of Ḥusayn still saw him as the main advocate of a revolutionary Islamic reform in postcolonial Egypt. So, to read al-Khūlī, Khalafallāh, Bint al-Shāṭi’, and Abū Zayd is in many ways to read Ḥusayn and of course ‘Abduh as inspirational forces. To read them is also to witness not only the emergence of new figures of intellectual dissent in the era of postcolonialism but also the emergence of post-nationalism—the slow yet sure rigidity of both Islamist and nationalist discourses as well as the regimes and systems of governments that perpetuate them. It was the subsequent curbing of academic freedom and censoring of vigorous critical discourse that pushed the academic Qur’ān debate to go underground in the 1950s. Nasser’s firing of al-Khūlī, among 200 other professors at Cairo University in 1954, in what is historically known as Ḥarakat al-Taṭhīr (The Purification Movement), is precisely what granted credence and support to the underground regressive and “revivalist” Islamist discourse of the Muslim Brotherhood among many other radical groups.16 As this book draws attention to the contributions a responsible cohort of scholars has made, albeit at a dear price, to the emancipation of Qur’ānic

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The Qur’ān and Modern Arabic Literary Criticism

Studies in twentieth-century Egypt, it also places the Qur’ān debate in dialogue with the dynamics of modernity, decolonization, and postcolonial Islamic thought. In these and other instances, this study seeks to underscore the significance of literary approaches to the Qur’ān without presupposing that the difference between al-ittijāh al-‘aqlī wa al-ittijāh al-naqlī (rationalist versus revelationist approaches) is irresolvable when it comes to different and diverse understandings of the Qur’ān.17 What is discoverable from these juxtapositions, however, is not only that one must eschew any ideological underpinnings of homegrown fundamentalist interpretations of the Qur’ān,18 as well as the nonlinguistic “historical” approaches of positivist Eurocentrism,19 but also that the Arabic language—the Qur’ān’s constitutive logos, with all its associated philologies of literariness—remains the most authoritative and legitimate linguistic tool for the dual task of both debunking essentialism and drawing attention to its occurrence. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, Qur’ānic exegetes in Egypt have striven to achieve this precise task by building stronger ties not only between the Qur’ān and literature, but also between the Qur’ān and the tradition of Arabic literary criticism. ‘Abduh has emphasized the sensibility of the adīb (author/writer) in deriving from the Qur’ān; Ḥusayn has sought to find new beginnings for Arabic literary tradition, dismissing pre-Islamic Arabic poetry as a credible source for pre-Islamic Arabia and installing the Qur’ān as the fountain source of that very poetry and its epoch, not the other way around; al-Khūlī has insisted that the most viable explication of the Qur’ān is a literary one and that the Qur’ān includes a literariness that does not admonish or belittle the book’s divine authority, but in fact is part and parcel of its rhetorical i‘jāz. The authors in this study have not only achieved a level of Arabic proficiency unparalleled in the Western academy, but they have also perceived the Qur’ān as the highest achievement in and of that language. The Qur’ān owns and is owned by Arabic, the subject and object of its own linguistic ontology. It is therefore inevitably figurative and forever conscious of its own figurativeness as it states its rhetorical supremacy. To view the Qur’ān as biblically intertextual or to propose that its Meccan sūras (chapters) are best understood as Psalmodic or that its Medinan chapters are midrashic should in fact enhance, not diminish, its inherent rhetorical quality.20 Yet, the Qur’ān is not just an achievement

Introduction

11

in form or stylistic i‘jāz. The book affirms its own rhetorical brilliance while conveying a message that soars beyond mere linguistic i‘jāz at the same time as the content relies on the deliverer to deliver its message. This figurative aspect of the Qur’ān is what prompts the authors in this study to embrace literary approaches to exegesis. Unlike these scholars, other scholars seem to experience the unheimlich, the uncanny à la Freud, when it comes to reading and internalizing classical Arabic, especially in its intricate and complex formations, its convoluted inflections, and its tortuous syntax vis-à-vis the mostly unsurprising syntax of a Romance language. It takes only a few pages of reading to know if a scholar does or does not have enough mastery to allow for a basic understanding of Qur’ānic Arabic, not to mention the in-depth analysis of its chapters and see through scholarship that has opted instead to study the Qur’ān in translation or to renounce the book altogether and seek comfort in assuming that its origins lie in another language, or another history—one they can understand. Arabic is one of the most intractable languages in the world, and its proper mastery can take decades if not one’s entire lifetime. Nevertheless, it provides the one and only access point to any credible scholarship on the topic. Subjecting Qur’ānic Studies to a mediocre level of scholarship in classical Arabic is like losing a key and searching for it only under the one post that has light, ignoring the unlit surroundings. Nonlinguistic “historical” approaches offer a kind of reading conveniently calculated to allow one to ignore the denotative and connotative qualities of the Qur’ānic verse. I refer here to a larger discipline of history that likes to probe certain periods of the past with “objective” analysis in order to dismantle organic narratives and discourses, especially those of sacred histories. This facade of objectivity dictates a new epistemology that offers a means for constructing a false consciousness in Eurocentric progress narratives that is even more subtle and advanced than crass orientalism. This historical “school of information” acts with a detached superiority that effectively separates facts from truth and always addresses a readership unfamiliar with either Arabic or Islam, or even both. The irony of intellect paradoxically invites us to generate history out of certain historical writings. The tracing of origins, which have long been assumed to contain tangible historical evidence, is no longer an innocent

12

The Qur’ān and Modern Arabic Literary Criticism

etymological operation in the sense of older semantic inflections or linguistic deviations. The treatment of Qur’ānic lexicons as mutational “puzzles” that need to be solved in order to expose the Qur’ān as imitative and composed by Muhammad exposes a deeper epistemological lacuna in the very discourses that make the Qur’ān an object of intellectual pursuit. Dialectically, the very core of Islam, the Qur’ān, which has become the key object of this type of intellectual “problem solving,” is also the key witness of the unflattering biases of historical positivism and the exposer of one of the last free-standing disciplines engaged in systematic orientalism.

Chapter Summaries Chapter 1, “A Cartesian Backfire? Ṭāhā Ḥusayn, the Qur’ān, and the Cogito,” examines Ḥusayn’s provocative work Fī al-Shi‘r al-Jāhilī, which caused a storm of criticism in Egypt upon publication in 1926. Ḥusayn prefaces his book with a new and bold assertion that “we should pursue our critique of literature unmindful of whether we glorify or belittle the Arabs, unconcerned with vindicating Islam, with bemoaning its ills, or reconciling it with the results of literary and scientific research.”21 Highlighting the hegemonic persistence of traditionalism and the relentlessness of reformism, this chapter makes two central arguments. First, it claims that Ḥusayn’s work extends ‘Abduh’s thesis in Tafsīr al-Manār22 as well as his (neglected) 1875 marginalia, Ḥāshiya ‘alá Sharḥ Jalāl al-Dawwānī li-l-‘Aqā’id al-‘Aḍūdiyya, which map out a fresh geography for intellectual engagement with the past. Second, it contends that Ḥusayn’s work establishes new grounds for Arabic literary criticism as practice, as discipline, and as discourse. ‘Abduh also managed to maintain this rationalism without succumbing to atheistic naturalism as some studies have implied.23 Building on the reformism thesis that authors such as Charles C. Adams,24 Harun Nasution,25 Albert Hourani,26 and Mark Sedgwick27 have outlined, this chapter investigates Ḥusayn’s critical venture28 and the “great divide” it inflicted upon the discipline of classical Arabic literature in subsequent years. Central to this chapter is the interrogation of Ḥusayn’s Cartesian effort to effect an intellectual transformation in Arabic and in Islamic Studies through a contextualized discourse of objective criticism, a criticism that negotiates

Introduction

13

radical reassessments of the formative moments in the Arabic literary heritage and its relationship to its foundational text, the Qur’ān. If “the negation of past prejudices,” as Cachia argues, “is all that Ṭāhā Ḥusayn’s Cartesianism may be said to consist of,”29 then how successful has Ḥusayn’s theory of critical philology been in steering the course of criticism away from regarding preIslamic poetry as the source of knowledge on pre-Islamic Arabia and toward the embrace of the postulate that “a true intellectual history of Arabic literature is the one that begins with the Qur’ān”?30 Some of the questions that this chapter investigates include the following: Does Ḥusayn’s work rise above the ingrained binary oppositions between Islam and modernity, or does it confront them both? In other words, is Ḥusayn’s critique of literary dogmatism (the dogmas of traditional literary and Qur’ānic interpretations and the dogmas of modernism, especially Cartesian positivism) a transcending of modernity, that is, is his critique seeking a deeper synthesis of the two? Or is it, on the contrary, an antithetical clash, a use of the tools of modernism as a way of correcting errors in Arab-Islamic thought and literary criticism? If Ḥusayn’s work is indeed an “unfinished project” of Arabic and Islamic modernity, is he then advocating a new theology of reason to be revived and improved upon in postcolonial and post-nationalist Egypt, or is he simply retrieving “blind spots” in the intellectual history of the Arab-Muslim world? Chapter 2, “The Return to Philology and the Unmasking of Traditionalism in Amīn al-Khūlī,” interrogates some of the ways in which al-Khūlī’s philological methodology seeks to prioritize a literary and linguistic ontology in Qur’ānic Studies. Drawing on the “historicization thesis” that ‘Abduh utilized and Ḥusayn developed, this chapter identifies al-Khūlī and his school of tajdīd (renovation) as the pioneer of a paradigm shift in Qur’ānic Studies in twentieth-century Egypt, especially in relation to academic approaches and the recognition of the role of language as an agent of interpretive possibilities. Factoring in al-Khūlī’s concept of “the psychology of reception,” which the historical positivism of Eurocentrist discourses on the Qur’ān fail to take into account, this chapter examines the epistemological complexity of the task of the historian and the exegete.31 In Chapter 3, “Muḥammad Aḥmad Khalafallāh: The Art of Narrative in the Qur’ān,” I argue that the public discontent with which the work of Khalafallāh was met points to a crisis in modern Arabic literary thought. This chapter

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The Qur’ān and Modern Arabic Literary Criticism

examines the critical deadlock that resulted in the expulsion of Khalafallāh and the demonization of his scholarship on the Qur’ān, with particular reference to his controversial dissertation, al-Fann al-Qaṣaṣī f ī al Qur’ān (1947/8) (Narrative Art in the Qur’ān). This chapter specifically investigates Khalafallāh’s reconfiguration of Qur’ānic narrative in terms of aesthetic tropes, postulating the role of wa‘ẓ (admonition) and taḥdhīr (warning) as the modus operandi in the revelation of those narratives.32 Examining the principles of his critical approach to narrative logic in the Qur’ān, this chapter also positions the case of Khalafallāh, like that of Ḥusayn, as one that marks a dilemma in Arabic literary critique: a clash of priorities between speculative reasoning and scriptural determinism, in which the latter dismisses the former as a scholastic practice in atheism that can readily be dismantled and punished once the so-called serious guards of Islamic faith allude to it. The major question this chapter poses is the following: What are the intellectual grounds that make literary criticism particularly dangerous or sacrilegious? Chapter 4, “Bint al-Shāṭi’: Literary Significations in the Qur’ān,” examines both ‘Ā’isha ‘Abd al-Raḥmān’s (Bint al-Shāṭi’) extension of al-Khūlī’s approach and her own efforts to advance a lexicon-based and phonological analysis of the Qur’ān. What we call adab is located in a constellation of historical shifts from the era of the pre-Islamic qaṣīda until now. The emergence and codification of Arabic belles lettres has also resulted in the formation of aesthetic and philological principles that at once elevated this so-called adab and distinguished it from nonliterary forms of human expression while belittling it in comparison to i‘jāz al-Qur’ān. Bint al-Shāṭi’ sublimates this antithesis by employing the aesthetics of adab—seen in the work of influential and pioneering philologists such as the grammarian Ibn Jinnī— in the considerations of tafsīr. The result is a boomerang effect whereby the principles of literary criticism used by classical apologists to defend the Qur’ān against poetry (with poetry presented as less rhetorical) have now come full circle in critical appreciations of the literariness of the Qur’ān, an appreciation that does not detract from its sacred or divine message. This fresh approach to tradition, boldly ventured by Ḥusayn in Fī Sh‘ir al-Jāhilī, begins by alienating itself from what it studies, thus becoming the reverse of dogmatism and nationalism in an era infested with both. In this spirit of desacralizing both traditionalism and fanaticism, the new school of al-naqd al-adabī prepares the

Introduction

15

reader to look at sacred tradition both scientifically and historically, that is, with a disinterestedness that could only proceed from a methodical linguistic and aesthetic assessment. Regardless of whether this disinterestedness from the text is ever achieved in modern Qur’ānic tafsīr, the Mujaddidūn, the midtwentieth-century school pioneered by al-Khūlī, adapted by Khalafallāh, and put to the test by Bint al-Shāṭi’, has managed to establish an adab-inspired and dogma-free literary approach to exegesis. In particular, Bint al-Shāṭi’’s work, al-Tafsīr al-Bayānī li-l-Qur’ān al-Karīm (Rhetorical/Literary Explication of the Glorious Qur’ān) (1962–68),33 offers a literary examination of the Qur’ān’s Meccan chapters through a scholastic approach that crowns the efforts of this school and examines the literary and linguistic qualities of those Qur’ānic chapters. This chapter shows how Bint al-Shāṭi’’s critical literary insights reinvigorate the synergies between adab and the Qur’ān. Chapter 5, “Reclaiming Qur’ānic Exegesis: Naṣr Ḥāmid Abū Zayd between Traditionalism and Postsecularism,” draws on Abū Zayd’s neo-rationalist approach to the Qur’ān in order to ask the following questions: What serious justifications can be made—and accepted—for an endeavor to condemn a modern Qur’ān scholar whose only “sin” is to insist relentlessly, as Ḥusayn and Khalafallāh did, on the need for criticism to be more difficult and demanding, to rid itself of debilitating dogmas and taboos, and to reawaken dull thinking? Why has a discussion of Mu‘tazilite theology become a taboo in modern Egypt? How did Islamism infiltrate the field of modern Arabic criticism, leading to the confusion of critique with atheism and the fragmentation of literary theory into an array of seemingly unrelated methodologies? Investigating the principal thesis of Abū Zayd’s Mafhūm al-Naṣṣ: Dirāsa fī ‘Ulūm al-Qur’ān (The Concept of the Text: A Study in the Sciences of the Qur’ān), I interrogate the critical impasse that resulted in the dismissal of literary approaches to the Qur’ān as sacrilegious. Chapter 6, “On Metaphor: Abū Zayd and the Ideologies of majāz in the Qur’ān,” examines the validity of metaphor in discussions of the Qur’ān today. Majāz was historically at the heart of the fatal debate between the two wellknown theological schools of Islamic faith, the Mu‘tazilite and the Ash‘arite, in their respective approaches to the Qur’ān. Whereas the Mu‘tazilites see metaphor as a rhetorical and interpretive tool essential to approaching divinity, some Ash‘arites, especially in the work of the medieval grammarian

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The Qur’ān and Modern Arabic Literary Criticism

and rhetorician ‘Abd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī (1010–79 or 1082),34 believe in a figurative language imitative of a transcendental realm of eternal truth, as a predetermined divine gift to the world. While al-Jurjānī acknowledges the existence of majāz in language and draws a distinction between intellectual and linguistic figuration, he still adheres to the scholastic belief that such figurative expressions in the Qur’ān should be treated cautiously only. Drawing on such a contested tradition, modern Arabic criticism is faced with the predicament of choosing between hermeneutics and literalness. How, then, does metaphor, or the lack thereof, affect one’s perception of and relationship to God and to Qur’ānic language today? In this concluding chapter, I argue that if certain conditions are attained, the resurrection of the metaphor debate not only could revitalize the medieval problem of the relations between divine words and their referents but could also expose the epistemological contours of hegemonic religious discourses and their persistence in postcolonial debates. The study of majāz reopens an inevitable dialogue between two opposing theologies that may disagree in approaching Qur’ānic language but are still in harmony with the semantic subtlety and interpretive multiplicity inherent in the Qur’ān. This chapter ultimately demonstrates how Abū Zayd’s thought is shaped to inform future negotiations of autonomous critique and academic freedom in Arabic literary thought. In conclusion, The Qur’ān and Modern Arabic Literary Criticism characterizes the rise of ultraconservatism and Salafism as a radical defiance of colonial modernity in Egypt. While this defiance has led to a tragic deadlock, it also addresses possible areas of change in the potential bearings of the century-old Tajdīd School. By restoring civil dialogue, a constructive critique, and a basic pluralism—tools indispensable in combating not only internal fundamentalisms but also the external hegemonies of orientalist historical discourses— the robust reformist discourse of the Tajdīd School continues to defend the ­progressive legacies of an enlightened Islam.

1

A Cartesian Backfire? Ṭāhā Ḥusayn, the Qur’ān, and the Cogito

One must have tradition in oneself, to hate it properly. —Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia Theodor Adorno’s above statement encapsulates Ṭāhā Ḥusayn’s story and his own tradition. Ṭāhā Ḥusayn sparked a seismic epistemological shift in the relationship between dogmatic and secular thought in modern Egypt. Almost all of his works include dismissals of well-established and deep-rooted ideas of literary history and cultural traditions, both of which he refers to as irrational, unfounded, or simply just plain wrong. But in this chapter, I aim to show how Ḥusayn’s theoretical venture can also inform and illuminate our understanding of tradition. My argument centers on an examination of Ḥusayn’s provocative book Fī al-Shi‘r al-Jāhilī (1926) (henceforth On Pre-Islamic Poetry). More precisely, with reference to his provocative theory on pre-Islamic poetry, this chapter discusses Ḥusayn’s complex relationship with the Qur’ān and Arabic literary tradition from both historical and theoretical perspectives. The first part situates his literary training relative to customs and practices of literary criticism in his time. To Ḥusayn, history is inseparable from literary analysis. His argument concerning so-called “pre-Islamic poetry” has an ambivalent relationship with the Qur’ān and with traditional Arabic literary criticism. Such a relationship, Ḥusayn contends, must be completely reconfigured. The second part shows passages from Ḥusayn’s oeuvre weighed against Descartes’s philosophy of doubt, which Ḥusayn claims to adopt. A final goal in this chapter is to show the significance of linking history with literary criticism, and the persistence of this link in Qur’ānic exegesis as reflected in the work

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of Ḥusayn’s students and disciples, including Amīn al-Khūlī, Muḥammad Aḥmad Khalafallāh, Bint al-Shāṭi’, and Naṣr Ḥāmid Abū Zayd. With Ḥusayn’s critical intervention in and epistemological disruption of traditional understanding of pre-Islamic poetry, a new generation of secular thought entered the cultural scene of modern Egypt in the mid-1920s. This deluge of Europe-educated cultural critics1 was responsible for a certain turmoil in the field of Arabic and Islamic studies, whose authority at that time mainly lay in al-Azhar and its traditional teachings. This turmoil presented itself at once in the concern over fundamental theological and doctrinal matters as well as in the polemical character of studies published by Ḥusayn and other scholars such as ‘Alī ‘Abd al-Rāziq. ‘Abd al-Rāziq’s 1925 book, al-Islām wa Uṣūl al-Ḥukm (Islam and the Principles of Governance), for example, constructs its own anti-traditionalist narrative, thus terrifying the religious establishment and raising public uproar due to its radical deconstruction of time-honored Muslim views on the nature of Islamic rule.2 Adopting a dispassionate historical analysis of Islamic government, which involved the examination of primary sources including the Qur’ān and the Sunna, ‘Abd al-Rāziq’s is the first study in the history of modern Egyptian thought to call for a separation between the mosque and the state—or, to be historically accurate, the Sultanate. Himself an Oxford-educated Azharite Shaykh, ‘Abd al-Rāziq sets out to debunk any legitimate basis for an Islamic caliphate, dismissing it as “a plague for Islam and Muslims, a source of evil and corruption” and repudiating it as a political imposition that has continued to be forced on Muslim communities since the first generation of Islam.3 Thus, the 1920s was a transformative epoch in modern Egyptian history. An entire politicization of society and culture was taking place, which began with the 1919 Revolution, continued with the choice of Paris as the capital of human rights and the home for the Paris Peace Conference in 1921, which would eventually usher Egypt into her long overdue liberation from colonial rule, and reached its climax with Egypt’s nominal independence from Britain in 1922. This independence was soon followed by Fuad I’s substitution of the title of King for the Sultan of Egypt. In 1924, the Ottoman Caliphate collapsed. For the first time since the earliest Muslim community, the Islamic world found itself without religious sovereignty and, thanks to colonialism, more disintegrated and shattered than ever. The clash between liberalism and



A Cartesian Backfire? Ṭāhā Ḥusayn, the Qur’ān, and the Cogito

19

reactionary thought, the struggle for the reconciliation of the achievements of the 1919 Revolution, the ambitions of the new Sultanate and Egypt’s privileged class, as well as the interests of the intelligentsia, dominated Egypt’s cultural scene. All of this took place while the symbolic dominion of the Ottoman Empire as a centripetal force for Islamic governance—albeit a feeble one—had come to an end. In 1920s Egypt, there was a deep antithesis between Europeapprenticed intellectuals and their locally educated and trained Azharite counterparts. The latter saw themselves as the last bastions for defending the tradition of Islam against the onslaught of European modernity and Egypt’s own expatriate Trojan horses. Ḥusayn and his cohorts were no Trojan horses: nothing was further from the mind of this group of scholars than to be taken as destroyers of Islam. But the clash between rationalism and traditionalism was inevitable. In fact, no work better reflects the cultural discordance between the highly educated literati and the receptive readership of the 1920s than Ḥusayn’s On Pre-Islamic Poetry. The basic principle of this study is the attempt to withdraw the whole mechanism of critical thinking from direct theological influences, that is, from all considerations of faith-based dogmas and personal relationships, toward rationalism. With Ḥusayn, the methodological understanding of the history of Arabic literature, Islamic history, and with it, the cultural heritage of the Arab world, became a new pursuit of academia in Europe and in Egypt. It is important to have a sense of the traditionalist thought that Ḥusayn was up against. He owed a genuine debt to his traditionalist educators, or at least to some of them. But his generation had been initiated into what came to be seen as the outworn verbosity and rigid ahistoricity of a parochial Arabic literary criticism without knowledge of any other tradition. It is no surprise, then, that when this generation was able to stand on its feet, it mutinied against the blind traditionalism to which it had been subject. Throughout Ḥusayn’s early career, the issue of his relationship to tradition was one with which he struggled. Even though he began his project of cultural reformation with more philological leanings, which he drew from his forerunners Ḥusayn al-Marṣafī and Aḥmad Luṭfī al-Sayyid, Ḥusayn later incorporated the sociological approach that his Sorbonneian advisor Gustave Lanson initiated.4 We see this clearly reflected in his claim that a critic adopting a historical approach must

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The Qur’ān and Modern Arabic Literary Criticism

always remember that he or she is not a historian, and that explicating literary texts is informed by a deeper understanding and examination of their linguistic settings and sociohistorical contexts. To Ḥusayn, history informs literary analysis and not the other way around, lest the critic turn into a historian. For him, a literary text is neither a mere historical pamphlet produced by collective social forces nor a unique work of an ahistorical genius shelved in an ivory tower. It is thus fair to argue that Ḥusayn laid the foundations of the historical approach in Arabic literary criticism5 and lived to put his method into effect. A work of art does not exist in a vacuum: its author is inevitably conditioned by race, gender, economic status, environmental circumstances, and social relations. But the epoch does not simply write the text; each text uniquely exemplifies the signature, the distinctive DNA, of its author. Ḥusayn’s work in the mid-1920s reflects this method very clearly. Take, for instance, his Ḥadīth al-Arbi‘ā’ (Wednesday Talk) where he outlines the goal of his study as follows: 1. To understand the psychology of the poet, learn how he feels, and how he describes his emotions. 2. To take this knowledge of the poet and the sum of his feelings and his disposition as a key to understanding the age in which he lives, his environment, and his formative identity. You do not aim to understand the poet in isolation, but to understand him as a cross-section of his own society. Don’t just be satisfied with the individual but aim for the collective; don’t be content with the part, but aspire for the whole.6 Ḥusayn addresses the reader directly as he seeks to draw his audience into the aesthetic realm of literary criticism: I do not seek to establish specific rules and principles for literary criticism. First, I try to understand with you how criticism works and what a critic aims to achieve [the process] by which one grasps the psychology of the poet. Secondly, one comprehends the poet’s formative society, his age, and his environment; and thirdly, a critic aims to extract the pleasure of the text: the artistic pleasure you derive when you look at a beautiful object, or listen to a musical piece, or behold one of nature’s beautiful scenes. This is how your mind and heart work when you read and analyze poetry. For as much as you wish to provide an exegesis of the work of art, you also want to seek pleasure in reading it.7



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Ḥusayn is perhaps the first intellectual in modern Egypt to emphasize that an important component of literary criticism lies not only in historicization, but also in the critic’s intent to dwell on and emphasize the beauty in a work of art. This “pursuit of enjoyment in art,” as he calls it, marks an aesthetic quietism by which criticism becomes the most efficient cultural tool to advocate aesthetic reflection at the same time as it renounces all forms of praxis. Yet there is always a pragmatic element in Ḥusayn’s thought. The enjoyment of the text pleases the heart, but the mind yearns for knowledge. In a later study, Tajdīd Dhikrá Abī al-‘Alā’ (Renewing the Memory of Abū al-‘Alā’ [al-Ma‘arrī]), Ḥusayn emphasizes the epistemic dimensions of a text’s historical insights: The purpose of this book is not to describe Abū al-‘Alā’’s life in isolation but to study the broad tendencies and conditions of the Islamic self during his time. He did not singlehandedly write his own account in the absence of all social influences. . . . Abū al-‘Alā’ is a fruit of his age, ripened by his own place in history and by the political, social, and economic conditions of his time.8

As this quote reveals, it is precisely in order to protect literary criticism from being viewed as dehistoricized exercises conducted solely at the whims and caprices of authors that Ḥusayn describes history as a condition of philological and contextual associations which shapes the individual talent. One can attribute this adoption of a historical theory of literary criticism as a reaction to a crisis that occurs when literary criticism isolates the objects of its inquiry from the sociopolitical realities and historical epochs in which they emerged. In other words, Ḥusayn’s emphasis on extracting history from al-Ma‘arrī’s poetry also reveals the history of a crisis in the field of Arabic criticism, a history that goes as far back as the time of al-Ma‘arrī and summons the poet’s legacy in order to dwell on Ḥusayn’s own time and position in history, prompting him to undertake his study and emphasize the importance of his approach. In On Pre-Islamic Poetry, Ḥusayn launches a bold attack against dominant methods of Arabic literary criticism and proposes a corrective theoretical framework, this time a Cartesian one. To Ḥusayn, the problem in critical discourse emerges from an excessive sacralization of the past that discourages critical inquiry. As all cortical controversies refer to the relationship between evidence and proof, how could we arrive at or retrieve material to support the arguments we make about the past? It is a deceptively simple question. At stake is the materiality of history, of history as language and its relationship

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to divinity. To Ḥusayn, if there is an answer to this question, it must lie in the careful examination of language and its multiple associations, which he sees as the primary task of criticism. To Ḥusayn, the task of criticism centers on detecting the signifying value of texts in the triangular interconnectedness between the author’s originary experience, the historical and linguistic context, and the literary expression. In his analysis of poems by al-Ma‘arrī and al-Mutanabbī, Ḥusayn looks at the linguistic and philological structures insofar as they correspond to the aesthetics of the historical moment when both authors composed their work. This alone makes Ḥusayn’s contribution essential to the yet-to-come school of Qur’ānic Bayān, precisely because of his advocacy for an approach that moves away from the merely philological in order to periodize the aesthetic experience and take it into serious consideration. Ḥusayn’s critical perspicacity stems from the fact that his approach to poetic texts is philosophical, aesthetic, and historical as much as it is philological. From this perspective, poetic language is seen not only as a reservoir of rich semantic and aesthetic possibilities, but also as a sign of its own history, the history of its composition being consistent with an intimate relationship to its producer. Poetic language is not just a Derridean exercise in différance; what it connotes outside the metaphorical meaning is a complex symbolic function that is simultaneously denotative, connotative, and ruthlessly historical. These three aspects are unconnected, but each has its own characteristics. Classical poetry is a supreme form of the Arabic language at which the semiotic function of the poetic kalima (word/lexicon) is entirely transformed into a ramz (a symbolic function). Ḥusayn’s theory of naḥl al-shi‘r (poetic forgery) falls squarely within this paradigm. In addition to its rich metaphorical possibilities, the Arabic qaṣīda includes another mimetic role of language as a record of history. Critics before Ḥusayn had not paid much attention to the symbolic function of language, especially its sociohistorical connotations. Ḥusayn asserts that the elimination of all reference to history in so-called “pre-Islamic poetry” is not a matter of poetic choice; it is a matter of historical determinism, of the postulate that such poetry may not have been produced in the historical era in which it is supposedly set: The first thing in this study that you will find shocking is that I have come to doubt the value of pre-Islamic poetry as a verifiable historical document and persist in my doubts, or say my doubts persisted. I started to research,



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examine, read, and think until I came to the conclusion or a near certitude that the larger majority of what we call pre-Islamic poetry has nothing to do with pre-Islamic times [emphasis mine]. Those poems were counterfeited in the aftermath of Islam. The poems are more Islamic than they are pre-Islamic, representing the lives, attitudes and dispositions of Muslim communities more than any other time prior to it. I have almost no doubt that what is left of pre-Islamic poetry is an insignificant sum that does not amount to much and that cannot be relied upon in portraying a correct and complete picture of the pre-Islamic era.9

Ḥusayn’s concern with the special relationship between art and its historical and psychological grounds is what sharpens his critical sense and allows him to excel as a literary historian. “It is inconceivable,” exclaims Ḥusayn, “that Judaism and Christianity, two great religions of pre-Islamic Arabia, would exist and spread among the Arabs without any major reference to them in pre-Islamic poetry.”10 It is a fact that Ḥusayn considers the Qur’ān the only verifiable text which the critic can use to approach classical literature; he regards it as a true reflection of pre-Islamic life in Arabia. To him, pre-Islamic Arabic poetry cannot be used to judge the rhetorical excellence of the Qur’ān. Rather, it must be the other way around, it is the Qur’ān that allows for the understanding and explication of pre-Islamic Arabic poetry: “We must quote the Qur’ān to explicate this poetry and analyze it.”11 He dismisses most pre-Islamic Arab poets as non-credible, writing with emphasis: If I want to study the life of pre-Islamic Arabia, I won’t do it through Imru’ al-Qays or al-Nābigha or al-A‘shá or even Zuhayr, because I do not trust what has been attributed to any of them. I would rather study it in a text that has not been altered or tampered with. I will study it using the Qur’ān. The Qur’ān is the most veritable reflection of the pre-Islamic era in Arabia. The text of the Qur’ān is fixed and cannot be disputed.12

This certainty, however, is short-lived, as Ḥusayn soon finds in the Qur’ān a few texts and events that are allegedly not historically “valid,” leading him to commit what many have characterized as a scholastic lapse that is also a kind of transgression and a deviation from faith.13 For now, suffice it to say that Ḥusayn sees a close affinity—linguistically, rhetorically, thematically, and politically—between poetic production and sociopolitical circumstances.

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Intellectual history within the Arabic tradition seems to have had a great deal of difficulty escaping from the reification and sacrelization that threatens all historical narratives. Ḥusayn’s On Pre-Islamic Poetry addresses this limitation with a sense of urgency. A work of intellectual history in its own right, On Pre-Islamic Poetry is also a textual event, an attempt to change the starting point, and with it the common historical consciousness, of the entire body of Arabic literature and literary criticism. This alone is a bold undertaking and a landmark of both historical progress and, dare I say, freedom in the field of Arabic literary criticism. The publication of Ḥusayn’s book therefore created a transformative moment in secular critique, where we came to learn through his critical venture that the conservative understanding of pre-Islamic poetry must not be separated from the interpretation of the individual authors who promote and connect it directly to the i‘jāz discourse of Islamic apologetics. In seeking to free classical poetry from such tendentious interpretations, Ḥusayn’s hypothesis becomes more threatening and unsettling, not just to traditional Arabic criticism, but also to the core principles of classical Qur’ānic exegetics. If pre-Islamic poetry was not a collection of poems composed by a group of incredibly talented tribal Arab poets, then what do we make of the time-honored discourse of the inimitability and linguistic miracle of the Qur’ān? The controversial modifier jāhilī, which is euphemized in English as “pre-Islamic,” includes not only a sharp distinction between Islam and whatever has preceded it, but has also come to label pre-Islamic epistemes as languishing in ignorance, barbarity, and tribalism, many aspects of which continued after the advent of Islam, as Ibn Khaldūn pointed out. Ḥusayn does not dwell much on the notorious connotations of the adjective jāhilī. Yet he still sees it as a loaded ṣifa/na‘t (modifier) that has come to depend on the accumulative knowledge the term invokes in the mind of the traditional Arabic critic. With his critique, Ḥusayn threatens both to tumble down the core structure of Islamic and Arabic literary and exegetical thought and to cause an intellectual crisis of immeasurable proportions. Qur’ānic exegetes, from the classical era to Ḥusayn’s time, including classical exegetes such as al-Khaṭṭābī, al-Rummānī, al-Bāqillānī, and al-Jurjānī, as well as postclassical authors such as al-Zamakhsharī and al-Suyūṭī,14 rely on the anteriority of pre-Islamic poetry in the explication of i‘jāz and the linguistic miracle of



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the Qur’ān. As all their works demonstrate, pre-Islamic poetry is the grist for which there is a mill we call i‘jāz al-Qur’ān discourse (the discourse of Qur’ānic inimitability/apologetics). Take that grist away (i.e., call pre-Islamic poetry post-Qur’ānic poetry) and the entire discourse of i‘jāz al-Qur’ān will have to be reshuffled and reconfigured. To make matters more complex, Ḥusayn’s theory is deeply connected to the theological origins of Arabic criticism, so the linguistic burden for him is now a historical one that is intricately tied to a discourse of divinity. This is not an issue with which any of his French mentors had to struggle—not Gustave Lanson or his advisor Hippolyte Taine, not even Ḥusayn’s intellectual idol René Descartes. Islam in this context, and its core text the Qur’ān, becomes the irreversible linguistic event, the event that emerges in the aftermath of a remarkable poetic tradition, or conversely, according to Ḥusayn, around which a remarkable poetic tradition “forged” itself. This is where Ḥusayn draws the line and fearlessly attempts to establish a different starting point. When there are no solid lines, however, we rely on reason to make sense of the past, even if that very reason itself becomes the history of God. Reason to Ḥusayn resembles the dotted line that connects point A to point B in a crooked fashion devoid of empirical evidence—or, to be fair, where language becomes the only empirical evidence. One does not need to be a shrewd literary historian to see the seismic magnitude of Ḥusayn’s study, for it opens up the disruptive possibilities of secular criticism and realigns the relationships between literature, God, and history. Dissatisfied with the insignificance given to the role of history and with Arabic criticism’s inane indifference to both the context and symbolic functions of poetic language, Ḥusayn’s primary concern is that Arabic criticism may be condemned to a vicious circle of reductionism and futility, leaving it cut off from the tree of knowledge and paying false tribute to critical thought by claiming to engage in it while betraying its principles. He expounds the exemplary case of this proto-historical, pre-Islamic Arab society as an unrealistic community, one that must somehow be governed by cosmic and religious indifference in order for it to produce a cultural document, that is, poetry, that has nothing to do with its own lived reality or its immediate social, political, and religious surroundings. The challenge in Ḥusayn’s study thus forces Arabic criticism to historicize, to fulfill the modern Cartesian will of embracing reason and doubt,

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by exercising reason and taking a fresh look at tradition in order to expose the so-called bankruptcy of eschatological narratives: I have argued that the Arabs (after the rise of Islam) experienced the same influences that worked on other ancient nations, influences that led to false attributions of poetic production and historical events. The most prominent of those influences is a product of two strong elements: religion and politics. The reality is that there can be no understanding of Islamic history with all its varied fields without a reasonable inclusion of this matter (i.e., its religion and politics).15

As he associates politics and religion with what he calls the “false attribution of poetry,” Ḥusayn emphasizes a kind of Cartesian methodology, one he explains more fully in the revised version of the book that he published after the original book was condemned and banned by religious and state authorities. In fact, the thesis of the 1927 edition, entitled Fī al-Adab al-Jāhilī (On Pre-Islamic Literature), does not differ at all from that of the original book of 1926 except for the omission of some controversial lines, such as the story of Abraham and his son Ishmael, which I will address in fuller detail shortly, and the inclusion of some other prose writings. In the new edition, Ḥusayn still calls for what he considers to be a long overdue “Cartesian” investigation of classical Arabic literature and its historical imbrications: This method demands complete abandonment of the researcher’s preknowledge and an approach to the topic with a clean slate. Everyone knows that this method, resisted and ridiculed by the old guards of religion and philosophy, is the most productive and effective of all methods, that it re-invigorated human knowledge and philosophy and changed the course of literary and artistic traditions. This method is the most dominant feature of our modern age, and it behooves us to adopt it in investigating the history of our classical Arabic literature. Let us then approach this literature and its history with a complete relinquishment of everything that has been said about it before. Let us free criticism from the yokes that have curtailed our minds and impeded our capacity for liberal thought.16

To Ḥusayn, then, knowledge of pre-Islamic life of the Arabs is to be found only in the Qur’ān and not in poetry: Pre-Islamic history is not lost to us. If we wish to study it properly, we must apply relevant research tools historians use in examining pre-historic eras.



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Therefore a true intellectual history of Arabic literature, a history that could be studied and taught with authority and steadfastness, is one that begins with the Qur’ān.17

But what happens when one studies the Arabic literary tradition following Ḥusayn’s instructions? The answer is simple: texts cannot be studied in isolation from history. This method persists in Ḥusayn’s writings and has become the core value of his teachings. Although a good number of Ḥusayn’s students adopt this approach, many have resisted it. Ḥusayn’s method continues in Amīn al-Khūlī, one of his most insightful disciples, who extends it to the study of the Qur’ān—its grammar and rhetoric. This method also continues in Naṣr Ḥāmid Abū Zayd, who advances it in the direction of exegesis and Islamic philosophy. For example, al-Khūlī, a critic of great perspicacity and a literary methodologist in his own right, as I elucidate in the following chapter, prioritizes the Qur’ān, à la Ḥusayn, as the primordial text and the most important source of the entire Arabic tradition—culturally, literarily, linguistically, and historically. The strict principles of Ḥusayn’s critique demand that literature be representational of the age in which it was composed; they inevitably allude to the realm of politics and history surrounding its production. Already in 1926, following his return from the Sorbonne and his exposure to Cartesian logic, Ḥusayn was convinced that the principal value of literary criticism lies in doubting all given foreknowledge and in suspending all accepted historical narratives.18 Ḥusayn’s “Cartesianism,” however, seems to be tainted by the influence of the orientalist historian D. S. Margoliouth, whose dogmatic positivistic skepticism, as opposed to genuine Cartesian doubt, a process open to a range of possibilities, could indeed be detected in Ḥusayn’s questioning of the historical validity of the Qur’ānic reference to the building of the Ka‘ba (the stone building in the court of the Great Mosque at Mecca) by Abraham and his son Ishmael. The following lines in his argument present Ḥusayn’s version of Cartesianism at its highest degree: The Torah tells us about Abraham and Ishmael, and the Qur’ān tells us about them too. The mention of these two names in the Torah and Qur’ān, however, is insufficient to verify their historical existence, not to mention the veracity of the story of the migration of Ishmael, son of Abraham, to Mecca and the genesis of the so-called ‘Arab Musta‘riba (Northern or Arabized Arabs). One

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is obligated to see in this story an attempt to establish a link between the Jews and the Arabs on the one hand, and a link between Islam, Judaism, the Qur’ān, and the Torah, on the other.19

This statement has been seen as arguably the most flagrant and sacrilegious utterance ever to be made by a renowned critic in early twentieth-century Arab thought. Ḥusayn contends that the story of Abraham and Ishmael served a social-political purpose in pre-Islamic Meccan society by facilitating relationships between religious groups in Yathrib; in turn, he claims, the story was co-opted in Qur’ānic narratives in order to reinforce the Abrahamic lineage for Islam. But what Ḥusayn proposes is not that the Qur’ān lies about the historicity of Abraham and Ishmael, but rather that its dialogic narrative, which incorporates ideas, events, and social practices in Meccan society over the span of twenty-three years, refers to it as a story already circulating in the collective consciousness of Meccan society—and circulating for an exclusively faith-based value rather than for a perspective of historical validation (Q  2:127–134 and 14:36–39). It is evident that Ḥusayn does not intend for his argument to be taken as sacrilegious. It is not an exaggeration to say that Ḥusayn is the most gifted Arabist of the last century, a scholar who chooses his words meticulously and carefully. His use of the word ḥīl (which I interpret in this context as “attempt”) comes from the root ḥ / w / l, a rich Arabic root that conveys an endeavor, an attempt, a transformation, and an empowerment. The Qur’ān’s reference to the story, then, according to Ḥusayn, is predicated on social acceptance in Meccan society as well as on cementing deeper ties between Jews and Muslims, which resulted in welfare and prosperity, as symbolized in the miracle of the well of Zamzam.20 In this sense, it is easy to read Ḥusayn’s reference as benign and un-antagonistic. In fact, Ḥusayn is making a solid argument that Abraham is exemplary of and crucial for the Prophet’s proselytizing and for his early call to Islam. Like Abraham, a true Muslim puts God above all, including family members, and is not a polytheist even though he or she might have a pagan parent: The rationale behind this story is thus clear. It is recent and appeared just prior to the emergence of Islam. Islam benefited from it for religious reasons, and Meccan society approved it also for religious and political reasons. Literary and linguistic history should not take this story into consideration when examining the actual roots of classical Arabic.21



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This rationale, however, is still provocative, and Ḥusayn’s invocation of history, while useful, complicates the relationship between faith and anthropology. It unwittingly creates confusion among his readers and leaves them with the impression that the Qur’ān is inattentive to history or insufficient as historical evidence. At the same time, he describes it as the one and only trusted source of knowledge on Meccan society. While it is clear to the educated reader that Ḥusayn’s intent is to contend that the Qur’ān is not so much a book of history as it is a book of faith, his assertive language—“Literary and linguistic history should not take this story into consideration”22—is bound to upset the average reader. Moreover, it removes Ḥusayn himself from the Cartesian zone of doubt, which he claims to adopt. In fact, Descartes himself, as he makes pronouncedly clear in his Third Meditation, insists that his criterion of doubt, his very method of rational theology, consists of a “divine guarantee.” I recognize that it would be impossible for me to exist with the kind of nature I have—that is, having within me the idea of God—were it not the case that God really existed. By “God” I mean the very being the idea of whom is within me, that is, the possessor of all the perfections which I cannot grasp, but can somehow reach in my thought, who is subject to no defects whatsoever. It is clear enough from this that he cannot be a deceiver, since it is manifest by the natural light that all fraud and deception depend on some defect.23

This passage is important because it shows that Descartes’s doubt, unlike Ḥusayn’s, is an appeal for an all-perfect God. If Ḥusayn had followed in Descartes’s footsteps, he would have ended up defending a perfect divinity against all kinds of historical doubt and would have indeed acknowledged the Qur’ānic account of Abraham and Ishmael. If God as an all-perfect being à la Descartes has said that Abraham and Ishmael lived in Northern Arabia and built the Ka‘ba, then they must have lived there and built the Ka‘ba, no questions asked, despite Margoliouth, despite positivism, and despite an evolving Hagarism. Readers familiar with orientalist discourse on the origins of the Qur’ān will understand the significance of Ḥusayn’s claims. Questioning the authenticity of Islamic sources, especially the Islamic account of the story of Abraham and his wife Hagar, is not new in orientalist discourses. However, the writings of Margoliouth at the outset

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of the twentieth century must have prompted Ḥusayn to preempt the perverse effects of Hagarism and seek to establish an early differentiation between Qur’ānic and historical narratives. What later comes to be known as “Hagarism” in Western scholarship on Islamic Studies will confirm Ḥusayn’s premonitions as well as the general Muslim perception that Eurocentrist historical revisionism dismisses all mainstream references and traditions from within the Islamic faith. Historical revisionism prefers to rely on alternative sources, such as Armenian, Coptic, Greek, Hebrew, or Syriac manuscripts, pre-canonical ḥadīth, and other sources derivable from papyri, coins, as well as pre-Islamic poetry. Casting a wider net for historical references undoubtedly enriches research and renders the findings more effective and more accurate. What is at stake, however, is not just a matter of identifying reliable sources and dismissing undependable “faith-based” ones, but is in essence a grand project of reconstructing history that includes data control, source deployment, and, most importantly, scholarly pre-commitment to the European orientalist establishment. Patricia Crone and Michael Cook’s Hagarism (1977) falls squarely within that category. The book accuses then-current scholarship on Islamic sources of relying only on the conservative Sunni tradition as reliable sources. Crone and Cook argue that Prophet Muhammad spearheaded a messianic movement of Jews and Arabs toward Jerusalem, and that the history of such movement was fundamentally distorted by the mainstream Islamic historical tradition.24 Why, then, does Ḥusayn adopt this provocative and ultimately nonCartesian language? The answer is simple: by proposing a rationale for the story, Ḥusayn is responding to a larger problem, namely, to the orientalist accusation that the Qur’ān is false and imitative because a growing body of anthropological evidence suggests that Abraham did not live in modern day Saudi Arabia. On a broader epistemological scale, then, Ḥusayn’s reference to Abraham’s story in the Qur’ān is an important theoretical intervention. He seeks to dispel the myth of historical revisionism by arguing that the Qur’ān mentions the story of Abraham not for the sake of correcting a historical error (although it does state that both the Torah and the Gospels appeared after Abraham’s time; see Q 3:65), but only to cement its primordial message of monotheism and to foster positive relationships between Muslims and Jews through Abraham.



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What complicates this argument, however, is that Ḥusayn’s Cartesianism leads him into the trap of dogmatic orientalist skepticism. During his education in France, skepticism became part of a larger secular movement of exercising free and independent thought. In this context, Ḥusayn’s main goal was well intended: to bring forth this overdue discourse on doubt in order to enrich the field of literary thought and to shift the tone of critical analysis both from regurgitation to critique and from dogma to humanism. Yet, his emphatic distinction between a “historical” Abraham and a Qur’ānic Abraham still represents a stark deviation from the Cartesian method—a deviation I can neither understand nor explain. This distinction, in any case, was audacious enough to raise the eyebrows of both Arab liberals and traditionalists.25 Thus, Ḥusayn opened a Pandora’s box of historical indeterminacy and struggled to prove that the actuality of the historical, especially that of the sacred past, does not lie in whichever theological or historically verified sources claim to have “gotten it right” or in a fixed rigidity of historical positivism, which often confuses postulates with reality. Rather, the actuality of all history lies in its varied possibilities. Interest in historical criticism emerged from the Enlightenment’s fascination with positivism. Little did Ḥusayn know that positivism, like all products of European modernity, has a tendency to regard the thinking of its own era as the most reliable in applying “state of the art” tools for the proper scientific investigation of knowledge. Eager “to take its own ways of thinking for granted,” as Herbert Schneidau has cogently put it, positivism is a discourse contaminated by “an implicit assumption that we have an easily accessible standard for ‘external reality’ against which to measure any of our utterances.”26 This is where Ḥusayn’s theory goes awry, where criticism falls prey to eschatology and the delusion that historical facts exist for the benefit of a clear historical scheme—the misconception that the intrinsic interest of critics can be measured by the contribution they make to the elaboration of a cogent historical outline. In other words, Ḥusayn’s Cartesianism is not fully thought out, or even thought at all, in the context and through the principles of literary criticism. If he were to adhere fully to the Cartesian discourse on doubt, Ḥusayn, one would expect, would cast doubt over everything, including Descartes and Ḥusayn himself. Nor is Descartes himself fully “Cartesian.” He begins his

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Meditations with the intention to eliminate doubt. Descartes opens the First Meditation of his “autobiographical” philosophy by asserting the need “to demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundations”: Reason now leads me to think that I should hold back my assent from opinions which are not completely certain and indubitable just as carefully as I do from those which are patently false. So, for the purpose of rejecting all my opinions, it will be enough if I find in each of them at least some reason for doubt.27

If Cartesian reason inevitably leads to self-doubt, then suffice it to say that Ḥusayn neither finds reason to doubt the principles of Descartes’s philosophy of doubt nor follows Descartes’s method meticulously enough to avoid falling into a groundless epistemological abyss of avowing history despite its absent referents. It does not help that this crisis is aggravated by the fact that even a philosophical tradition, like the very literary tradition from which Ḥusayn derives his theory, must succumb to the monotonous redundancy of power relations.28 Ḥusayn’s somewhat diluted and truncated adoption of Descartes’s method still allows his secularist critique to confront religious orthodoxy and open new horizons for literary criticism. The so-called partial ta‘addī ‘alá al-ḥudūd (transgressing the boundaries of the sacred) of which Ḥusayn was accused but was eventually acquitted, may not, in fact, amount to anything Cartesian at all. However, it does break away from the conventional system of constraints imposed on Arabic literature and Qur’ānic exegesis since the time of Ibn Ḥanbal. It also exposes the principles of fundamentalist Islam, especially the eighteenth-century Wahhabism of Saudi Arabia, a fundamentalism whose deleterious impact on Islam and the culture of modern Egypt as well as the entire Arab world would have deleterious effects in and beyond the second half of the twentieth century. In combating the stifling of critical freedom and in opening up thinking in different and new directions, Ḥusayn himself becomes a Cartesian figure: the Arab intellectual of the break, the theoretician of the divide between rationalism and anti-rationalism in the history of modern Arabo-Islamic thought. He is undoubtedly the first to perceive the decline in critical thinking as a sign of a broader cultural predicament. He is also the first to express the basic principle that the exercise of reason is a public necessity that can only be



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attained through learning, that “the right to education is as indispensable as the right to water and air.”29 That is, his critical eye toward both literary and cultural traditions observed that the ethos in which Egyptians live must first be changed on a grand scale if their understanding of literary tradition, the Qur’ān, and religion is ever to be elevated. The backlash against Ḥusayn is understandable, though not quite pardonable, on two important levels. First, methodologically, whenever new approaches to the study of our great books are introduced, a sense of defensiveness overcomes those who feel that what they have written before on the same or similar topic may not have been adequate. This sense occurs even though when they wrote their studies they may have consulted the most sophisticated and well-established theories that were in vogue, theories that may have served their purposes well until the next enfant terrible came along and disrupted the status quo. Second, theologically, some of the points raised in Ḥusayn’s book are drawn too sharply and are not only critical of the historical complacency and rigidity in some existing methods of Arabic literary criticism, but also extend to criticize aspects of history central to the Islamic faith, especially as they are narrated in and related to the Qur’ān. It is one thing to argue that existing methods of Arabic criticism have ignored obvious linguistic facts that suggest that pre-Islamic poetry never existed and was “forged” during the early years of Islam; it is a completely different matter to contend that the Qur’ānic narrative contradicts history and that Abraham and Ishmael never built the Ka‘ba. Let us examine these methodological and theological aspects more closely. Ḥusayn arrived in Paris at the outbreak of what Louis de Boland once described as “the war between science and literature,” where science appeared to have been winning on many grounds. “For some time the symptoms of discord between the republic of science and that of literature have been apparent,” continues de Boland, “the sciences accuse literature of being jealous of its progress. Literature reproaches the sciences for being arrogant and having excessive ambition.”30 These were difficult and pressing times for the humanities, a field that found itself forced, as it were, to modernize its research tools. The natural sciences were already beginning to gain more distinction and enjoy more glamour; “everything,” notes Boland, “is pointing toward the imminent downfall of the Republic of Letters, and the universal domination of the exact and natural sciences.”31

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In other words, Ḥusayn studied in Paris at a time when there was a crisis in human sciences and when literary studies needed to adopt skepticism in order to survive. To be fully educated meant to be fully skeptical. Science became the new philosophy of the age. It was perceived as more than a body of knowledge— as a way of critical thinking, a manner of skeptically interrogating both the word and the world with a clear understanding of humanity’s predisposition to errancy. If humanity ceases to be skeptical, it was argued, then the door will be open for political despotism and religious dogma to roam unchecked. Ḥusayn must have been influenced by Lanson in examining the corpus of Arabic literature in this particular manner, as it was Lanson who first proposed the idea of “literary sociology,” a myriad of pseudoscientific claims about social and historical influences on the text and its author. As to the matter of theology, French secular and antiestablishment social criticism has been the signature of all realist literature since Flaubert and Zola. But twentieth-century Egypt is not nineteenth-century France. With Ḥusayn’s bold theory, we have come face-to-face with the question of whether there is a rapprochement between the word of God and the word of humans, between the Qur’ān, history, and literature. This question is at the heart of the divorce that took place between the Ash‘arite and Mu‘tazilite schools of Qur’ānic exegesis in the third century of Islam. Indeed, this long-standing tension between the two schools resurfaces in many I‘jāz discussions over the centuries, and could be traced in the works of scholars ranging from al-Bāqillānī to Ḥusayn and even extending far beyond to include Ḥusayn’s intellectual successors such as al-Khūlī, Khalafallāh, Bint al-Shāṭi’, and Abū Zayd. It can now be seen that the future of secular critique hangs on this question. Not only does literary criticism depend on skeptical critique, but the construction of borders between scripture, history, and literature also threatens to fossilize human reason and send it back against itself, revolving in a repetitious circle of redundancy and despair. Perhaps a total redefinition of the principles and function of literary criticism is what led Ḥusayn to call for an epistemological break at such a high personal risk. Perhaps making the leap from fallacy to insight required a ruthless exposure of both the sleepy redundancy of Arab critics at home and the orientalist assumption that the Qur’ān can be “accounted for” without consideration of its own sources, its content, or its semantic, syntactic, and phonological brilliance.



A Cartesian Backfire? Ṭāhā Ḥusayn, the Qur’ān, and the Cogito

35

To be sure, Ḥusayn has committed no act of sacrilege against the Qur’ān or against Islam, a verdict verified by his prosecutor Muḥammad Nūr, who acquitted him and closed his case.32 Even when he discusses the seven readings of the Qur’ān, Ḥusayn does not doubt the revelation. Instead, he contends that readings of the Qur’ān would inevitably submit to phonological and regional dialect varieties. To Ḥusayn, this makes sense because “the dialect of Quraysh is different from that of other tribes. Those tribes must have adapted Quraysh’s dialect (of reading the Qur’ān) to their own varieties, drawling where Quraysh would not and elongating where Quraysh would not.”33 There is always the genuine concern that Ḥusayn’s argument, dogmatically presented with its apparent abandonment of genuine Cartesian doubt, could set a dangerous precedent and be co-opted by orientalists to question the status of the Qur’ān itself rather than just that of pre-Islamic poetry, an orientalist move exemplified by John Wansbrough in his 1977 book Quranic Studies. Wansbrough misappropriates Ḥusayn’s thesis to advance a theory that the Qur’ān appeared long after Muhammad and does not match the historical chronology of seventh-century Arabic.34 If Ḥusayn indeed made a mistake, it would be a mistake in judgment, and not necessarily an error in critical analysis. To conclude, in a head-to-head conflict between a literary-critical view of scripture and a religious one, the literary-critical approach may not stand a chance. In the Islamic tradition, literature, history, and divinity are three of the most powerful discourses that exist along the fault line of Ḥusayn’s On Pre-Islamic Poetry. Ḥusayn has invoked Descartes to explain the relationship between faith and science on the one hand and between history, literature, and belief on the other. But how does this reflect on the validity of Ḥusayn’s quasiCartesian critical apparatus? Has Ḥusayn’s intellectual project backfired? I believe that it has not, for two specific reasons. First, it is certainly a fact that the experience of literature is, in a very real sense, radically different from the experience of religion. Furthermore, criticism is not an identification with but a reflection on texts. “Of all human activities,” Paul de Man emphasized, “literature is the one least compatible, in the final analysis, with religious experience,” precisely because unlike all religions it remains “non-canonical, the critique or, if you wish, the deconstruction of canonical modes.”35 It follows that literary criticism will

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always seem to pose a challenge to theological forms of interpretation; and from this perspective placing literature against scripture is always going to be to the detriment of the literary critic, especially in a society in which religion is central and, to some degree, in the more secular societies of Europe and North America. Yet the tendency to “de-canonize” is a necessity if we are to prevent religion from being hijacked by dogma in all its pernicious forms. From this perspective, rather than being an expression of antagonism, literary criticism, as practised by Ḥusayn, is a studious form of tough love. This leads directly to the second point. Ḥusayn commits what appears to the local eye to be a crime of transgression, of pitting criticism against divinity; in fact, he is making a valid and necessary historical argument precisely in order to nip in the bud an emerging Islamophobic discourse, one intent on discrediting Islam as a religion and denying that the Prophet Muhammad even existed. Ḥusayn, then, has tricked us all, allowing even the most informed of critics to believe that he has succumbed to a fascination with Western Europe from which he is unable to free himself. Many critics believed, and some still do, that Ḥusayn had swallowed the bait Foucault once accused Marxism of swallowing, namely, “exist[ing] in nineteenth-century thought like a fish in water: that is, it is unable to breathe anywhere else.”36 Ḥusayn did embrace the pragmatic and positivist assumptions of nineteenth-century Europe, but he neither made it his new “religion,” nor allowed it to impede him from reaching more insightful conclusions, conclusions that were unpopular and have caused him to stand public trial and suffer the discontent of his generation, but conclusions that are nonetheless more insightful and more forward-looking than the expediency of the present. With Ḥusayn, the literary critic becomes the pharmakon par excellence, the sacrificial lamb of a grand drama in the same manner Northrop Frye uses the word to describe scapegoats: not because criticism determines, validates, or denies the existence of God, but because it is absolutely necessary that there be a reliable and reasonable discourse to shed light on human thought as far as it can reach, even if such discourse is initially sacrificed and martyred at the altar of traditionalism. From this perspective, Ḥusayn’s work lays a cornerstone for new and enlightened generations who will carry on the task of sifting through tradition and making tradition itself an agent for change.

2

The Return to Philology and the Unmasking of Traditionalism in Amīn al-Khūlī

Of the new generation of scholars who carry on Ḥusayn’s task of making tradition itself an agent for change, the first is Amīn al-Khūlī. Al-Khūlī is a mid-twentieth-century Egyptian Qur’ānic scholar whose work has not yet received critical attention worthy of its significance in the field of Qur’ānic Studies.1 An influential thinker and “an important reformist,” as Naṣr Ḥāmid Abū Zayd has called him, al-Khūlī cultivates a literary approach to the study of the Qur’ān; he outlines this approach in his book Manāhij Tajdīd (Methods of Renovation), which aims to create a functional restructuring of tafsīr (explication) through a rigorous theory that integrates traditional and modern perspectives on exegesis. Al-Khūlī’s fate was similar to that of others motivated by this ambition. He taught Qur’ānic Studies at Cairo University until he was removed from his post in 1954 and banned, by a presidential decree, from teaching and supervising theses. The government decree, or what is historically known as Ḥaraka-t- al-taṭhīr (the Purification Movement), was mandated by the Free Officers and eventually forced al-Khūlī and many of his colleagues into early retirement. Nevertheless, he remains a potent influence, as will become clearer, I hope, hereafter. Al-Khūlī’s method invites us to investigate the grand context of colonialism and modernity; but his legacy continues to raise important questions about the relationship between the two. Is his work a clarion call to liberate the “Islamic mind” from the blind spots of its own traditionalism: an attempt to overturn, in the spirit of modernity, a petrified system of Qur’ānic explication? Or, to the contrary, is it an attempt to reinvigorate tradition, to look backward in order to look forward, to “smoothen out” tradition by rendering it “methodical” and compatible with the so-called liberal, progressive, and secular practices of

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institutionalized European modernity? Or perhaps, in the end, is it no more than a hidden form of colonial mimicry, a Manichean transfer of la mission civilatrice in which the colonizer still controls the intellectual trajectories of the Other? We must also consider a broader question, which bears heavily on Al-Khūlī’s method, and on the Descartes-inspired initiative of Ḥusayn as outlined in Chapter 1: If al-Khūlī indeed has a method, and if he is using it to investigate the context of coloniality/modernity, then how does this “method” function as a kind of immanent critique par excellence, as a rewriting and a retooling of the Cartesian method that is itself part and parcel of a project(ion) to be “masters and possessors of nature” and of Other?2 In order to respond to these questions, one has to contextualize al-Khūlī in relation to his age. From Ḥusayn, al-Khūlī imbibed the intellectual turmoil of On Pre-Islamic Poetry, with its doubts, insistence on historical criticism, and sharp interrogation of traditionalism. Confronting political, traditionalist, and Eurocentric tools of knowledge production, al-Khūlī’s philological rationalism makes him one of the most revolutionary anticolonial intellectuals in the Arab world. He has challenged, à la Ḥusayn, the intractable rigidness of al-Azhar, the calcified recycling of canonical texts, and the sacralization of said texts above reason. A crucial aspect of his theory is what could be loosely termed “the psychology of reception.” Anchoring the relationship between the Prophet and the Revelation in a psychological state of reception, al-Khūlī has developed one of the last century’s most innovative theories regarding tafsīr in relation to asbāb al-nuzūl (causes/promptings of the Revelation). In so doing, he has withstood the fundamentalism of the Muslim Brotherhood and the despotism of Nasserism while resisting the allure of European modernity. Like Ḥusayn’s venture in On Pre-Islamic Poetry, one of al-Khūlī’s main objectives is to decolonize the study of the Qur’ān in a way that simultaneously saves it from the recalcitrant mythologies of hegemonic religious discourses. Al-Khūlī’s method of approaching the Qur’ān is literary in that he examines it with a twofold view, addressing both extrinsic and intrinsic components as he actively reads himself into and out of themes, traditions, and texts. The extrinsic component consists of studying the history of the Qur’ān, including chronicling the geo-history of the Revelation as well as other related Qur’ānic subfields. The intrinsic aspect includes a thorough analysis of figuration, style,



The Return to Philology and the Unmasking of Traditionalism in Amīn al-Khūlī 39

etymology, the meaning of words as used in the Qur’ān, and their linguistic specificities. In elaborated form, his literary explication of the Qur’ān comprises the following: 1. Extrinsic Study of the Qur’ān: This study pays close attention to learning the historical, geographical, and sociological circumstances of the first community of Islam when the Qur’ān was revealed, including asbāb al-nuzūl (causes/promptings of the Revelation) as well as the difference between tartīb al-nuzūl (the arrangement of Qur’ānic chapters according to the historical time each chapter was revealed) and tartīb al-tilāwa (current arrangement of chapters in the Qur’ān as they are recited today, from longest to shortest in verses). 2. Intrinsic Study of the Qur’ān: This study focuses on analyzing Qur’ānic lexicon, word associations, figures of speech, and style. It is also topical in nature, that is, discussing all suwar (Qur’ānic chapters) that address the same topic/theme/prophet, and so on, and finding associations, tensions, and interplay between the syntax, phonology, and meaning therein. Although he never wrote his own tafsīr of the Qur’ān, al-Khūlī succeeded in developing a theory complete with research tools for approaching Qur’ānic explication, which many scholars draw upon, including his student Muḥammad Aḥmad Khalafallāh, his wife Bint al-Shāṭi’, and his intellectual disciple Abū Zayd. As mentioned previously, al-Khūlī contends that a more informed understanding of the Qur’ān has to include two main principles. The first principle, perhaps not as revealing as the second principle, is the study of the Qur’ān’s historical background. This principle reflects the critical epistemological approach that clearly draws on the work of Ḥusayn and includes particular reference to the classical Arabic of Quraysh and Medina, that is, to the language of the society unto which the Qur’ān was revealed.3 Through its linguistic demands and unfolding possibilities, the second principle appeals to the critical scholar. Al-Khūlī contends that a scholar embarking on tafsīr must be topical in their approach. They must address all verses in which the Qur’ān discusses a subject (relying on the famous exegetical saying that the Qur’ān explicates itself: al-Qur’ān yufassiru ba‘ḍuhu ba‘ḍan). So, learning about Mūsá (Moses) will not be sufficient if the topic is discussed with reference to one chapter alone: Moses’s journey is a story that comes full circle

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only when one reads the whole of the Qur’ān, thereby collecting the totality of dispersed narratives—or, more precisely, the traces of narrative from different verses and different chapters, constantly referring back and forth to one another in dynamic (con)textual interplay. Both principles involve contextualizing a particular passage in terms of other passages in the Qur’ān. As such, an exegete must exercise a careful handling of every word in the Qur’ān and restore it to its Qur’ānic code, its meaning which is not necessarily related to the root of the word (and its lexical variations) as we find it in Ibn Manẓūr’s dictionary Lisān al-Arab (The Tongue/Dictionary of the Arabs), for instance. Decontextualized lexicography is simply not enough. In questions of social responsibility, history, time, difference, public and personal relations, and so on, must be considered when we give an account of ourselves, including when we position ourselves vis-à-vis the texts we read.4 Words have different stamps and connotations in the Qur’ān itself, and their various recurrences must be traced and recorded to understand their multiple significations as well as the relationship of those words to their syntactic positions in āyāt (verses) during the very histories in which we read them. This opens up the possibility of legitimate alternative practices of reading within a tradition. As Mahmoud Darwish writes, “Whenever I searched for myself I found others.”5 This syntactic lexicography of the Qur’ān is key to al-Khūlī as it finally opens the door for the exegete to arrive at al-tafsīr al-nafsī (psychological explication), the status of being able to explain the emotional affect6 of the language of the Qur’ān on the Prophet and on the community of listeners— and by proxy on the exegete. This is a vexing point that Bint al-Shāṭi’, al-Khūlī’s student and spouse, would later approach with great reservation in her early tafsīr work, as I explain in Chapter 4. To al-Khūlī, however, the connection between the psyche and the words of the Qur’ān is what will essentially make i‘jāz a reality to the listener/reader. It is, he argues, the most needed type of tafsīr in our world today, for it constitutes the heart of the Qur’ān both as a literary text of the highest artistic quality ever possible in the language and as a message of guidance to humankind.7 Al-Khūlī is intentionally terse with his examples, but he nevertheless provides one in this particular context; he refers to the explication of Q 26:193–195: “nazala bihi al-rūḥu al-amīn / ‘alá qalbika li-takūna mina al-mundhirīn / bi-lisānin ‘arabiyyin mubīn (The Trusted Spirit has brought it down / Upon your heart so that you may be among the



The Return to Philology and the Unmasking of Traditionalism in Amīn al-Khūlī 41

forewarners/In a clear Arabic tongue).” For clarity, I quote al-Khūlī’s analysis at length: Exegetes are divided on the explication of those verses. Some use the verses to subscribe to the notion that the Qur’ān was revealed as meaning (content) and not necessarily as expressed words, and that the words came from the prophet, peace be upon him, because according to them the heart receives only meaning. . . . This is a slippery slope for the discourse of inimitability and a denial of the divinity of the utterances of the Qur’ān. Another group of exegetes denounces this explication on the pretext that revealing the Qur’ān to the heart necessitates that it passes through human senses, as the crux of the heart is the human mind. This is the paradox that the exegete al-Rāzī had brought forth to us. Al-Rāzī mentions all opposing views on this matter. . . . These are difficult and dark corridors of tafsīr which make exegesis a difficulty and daunting task. In the end, al-Rāzī had to make a choice and so he favored the heart and made the argument that revelation ascended to the heart [of the Prophet] although revelation is not simply just meaning but [rather] it consists of words as well.8 However, it was al-Zamakhsharī who discovered the psychological dimension of the verses and solved the meaning-versus-utterance problem as he linked the verse bi-lisānin ‘arabiyyin mubīn ([revealed]in a clear Arabic tongue) to the verb nazala (brought down) so the verses would have the syntactic deep structure of nazala bihi al-rūhu al-amīnu ‘alá qalbika bi-lisānin ‘arabiyyin mubīnin, li-takūna min al-mundhirīn (The Trusted Spirit has brought it down/Upon your heart [Muḥammad] in a clear Arabic tongue so that you may be among the forewarners). So basically a grammatical process of taqdīm wa ta’khīr (frontal predicate) is at work in the verses according to al-Zamakhsharī, who also maintained that if the Qur’ān were ‘ajamiyy (foreign/non-Arabic), then it would still be revealed unto the Prophet’s ears but would never make it to his heart, as he would then be listening to sounds whose meaning he would not necessarily be able to understand or decipher. The fact that the Qur’ān was revealed in Arabic is to al-Zamakhsharī the only explanation why it has reached the Prophet’s heart in the first place, since Arabic is [emphasis mine] the Prophet’s mother tongue and directly relates to his physical being and his psychological condition.9

Al-Khūlī strongly believes that we are bound to miss i‘jāz if we do not pay attention to this psychological dimension in tafsīr, which he directly connects with both philology and the history of the semantic moment of

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revelation: “All I want to say is that the close connection between letters and literature, indeed rhetoric and the psychological condition, is at the heart of the i‘jāz discourse and constitutes the modus operandi in explicating its verses.”10 Al-Khūlī concludes his discussion of the relationship between psychology and revelation with a reference to a statement by al-Imam al-Sakkākī, to whom al-Khūlī acknowledged an immense debt of gratitude: “We should not even seek to explain/expound i‘jāz but leave it to artistic sensibilities and literary taste.”11 To al- Sakkākī, i‘jāz is something yudrak wa la yumkin waṣfuh (that which can be comprehended but not explained). This inexpressible comprehension is, for al-Sakkākī, where i‘jāz begins and where tafsīr collapses. In other words, the unfathomable rhetoricity of the Qur’ān is something that even the field of rhetoric is itself forever incapable of capturing. Balāgha (rhetoric) is a study in human taste and judgment, a tool for the appraisal of compositions and a polishing of the critical mind in valuing and evaluating artistic mastery in linguistic expressions. This art of effective expression stops short of fully accounting for i‘jāz in the Qur’ān—but it does not prevent scholars from marveling at its exquisite language and rhetoric. Although al-Khūlī is not a traditionalist, it is a mistake to label him as a modernist. His oft-quoted statement awwal al-tajdīd qatl al-qadīm baḥthan wa dirāsatan wa naqdan (renovation proper begins with the exhaustive investigation, research, and critique of tradition) sums up his entire philosophy, namely, there will never be a healthy understanding of the present in the absence of a methodical and scholarly examination of the past. Therefore, the relationship between qadīm (classical/old) and tajdīd (renovation) is complex and dialectical. Developing a functional methodology out of this relationship and applying it to tafsīr is a daunting but long overdue task. To achieve this task, al-Khūlī first invites his reader to come to terms with what tafsīr invokes linguistically, historically, and socially. To get there one must address the Qur’ān and learn how to approach it. No matter what we do in our academic studies and professions—for example, what literary texts we read and analyze—a comprehensive assessment and appreciation of the Arabic language, read at its highest level of artistry and felt in its full history, context, and depth, will never be attained without studying the Qur’ān, an essential and fundamental component of the qadīm, if not the very heart of it.



The Return to Philology and the Unmasking of Traditionalism in Amīn al-Khūlī 43

This qadīm (ancient/old) takes us back to the genesis of tafsīr in the Islamic tradition. One must understand how tafsīr began and developed, what dispositions and trends it has carried, how it has matured, and where it leaves us now. This is where al-Khūlī drives his message home. For him, tafsīr is, after all, an explication of the verses of the Qur’ān: “bayān kalām Allāh” (explaining/ explicating/clarifying the speech of Allāh/God). Of course, there is more to tafsīr than just that, including the study of Qur’ānic words and structure; ‘ilm al-sab’ qirā’āt (the seven readings); and philology, grammar, conjugation, and rhetoric. That is why al-Khūlī describes tafsīr as one of the four fundamental and combined sciences or fields of Islam, which include ‘ilm al-dirāsā-tal-shar‘iyya (the field of doctrinal/religious studies), ‘ilm al-qirā’a (the field of Qur’ānic reading/recitation), ‘ilm al-ḥadīth (the field of ḥadīth, i.e., collecting and verifying the sayings of the Prophet), and ‘ilm bayān mā quṣida bi-alQur’ān (the science of explicating what is meant/intended by the verses of the Qur’ān, i.e., tafsīr). Al-Khūlī sees these scientias, or subfields, as fundamental to the practice of Qur’ānic exegesis; therefore, no exegesis is possible without them. He defines the Qur’ān as the greatest book of the Arabic language and its most glorious literary manifestation (kitābu al-‘Arabiyya al-akbar wa atharuhā al-fannī al-aqdas).12 In Manāhij Tajdīd (Methods of Renovation), he emphasizes that the Qur’ān immortalized the Arabic language, which became its crown and source of pride, and that the quality of the Qur’ān is recognizable by all Arabs irrespective of their religious views, as long as they are aware of their Arabness, and regardless of whether they are Christian, pagan, determinists, atheists, or Muslims. To al-Khūlī, this attachment of the Qur’ān to the everyday life of the Arabs makes it a text of “intimate connection to their human existence.”13 For al-Khūlī, a true appreciation of the aesthetic qualities of the Arabic language and its marvelous manifestation is indispensable for any meaningful exegesis of the Qur’ān.14 This appreciation, as explained earlier, cannot happen without a synthesis of the extrinsic and the intrinsic: dirāsa-t- mā ḥawl al-Qur’ān wa dirāsa-t- al-Qur’ān nafsih (an external study around the Qur’ān and an internal study of the Qur’ān itself). In other words, proper tafsīr requires versatile knowledge of the history, language, habits, and thought of the Meccan society upon which the Qur’ān is revealed in the seventh century. Additionally, this knowledge is augmented with a full linguistic and literary

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appreciation of the Qur’ān, attainable only through expert knowledge of philology, grammar, rhetoric, and lexicography. The latter does not just end after checking the meaning of a word in one of the Arabic dictionaries, which often fail to provide historical context and denotation shifts in word usage.15 The jewel in the crown, as it were, is what al-Khūlī specifically refers to as the relationship between psychology and revelation, or psyche and divinity. In the eyes of al-Khūlī, then, al-mufassir al-ḥaqq (the proper explicator, exegete) is a historian, an anthropologist, a sociologist, a grammarian, a philologist, a rhetorician, and a psychologist all at once. To al-Khūlī, knowledge of psychology, in particular studying the psychological condition of the Prophet, brings to tafsīr something previously ignored or dismissed, at least in traditional approaches to exegesis. Al-Khūlī’s formulation of this manhaj (method/pathway/adoption) suits his purpose: before we engage in tafsīr or seek to define it, we must first know and trace its history. There are important and controversial implications to this manhaj. Saying that Qur’ānic exegesis is more informed about and aware of dirāsa-t- ma ḥawl al-Qur’ān and dirāsa-t- al-Qur’ān nafsih while attending to the psychological function of revelation invites us to probe asbāb al-nuzūl (causes/prompting of the Revelation). This awareness also means that an exegete has to be equipped both with knowledge of the emotional condition of the Prophet in relation to the verses revealed and insight into the different psychological promptings of different revelations. In other words, an exegete has to read all four scientias in order to arrive at the inner feelings of despair, confusion, guilt, perseverance, patience, resolve, hope, and sadness that surround tanzīl (revelation). This quadripartite structure, in conjunction with the psychological emphasis in al-Khūlī’s method, requires exegetes to be well-rounded and robust readers, able to detect catharsis as well as emotional states of fear, pity, or compassion. Psychological emphasis thus provides a means to recognize the momentousness of the historical instance of revelation associated with Qur’ānic verses. But is this “psychological” training not in itself an invitation for sinking into exegetical subjectivity? Al-Khūlī does not seem to defend his point, perhaps because he believes that subjectivity is inevitable. He emphasizes that mere traditionalist approaches to the Qur’ān as a book of either wa‘d wa wa‘īd (promise of Paradise and warning of Hell) or hidāya (guidance to the



The Return to Philology and the Unmasking of Traditionalism in Amīn al-Khūlī 45

straight path) obscure the personal connections and feelings that are related to the ability to distinguish between good and evil. These experiential links and emotions, al-Khūlī maintains, are often absent in the categorical abstraction of good versus evil. Hence, he insists that an exegete’s work to explicate and clarify Qur’ānic verses in a manner that appeals not only to the senses but also to the sensibilities will support the important argument that belief is a personal matter first and foremost, something that has to be experienced through the heart (to build on al-Zamakhsharī’s aforementioned explication of Q 26:193–195) as it passes into one’s higher faculties.16 Structurally, al-Khūlī’s thesis relies on finding an objective forum where exegetical judgments can be made with deliberation, not merely by pronouncing publicly and with certainty what the text is trying to convey. Al-Khūlī’s work is an epistemological extension of Ḥusayn’s, although al-Khūlī’s is more methodically detailed. His intervention is a response to various issues that persist today. Al-Khūlī knew well that the challenge to Islamic thought is not only external—that is, it is not just self-aggrandizing Eurocentric orientalism or ethnocentrism and its infiltration of the ArabMuslim world—but also, more fundamentally, it is internal. It is prompted by the rise of the Salafi current, which reached its acme in the establishment of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928. And it has been advanced by the inventible rise of ideological and political tides of Islamism, which have culminated in Sayyid Qutb’s writings as well as his exegetical work Fī Ẓilāl al-Qurʾān17 To al-Khūlī, academic and methodological understandings of Islam are long overdue. With a few exceptions, the current status in the field of Qur’ānic Studies in Arabic scholarship assumes an autonomy that allows readers to interact with the text either with prejudices or with sleepy dogma. For al-Khūlī, the Qur’ān is not to be reductively viewed as a prescriptive text of permissions, prohibitions, and obligations; it is, rather, primarily a text of freedom, which elevates the thoughts of humankind and includes interpretive possibilities that allow believers to make the best judgment according to the various cultural conditions and circumstances of their time.18 This is how the Qur’ān was revealed, and this is how a dialogue was established to negotiate and abrogate verses over the span of twenty-three years of revelation, where free actions and interactions with the Muslim community have allowed for conversation and reconciliation between the prescribed and the permitted. Al-Khūlī’s work

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reflects this interstice, this space in-between, as it seeks both to pull Islam away from the essentialisms of both East and West, and, most importantly, to bring it down from the clouds of eschatological and apocalyptic thought to the lived and practised, material and inhabited, relational and concrete social realities of everyday.19 Like Ḥusayn, al-Khūlī traveled to Europe from 1925 to 1927. In Europe, he worked as Imam of the Egyptian Embassy in Rome and became the religious leader for the Egyptian Mission in Berlin. He also studied European religious thought as part of broader comparative research. This interest led to an important study entitled Ṣila-t- al-Islām bi-Iṣlāḥ al-Masīḥiyya (The Connection between Islam and the Christian Reformation), which he presented at the International Conference on Religion in Berlin in 1935.20 What is evident, however, is that al-Khūlī draws on literary criticism to introduce a method of reading and explicating the Qur’ān that aims at a closer rapprochement with the divine through keen analysis which revitalizes the psychology of authorial intention. Al-Khūlī knows that a systematic literary approach to divinity might not be popular in the end; for him, a larger dialectic exists between humans’ endeavor to grasp meaning and divine authority. Yet, there will always be an essential dialectic in every rhetorical text we read, a tension, as de Man has said, “by which it simultaneously asserts and denies the authority of its own rhetorical mode.”21 This statement sums up al-Khūlī’s theoretical approach to the dialectic of balāgha (rhetoric) and i‘jāz (linguistic miracle/inimitability) in Qur’ānic tafsīr (explication).22 In this context, al-Khūlī’s work is fundamental and pioneering not only because it lays the groundwork for his students, but also because it argues— and, moreover, establishes—that only in relation to literary appreciation can tafsīr take place and a deeper and broader understanding of i‘jāz in the Qur’ān be achieved. Drawing on rhetoric, grammar, literature, philology, psychology, the Qur’ān itself, its own language, as well as kutub al-tafāsīr (exegetical works) surrounding it or originating from it, al-Khūlī maintains that the Qur’ān shocked the Meccan and Medinan communities with completely novel linguistic phenomena. This shock is the starting point of linguistic and rhetorical inimitability and must be examined and clarified thoroughly. In other words, al-Khūlī’s emphasis on the Arabic language as the one and only access point to understanding the Qur’ān restores Qur’ānic exegesis to



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philology and saves it from the inherent biases of Western historical positivism. Al-Khūlī’s assumption is that the history of linguistic influences often reveals the falsity of the presuppositions inherent in its premises. We would have learned nothing from a century of theory if we neglected to interrogate the principles upon which our own notions of referent and origin are based—a preexisting condition for thinking totality, or possibly a nostalgia for an ideal center or a wholeness at the Tower of Babel where all languages are said to have originated. This is how al-Khūlī’s theory confronts orientalism. In this spirit, it will be almost futile to trace Qur’ānic Arabic in, say, Latin, as does Michael Cook when he tries to connect the Arabic ṣirāṭ (straight path) with the Latin “strata.” 23 The anchoring of lexicon in a deep sea of significations turns the entire etymological project against itself and leaves us with nothing other than what the French deconstructionist Jacques Derrida has once called “the différance of temporization.” 24 This “temporalization” suggests, rather, the historical contingency of so-called foundations, the presence of self-deception, and the impossibility of self-transparency. That is why, for al-Khūlī, all faith is primarily a metaphysical and metalinguistic leap that uses language to allude to something merely representational in language. This metaphysicality is also evident in the beginning of the Qur’ānic Chapter of the Cow (Q 2), where al-muttaqūn (the righteous/ pious people of God) are described first as those who believe in ghayb (the unknown, the unseen, or the imperceptible). They do so before yuqīmūn al-ṣalā (establish prayers), or give from what God has provided for them (Q 2:2–3). Here lies the irony of positivistic approaches that skip Arabic and trace older languages in the Qur’ān with the tacit assumption that the Qur’ān was not originally revealed in Arabic or that it was borrowed or translated by Muhammad from another older language. Language, as al-Khūlī has emphasized, always speaks itself, yet this very speech includes an infinite exposition of differences and deferrals.25 In these deferrals lies a paradox: language is itself the system out of which divinity is thinkable. Engaging in a circular exercise of endless concatenations of linguistic influence, however, will, in the end, defeat the purpose of vigorous critique. The Muslim intellectual Aziz Al-Azmeh makes a salient point when he observes that, compared to other languages, Arabic linguistic sources are willfully dismissed as unreliable in Qur’ānic Studies in the West.26 Many

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orientalists shun Arabic because they are convinced that somehow it has made a pact of loyalty with Islamic divinity and therefore every Arabic text must be either dismissed as an “ally” or treated with extreme caution and great critical distance as it is automatically assumed to be apologetic or subjective. But non-Arabic sources, especially in languages that existed prior or concurrent to Arabic during the life of the Prophet and the first community of believers, are taken mechanically as acceptable proof and, moreover, often as unquestionable sources of verification. For instance, the resonance of a certain word, or the similitude of a root such as aḥad (one) or ṣirāṭ mustaqīm (straight path), has to some scholars become that telling clue promising to tear apart the entire gown of the Qur’ān and expose a grand scheme of scriptural plagiarism.27 This theory of the Qur’ān as stolen, and of Muhammad as an imposter, has persisted in orientalist thought and can be traced back to times when the Qur’ān was first heard of in Europe. The theory of Muhammad as an imposter, a forger, and a plagiarist, which was widespread in Medieval Europe, has not died out as one would have expected, but has metamorphosed under the garb of scientific historical approaches to the past. The work of al-Khūlī thus emphasizes the substantial function of the Arabic literary and linguistic tradition in explicating the Qur’ān, which his devotees Bint al-Shāṭi’ and Khalafallāh indeed put to good use in their respective exegetical ventures. In the writings of al-Khūlī and his students, the significant role of classical poetry in Qur’ānic exegesis cannot be underrated. It is fair to argue that al-Khūlī was not much of an innovator as he was a sifter through, or better yet, a conscientious detective, of tradition. However, one must admit that the use of classical Arabic poetry as a supporting tool for tafsīr is found not only in al-Khūlī’s school but also in many commentaries on the Qur’ān, as I elaborate more fully in Chapter 6. These commentaries include, to mention but a few, the work of exegetes like al-Zamakhsharī28 and al-Dimashqī.29 The latter is said to have committed thousands of lines of classical Arabic poetry to memory, which readily come in handy in his semantic engagements with the meaning of Qur’ānic words. The list also includes canonical works by Ibn ‘Abbās and Abū ‘Ubayda. The latter states that the stylistic features of the Qur’ān are similar to those of preIslamic Arabic poetry, “mā dām yaḥmil kull khaṣā’iṣ al-kalām al-‘arabī min



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ziyāda wa ḥadhf wa idmār wa ikhtiṣār wa taqdīm wa ta’khīr” (as long as it [the Qur’ān] carries the same traits of the Arabic logos including additives, ellipsis, pronominalization compactness, anteriorization, and suspension [of predicates, agents, etc.]).30 Al-Khūlī both revived Abū ‘Ubayda’s important work on Qur’ānic metaphor and wrote its preface in the 1954 edition. Till the end of his days, al-Khūlī remained committed to the crucial value of qadīm (ancient Arabic literary tradition) in explicating the Qur’ān. He made it his vocation to bring literary appreciation to the considerations of Qur’ānic exegesis on the basis of the history of language. That is why he was among the first Arab academics to call for a dictionary of Qur’ānic words. To crown it all, he became the pioneer member of the committee in charge of the enormous project of Mu‘jam Alfāẓ al-Qur’ān al-Karīm (A Dictionary of the Words of the Glorious Qur’ān), which was launched in 1940 and concluded in 1970. Although al-Khūlī did not live long enough to witness and celebrate the completion of this sixvolume magnum corpus, his philological stamp is imprinted everywhere on this remarkable multivolume work. As language is always figurative, the linguistic sign will never coincide with what it signifies. But though language can never embody truth, it is all we have to gesture toward it. Without language, divinity becomes unthinkable. That is why it is impossible to understand the Qur’ān or pass judgment on it without close and sensitive attention to the Arabic language. It was al-Khūlī’s central belief that understanding the Qur’ān begins with a clear understanding of its diction—a colossal task and massive effort for the literary historian that later scholars have continued to carry out.

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Muḥammad Aḥmad Khalafallāh: The Art of Narrative in the Qur’ān

The public discontent with which the work of Muḥammad Aḥmad Khalafallāh (1916–98) was met in Egypt points to a crisis in modern Arabic literary thought. This chapter examines the critical deadlock that resulted in the expulsion of Khalafallāh and the demonization of his scholarship on the Qur’ān, with particular reference to his controversial dissertation, al-Fann al-Qaṣaṣī fī al-Qur’ān al-Karīm (1947/8) (Narrative Art in the Holy Qur’ān). The fundamentalist denigration of literary criticism when it comes to offering new insights into Qur’ānic exegesis provides an important context for examining the principles of Khalafallāh’s critical approach to narrative logic in the Qur’ān. I will argue that ultimately Khalafallāh’s case, like that of Ṭāhā Ḥusayn before him and Abū Zayd after him, marks a chronic dilemma in Arabic literary thought: a deep-seated conflict between speculative reason and scriptural determinism, in which the latter dismisses the former as an act of ungodliness and an exercise in impurity that needs to be eliminated by the “true” guardians of the Islamic faith. Khalafallāh died in 1998, leaving behind him a significant oeuvre on the Qur’ān and Islamic Studies. The predominant line of thought that characterizes his writings pays particular attention to philology and etymology applied through a rigorous process of methodology that he received from his mentor, Amīn al-Khūlī: I am indebted to Professor al-Khūlī whose teachings on literary approaches to the Qur’ān have illuminated the path for me to pursue this study and to make the Qur’ān a proper field to nourish my passion for literary studies. His brilliant remarks sank deep into my consciousness and allowed me to perceive his method as a rich vehicle for a literary approach to the Qur’ān.

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This conceptualization was aided and developed by a religious self that grew inside of me since I was young and allowed me to believe that a true Islamic mind is the one capable of approaching the Qur’ān not just as a theological or a legislative concern, but also as a literary experience and that students of Arabic in the College of Arts should be allowed to pursue Qur’ānic Studies with steady and firm steps.1

The reference is to al-Khūlī’s aforementioned method in approaching exegesis. The method that al-Khūlī outlines and Khalafallāh adopts consists primarily of investigating sources and context as well as the chronology of revelations, namely tartīb al-nuzūl (chronological arrangement of Qur’ānic chapters according to the history of their revelations) instead of tartīb al-tilāwa (arrangement of Qur’ānic chapters according to their current indexical placement).2 As I claimed in the previous chapter, al-Khūlī argues for renovating tradition by prioritizing the Qur’ān as the most sacred artistic heritage and most important text in the Arabic language.3 In 1947, and upon completion of his dissertation, Khalafallāh was faced with a surge of discontent and indignation as he was seeking to defend his work. The turmoil resulted eventually in the rejection of his dissertation and his subsequent expulsion from the university.4 Without a good grasp of the history of Islamic thought concerning Qur’ānic explication, it is difficult to understand the reason for this turmoil. With respect to philology and understanding words in their historical contexts, one can distinguish between two rival schools. The first could be described as an orthodox Salafism with its various Islamist offshoots. This particular school is currently dominating Islamic thought and controlling its epistemological machinery. When it comes to Qur’ānic explication, the most basic tenets of this school include literalism, the belief that the Qur’ān is not created but has the same coeternity of God, and the adoption of al-naql wa al-isnād (revelation and narratives based on a concatenation of rusted narrators) as opposed to al-‘aql (reason) with respect to this school’s approach to exegesis. Orthodox Salafism also adopts a non-changing fundamentalist methodology toward tradition, accepting tradition as inerrant and in most cases approaching it with complete acceptance and resignation. The second school is historical in its methodology and adopts a more linguistic and literary approach to the Qur’ān, believing that faith and reason, or faith and intellect, are not in contradiction with one another. While both Salafism and historicism have

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their own adherences and principles, early European orientalism derived its epistemological understanding of Islam and the Islamic world only from the former. It is the tendentious Salafist claim that Khalafallāh's historicist dissertation focused on inconsistencies and contradictions in the text of the Qur’ān that generated the storm of discontent which met his work. The major opposition raised in Khalafallāh’s work is thus between the historical authenticity and the artistic nature of some of the events mentioned in the Qur’ān. The classical explanation of i‘jāz is based on literary appreciation. Approaches to the Qur’ān as inimitable rely on the text’s intrinsic rhetorical characteristic as the highest and most incomparable, far superior to the existing literary tradition attributed to humans. Supporting Khalafallāh’s claim, Abū Zayd distinguishes two major issues that preoccupied apologists in the classical era: “First, what was meant by the challenge of the Qur’ān to produce something ‘like the Qur’ān’? What features are to be considered? Second, why did the Arabs fail to produce something like the Qur’ānic text by simply imitating its style?”5 Abū Isḥāq Ibrāhīm Ibn Sayyār Ibn Hāni‘ al-Naẓẓam (c. 775–c. 845) was the first to introduce the notion of al-ṣarfa (Divine intervention to block/ divert), which comes from the root ṣ / r / f, suggesting that God intentionally diverted the attention of the Arabs away from creating texts that have the same quality of the Qur’ān, texts that otherwise could have stood up to the challenge.6 Of course, this is a complex issue that later Mu‘tazilite as well as Ash‘arite theologians decried on the basis of its denial of Divine Justice. Other exegetes, including al-Naẓẓam’s cousin al-Jāḥiẓ, whose Naẓm al-Qur’ān was lost, and Abū Hāshim al-Jubbā’ī, who trained Abū al-Haṣan al-Ash‘arī, continued the tradition of literariness. Al-Jāḥiẓ, for instance, worked on the relationship between al-lafẓ wa al-ma‘ná (utterance and meaning).7 Ash‘arite apologists such as al-Bāqillānī also continued the literary approach, albeit with different emphases on unprecedentedness, as did al-Jurjānī who further theorized and improved on al-Bāqillānī’s denigrating theory of poetry. Al-Jurjānī consistently relied on the rhetorical secrets and ambiguity of poetry to explicate Qur’ānic i‘jāz, thus employing the established qā‘ida uṣūliyya (a religious maxim derived from fundamental sources, such as Arabic linguistics and the core principles of Islam) that everything needed for an exegete to perform a religious task (in this case, of understanding and explicating the

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Qur’ān) is a task unto itself: mā lā yatimm al-wājib illā bihi fa-huwa wājib (all that is required to fulfill the duty is a duty).8 Thus, it is obvious that Khalafallāh’s discussion of the relationship between the Qur’ān and history in his dissertation is what made him misunderstood, even though his reference to the overall message of Qur’ānic narrative as exhortation is not new.9 In fact, many, including ‘Abduh, have come to the same conclusion. Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad attempts to appropriate this issue by arguing that Khalafallāh’s reference to narrative material is as hypothetical as it is historical: The important thing according to Khalafallah is that the Quran does not deny that these narratives are asatir. All it denies is that their source is Muhammad and not God. Thus if the Orientalists say that some of the narratives of the Quran, such as that of the Ahl al-Kahf, are mythological, we can answer that that does not detract from the Quran. It is one of the characteristics of world literature as well as the text of the great religions. Muslims are proud that the Quran has pioneered in setting the standards and measures by which the material can be appreciated.10

Yet, as it stands, Haddad’s defense misses the mark and almost reiterates the Islamist argument that generated a storm of discontent against Khalafallāh in the first place, which mostly centered on accusations of a lack of accuracy and possible historical contradictions in the text of the Qur’ān.11 It is important therefore to investigate the parameters of Khalafallāh’s thesis and closely examine the Qur’ānic references to those narrative in order to assess the cogency or validity of his argument. Khalafallāh divides his dissertation into a preface, a short introduction to the methodology, four chapters, and a conclusion. Chapter 1, roughly titled “Historical, Social, Moral and Religious Meanings and Values,” includes four sections on the relationship between meaning and history, literature and history, religious and moral values, and the social and psychological significance of the Qur’ān. Chapter 2, titled “Art in Qur’ānic Narrative,” includes three sections. Khalafallāh begins the first section by defining narrative and posing the question of whether or not the Qur’ān includes what might be called artistic narrative. In this chapter, Khalafallāh adopts al-Khūlī’s methodology of philological investigation and attempts to define Qur’ānic narrative. He follows this investigation with a section on the purpose and

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goals of such narratives. In Chapter 3, he delves into sources and etymologies of narrative art. This chapter includes four rich sections on the sources of Qur’ānic narrative, the historical Arab environment into which the Qur’ān was revealed, the literary elements of Qur’ānic narrative, and the development of narrative art. The dissertation’s final chapter includes a discussion of the psychology of the Prophet in relation to Qur’ānic narrative, which shows the unmistakable influence of al-Khūlī. In the theoretical part of the dissertation, Khalafallāh enumerates the al-Khūlī-inspired steps that he has followed in order to compose his work. These steps begin with the topical or thematic compilation of Qur’ānic stories followed by the rearrangement of the Qur’ānic chapters according to tartīb al-nuzūl (historical context and linear chronology). His ultimate goal, as he shows in Chapter 4, is to restore those stories to their original context and the psychological state of the Prophet during the revelation of the verses. Khalafallāh argues that such a method helps reveal deeper layers and semantic nuances in the verses and allows for more informed appreciation of the art of Qur’ānic narrative, coupled with a more profound understanding of its meaning. One remarkable deviation from al-Khūlī’s method is worth mentioning. In his different chapters, Khalafallāh intentionally avoids any thematic accumulation of the stories mentioned in the Qur’ān, for he argues that every piece of Qur’ānic narrative, even if it appears repeated or in scattered chapters, in fact constitutes a unified and autonomous “story” in and of itself. For instance, compiling the stories of Prophet Noah into one larger diachronic unit would risk destabilizing the historical context not of Noah’s storyline, but of the time of revelation and of the historical context and its immediate connection to the psychology of Prophet Muhammad. In other words, the unity of the text (Noah’s story) reflects the unity of the context (the exact point in time of revealing the story/stories) and is indispensable for our understanding of the subtext (the emotional condition of the Prophet while receiving the revelation and its effect on the status of his prophethood). In the chapter on the Qur’ānic narrative, the main focus of the criticism regarding his dissertation, Khalafallāh divides Qur’ānic narratives into three categories: the historical, the allegorical, and the mythical. He defines the historical narrative as the one that revolves around actual history including the history of the Prophets, the messengers, and so on. Examples of historical

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narratives include the story of the people of the cave (to which I will return briefly toward the end of this chapter), the story of Moses and his brother Harūn (Aaron), and the story of Lot. Khalafallāh defines the second kind of narrative, the allegorical, as one where the events are believed to be used to guide and explicate rather than to refer to a certain history external to them. In other words, he conceives of such stories as artistic and argues that some exegetes have indeed classified them as forms of art and literature. The allegorical story is part of balāgha (rhetoric); and even though it may not include a historical reference external to the text, it is still capable of conveying the truth about what it narrates, only such truth is conveyed through a story that may occur in different versions which differ in historical details. In this particular type of narrative, Khalafallāh makes the disclaimer that he does not want to convey wrongly that allegorization in the Qur’ān is there because God needs imagery: “I seek refuge in God from any claim that God is in need of imagery, but humans understand better and more clearly if ideas are conveyed to them through the vehicle of allegory.”12 For instance, Khalafallāh refers to Q 33:72: “innā ‘araḍnā al-amāna-ta- ‘alá al-samāwāti wa al-arḍi wa al-jibāli, fa-abayna an yaḥmilnahā wa ashfaqna minhā wa ḥamalahā al-insānu innahu kāna ẓalūmāan jahūlā” (We offered the Trust to the heavens, the earth, and the mountains; they refused to carry it and dreaded it; but humankind accepted it, in all oppressiveness and ignorance). Another example is Q 2:259: “aw ka-alladhī marra ‘alá qaryatin wa hiya khāwiyatun ‘alá ‘urūshihā qāla anná yuḥyī hādhihi allāhu ba‘da mawtihā” (Or like [the example of] the one who traversed by a depopulated and forsaken village asking “how could Allah ever resurrect this from the dead?”)13 In this example, Khalafallāh makes reference to Ṣāḥib al-Manār, that is, Muhammad ‘Abduh, “it is possible that this story is tamthīl, wa allāhu a‘alam” (allegorical, and only Allāh knows).14 It is Khalafallāh’s discussion of the third kind of narrative, the mythical, that is the most intriguing and provocative section of his dissertation. Mythical narratives are built on usṭūra (an ancient narrative surviving in written form), which is usually associated with an extraordinary superhuman phenomenon. For Khalafallāh, this narrative type is not meant to convey history per se but becomes a vehicle for conveying exhortation and wisdom. The usṭūra type, Khalafallāh warns the reader, would readily become the orientalist’s lowhanging fruit in submitting the Qur’ān to the test of historical veracity.

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He begins by finding the root of the word asāṭīr and traces it exhaustively in various Qur’ānic occurrences, such as Q 6:25, Q 8:31–32, and Q 16:24. Take, for instance, the story of the People of the Cave in Q18. According to Khalafallāh, it appears that at some level the narrative of the people in the cave would bridge the two categories of the historical and the usṭūrī (ancient narrative having the quality of surviving in written form). The Qur’ān’s reference to this particular story effaces its historical reference and foregrounds its moral value. On the one hand, the narration of aṣḥāb al-kahf (The People/Dwellers of the Cave) belongs to the first category of history. It has a straightforward narrative plot: a group of God-abiding young people left their ungodly society and hid away from its evil practices for fear of being forced to adopt a heathen religion or being persecuted. Together with their dog they fall asleep in a cave. However, Khalafallāh argues that the manner in which their story is expressed borders on the literary rather than the merely historical. The Qur’ān deliberately refuses to provide any historical details (Q 18:22, 18:26). Khalafallāh’s point is that the art of narrative, taken as emblematic, can yield a more profound impression on the core of faith than historical details.15 A comparatist would not fail to see in Khalafallāh’s argument echoes of Aristotle’s defense of art against history as a medium expressing the universal truth of things and not necessarily the particulars. Aristotle’s theory of poetry emphasizes that the function of the poet is loftier than that of the historian because poets are liberated from reporting the particular truth of things, and convey instead things as they should be. Art is thus more philosophical, and hence more truthful and more serious, than all records of history as it addresses universal truth, whereas history claims to speak of the particulars.16 Despite his claim that the Qur’ān is intentionally nonhistorical in some of its narrative, Khalafallāh still argues that its narrative includes references to common history, especially knowledge of past generations that circulated during the time of Prophet Muhammad. At that time, the only faithful community with a revealed “book” was the Jewish community. According to Khalafallāh, this community has scriptural knowledge that allows them to distinguish between truth and lies among those who claim to be prophets and tells people that they have been receiving revelations from Heaven. A form of knowledge that helps to make a distinction between a prophet and an imposter is the prophet’s knowledge of al-ghayb (the unseen, the

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unknown, the imperceptible). Part of al-ghayb is the knowledge of al-sābiqīn (the predecessors and their distant past), knowledge of past messengers and prophets, which common people, and especially illiterates, would otherwise have no access to.17 Khalafallāh is specific in arguing that the Qur’ān represents the People of the Cave in a manner and style that, together, downplay historical details. In other words, while the People of the Cave are part of history in the sense that their story took place at a certain time in the past, they are not represented historically. Rather, their story is mentioned to prove that the Prophet is indeed a prophet and that he has knowledge of al-ghayb. The narrative intentionally transcends the specifics of a historical account in favor of using the event as a trope to portray divine power (a synecdoche for Resurrection), in order to showcase God’s pledge to protect the believers, and to demonstrate His omnipotence, which manifests in His ability to awaken the People of the Cave. While the story of the People of the Cave may refer to a specific place on earth, namely al-kahf wa al-raqīm (a mountain, as some have claimed), and although some mystics, such as Ibn ‘Arabī, see the raqīm (which could refer to the name of the mountain where the cave people took shelter or to their shabby and tattered clothes) as a condition of asceticism and not necessarily as a geographical location, the Qur’ān does not say specifically where the cave is located, who the sleepers are, from which ungodly society they are running away and hiding from, how many they are, or for how long they remain asleep. Of course, there are differing explications of these verses. There is thus more to the People of the Cave than meets the historical eye. According to Asbāb al-Nuzūl, the Prophet was challenged to prove that he is a prophet and that he has knowledge of the past, especially in regard to the story of the People of the Cave. But how exactly is the story of the People of the Cave an usṭūra and at the same time historical, and how could these two seemingly contradictory categories of narrative come together? A point that Khalafallāh makes must be reiterated. Al-qiṣṣa al-usṭūrriyya does not translate as “mythological” or “narrative.” These are two different words with complex historical denotations and connotations. It is a mistake to think of the Arabic word usṭūra as translatable into “myth.” But Salafic dogmatism has fallen into the trap of misinterpreting Khalafallāh’s intentions, conflating his reference to usṭūra with khurāfa (myth/fable), and identifying

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the former with myth. In colloquial use, usṭūra (ancient narrative surviving in written form) has become equivalent to, and is often used interchangeably with, words such as khurāfa (mythos/fable), khuza‘bala (fabrication), kadhiba (lie), khudā‘ (deception), and so on. Although Khalafallāh does not dwell much on the etymology of usṭūra, it is important to know that classical Arabic dictionaries explain that usṭūra derives from the root s / ṭ / r.18, which the renowned lexicographer Ibn Manẓūr defines as “related to a book.” The plural is asṭur, asṭār, asāṭīr, and suṭūr.”19 This is the traceable origin of the word. In Ibn Kathīr’s Tafsīr, there is a clear reference to the origin asāṭīr in explicating part of the Qur’ānic verse Q 25:5 “wa qālū asāṭīru al-awwalīna iktatabahā” (They said [these are] the narratives of the ancient peoples which he copied down) by stating that “they mean he (Muhammad) must have copied narratives from the books of ancient peoples.”20 It is worth mentioning that all occurrences of the word asaṭīr in the Qur’ān are in the plural form and in relationship to ancient peoples, for example, “the asāṭīr of the ancient peoples.” We see this in Q 8:31: “When our verses are recited unto them, they would say we heard (and) if we wanted, we could have said something like it for this is nothing other than narratives in the books of ancient peoples.”21 Here is where Khalafallāh makes his point. He argues that upon the narration of qaṣaṣ (Qur’ānic narratives), which are immediately frowned upon and dismissed by the disbelievers as asāṭīru al-awwalīna (narratives of the ancient peoples which he/ the Prophet must have copied down), the Qur’ān shifts its emphasis to the Prophet and the Muslim community. Khalafallāh contends that the narrative the Prophet is giving is not a copying down from other nations’ bygone eras, but rather ghayb (knowledge of the unknown), and argues that he would have no idea of or access to those narratives unless God had revealed them unto him. The reference here is not only to the People of the Cave but also to all Qur’ānic narratives, including the story of Mariam in Q 3:44, the story of Moses in Q 28:44–46, and the story of Yūsuf in Q 12:102 and 111. The principal criticism of Khalafallāh’s dissertation claims that he has restricted historical references in the Qur’ān to the role of exhortation and advice rather than events that have physical referentiality external to the text, that is, events that existed in the past. But a closer reflection on this ‘Abduhinspired approach reveals that Khalafallāh seeks to critique existing orientalist discourse in Western academia, where historians of Islam are keen on finding

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contradictions between the stories told in the Qur’ān and the so-called records of history. This orientalist practice is seen, for example, in reference to Hagarism as discussed in Chapter 1. Khalafallāh’s goal is to defend the Qur’ān against the assault of both its own adherents and European historical positivists, so as to allow for the text to be read, and understood, for its literary significance. Khalafallāh further explains his intention by arguing that the Qur’ān deliberately obfuscates references to places where events take place, the sequential narrative storytelling, the development of events, and the emotional development of the people in its stories. For instance, the story of Moses is scattered throughout the Qur’an, and in certain verses Moses comes before Abraham, an anteriority that is not necessarily historical, for the Qur’ān confirms that Abraham came before Moses. A good example here is Q 53:36– 37: “Am lam yunabb’ bimā fī ṣuḥifi Mūsà. Wa Ibrāhīm al-ladhī waffà” (Was he not informed of the scriptures of Moses? Or of Abraham who fulfilled [his prophetic tasks]?). Khalafallāh uses these dehistoricized references as proof that the Qur’ān enjoys the same liberty that characterizes artistic work. The Qur’ān does not treat historical chronology as a matter of significance; rather, it anteriorizes the moral lesson itself as well as the method and technique of expressing this lesson. In his reading of the Qur’ān, Khalafallāh offers a nontraditional way of explicating meaning and arriving at the religious historical, social, and psychological value of this sum of stories mentioned and imbricated throughout the Qur’ān. An important reference that allows Khalafallāh to create the link between ḥaqīqa (literalness) and majāz (metaphor) is the Qur’ān’s use of the word mathal (example/likeness of). Not only does Khalafallāh exhaust various occurrences of the word mathal in the Qur’ān, but he also arrives at the conclusion that the use of mathal confirms his argument that references to narratives are delivered in such an artistic way precisely to solidify faith. Here he derives his arguments from both al-Rāzī and ‘Abduh, especially in reference to Q 2:62 and Q 11:120. In these references, Khalafallāh claims to offer what he perceives as a corrective explication, or a reformist outlook, on the Qur’ān’s narrative. Following al-Khūlī’s approach to the Qur’ān, Khalafallāh highlights the psychological factors that the Qur’ān uses in introducing al-da‘wa ilá Allāh (the call to God), whether through dialogue, debate, or promise, to which

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he dedicates the last chapter. In the concluding chapter of his dissertation, Khalafallāh studies the connections between circumstances in the life of Prophet Muhammad and the Revelations precisely in order to expose erroneous approaches to the Qur’ān that treat its stories as if they were a desiccated historical document. As Amīn al-Khūlī writes in his apologetic introduction to Khalafallāh, all Khalafallāh wanted to argue is that “the Qur’ān is not a book of science nor of history or political theory.” This is what the discourse of tajdīd (renovation) seeks to establish. The Qur’ān is a spiritual and ethical book of guidance, one whose stories function precisely to fulfill this purpose in an aesthetic manner. In other words, the Qur’ānic stories are literary narratives, tropes employed to serve ethical, spiritual, and religious purposes. It is, therefore, a fatal methodological mistake to deal with the narrative of the Qur’ān as if it were purely history or to confuse history as happenings or events with history as communal knowledge of events that may or may not have taken place. Khalafallāh regards the Qur’ān as a book of ultimate grandeur and inimitability, but one that also consists of language and will therefore always invite appreciation of its literary tropes from whatever angles are available in humanistic discourses. Khalafallāh’s work, objectionable as some may have seen it, constitutes a revolutionary beginning of a crucial yet largely neglected investigation of literariness in Qur’ānic Studies. His keen analysis of the art of narrative in the Qur’ān reveals him as an avid grammarian, a sensitive rhetorician, a learned literary critic, a careful exegete, and a patient philologist intent on offering a fresh look at tradition and providing a theoretical space for identifying the aesthetic brilliance and literary relevancy of Qur’ānic narrative. For this committed—or one might even say receptive, attentive, or faithful— practice of reading, he paid a heavy price. To be sure, there is no offense, let alone blasphemy of any kind, in Khalafallāh’s work. As a literary critic, he is regarded as an outsider breaking into the lab of Islamism in mid-century Egypt. Islamism has always regarded literature and literary analysis as a secular, if not a sacrilegious, project.22 This clash, as explained earlier, did not begin with Khalafallāh, and it won’t end with him. The richness and value of Khalafallāh’s work, however, lies precisely in offering a literary appraisal of Qur’ānic narrative, in prioritizing the role of Qur’ānic language, and in exploring its multiple aesthetic possibilities that

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together weave a way for a new, post-dogmatic, and more textured appreciation of the Qur’ānic tradition. To his credit, Khalafallāh makes the salient point, in a Jāhiẓian fashion, that “the Qur’ān’s choice of utterances has not been thoroughly studied because it has been long established in the minds of the believers that the only raison d'être of alfāẓ [utterances] is to convey ma‘ānī [meaning].”23 To Khalafallāh, the exquisite ḥalāwa (sweetness of sound) and ṭalāwa (cadence) of Qur’ānic utterances,24 unlike its overall guiding message, which he does not fail to emphasize, have the capacity to transfer its metaphor into something remote from its historical reality. This is perhaps because the promise inherent in its linguistic signs points beyond the mere possibility of its realization in the phenomenological world. The Qur’ān’s open-ended imagery, which Abū Zayd takes up and which I address at length in Chapter 6, is a standing reproach to historical positivism and empirical rationalism. In fact, the Qur’ān posits a metaphysical dimension that suspends human laws of causality and probability.25 By attempting to steer the reader away from seeing the Qur’ān as a mere historical pamphlet, Khalafallāh establishes not just history, but understanding itself as a human faculty, à la Kant, especially in its connection to aesthetic judgment; rational and historical discourses, even the very faculty of understanding, fail in comprehending the linguistic brilliance of the Qur'ān as a sublime text.26 Khalafallāh’s point is that the art of narrative in the Qur’ān achieves that status of permanence and can affect the essence of empirical reality more profoundly than historical particularities. The point is far from vague: faith itself is a posit, a leap into l'à-venir (what is yet to come); faith is a theory, and the theo- of theory, like that of theology, has no need for history. Historiography in that sense is always just contested impressions of the past after all, calling itself into question with each word it posits as assertive of its truth. Therefore, anyone who seeks to understand the divine exclusively through pseudoscientific tools of historical positivism is destined to fail. The longer this failure to understand looms, the more inadequate, confused, and paralyzed it becomes in the face of rhetorical and tropological brilliance. This is why Khalafallāh insists that the Qur’ān must not be reduced to a mere document of history, even though it includes history. To spend one’s career trying to prove whether or not the Qur’ān contradicts history is to act like the one-dimensional critic whose only concern, say, is to find a plot in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.

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Khalafallāh claims that his intention is to relieve the Qur’ān of the burden of having to be regarded as a book of history, as he emphasizes, instead, the core value of the telling of narratives, al-qaṣaṣ. In other words, Khalafallāh argues that one should not read Qur’ānic narrative as necessarily historical, but rather as stories of ‘ibra (exhortation) that employ events regardless of their historical veracity in order to either guide people to the straight path or to warn them against the consequences of nonadherence. To Khalafallāh, this is not a new or novel approach, but a view that finds credence in the works of other luminary Muslim exegetes, including Muhammad ‘Abduh, al-Rāzī and al-Jurjānī. In particular, Khalafallāh credits ‘Abduh for the unpopular decision to incorporate al-Jurjānī’s work in the tafsīr syllabuses of al-Azhar.27 ‘Abduh saw it as important to resurrect the tradition of literariness in the Qur’ān, both by reviving al-Jurjānī’s significant work and making it required reading for his students.28 Khalafallāh, as well as his mentor Amīn al-Khūlī, must then be viewed in connection to this important history. Khalafallāh’s most keen observation is as follows: Narrative unity in the Qur’ān does not revolve around the personalities of the Messenger or the Prophet but is above all based on the religious themes, whether they are social or moral, since the Qur’ān rarely approaches history historically. The Qur’ān deliberately obfuscates historical reference, especially social references of time and/or place. This is where we see how the Qur’ān became misunderstood as people occupied themselves with finding reference to history while ignoring the real purpose of Qur’ānic narrative. Had the focus been on the intentions of such narrative, orientalists would have saved themselves the toil, and instead would have found the religious and social aspects of Qur’ānic narrative that evoke emotions and create affect in the hearts and minds of believers.29

In the end, Khalafallāh offers an explication of the Qur’ān suggesting that its narrative art evokes a figurative use of language that displays theological arbitrariness and eventuality. According to Khalafallāh, these kināyāt (metonymic acts) that predominate in the Qur’ān include various parables and stories such as that of aṣḥāb al-kahf (the People of the Cave) and serve to exhibit a message of exhortation and not necessarily to establish historical facts. Khalafallāh derives this metonymic function of Qur’ānic narrative

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directly from ‘Abduh and Ḥusayn. ‘Abduh has emphasized that the ultimate purpose of all asālīb balāghiyya (rhetorical tropes) in the Qur’ān is to guide and forewarn humankind.30 Just as Ḥusayn attributes some historical accounts in the Qur’ān as a reference more to the “period style” and the sociopolitical circumstances in first Muslim society than to historical exactness, Khalafallāh also sees the literariness of Qur’ānic narratives as a tool to push the reader away from treating them as essentially historical. Otherwise, one would fall into the trap of historical references, lose track of the universality of the Qur’ānic message, and commit a gross misunderstanding of the metonymic function—of kināyāt (metonymies) as exhortations.31 Khalafallāh’s thesis is based on the premise that in the Qur’ān God does not just tell people what He is, but that He is, which is itself a significant Qur’ānic message whose impression on the present negates any reliance on absent referents/events from a distant past which may or may not be proven to have taken place. In this sense, a figurative language, unlike isti‘āra (metaphor), invites a secularization, that is, a freeing of the listener/reader from any positivistic referentiality of faith and from submitting one’s conviction to the pseudoscientific caprices of historical revisionism Thirty years after Khalafallāh’s work caused turmoil in the field of Arabic literary criticism and Qur’ānic Studies, Derrida argued that il n’y a pas de horstexte (there is no outside-text), thus complicating the origins as well as the referentiality.32 Khalafallāh examined this externality much earlier, although for him it did not really matter if there was an hors-texte. His reference is a sacred book whose verses point to a signified that lies beyond the phenomenological world, and not a simple phenomenon, namely history, that, after all, does not have any material reality outside language.

4

Bint al-Shāṭi’: Literary Significations in the Qur’ān

What we call adab (literature) is located in a constellation of historical shifts from the era of the pre-Islamic qaṣīda until now. The emergence and codification of Arabic belles lettres resulted in the formation of aesthetic and philological principles that elevated adab and distinguished it from nonliterary forms of human expression; however, this process also involved belittling it, in comparison to iʿjāz al-Qur’ān. In this chapter, I argue that the aesthetics of adab, which eventually resulted in the formation of the discourse of al-naqd al-adabī (literary criticism), have in modern times created a kind of return that brought the tools and benefits of literary criticism back to Qur’ānic exegesis, rescuing it from the persistence of rigid and inflexible ideologies. This new approach to modern Arabic literary criticism, which is boldly adopted by Ṭāhā Ḥusayn in On Pre-Islamic Poetry, as discussed in Chapter 1, begins by alienating itself from the traditional Qur’ānic exegesis it studies: it becomes the reverse of dogmatism and nationalism in an era infested with both. In this spirit of desacralizing both traditionalism and fanaticism, al-naqd al-adabī prepares the reader to look at sacred tradition both scientifically and historically, that is, with a disinterestedness that could only proceed from a methodical linguistic and aesthetic assessment. Regardless of whether or not this disinterestedness from the text is achievable in modern Qur’ānic tafsīr, the Mujaddidūn (renovators)—the mid-twentieth-century school inspired by Ḥusayn, laid out by al-Khūlī, and exercised by Khalafallāh and ‘Āisha ‘Abd al-Raḥmān (henceforth Bint al-Shāṭi’)—have managed to establish an adab-inspired, dogma-free, literary approach to exegesis. In particular, Bint al-Shāṭi’’s work al-Tafsīr al-Bayānī li-al-Qur’ān al-Karīm (Rhetorical/Literary Explication of the Glorious Qur’ān) (1962–68) offers a literary examination of the Qur’ān’s Meccan chapters through a scholastic approach that effectively

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sums up the efforts of this school. In this chapter, I aim to show how Bint al-Shāṭi’’s critical insights and adaptation of this literary approach reinvigorate the synergies between adab and the Qur’ān. Bint al-Shāṭi’ completed her master’s degree, which she received with honors, in 1941; its topic was al-Ma‘arrī, the captivating classical poet who piqued Ḥusayn’s critical interest and whose work she decided to explore even further in her PhD dissertation. When she completed her dissertation in 1950, it was none other than Ḥusayn who conferred the degree upon her, with distinction. But it was only in the 1960s that Bint al-Shāṭi’ began to engage in Qur’ānic exegesis in a scholarly fashion; it took her more than twenty years after she started her graduate education in Arabic to feel confident enough to undertake such an important step. Bint al-Shāṭi’ completed the first volume of her exegetical study al-Tafsīr al-Bayānī in 1962. She finished the second and final volume in 1969. Her study is a work that bridges her scholarship in classical poetry and literary criticism with her enduring interest in Qur’ānic exegesis. Bint al-Shāṭi’ strictly adheres to a language-based approach in her literary examination of Qur’ānic verses. She supplements her study with al-Khūlī’s dual approach to the Qur’ān: the intrinsic and extrinsic considerations, which I will address in detail hereafter. What matters to Bint al-Shāṭi’ is that in pure, unadulterated literary criticism, the most important tool by which the Qur’ān and its associated interpretive and/or exegetical texts must fundamentally be assessed is language itself. The Arabic language, the very medium of the Qur’ān, should constitute the primary focus of any exegetical endeavor. Bint al-Shāṭi’’s work is a practical enhancement of al-Khūlī’s theoretical labor, of his pioneering charting of a linguistically sound and literarily conscious critical method for Qur’ānic tafsīr. His method, as discussed in Chapter 2, aims to avoid the erroneous postulates of orthodox and traditionalist exegesis: We aim to introduce the Qur’ān, explain its common characteristics, discuss the revelation, how it took place, how it was received, and in which geohistorical environment, how the Qur’ān was compiled, scripted, persevered, committed to memory, transmitted from the early eras of Islam till our present day, how it was arranged, how it received its diacritical marks, how it acquired varied recitations, the relationship between sound and meaning, the arrangement of its themes and chapters, and the connection between all this and its literary significations.1



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It is important to note that for Bint al-Shāṭi’, tafsīr deviates from ‘Abduh’s more focused employment of the term for the service of the divine message. ‘Abduh sees tafsīr as hudá li-l-nās (guidance to humankind), or as he puts it, “in tafsīr we seek an understanding of the book as a religion that guides people in their pursuit of contentment on earth and in the hereafter.”2 However, tafsīr for Bint al-Shāṭi’, as it is for al-Khūlī, is first and foremost “a literary [italics mine] experience employing comprehensive and thorough methodology, whose first goal today is purely and exclusively literary, a goal which does not compete with any other goals.”3 Bint al-Shāṭi’, in particular, strives to offer a critical exploration of the Qur’ān as “the greatest achievement of the Arabic language, its most sublime literary expression”4 by incorporating sound and a comprehensive critical assessment: In studying the Qur’ān, I aim to interlink the field of Qur’ānic Studies with the field of Arabic literary criticism both philologically and rhetorically, both literarily and metaphorically. There can be no serious undertaking of Qur’ānic Studies as a field of research without a thorough and profound establishment in the Arabic language and its sub-fields as much as there can be no thorough and profound establishment in the Arabic language without deep knowledge of the Qur’ānic and Islamic sciences.5

This interconnectedness, or inseparability of the Arabic language and the Qur’ān, puts into effect both Ḥusayn’s assertion that the Qur’ān is the most verifiable Arabic text on pre-Islamic life and al-Khūlī’s statement that it is the greatest manifestation of the Arabic language.6 Bint al-Shāṭi’’s fine-tuning of these emphases comes with the strong conviction that a masterful attentiveness to literariness would bring the closest approximation of Qur’ānic signification, allowing the reader to arrive at meaning in the most efficient way and to reach a more informed understanding of the Qur’ān’s message as well as its literary and linguistic uniqueness.7 To Bint al-Shāṭi’, the long-standing opposition between the Sufi and the Ash‘arite, the mystical and the historical, the personal and the doctrinal, is superseded by a philological synthesis of text, subtext, and context. In this manner, Qur’ānic exegesis is no longer a matter of theological leanings or spiritual inspiration, and no longer a vehicle in the hands of an interpreter with special gifts inspired to detect ma‘ná bāṭin (hidden meaning) concealed

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in a ẓāhir (external, explicit, outer) one. Instead, the interpretive modes and licenses of Qur’ānic exegesis come to be understood as cultural indicators of certain epochs and trends in Islamic history. It is from this perspective, then, that Bint al-Shāṭi’ views the text, both historically and with acute awareness of the inherent complexities of the Arabic language. In this sense, her analysis becomes a hypothetical reestablishment of the prophetic moment of receiving tanzīl (Revelation); this reestablishment seeks to make comprehensible the socio- and psycholinguistic culture of the first Muslim community. Bint al-Shāṭi’’s al-Tafsīr al-Bayānī offers a topical and thematic explication of the Qur’ān and, à la al-Khūlī, studies its chapters chronologically according to the historical context and the occasions of revelations. However, there is an important difference between her approach and al-Khūlī’s. While his method involves the recovery of the psychological and emotional condition of the Prophet as a receiver of tanzīl, this is an issue that Bint al-Shāṭi’ largely avoids. To invoke the psychological condition of the Prophet is to perpetuate the illusion that there could be an objective analysis of Qur’ānic verses. Had Bint al-Shāṭi’ chosen to identify the psychology of the Prophet with the use of language and with the general message of divinity, it would have become evident that one would hardly be able to explicate God’s words without presupposing the psychology of His Prophet. In any case, especially in dialogue with Western thought, one will want to remove from al-Khūlī’s use of the term “psychology” any associations with the unconscious and the symbolic; also, the term cannot maintain any of its broader implications of the human as opposed to the divine. Thus, in her study of the Qur’ān, Bint al-Shāṭi’ does not refer to the psychological condition of the Prophet unless the text specifically draws attention to it, as I will elaborate upon in reference to her analysis of Q:93, al-Ḍuḥá (The Forenoon). She realizes that, in most cases, a focus on psychology, while tempting and perhaps somewhat useful in clarifying certain revelations, would immediately be counterproductive if not anti-Qur’ānic, for it would contradict the scriptural prohibition of identifying the sender of the message (God) with the receiver (Muhammad), as stated in hundreds of verses that confirm the oneness and absoluteness of God on the one hand and the transience of all humans on the other (e.g., Q 2:163; Q 6:19; Q 16:2; Q 16:96; Q 37:4; Q 55:26). Furthermore, personalization could be a perilous



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undertaking as one might run the risk of pulling the reader back into the circle of subjectivity, thus detracting from the assumed impersonality of the literary approach. Bint al-Shāṭi’ adopts a five-part method of tafsīr bayānīi (rhetorical explication), which can be recapitulated as follows: 1. Thematic/Topical Analysis: The collection of all verses related to one particular theme or topic of study. 2. Chronology: Arranging suwar (Qur’ānic chapters) in a chronological order according to the times of each text’s revelation in order to better understand its context with regard to time, place, and asbāb al-nuzūl (promptings of Revelation). It is important to be mindful in Islam of the particularity of the event, which leads to the generality of the commandment. In other words, Qur’ānic commandments are tied to history or time. On the contrary, signification is decided by the universal applicability of the utterance as opposed to its narrow historical circumstance, and the generality of the Qur’ānic word supersedes—both preserves and cancels—the particularity of the event which prompted the verse in the first place. 3. Lexical Signification: Probing for all possible denotations and connotations available in a word, whether used in classical Arabic, as defined in a dictionary, or appearing in the Qur’ān on different occasions. 4. Nuances of Expression: Exploring the subtleties of Arabic expressions with reference to the context of their use in the Qur’ān; examining the explications of other exegetes dealing with nuances of expression in order to weed out hermeneutic and interpretive impurities celebrated by certain cults and persuasions blindsided by one-dimensional and one-sided explanations. 5. Rhetoric: Paying closer attention to aesthetic expressions and metaphorical language in the Qur’ān including the use of tropes, similes, metonymies, and so on. Bint al-Shāṭi’ expects all these tools of analysis to help the reader see the Qur’ān as a uniform and unifying text that brings together multiple nations and societies in appreciation of its literary and rhetorical value. Thus, she begins her analysis of the Ḍuḥá chapter by providing a historical background based

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on multiple references in the tafsīr tradition. She situates the chapter as Makkī (revealed in Mecca) and relates its causes to a time when the Prophet suffered from the slowing down of revelations during the beginning of the prophecy, up to a point where some began to think that God had abandoned him.8 She does not take any of these references at face value; instead, she gives her own view on these various claims, arguing against ones she considers invalid. She then follows with an exhaustive exegesis of the chapter. This is where Bint al-Shāṭi’’s analysis is at its best; she engages in a literary explication of the rhetorical and grammatical significance of the Arabic letter wa at the outset of the sūra, which is repeated through its eleven verses, and begins eight of them: The common understanding among classical exegetes is that this heavenly oath carries the meaning of divine glorification of whatever God chooses as the subject of the oath. This understanding has been so rampant that [classical exegetes] applied it arbitrarily to every wa oath mentioned in the Qur’ān. Take for instance, the use of wa in the following verse with layl [night]. Classical exegetes continued to consider this verse a variation on the theme of divine self-glorification by addressing the divine wisdom in creating the night and making it time for repose and quietness. But they have also observed in connection to the preceding verse ḍuḥá (forenoon) that there is a sense of wilderness and abandonment, perhaps on hermeneutical assumptions that the dark silence of night is connected to the dark silence of the tomb and alienation—which renders any connection to divine glorification hollow and ostentatious, if not detestable.9

Bint al-Shāṭi’ does not stop there, but continues to critique well-established and widely acceptable explications of this Qur’ānic chapter. She adds: [Classical exegetes] have connected layl [night] with divine glorification indiscriminately in every mention of the word in the Qur’ān despite the obvious fact that in the context of other verses in this Chapter, this particular verse ‘idhā sajá [as it spreads darkness and quiet] dictates a different and more limited meaning of the night, as is also the case with other verses and chapters. It is obvious that in the Ḍuḥá Chapter, as well as in most oath verses that include the wa letter/particle, they confuse glorification with the wisdom of creation, i.e., of creating an entity that becomes the subject of the oath. God has created everything for a reason and a wisdom, whether known to us or not. One cannot simply resort to glorification so perversely and expect the term to replace the apparent wisdom of creation.10



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Bint al-Shāṭi’’s analysis is worthy of consideration. She surmises that the initial wa, which appears at the beginning of some Qur’ānic chapters, “could be, and only God will know, a particle that has stepped outside the linguistic prescription of a glorification oath to acquire a different rhetorical function, as it is the case with Arabic imperatives, prohibitives, and interrogatives that have also acquired rhetorical functions.”11 For Bint al-Shāṭi’, the wa in this rhetorical mode draws attention to indisputably perceivable entities at the same time as it connotes unperceivable and immaterial concepts. The wa oath, then, is a rhetorical literary trope that at once reveals both the ḥissī and the ghaybī (the phenomenological and the metaphysical). This figurative virtuosity, which connects the material with the immaterial and allows the reader/ listener to relate darkness and light to loss and guidance, is itself part of the stylistic genius of the Qur’ān, and therefore must be approached with care and diligence.12 In sum, Bint al-Shāṭi’’s treatment of the wa in the Ḍuḥá chapter is an excellent manifestation of al-Khūlī’s method: she approaches a word or utterance, investigates its grammatical and rhetorical functions in a given verse, connects this utterance to its denotative and connotative associations in Arabic lexicographical tradition, and traces it down to its use and function in the Qur’ān. So far so good. In principle, Bint al-Shāṭi’’s work is a story of influence and innovation. She honors the spirit of al-Khūlī’s method as she attempts a literary explication of the Qur’ān with exceptional talent and erudition, critiquing conventional explications and exposing the unquestioned assumptions of a moribund exegetical tradition. But she does so with extreme caution and concision, and only up to a point. She promises a critique of the traditionalist state of mind, and at times she fulfills this promise. Yet, her work remains hampered by the linguistic and rhetorical modes of the very tradition she seeks to debunk. This is perhaps due in large part to the fact that al-Khūlī’s method itself is not really innovative, but rather an attempt to utilize the best elements of traditional exegesis. This is not to diminish al-Khūlī’s achievements. On the contrary, sifting through thousands of manuscripts and treatises on tafsīr to identify still valid aspects of traditional exegesis is in itself a formidable task and an extraordinary accomplishment. But it is possible that the penchant for honoring and adhering to a selected tradition, as well the dread of coming up with something controversial á la Ḥusayn or Khalafallāh, may have played a

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role in preventing Bint al-Shāṭi’ from fully exploring previously undiscovered aesthetic qualities in Qur’ānic verses. Bint al-Shāṭi’’s rhetorical Qur’ānic exegesis thus walks a fine line between tradition and individual talent, where a creative scholar might seek to veil her ingenuity under the garb of a traditional discourse. We can see this in Bint al-Shāṭi’’s argument on the wa in the Duḥá chapter. Linguistically, the wa is a conjunctional particle, one that connects parts of speech and in some cases even begins sentences. In English, the wa would be a linguistic equivalent to the conjunctive “and.” It is difficult, if not illogical, to start an English sentence with “and,” whose essential function is to connect that which comes before it with that which follows it on the same sentential level. But in Arabic, wa has numerous complex functions, syntactically as well as rhetorically; Bint al-Shāṭi’’s analysis does not address these functions fully. Yet, in a thorough and nuanced literary analysis of Qur’ānic verses, it makes perfect sense to reference those functions, something well within the capacity of an insightful scholar of Bint al-Shāṭi’’s caliber. There are numerous aesthetic and grammatical functions for the wa in Arabic; the most relevant in this context is wāw al-tamthīl or wāw al-ḥāl (the adverbial wa of likening/linking a condition or status to another). This metaphorical employment of wa is quite rare, and very few examples are found in classical Arabic, but when used, the power of this rhetorical trope is quite remarkable. For example, Bashshār ibn Burd, the poet of late Umayyad and early Abbasid dynasties, is said to have composed one of the most exquisite metaphors in Arabic poetry by using the wa particle to liken the condition of flickering swords in a dark battlefield to the falling stars of the night: Ka’anna muthāra al-naq‘i fawqa ru’ūsinā /wa [my emphasis] asyāfanā laylun tahāwt kawākibuh [As if sanded turbulence were above our heads /And (as if) our swords were (like) a night of falling stars].13

The Qur’ān also uses this metaphorical wa on a few occasions. There is an instance where the deeds of disbelievers are likened to a mirage using the wa particle: Wa alladhīna kafarū a‘māluhum ka-sarābin bi-qī‘atin yaḥsabuhu al-ẓam’ānu mā’an ḥattá idhā jā’ahu lam yajidhu shay’an wa wajada Allāha ‘indahu fa-waffāhu ḥisābahu wa Allāhu sarī‘u al-ḥisāb.



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And [the likeness of those] who disbelieved—their deeds resemble a mirage in a lowland which the thirsty mistakes for water until he reaches it only to find nothing but God there, and He will repay him in full his due; and God is prompt in repayment. (Q: 24:39)

Although Bint al-Shāṭi’ still works within a long-standing custom of relying on classical poetry for exegesis, she does not take into account this rhetorical variation of the wa. She is unwilling or unable to see the wa outside the conservative oath tradition that she critiques, even though it is quite likely, and indeed appropriate, that in this context, the wa may be metaphorical in that it likens one condition to another. Scholars, ideally, should not only demonstrate the care and resolution to dwell among different clarifications, they should also posit alternative explications. It is difficult to tell whether or not Bint al-Shāṭi’ has considered this possible literary trope. Yet the possibility exists, and the verse could very well include a high level of tropological rhetoricity predicated on the assumption of a deeper structure with the omission of an implied kamā/ ka-ḥāl (like the condition of). Such omission is not an uncommon feature in the Qur’ān. The first three verses, then, could possibly be explicated as follows: “just as there is brightness in the day, and just as it is inevitably followed by the descent of night, it is inevitable that God will never abandon or forsake you.” This is a possibility that Bint al-Shāṭi’ does not entertain. Other scholars have criticized Bint al-Shāṭi’ for falling into conservatism in her exegetical writings. Take, for instance, Shukrī ‘Ayyād, who criticizes her for deliberately avoiding the word adabī (literary) and opting for bayānī (rhetorical) in her title. To ‘Ayyād, this in itself is a clear sign of a scholar who concedes to public discourse at the expense of scholastic integrity, and one who does so in order to avoid controversy. Himself a devoted student of al-Khūlī, ‘Ayyād argues in his review of Bint al-Shāṭi’’s book that the study is rich, albeit limited, as indicated by the book’s title: Today Dr. ‘Ā’isha ‘Abd al-Raḥmān adds her book Rhetorical Explications of the Qur’ān to the library of Qur’ānic Studies. In her book she addresses what a proper literary academic study of the Qur’ān should be like. She follows the approach laid down by our own professor Dr. Amīn al-Khūlī. She offers examples of a literary study of the Qur’ān by explicating a number of short Meccan chapters. I wonder why Dr. ‘Ā’isha has chosen to name her book “Rhetorical Explication” rather than “Literary Explication.” I also wonder

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why Dr. ‘Ā’isha has opted to work on the last Qur’ānic chapters according to their current arrangement instead of offering a thematic and topical study, as recommended by Dr. al-Khūlī.14

‘Ayyād’s criticism is not indefensible. In fact, it is not difficult to find an answer to his second question. Diversity within thematic unity is noticeable throughout the last Meccan chapters of the Qur’ān—resolute faith, the oneness of God, the day of judgment, perseverance, emotional uplifting, promise of paradise for believers, and warning to disbelievers. She is thus still within the framework of the rhetorical method. To her credit, Bint al-Shāṭi’ does address the question of the day of judgment effectively and thematically throughout her study of the seven short chapters; she additionally, as aforementioned, analyzes the issue of the divine oath extensively. In other words, she is able to merge topical unity with the conventional chapter-by-chapter analysis in an effective manner that reveals the general emotional and mental conditions of the Meccan society during the early years of Islam. The importance of her literary exegesis of complete chapters lies precisely in showing the difference between traditionalist and modern methods of tafsīr, an achievement which ‘Ayyād himself does not fail to recognize.15 ‘Ayyād’s first question, however, does not lend itself to an easy answer. The difference between adab and bayān lies at the very heart of this problem. Bayān (which Bint al-Shāṭi’ uses adjectively in her book title, and which I translate roughly as “rhetoric”) is a term that has its own cycle of historical and philological significations.16 To be sure, bayān as a stylistic mode of literary expression is closer to literature than, say, naḥw (grammar), but in no way does the term bayān amount to or encompass the grander significations of the term adab—hence the noticeable limitation. Philologically, the word bayān means “to explain,” “to make clear,” “to explicate,” or “to expound.” At times, the Qur’ān refers to itself as bayān (that is, an ultimate manifestation, a clear communiqué, a lucid explication, a transparent message and statement).17 The title is therefore a misnomer. After all, Bint al-Shāṭi’’s is not a study in ma‘ná (meaning or lucidity), but in affect, not in sense but in sensibility— in what ‘Ayyād refers to as ḥiss al-Qur’ān (the aesthetic sensibility of the Qur’ān).18 The task is not to account for a fuller comprehension of the Qur’ān as a hermeneutical text. The task is to catch a glimpse of the Spirit itself in its figurative omnipresence, in the perfection of eloquence (ḥusn al-bayān), not



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just in the manifestation of the intention (ma‘ná bayān) of its message. Bint al-Shāṭi’’s use of the modifier al-bayānī, which Ayyād criticizes, is perhaps an indication that she is not fully committed to this task. To her credit, Bint al-Shāṭi’ moves closer toward fulfilling this task in her following study, al-I‘jāz al-Bayānī li-al-Qur’ān wa masā’il Ibn al-Azraq (Rhetorical Inimitability of the Qur’ān and the Issues of Ibn al-Azraq). In this book, Bint al-Shāṭi’ presents her most nuanced approach to analyzing the various associations of i‘jāz, how the Qur’ān has come to claim linguistic and rhetorical distinction above all other texts ever produced in Arabic.19 She consolidates her findings with reference to classical Arabic poetry, Qur’ānic verses, and various other references. She tells the story, for instance, of how the recitation of some verses from Ṭāhā (Q 20) calmed the fury of ‘Umar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb and opened his heart to profess Islam. She narrates, furthermore, how the Qur’ān’s unrivalled acoustics continued to sway many a defiant heart to embrace the new religion, including Sa‘ad Ibn Mu‘āth and Usayd Ibn al-Ḥuḍayr, among others: In classical Arabic poetry, linguists and philologists dwell on metaphor, meaning, appreciate meter, prosody, spot associations between form and content, and learn about the linguistic varieties of Arab tribes. It is also classical Arabic poetry which has provided the deeper understanding and appreciation of the language of the Qur’ān, which brought to the Arabs a level of rhetorical genius the like of which they have never witnessed before. The language of the Qur’ān stands out, is unique, different and defiant, challenging anyone who hears it to compose something like it.20

What thus gives the Qur’ān linguistic authority and legitimacy is its mystery as a miraculous and imitable phenomenon, a mystery that makes the most capable of poets living in the most fecund and glorious era of Arabic poetry helpless and powerless.21 It is hard for an Arabist of Bint al-Shāṭi’’s caliber not to be amazed by the enigmatic imagery of the Qur’ān. In every attempt at explication, the text of the Qur’ān stands before the reader ready to test his or her conceptual abilities, aesthetic judgment, and cultural knowledge. Through an approach informed by an aesthetics of adab, we see that the Qur’ān unfolds contextually and continually, giving itself, in excess of its clear message for guidance, not as literal and fixed, but as affective and unknowable; this mystery or genius will always be bound up with history and with the history of its own

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language. It is through Arabic after all that the Qur’ān becomes a linguistic miracle, and it is Arabic alone which gives it its authority. Through a seventhcentury variety, namely that of the tribe of Quraysh, spoken and understood in all of Arabia, the Qur’ān gained its access to Arab ears and hearts, manifesting God’s divinity and appearing at every moment to convey a message of faith while, at the same time, in its impenetrable figuration and metaphorical motion, continuing to mystify the most perspicacious of aesthetic theorists.

5

Reclaiming Qur’ānic Exegesis: Naṣr Ḥāmid Abū Zayd between Traditionalism and Postsecularism1

As the need to engage fully and without preconditions with core texts in the Islamic tradition continues to grow, this chapter offers an examination of Naṣr Ḥāmid Abū Zayd’s counter-hegemonic intervention in the dominant religious discourse of twentieth-century Egypt.2 Abū Zayd’s case is a striking example of a wider phenomenon occurring in the world of Arabic literary thought, which has been the subject of the previous chapters of this book, and it raises pressing questions about Islamist discourse and the nature of criticism. Some of the questions this chapter examines are: How does philology mediate the relationship between the language of God and human language? What aspects of literary criticism make it seem dangerous or sacrilegious to traditionalists? What underlies the condemnation of “secular” critics as apostates in their own societies, or as US collaborators outside of them? And, finally, how can the case of Abū Zayd, heightened by both geographical exile and intellectual ostracism, enable us to rethink the tensions between modern Arabic literary criticism, secularism, and tradition? All responsible critiques must fit texts inside one another, must find relationships between texts and contexts, and must make logical, forceful, and coherent arguments. Yet, despite the accusations of hidebound traditionalists, not every critique involves violent opposition to the texts that it interrogates. Such is the case of Abū Zayd, an Egyptian intellectual émigré whose writings in exile became his only defense against the blatant accusations of Egyptian Islamists who had forced him to leave his homeland. Even a cursory reading of Abū Zayd confirms that he does not reject Islam, nor, surprisingly, does he bear any resentment toward a certain group of fundamentalists in the country

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that forced him from his home, labeled him an apostate, deprived him of his position and his students, and legalized a forced separation from his wife. And even when, in a television interview, he declared, “I want an apology,” he immediately mitigated this by saying, “But doesn’t everyone else in Egypt need an apology? Don’t the innocent killed due to neglect and lack of maintenance of railways systems need an apology? Don’t those who drowned in the Red Sea on non-operational ferries need an apology?”3 In the same conversation, Abū Zayd revealed his deep understanding of the larger context of the plight that included him along with many Egyptians; he mentioned in passing to his interviewer, Aḥmad ‘Alī, that the Egyptian poet Amal Dunqul has a beautiful poem that summarizes the exile of reason in contemporary Egypt. Abū Zayd was most likely referring to the following lines from Dunqul’s long poem “Sifr al-Takwīn” (The Book of Genesis): I said: Let there be reason on earth So you could pay heed to its balanced voice I said: Do birds make nests in the mouths of snakes? ... Reason has become a stranger, begging, children throwing stones At it, soldiers stopping it at borders/checkpoints; governments Revoking its citizenship, blacklisting it as an enemy of the nation I said: Let there be reason on earth, but there wasn’t Reason fell in the cycle of exile and imprisonment, until it lost its bearing And God saw that it was not good.4

Dunqul’s poem, which parodies the Book of Genesis, introduces a world that is both destructive and unforgiving. In a context beset by violence and barbarism, reason is destined to be an “exile” and a “vagabond,” falling prey to a vicious “cycle of banishment and imprisonment.” In “Sifr al-Takwīn,” Dunqul treats existence and madness as two faces of the same coin. It is no surprise that this personification of reason would resonate with Abū Zayd as an apt commentary on the current conditions of Egypt and his own exile. Indeed, the fate of Abū Zayd, like that of many intellectual exiles who hold steadfast to their belief that criticism and reason can overcome bigotry and narrowmindedness, reminds us that their writings, whose rigor and resilience allow the authors to survive an unjust banishment, can later become the very record of the barbarism that sought to obliterate them in the first place.



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Abū Zayd was born on July 10, 1943, in the small village of Quḥāfa near Tanta, Egypt. Prophetically, he was given his first name Naṣr (victory) as a hopeful harbinger for the victory of the Allies over totalitarianism in the Second World War. Abū Zayd committed the Qur’ān to memory by the age of eight. His dream of attending university dwindled after his father died in 1975, the same year young Naṣr finished middle school. He was only fourteen when he realized that he had become the breadwinner of his family. Thus, instead of going first to high school and then to a university, he took a shorter path to employment, obtaining a three-year industry diploma and specializing in wireless communications in order to support his mother, two sisters, and two brothers, which he did from 1960 to 1972. After graduating from the Arabic department at Cairo University, Abū Zayd joined the faculty and soon established himself as a versatile scholar in Arabic and Islamic studies. In 1992, his promotion to full professor was denied on the pretext of apostasy, his books were removed from the library of Cairo University, and he was no longer allowed to teach or work with students. As if this encroachment on his academic life was not enough, a group of Islamists filed a ḥisba case (accountability for behavior, mostly public, under Islam) against him, demanding that he be divorced from his wife, because as a murtadd (apostate), he could not continue to be married to a Muslim woman.5 In 1995, Abū Zayd and his wife left Egypt, seeking refuge in Holland, where he was given a temporary position as Professor of Islamic Studies at Leiden University. In the years to follow, he was to write some of the most remarkable and groundbreaking books in Arabic literary and Qur’ānic exegesis, including Dawā’ir al-Khawf: Qirā’a fī Khiṭāb al-Mar’a (Circles of Fear: Reading the Discourse on Women, 1999), Rethinking the Qur’ān (2004), and Reformation of Islamic Thought (2006). In 2005, Abū Zayd received the Ibn Rushd Prize for Freedom of Thought from Berlin. Unlike many intellectual émigrés, Abū Zayd had always wanted to return to his homeland. While he was able to visit Egypt occasionally and surreptitiously, mostly for reasons related to his family, he could not continue to teach there. After a visit to Indonesia, he contracted an unknown virus and was sent to Egypt for treatment; he died in a Cairo hospital on July 5, 2010.6 In 1992, when Abū Zayd applied for a promotion to full professor in the Arabic department of Cairo University, ‘Abd al-Ṣabūr Shāhīn, a blatantly Salafist

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professor of Arabic who epitomizes the encroachment of the fundamentalist ideology on Egyptian universities, produced a severely damaging retention, tenure, and promotion report, in which he accused Abū Zayd of apostasy and of the use of Marxist theory with a view toward dismantling the principles of Islamic faith.7 This accusation is a flagrant example of the rhetoric of persuasion responsible for the hazardous schism in critical literary appraisals and their relationship to tradition. The portrayal of Abū Zayd as a diluter of Islamic faith is not restricted to Salafist ideologues such as ‘Abd al-Ṣabūr Shāhīn. In a highly influential essay, the anthropologist Saba Mahmood condemned Abū Zayd as a USAID and Rand Corporation hack. Mahmood’s essay, “Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire: The Politics of Islamic Reformation,” sets out to respond both to what she describes as an “ascendance of global religious politics” since the events of 9/11 and “urgent calls for the reinstatement of secularism,” which “have reached a crescendo that cannot be ignored.”8 As she examines the contemporary Middle East, especially Egypt, Mahmood’s thesis is to expose “a particular understanding of secularism underlying contemporary American discourse on Islam, an understanding that is deeply shaped by US and foreign policy concerns in the Muslim world.”9 Mahmood builds her argument on the premise that there has been a coupling of “the fate of democracy in the Muslim world with the institutionalization of secularism,” originating specifically from “the U.S. State Department in its programmatic efforts to reshape and transform ‘Islam from within.’”10 Mahmood’s hypothesis fundamentally asserts that a secularization of Islam by any means possible is the United States’ most effective scheme for ridding the world of “terrorism” and bringing “democracy” to the Muslim world. This is exactly how Abū Zayd becomes relevant to her thesis. “Given the progressivist and empiricist conception of history that animates the interpretive method of Abu Zayd, Hanafi, Soroush, and others,” argues Mahmood, “this form of critical reading is the nadir of man’s attempt to grapple with the divine—all others who do not agree with this method stand in a false relation to this quest.”11 It is not clear how Mahmood situates Abū Zayd’s work on Arabic criticism and Qur’ānic Studies as “progressivist” when his main task, at least in the book from which she quotes, Naqd al-Khiṭāb al-Dīnī (Critique of Religious Discourse), is to resurrect an existing but silenced



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tradition of Mu‘tazilism in order to confront a perverse current of dogmatic Islamism. The charge that he was complicit with what she characterizes as the imperialist apparatus of the US State Department and, moreover, exercised a kind of intellectual terrorism (accusing “all others who do not agree with [his] method” of being “false”12) is invalidated by Abū Zayd’s insistence on allowing for alternative approaches to Qur’ānic explication. Indeed, the epistemological expansion of the realm and methods of exegesis, to which he dedicated several of his books, is one of Abū Zayd’s most significant contributions to the field of Qur’ānic Studies. In her essay, Mahmood goes on to pose the following question about Abū Zayd’s approach to exegesis: “Once metaphysical intention is separated from the text, how is this text to be read and what would its significance be for the secularized believer?”13 It is worth asking from where in Abū Zayd’s text Mahmood is able to infer that he contends that metaphysical intention is separated from the Qur’ān; after all, Abū Zayd fully knows that the text itself is an embodiment of such intention.14 In other words, I ask, what allows Mahmood to draw the ill-founded conclusion that Abū Zayd is “engaged precisely in formulating the interpretive arguments through which traditional hermeneutical methods can be displaced,” leading to a “convergence between secular Muslim reformers and the interests of the US State Department?”15 While this is not the time to engage more broadly with Mahmood’s idiosyncratic take on reformist Islam and its relationship to secularism, one cannot help but question how she is able to include Abū Zayd in a disparate pool of “indicted” Muslim thinkers, which includes luminaries such as Ḥasan Ḥanafī (a leading scholar in his own right whose project of the Islamic Left Abū Zayd critiques in the same book Mahmood cites to support her argument16) and Soroush (whose work is more concerned with Shi‘i theology and jurisprudence—i.e., Khomeinism more than with Salafism), both of whom probably consider themselves reformers engaged in the task of reviving Arab and/or Islamic thought after it was caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of puritanical Wahhabism and colonial orientalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The thinkers in Mahmood’s disparate pool, who spent their careers unmasking Eurocentrism, advocating a new science of occidentalism, and uncovering ideological underpinnings of traditional Muslim texts, would be rightfully astonished, if not sorely offended, to learn that they are perceived

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as implementers of the US State Department’s grand scheme of diluting Islam from within. Mahmood states that her reading of Abū Zayd “is deeply indebted to Charles Hirschkind’s work.”17 In his essay, “Heresy or Hermeneutics: The Case of Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd,” Hirschkind claims that Abū Zayd posits “an abrupt break with the divine occurring at the moment of revelation,” resulting in “the total secularization of the text, which henceforth becomes a book like any other.”18 It is unclear how Hirschkind arrives at such a misinterpretation of Abū Zayd’s text. Mahmood’s misreading of Abū Zayd, however, is not just an unquestioning rehash of Hirschkind’s slipshod case: it is a mistake superimposed upon an error, a new postsecularist “anthropology-from-above” approach to reformist Islam, only this time it is enlivened with the dramatic twist of a conspiracy theory. This systematic conflation of simple facts with fiction—for example, arguing that Abū Zayd was denied “tenure” where a simple internet search in Arabic would reveal that he already had tenure and was denied promotion to full professor, which makes the firing even more flagrant—constitutes a new trend in transcendental essentialism, advanced at a grave risk, in anthropological studies.19 This essentialism enables Mahmood to read Abū Zayd irresponsibly out of context, with the aim of reducing him to a USAID and Rand Corporation liberal dissolver of the Islamic faith. It is, one must say, an intriguing hypothesis to link Muslim intellectuals and anti-fundamentalists to the United States’ grand militarization project against “terrorism,” an argument readily welcomed by a growing pool of indignant, but perhaps ill-informed, anti-imperialist readers. It is, however, an argument that “hangs loose, like a giant’s robe upon a dwarfish thief,” to borrow from Shakespeare.20 This kind of misreading is typical of the postsecularist’s approach to those they condemn as “liberal” Muslims and who must, therefore, be dealt with in some way that “plunge[s] the domain of the secular to the uncertainty of its own interrogation,” as Stathis Gourgouris has brilliantly characterized it.21 Most of the authors Mahmood describes as engaging in a “process of disenfranchising traditional modes of interpretation” write in highly specialized Arabic, and not many of their works are available in English, but even a cursory reading of any of their texts is enough to disprove Mahmood’s argument.22 The irony here is that a theory of the secular, fully aware of the nefarious dark side of the United States’ “war on terror” and its fostering of conspiracy theory



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(Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, for instance), ends up reinforcing, in an essentialist manner, what it seeks to demystify. To this effect, a point made by Aamir R. Mufti must be emphasized yet again. There will always be the risk of hamartia (literally, “missing the mark”) when we project methodological tools, already at odds with themselves and laden with problematic modes of Western thought, on other cultures and traditions. This “marks a failure to look honestly at one’s own intellectual practice and conceptual apparatus, at its own location within the secular culture of critique.”23 It is crucial for a better and more informed assessment of Abū Zayd’s work and the circumstances of his case, therefore, to contextualize the fundamentalist turmoil in Egypt during the 1980s and 1990s leading up to the January Revolution of 2011, the ousting of Mubarak, and the subsequent brief rule of Mohamed Morsi, which was followed by the military coup of the present government. To be a Muslim in postcolonial Egypt means living in a predominantly Sunni milieu, challenged and enriched by competing religiosities. Such religiosities range from the conformist state-administered authority of al-Azhar to politically oriented militant organizations (e.g., the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Jamā‘a al-Islāmiyya, Jamā‘a-t- al-Takfīr wa al-Hijra, and Jamā‘a-t- al-Amr bi-al-Ma‘rūf wa al-Nahyy ‘an al-Munkar), pacifist and nonpolitical groups (e.g., Jamā‘at al-Tablīgh wa al-Da‘wa), and a variety of Sufi sects. This is not new; across time and space, Muslim societies, continually contested from outside and within, have shifted their ideologies. Certain practices have always been understood or tolerated only within specific historical and geographical contexts. It is difficult if not perilous to give voice to challenging insights—acceptable as these ideas might have been in the past—about a rigid dogma, a dogma that I have suggested is already at odds with itself, both calcified and contested by its own internal and interreligious tensions. It is hardly surprising that the Islamist milieu of fin de siècle Egypt finds in Abū Zayd an intimidating intellectual who threatens the dominion of certain religious teachings. As Abū Zayd’s nontraditionalist insights challenge mainstream narratives about Muslim faith, he is made to appear “unfaithful,” even declared a murtadd (apostate). And because Islam, like all religions, maintains its very existence in the world through faith, it is unsurprising, albeit lamentable, that the “guardians” of Islamic faith would accuse Abū Zayd of being an unfaithful

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“secularist” and an enemy of Islam, thus alienating him from the very religion to which his entire academic life was devoted. The Egyptian literary critic Jābir ‘Uṣfūr rightly attributes the rulings against Abū Zayd to the lamentable reality of political conditions in Egypt during the 1990s, when “an alliance was formed between the political regime and religious authorities, resulting in the inhumane demonization of Naṣr where he was deprived of his wife, his students, and his home.”24 Elsewhere, I have discussed the nexus between Egypt’s despotic postcolonial regimes and the reification of militant religious thought, pointing to the emergence of a dangerous and fractious epistemology in religious thought that resulted in the rise of Islamism and its encroachments on intellectuals such as Abū Zayd.25 Secularism, a term coined in Europe in 1851 by G. J. Holyoake, was translated into Arabic in the early 1900s as ‘Ilmāniyya and‘Ᾱlamaniyya, and is now hypostasized in Islamist (and Egyptian public) discourse as a state of ungodliness akin to ilḥād (atheism).26 Secularism has undoubtedly influenced major transitions in decolonizing societies, including Egypt, where a supposed “earlier cohesiveness or integrity of man’s social and personal life,” as Wilfred Cantwell Smith puts it, “once religiously expressed and religiously sanctified, has been fragmented.”27 As strong adherents of the Muslim faith found it difficult to compartmentalize or to reconcile their faith with “worldly” aspects of societies, many proponents of the “separation of the state from the mosque,” including Egypt’s renowned postcolonial president Gamal Abdul Nasser, were immediately targeted and labeled as enemies of Islam who must therefore be killed or persecuted. Even before Nasser, the Muslim Brotherhood had always been l’enfant terrible of modern Egyptian politics; in one way or another, since its inception in colonial Egypt, it has been involved in the formation of the country’s political discourse. Upon its emergence in 1928, the Muslim Brotherhood gained immediate popularity at the hands of Ḥasan al-Bannā, perhaps in sympathy with the loss of the Caliphate/Ottoman Empire in 1924. Ever since, al-Ikhwān (the Brothers), as the organization calls itself, has begun to infiltrate the Egyptian terrain and establish centers all over Egypt. Sympathetic with the oppressed and the needy, the Muslim Brotherhood became the abode of the poor and disenfranchised majority of Egyptians seeking justice and economic sustainability in a sharply class-divided Egypt.



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While the class gap narrowed remarkably during the Nasser regime (1954–70), the monarchic Farouk reign (1936–52) that preceded it had already widened the chasm between Egyptian peasants and the landed elite in a country governed by a colonial feudal system. In the late 1930s and 1940s, the Muslim Brotherhood clashed with King Farouk. Its founder, al-Bannā, became its major martyr upon his assassination in 1949. The Muslim Brotherhood continued post-Farouk and is believed to have even assisted Nasser and the Free Officers in the soft coup of 1952 that overthrew the kingdom and established the Republic, but it was soon to become the enemy once again when Nasser and the Muslim Brotherhood leader Sayyid Qutb did not see eye to eye on the true definition of Islamic governance. This disagreement led to the arrest, jailing, and execution of the latter in 1966. The enmity between the Egyptian regime and the Muslim Brotherhood continued from Nasser through Mubarak and to the present. Accruing victims/martyrs over its eighty-year existence, the Muslim Brotherhood gained legitimacy and sustainability as it continued to be Egypt’s most organized and dedicated counter-government sociopolitical organization. This organizational principle of the Muslim Brotherhood came in especially handy in 2011. When the events of January 25 took place, the lack of a central leadership with a clear post-Mubarak political agenda immediately squandered the hopes of the Egyptian Revolution. When the call for presidential elections was made, the only political body in Egypt that was prepared without the need for an extensive campaign was without a doubt the Muslim Brotherhood. It was not surprising that Egypt’s new democratically elected president would be an Ikhwānī. Nor was it at all shocking that Mohamed Morsi spent the first six months of his presidency re-delineating Egypt’s “Islamic face.” Until June 30, 2013, Egypt had a president who broke out in Qur’ānic recitations in the middle of his political speeches, a president/imam (religious leader) who began surrounding himself by trustworthy Muslims based primarily on their affiliation and loyalty to the Muslim Brotherhood, as if professional merit or competence was not a consideration. After more than eighty years of operating underground, many Egyptians felt that the Muslim Brotherhood deserved a chance to bring the country “back” to the rule of Islamic law and social justice at a time when the experience of many Egyptians was such that they demanded a kind of nostalgic pull to that “past.” To the revolutionaries, the ending of

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tyranny and autocracy was the telos of the Tahrir Revolt; the expectation was that the age of autocratic terror would now be over, that a new era of liberal democracy was born at that historic moment of mass revolution.28 This expectation, however, did not last long. While a larger context helps us to situate the Abū Zayd affair in relationship to the Muslim Brotherhood, orthodox authorities, and other Islamist formations, the most recent developments in Egypt’s political history underscore the question mark over the precarious fate of any intellectual project of Qur’ānic exegesis. This is simply because anti-hegemonic intellectuals and writers continue to be viewed as both a fractious group and a threat to any kind of despotism, be it fundamentalist Islamism or an oligarchic dictatorship as seen in the regime of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. It should not escape our cultural memory that Abū Zayd was tried and sentenced during Mubarak’s secular regime and that the very ideology which claimed the lives of many Egyptians including President Sadat (1981) and the anti-fundamentalist intellectual Farag Foda (1982) has not perished with the political extirpation of the Muslim Brotherhood, but has rather metamorphosed into the political agenda of an equally intolerant and unenlightened dictatorship that still continues to ban Abū Zayd’s work today.29 Despite all these challenges, myriad journalists, litterateurs, and literary critics have stood their ground against fundamentalist doctrines, though paying a dear price, as they continue to occupy a significant space in preserving freedom of expression and other individual rights that are otherwise without defenders. Many Egyptian and Arab authors have faced death, torture, and imprisonment for their work. In 1993, the Algerian author Tahar Djaout was assassinated by the Armed Islamic Group because of his criticism of fundamentalism. In 1994, Islamists attempted to assassinate then eighty-twoyear-old Nobel Prize awardee Naguib Mahfouz on the charge of kufr (disbelief). Crucial interrogations of tradition in the last century at the hands of Abū Zayd’s predecessors, ‘Abduh, ‘Abd al-Rāziq, Ḥusayn, al-Khūlī, and Khalafallāh, stand out as a reminder of the challenges facing exegetes. Traditionalists have sought to elevate the Qur’ān, on the basis of its divine nature, beyond the scope of literary criticism, and in so doing they have demonized any humanly conceived tools for grammatical or rhetorical appraisals. A case in point is the work of Shawqī Ḍayf, who is believed to have instigated the resistance to Abū Zayd’s promotion to full professor after reading his work and refusing to be on his promotion committee, passing his seat down to ‘Abd al-Ṣabūr Shāhīn.30



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Ḍayf ’s literary scholarship, especially his multivolume historiography of the Abbasid era, played a significant role both in canonizing Arabic literature and in periodizing it according to major political events in Islamic history, while consistently following, from beginning to end, a narrow eclectic and puritanical pro-Islamist historiography.31 The seriousness with which such traditionalism upheld itself created a great divide between the Qur’ānic and the literary, cutting Islam off from literary modernity. This divide explains the violence that any literary tampering or intellectual play with the borders of the divine is destined to provoke, as we have seen reflected clearly in the case of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses. While Abū Zayd is not Rushdie, the turmoil that their two cases occasioned, as well as the proximity in time (1988 and 1995) in which they occurred, are a major sign of a flawed conservatism in recent Islamic thought. This conservatism tolerates neither any fictive ironization of the past (itself a postmodernist trait), nor any serious critique of its own tradition. It is within such a context that we can locate and read the specific case of Abū Zayd. As is the case with Rushdie, Abū Zayd’s exile in the wake of his analysis of religious discourse in postcolonial Egypt reveals a deep philosophical divide that extends to judicial questions, academic freedom, and the role of literary criticism.32 In order to have a deeper appreciation of Abū Zayd’s own interrogation of Islamic tradition, one needs to have a solid understanding of the differentiation between two kinds of tradition in literary and religious studies, namely, (1) the canonized tradition, wherein classical sources have long been viewed and adapted as a set of privileged texts that are perceived as natural and logical components of conventional literary discourse; and (2) tradition in its unadulterated, pre-interpretive condition, as originary sources unhampered by critical appropriation and therefore open to renewed critical visions and fresh perspectives. The difference between these two concepts of tradition lies both in the manner in which schools of criticism are fashioned and in the functions of such schools within their communities. The way in which Abū Zayd navigates between these two understandings of tradition discloses something about his own literary and cultural background. Abū Zayd’s writings belong intellectually to postmodernity, amidst a demise of historical absolutes and incredulity toward meta-narratives. His twofold project, to retrieve what he calls al-‘aql al-manfī (exiled reason) and to establish a dialogue with Islam’s

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unadulterated tradition, however, places him in conflict with an essentialist and one-dimensional Salafi tradition that denies and condemns counterhegemonic interpretations, even when such interpretations were accepted and exercised freely in the past. As he relates in a conversation with one of his professors in his 2004 memoir Voice of an Exile, Islamism has run deep in Egyptian academia since the beginning of the twentieth century, nullifying creative thinking and obfuscating dialogue: I said, “You know the problem—the problem of Ali Abd al-Raziq, the problem of Taha Husayn, the problem of Muhammad Ahmed Khalafallah.” My professors downplayed my concerns, saying that the problems these men had were personal, just something between professors—an internal affair. They were unaware how deeply I had delved into the history of the department. One of my professors asked, “Why do you think that this will happen to you? Do you think you are going to say something new?” This, of course, is the usual thinking. If you work within the field of Islamic Studies, the assumption is that you will discover no new knowledge. Islamic scholars, generally speaking, explain what has already been established. Scientific investigation is considered superfluous. Islamic Studies focuses on preaching.33

As these lines reveal, Abū Zayd is quite aware that he is neither the first nor the only Arab critic in modern times to call for a new order of critical discourse when it comes to tradition. Scholars such as ‘Abd al-Rāziq, Ḥusayn, al-Khūlī, and Khalafallāh managed to go beyond the tendentious reification of tradition, but not without major consequences.34 Abū Zayd properly positions himself within this tradition of revolutionary innovators of Arabic and Islamic heritage. From the start, there was resistance, ever since the first efforts to break new ground and to achieve a new order—a new order in which tradition would not be rejected but would inspire a different kind of literary criticism and dynamic patterns of cultural thought.35 Indeed, Abū Zayd’s critical approach draws upon and extends the important interventions of Ḥusayn, al-Khūlī, and Khalafallāh.36 Much like his predecessors, Abū Zayd contends that one cannot fully understand the Qur’ān without studying the history, geography, politics, and society in which the Qur’ān was revealed. The Qur’ān is generally understood to be the inimitable and infallible direct word of God; but, as Abū Zayd emphasizes, there is also both a remarkable human dimension and an intimate dialogue with divinity



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that connects the Qur’ān to asbāb al-nuzūl (causes/promptings of revelation). Over the period of revelation, which lasted twenty-three years, the community of believers raised a variety of pertinent questions about wine, gambling, orphans, menstruation, diet, charity, war, and so on. The answers to those questions, as revealed in the Qur’ān and complemented by the ḥadīth, became the foundation for the sharī‘a, about which Abū Zayd writes: My basic argument about the Qur’ān is that in order to make Islamic thought relevant, the human dimension of the Qur’ān needs to be reconsidered. Placing the Qur’ān firmly within history does not imply that the origins of the Qur’ān are human. . . . The Qur’ān addressed the Arabs living in the seventh century, taking into account the social reality of those particular people living on the Arabian Peninsula at that time. How else could they have understood the revelation? Without the Word of God being embodied in human language, there is no way for us to understand it.37

The close relationship between the revealed word of God and the history of human language represents Abū Zayd’s philologically nuanced approach to the Qur’ān. What Abū Zayd emphasizes in his critique is the indispensability of history and context both in understanding texts and especially in illuminating the space between revelation and history, between God’s infinite truth and the finite historical context in which the Qur’ān was revealed. For him, the connection between the absolute truth of religion and human language as a carrier of such truth has yet to be thoroughly explored. Critiques of tradition may fail to acknowledge either the historical distinctions between various eras of literary criticism or the theoretical differences between apologetic approaches on the one hand, and objective, or structural, analyses of tradition on the other. They may fail to acknowledge, as well, the receptions of such analyses by readers belonging to disparate ages and discourses of literary criticism. Recognizing this potential failure, Abū Zayd underscores the important role of philology in reading tradition. In fact, philology becomes Abū Zayd’s primary critical tool; there is hardly a word that escapes his etymological and genealogical flair as he indefatigably traces lexical shifts and semantic mutations across styles, borders, and centuries, revealing old theological debates as freshly germane to the current cultural milieu. For example, a prominent aspect of Abū Zayd’s work is his insistence on clarifying

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the relationship between the ta’wīl (interpretation) and the tafsīr (explication) of the Qur’ān, which to him is indispensable in resolving unending tensions between Islamic schools of theological thought. To do this, Abū Zayd examines not only the various occurrences of ta’wīl and tafsīr in the Qur’ān, together with their etymological, semantic, and syntactic associations and mutations, but also the existing tradition of Qur’ānic analysis, which has somehow managed, cumulatively, to view the two acts of analysis as oppositional instead of complementary.38 In this philological spirit, most of Abū Zayd’s oeuvre engages with the difference between interpretation and explication. He also investigates theological arguments between the Mu‘tazilites and Ash‘arites, especially on questions of divine creation and the interpretation of the Qur’ān39. The ideological conflict between the Mu‘tazilites and the Ash‘arites focuses on the divisive issue of whether the Qur’ān is, as the former holds, makhlūq (created) or, as the latter holds, qādim (ancient, co-eternal with God). The debate reached its climax during the rule of the Abbasid Caliph al-Ma’mūn (A.H. 198–218/ A.D. 813–833), who publicly supported the Mu‘tazilites and almost succeeded in codifying their views; he thus intensified a severe polarization between the two schools of kalām and exacerbated a long-standing conflict involving the interplay of texts, politics, and intellectuals. On this issue, Abū Zayd refuses to take a specific side; overall, however, his critical intervention supports the argument that the Qur’ān is divinely created in a historical moment and therefore not co-eternal with God, a nuanced position that of course does not diminish the sanctity of the Qur’ān. Abū Zayd argues that if God’s words exist in a sphere beyond human knowledge, then there should be no restriction in applying philological principles to a text that was revealed at a specific time and place in history. This position often causes a misunderstanding, namely that the Arabic-revealed Qur’ān is exclusively the word of God. Abū Zayd finds it questionable to make such an assumption. To him, this restriction not only contradicts Qur’ānic verses but also excludes other scriptures from presenting the word of God in languages other than Arabic.40 Although the classical discourse on the inimitability—and hence the untranslatability—of the Qur’ān emerged in the aftermath of this interreligious impasse and still reflects some of the theological biases of those two schools of thought, Qur’ān apologetists typically followed a more generalized approach



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in defending the Qur’ān against pre-Islamic poetry on the grounds that the former is inimitable.41 Abū Zayd’s intervention in these important issues aims to critique the presumption that Qur’ān apologists belong to a tradition of deeply devoted men of faith whose judgment must not be questioned and that the Qur’ān itself is under a spell that prohibits its inner comprehension. At issue is whether criticism of i‘jāz is by definition conditional, that is, permitted only with limited and predestined results whereby, for example, a comparison between pre-Islamic poetry and the Qur’ān must conclude that the former is deficient and inferior. This leads to the paradox that the objective of rhetoric is doomed to failure because it pits the sacred word of God against that of humankind. The question that follows is, how can literary criticism function when it is burdened with the pre-knowledge that it is superfluous, if not futile? Abū Zayd emphasizes that schools of Qur’ānic thought are conditioned by the historical circumstances in which they write, designating both their positions in history and their scholastic affinities on the issue of Qur’ānic inimitability.42 It is thus expected that all scholars of iʿjāz, for example, al-Bāqillānī (a tenthcentury Sunni Ash‘arite scholar), would as a rule emphasize the Qur’ān’s superiority in any possible comparison to poetry. These texts on i‘jāz al-Qur’ān echo the debate between the Ash‘arites and the Mu‘tazilites, whose beliefs about the nature of iʿjāz differ in some respects, owing to their larger points of theological disagreement.43 In each case, the license to defend the Qur’ān when compared to poetry is itself mimetic, although one must acknowledge that those early reflections gave way to the complexities of figurative language and Arabic aesthetics that were later developed by a remarkable pool of scholars that includes al-Qāḍī Abu al-Ḥasan ‘Abd al-Jabbār (d. A.H. 415/A.D. 1024) and Abū Bakr ‘Abd al-Qāhir b. ‘Abd al-Raḥmān al-Jurjānī (d. A.H. 471 or 474/ A.D. 1078 or 1081) among many others.44 The iʿjāz treatises were written as acts of faith and in defense of the faith. Their focus is primarily on demonstrating that the Qur’ān is an unprecedented and inimitable linguistic miracle, forever superior to the language of man, even and especially to poetry, a genre venerated as dīwān al-‘Arab (the Book of the Arabs) and as the supreme art of the Arabic language. These writers on iʿjāz frame the Qur’ān and poetry as being assessable using the same criterion of rhetoric, with the Qur’ān necessarily and eternally holding the highest possible level of eloquence and sublimity of expression.

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A related issue is the principle that the Qur’ān is revealed “in an Arabic tongue/language” (Q 12:2; Q16:103; Q 26:125; Q 46:12), understandable and recognizable to a community that must have been conscious of its unmatchable linguistic qualities.45 The paradox Abū Zayd addresses here is that in order for the Qur’ān to be believable it also has to be comprehensible and appealing to the linguistic sensibilities of the Arab community to which it was revealed. Thus, for instance, the denigration with which al-Bāqillānī regards the work of influential pre-Islamic Arab poets such as Imru’ al-Qays and classical ones such as al-Buḥturī when compared with the language of the Qur’ān would serve only to show the latter as superior to mortal language. However, such “superiority,” due to inimitability, must rely on rules apprehensible to the Arabs in order for the divine message to carry through. After all, there appeared to be no need to search for linguistic sublimity to prove the inimitability of the Qur’ān over poetry when the most obvious proof of the former’s divinity was the fact that, while it was revealed to the most eloquent society the Arabic language has ever witnessed, this society nevertheless failed to produce something like it.46 Abū Zayd’s critical approach to the Qur’ān and Arabic criticism is unequivocal. He contends that Islam, both in its core text of the Qur’ān and the biography of the Prophet, is an irreversible historical event, a happening that emerged as a corrective rechanneling of human understanding of the divine. In the introduction to Dawā’ir al-Khawf (Circles of Fear), he claims, contrary to his detractors’ accusations, that he is “a staunch believer in Islam as a strong religion based on reason.”47 He uses the following verses to argue that Islam advocates the primacy of intellect against convention and against the deification of what one’s fathers and forefathers used to worship: And when it is said unto them: Follow that which Allah hath revealed, they say: We follow that wherein we found our fathers. What! Even though their fathers were wholly unintelligent and had no guidance? (Q 2:170) And when it is said unto them: Come unto that which Allah hath revealed and unto the messenger, they say: Enough for us is that wherein we found our fathers. What! Even though their fathers had no knowledge whatsoever, and no guidance? (Q 5:104)

An informed Arabist can clearly see that as a literary critic and Muslim intellectual, Abū Zayd indeed writes with “a profound sense of responsibility” that compels him to “share research on Islamic thought with the Muslim world



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in plain and unambiguous language.”48 This sense of responsibility appears to have become his modus operandi, especially when numerous versions of Islamism started to appear on the Egyptian scene, often revealing a perilous misunderstanding of divinity and distorting the basic tenets of the religion. Criticism, which Abū Zayd expects to enlighten the modern age of Islam, has failed to grasp the enormity of the theological rift that has taken place. In one of his most important works, al-Ittijāh al-‘Aqlī fī al-Tafsīr: Dirāsa fī qaḍiyya-tal-majāz fī al-Qur’ān ‘inda al-Mu‘tazila (Rationalism in Explication: A Study of Metaphor in the Writing of the Mu‘tazilites), which I address in detail in the following chapter, Abū Zayd draws on the Mu‘tazilite school of theology. He provides an epistemological study of metaphor and holds a comparison between the Mu‘tazilite and the Ash‘arite schools of theological thought, emphasizing their political relevance to the Umayyad caliphate of the early Islamic era and underscoring their respective interpretive perspicacity as well as their scholarly imperfections, especially on the issues of ru’ya-t- Allāh (the viewing of God that is mentioned in some Qur’ānic verses) and its relationship to tawḥīd (belief in the oneness of God), al-khalq (creation), and al-af ‘āl ([human] deeds).49 Abū Zayd’s study serves three purposes. First, he proposes a genealogical study of majāz (metaphor) as a theological figuration inseparable from the Arabic literary tradition. Second, he pulls back the curtain on the longlost tradition of the Mu‘tazilite school. This school, although different in its approach to divinity, and while clearly having its own biases, remains sensitive to the metaphorical associations inherent in the Qur’ān. Third, he argues for a restoration of robust dialogue and civil academic conversations among scholars of Islam as a way to combat fundamentalist Islam in contemporary Egypt: Mu‘tazilite thought did not emerge independently from the social conditions of Muslim society. The notion of human choice was introduced to circumvent the determinism reinforced by the Umayyads in order to harness the Muslim public. It is thus to be concluded that the disagreement between al-Ḥasan al-Basrī and Wāṣil ibn ‘Attā’ on the perpetrator of a capital sin was not merely a theological dispute, but a disapproval that reflects differing political partisanships. The Mu‘tazilites’ introduction of the “in-between status” was an attempt to bridge the disputes among conflicting parties and to create a unified front against the Umayyad rule.50

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As this quote indicates, Abū Zayd contends that we must historicize our study of tradition, including the Qur’ān, and thus embrace difference in considering the text’s semantic multiplicity. The Mu‘tazilites and the Ash‘arites have their differences regarding what constitutes divine essence, divine justice and attributes, the creation of human deed, and so on, but neither denies the existence of God, His Oneness, or the Qur’ān. It is clear from this and many other examples throughout Abū Zayd’s work that what motivates his writing, contrary to what both ‘Abd al-Ṣabūr Shāhīn and Saba Mahmood claim, is a deep sense of responsibility toward Islam, a recognition of the need for a long overdue self-critique within the Qur’ānic and literary traditions, and general discontent with both the trivialization of Islamic history and the one-dimensionality of contemporary mainstream approaches to tafsīr. Abū Zayd fears that, perhaps with the exception of a handful of valiant counter-hegemonic literary critics, Arabic criticism, of which the Qur’ān is the foundational text, has condemned itself to conventional banality and to ignoring the epistemic ruptures at work in Islamic history from the postclassical to the postcolonial era. Thanks to Abū Zayd, Arabic literary criticism now has an opportunity to repose the question of whether there can be a rapprochement between kalām Allāh (the language/speech of God) and kalām al-bashar (the language/speech of humankind). One of the most compelling questions emerging from his work is how the fields of Arabic literary criticism and Qur’ānic Studies (which are not mutually exclusive) can find common ground on which to re-open the lost dialogue between dialectical reason and theological revelation in order to remedy the rift between religious and literary discourses. One’s entire conception of the tradition and practice of Arabic will depend on the answer to this important question, for Abū Zayd’s position is fundamental to the whole of classical, medieval, and modern Arabic criticism. One will have learned nothing from the entire discipline of the humanities if one fails to understand that the history of criticism is not to be understood apart from the interpretation of individual authors and their ideological predispositions. Criticism, as discourse, as discipline, and as practice, Abū Zayd warns us, could be in grave danger of stultification if we do not pay attention to the forces of reaction arrayed against it: The fundamental mistake of Ash‘arite theologians both past and present is their denigration of history and time as moving towards “the worst” on all



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levels. That’s why they seek to limit meaning and signification to the Golden Age, namely the time of the prophethood and the Message, forgetting that in doing this they are actually confirming the temporality of revelation itself, not only in terms of the genesis and formation of the text, but also in terms of its denotations and connotations. This is not a simple “conceptual” mistake, but rather an ideology.51

Abū Zayd sets out here a major problematic feature in Salafist thought (as one of the most radical variations of Ash‘arite theology in modern history) in relationship to literature and philosophy, its judgment that human history and thought are characterized by irremediable decline. To Abū Zayd, this perverse understanding of history, current in hegemonic Islamist discourses, contradicts itself by cancelling history while ironically confirming it, thus denying both the present and future of thought any redemption whatsoever. The animosity and discomfort toward Abū Zayd that ensued in the aftermath of his writings stems not from a failure to understand him, but rather from realizing that the clarity and rigor of his thought makes accessible to all the distinction between a nuanced conception of the tradition that is free of ideology and a dogmatic abuse of the past that is used for mass exploitation. Not only that, but the fundamentalists’ opposition to rhetorical analysis and literary criticism has developed into a resistance of critique as such.52 Clearly, dogmatic Islamism cannot be satisfied with the idea that a historical text is both internal and external to history. But Abū Zayd, who is, of course, not above debate and critique, has succeeded in delivering a strong message: the worst crime against thought is not simply to allow literalism to dominate, as Salafism did and continues to do, but to consecrate that very literalism, thereby worshipping tendentious interpretations instead of the true essence. Thus, a profound misunderstanding of the principles and function of criticism is what prompted Abū Zayd to call for an epistemological revival. Lamenting his death, Abū Zayd’s good friend Ferial Ghazoul, an eminent critic in her own right, says that although his passing is “intolerable and incomprehensible,” she finds solace in the fact that “amidst desolation and cultural despair, Naṣr remains and will continue to be a key to an alternative world and a free homeland.”53

6

On Metaphor: Abū Zayd and the Ideologies of majāz in the Qur’ān

As mentioned in Chapter 5, the status of majāz (metaphor) is at the heart of the debate between two well-known theological schools of the Islamic faith— namely the Mu‘tazilites and the Ash‘arites—in their approaches to the Qur’ān. Whereas the Mu‘tazilites see metaphor as a rhetorical and interpretive tool essential to approaching divinity, some Ash‘arites, especially in the work of the medieval grammarian and rhetorician ‘Abd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī (1010–79 or 1082), believe in figurative language as a predetermined divine gift to the world, a world imitative of a transcendental realm of eternal truth. Although al-Jurjānī acknowledges the existence of majāz in language and draws a distinction between intellectual and linguistic figuration, he nevertheless adheres to his theological dogma that such figurative expressions are to be approached judiciously and from the viewpoint of syntactic, notably verbal, attributions. Drawing on this contested tradition, this final chapter investigates how modern Arabic literary criticism is faced with the dilemma of choosing between tropes and literalness. The guiding question of this chapter is the following: How does metaphor, in its presence or absence, affect one’s perception of Qur’ānic language? Abū Zayd’s approach to Qur’ānic metaphor does not necessarily answer this question, but it does serve both to revitalize the ongoing debate over the relations between divine words and their referents and to critique the epistemological bases of hegemonic religious discourses and their persistence in the discourse of the postcolonial. In dedicating a full-fledged study to Qur’ānic majāz in his book Al-Ittijāh al-‘Aqlī fī al-Tafsīr: Dirāsa fī Qaḍiyya-t- al-Majāz fī al-Qur’ān ‘ind al-Mu‘tazila (The Approach of Reason in Interpretation: A Study of the Mu‘tazilite Question of Metaphor in the Qur’ān), Abū Zayd advances a tripartite project. First, he traces the relationship between intellect and language as he seeks

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to reach a more informed understanding of metaphor and its genesis as a theological trope vis-à-vis a literal tradition. Second, he reopens a dialogue with an opposing theology that, although in disagreement on approaching and defining divinity, is still in harmony with the semantic subtlety and interpretive multiplicities inherent in the Qur’ān. Third, through a careful and radical contextualization of this particular epoch of Islam, he lays the groundwork for both civil discourse and the respect of diverse points of view, both of which are required, he asserts, to escape the labyrinth of fundamentalism in contemporary Egypt. The term majāz is imbued with Arabic cultural significations and does not lend itself to easy equivalence in English. Thanks to recent studies on the connection between literary modernity and style in Western literature, however, the term “metaphor” has begun to acquire a broader significance that makes such an equivalence conceivable. Modernism, whether considered a discrete period of time or a style with fluid boundaries, reflects a variety of emotional and ideological impulses that affect our understanding of majāz. In order to make sense of these impulses, which include ruptures and disruptions in literary language, it is important to learn that throughout history and up to the modernist period there have been major shifts in common perceptions of the real and the metaphorical—breaks Foucault called coupures éspistémologiques—as well as new attitudes toward the relationship between language, space, time, and consciousness. It is no surprise, then, that a new critic such as I. A. Richards in The Philosophy of Rhetoric would perceive metaphor no longer as a mere literary device that creates verbal pictures in a work of art, but instead as a mechanism that makes language possible in the first place, an “omnipresent principle” that exists in all language.1 Other structuralist approaches to metaphor include Kristine Brooke-Rose’s Grammar of Metaphor (1958), which follows a traditional grammatical line of situating metaphor in relationship to parts of speech, including verbs, adjectives, and nouns; she thereby investigates the evolution of metaphorical construction in the English literary tradition from Chaucer to Dylan Thomas.2 Another seminal work on metaphor is Winifred Nowottny’s The Language Poets Use (1969), which defines metaphor as a figure of speech that “directs us to the sense, not to the exact terms,” where the reader is expected to “piece out the metaphor by something supplied or constructed from his own experience,



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according to the specifications given linguistically by the utterance in which the metaphor occurs.”3 Thus, as it is seen in modernist English criticism, the study of literature allows the reader not only to see how figurative language works but also to understand the complexity of the mental effort involved in the composition and analysis of literary texts. The conventional understanding of metaphorical language as connotative or suggestive has always situated it in a binary relationship to “correct” or “appropriate” non-figurative language. In Greek, the word for a figure of speech is trope, which indicates a twist or a turn from the proper meaning of a word. In this sense, one can see the trope of allegory, which derives from the Greek allos (other) and agoreuein (to speak in assembly), meaning to say something otherwise publicly. The same rule applies to metaphor, the master trope, which I use in this chapter to refer to a general definition of figuration, or majāz in Arabic. Aristotle defines metaphor as a trope “consist[ing] in giving the thing a name that belongs to something else; the transference (epi-phora) being either from genus to species, or from species to genus, or from species to species, or on the grounds of analogy.”4 Metaphor in the Western tradition, then, is a transfer of meaning through a recognizable analogy from a word that literally expresses it to another word that has a shared category of that meaning: A is to B as C is to D. In the more sophisticated tradition of Arabic rhetoric, this relationship is called isti‘āra (literally a borrowing from one category to express through another). For instance, Ibn al-Mu‘tazz, in his treatise al-Badī‘, identifies the following lines from Imru’ al-Qays’s poetry as metaphorical: wa laylin ka-mawji al-baḥri arkhà sudūlahu / ‘alayya bi-anwā‘i al-humūmi li-yabtalī (And a night like the waves of the sea has laid down its curtains / Upon me with a multitude of cares to afflict me).5

In this well-known line of classical Arabic poetry, one sees how the darkness of the night is likened to the waves of the sea (A is to B as C is to D). Therefore, metaphor is a condensed analogy as well as the ultimate trope that draws systems of thought into questions and configurations. This twofold function of metaphor is noted by the renowned Arab critic Muhsin al-Musawi, who finds in an “inexhaustible Scheherazade who fights against death and extinction” a metaphor for “the whole postcolonial

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endeavor in Arabic literature.”6 The literary critic Saadi Simawe emphasizes the significance of turning to metaphor in assessing continuities and discontinuities in the Arabic literary tradition, especially in its modern form; she makes the case that metaphor and innovation go hand in hand, and that “the historical evolution of the figures of speech in Arabic poetry reveals that metaphor is a creation of sophisticated imagination and bold semantic and syntactic adventures,” which, according to Simawe, must be traced back to the Qur’ān, whose revelation “caused a linguistic and figurative revolution so stunning to the Arab poets and orators that they believed it was either divine or satanic work.”7 Similarly, the Arab poet Adūnīs reflects on the aesthetic affect and influence of the Qur’ān on the entire Arabic tradition since its interruption of the familiar literary scene. He seeks to assess the meaning of modernism in current literary productions, especially when it comes to the crafting of poetry. In his book Al-Naṣṣ al-Qur’ānī wa Āfāq al-Kitāba (The Qur’ānic Text and the Horizons of Writing), Adūnīs, like Simawe, pays close attention to the “aesthetic shock” that the Qur’ān imparted on the seventhcentury Meccan community, emphasizing verses that declaratively ascertain its marvelous affect, such as Q 72:1, with its explicit reference to the revelation as “Qur’ānan ‘ajaba” (wondrous Qur’ān).”8 Thus, today we are acknowledging the need for a study of Qur’ānic metaphor in modern and contemporary Arabic writings, one which Kate Zebiri, for example, in a seminal essay on the rhetorical criticism of the Qur’ān, strongly advocates.9 Further, she regards this both as a long-overdue return to the continuity of the Greco-Roman and Arab-Islamic traditions and a new and liberating approach to the Qur’ān that does not confine one to a specific tradition.10 This is especially true of the study of figurative and rhetorical affect, or what Zebiri calls “the impact of a text on its audience or recipients.”11 Metaphor in the Qur’ān, which has rich figures and insights the likes of which had never been witnessed before in the Arabic language, continues to make the text distinct from even the most exquisite linguistic expressions found in pre-Islamic Arabic poetry. It is the linguistic genius of the Qur’ān that paved the way for its literary assessment vis-à-vis existing literature, giving birth to an impressive, though not widely known corpus of literary criticism. But why is this return to metaphor important or even relevant today? This question is answered, somewhat indirectly, by Abū Zayd, who argues that metaphor, or thinking metaphorically, has become a battlefield of literary values. As such,



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the challenge that metaphor poses for us is to make sure we are aware of its presence in our discourse and its effect on our thought and emotions. Invoking metaphor in the Arabic tradition and especially in the Qur’ān is a challenging and strenuous task for a variety of reasons. One reason is that a contemporary critic will find it impossible to address any modern critique of the trope without disrupting the status quo of theological conservatism and scholarly biases in classical, medieval, and post-medieval scholarships on the Qur’ān. Another reason has to do with the dearth of modern and contemporary scholarship on the topic. Wolfhart Heinrichs has rightly remarked that, at least until the 1970s, “a history of metaphor and its function in Arabic poetry (or literature in general) has not yet been written.”12 The Egyptian literary critic Jābir ‘Usfūr, who embarks on his own study of figuration in the Arabic literary tradition, similarly laments that “not a single research project has been dedicated to the study of the contributions of our critics to the Greek tradition of rhetoric and criticism.”13 ‘Usfūr prefaces his 1973 panoramic study, al-Ṣūra al-Fanniyya fī al-Turāth al-Naqdī wa al-Balāghī ‘ind al-‘Arab (Artistic Imagery in Arabic Critical and Rhetorical Tradition), by underscoring the need for extensive scholarship on tropes. He does not fail to mention that Arab philosophers were the first inheritors of Aristotle, the first to translate The Poetics and Rhetoric, and the first to compose foundational work on philology and literary criticism that is not only an inheritance but also an extension of Aristotle’s emphasis on the centrality of metaphor in philosophical and critical discourses.14 Metaphor is thus an indispensable component of Arabic thought and a barometer for the development of Arabic literary and cultural tradition. Hence, a serious study of such a tradition must include a chapter on the question of tajdīd or ibdā‘ (creativity/originality) in relationship to the genesis and historical evolution of metaphor. Such a study of metaphor would involve the revisiting of old debates among bellicose schools of Islamic theology. This is a dangerous undertaking, much like the conjuring of a genie out of a bottle after centuries of entrapment. Notwithstanding, in the West, a number of able scholars of Arabic and Qur’ānic Studies have addressed the validity and significance of metaphor. These scholars include Toshihiko Izutsu, Montgomery Watt, Issa Boullata, Angelika Neuwirth, Fazlur Rahman, Kamal Abu-Deeb, Mahmoud Ayoub, Yusuf Rahman, Navid Kermani, Mustansir Mir, Irfan Shahid, Michael Sells, and Andrew Rippin, among others. Their exhaustive and pioneering

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work on symbols, metaphor, style, phonic signification, and structure in the Qur’ān, as well as in Eastern monotheism in general, has advanced the rapprochement between literature and the Qur’ān quite effectively, offering many original and penetrating observations. In the two decades following Heinrichs’s lament and ‘Usfūr’s ambitious attempt at addressing the lacuna in metaphor studies and bridging the gap between literary criticism and the Qur’ān, Abū Zayd wrote two important studies on metaphor. The first is the book-length work referred to earlier, Al-Ittijāh al-‘Aqlī fī al-Tafsīr: Dirāsa fī Qaḍiyya-t- al-Majāz fī al-Qur’ān ‘ind al-Mu‘tazila (The Approach of Reason in Interpretation: A Study of the Mu‘tazilite Question of Metaphor in the Qur’ān).15 The second is a seminal essay that he published ten years later, entitled “Markabat al-Majāz: Man Yaqūduhā wa-ilá Ayn?” (The Vehicle of Metaphor: Who is Steering it and to What Destination).16 Together, these two studies have restored metaphor to modern Arabic criticism and have given it much needed visibility; but these readings do not emerge without political consequences. Indeed, as discussed in Chapter 5, they have put their author at risk of being labeled as an anticonformist who resurrects undesired themes and reawakens religious feuds long buried and silenced in the nationalistically charged religious orthodoxy of postcolonial Egypt. Despite these risks, the literary and political significance of Abū Zayd spurring the debate about metaphor cannot be emphasized enough. In these two texts, Abū Zayd critiques a growing politicization of the aesthetic; his critique is encapsulated in two quotations. The first is from ‘Alī ibn Abī Ṭālib, warning Ibn ‘Abbās against using the Qur’ān to argue with al-Khawārij: fa-khāṣimhum wa lā tuḥājjihim bi-al-Qur’ān fa-innahu dhū wujūh wa lākin khāṣimhum bi-al-Sunna As you argue with them, do not refer to the Qur’ān because it has many faces (different meanings and interpretations), but refer to the Prophet’s deeds and sayings.17

The second, from Ibn ‘Arabī, dwells on the complex levels of metaphormaking, especially in regard to the mystical relationship between humans and the divine and, analogously, to the ontotheological status of metaphor: The matter is between God and his worshipper; God has a path and the worshipper has a path. The worshipper seeks the doors of God and unto



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Him he seeks the end; and God is the path of the worshipper and unto Him he seeks the end.18

Together, these two quotes serve as guiding sources for a desperately needed investigation of the role of metaphor in the Qur’ān. The nexus between these quotes and Abū Zayd’s work is quite compelling, especially in the latter’s plea for a serious reconsideration of the aesthetic function of metaphor in contemporary Arabic literary thought. In addition, these two quotes sum up the argument of Abū Zayd’s work on metaphor in Mu‘tazilite theology and the germane connection of metaphor to modern Arabic literary criticism and the hegemonic discourse of Islamism. In the first quote, ‘Alī ibn Abī Ṭālib clearly utters what is regarded as the earliest awareness of the multifaceted significations in the Qur’ān. These possibilities of meaning—namely the idea that an utterance could indeed have numerous interpretations—constituted the nucleus for the literary approaches to the exegesis, where a clear distinction between tafsīr (explication) and ta’wīl (interpretation), as al-Suyūṭī argues, is crucial for understanding both the content and form of the Qur’ān and is at the heart of the majāz (metaphor) question.19 Metaphor or majāz in Arabic derives from the root j / w / z, as seen in jāza, yajūzu, jāwaza, meaning, in the Qur’ān, to cross from point A to point B, as seen in Q 2:249, Q 7:138, Q 10:90, and Q 18:62. Literally, then, al-majāz in Qur’ānic Arabic is a crossing. The noun majāza refers to a passage or a road that connects two paths. According to the Arabic dictionary, Lisān al-‘Arab, al-majāza is “al-ṭarīq idhā qaṭa‘tahu min aḥad jānibayhi ilá al-ākhar” (a passage that you cross from one of its sides to the other).20 The word majāz is thus itself a metaphor, an employment of language in order for meaning to cross through an alternate passage, a shortcut, or an alternative pathway to convey meaning. But it is also an utterance that has the license to remain ambiguous at the same time as it purports to clarify or arrive at meaning aesthetically, a definition akin to Paul Ricoeur’s in La métaphore vive (The Rule of Metaphor), where A is B, but still A, as it holds itself in an unresolved tension between itself and its non-self, an A that simultaneously is and is not  B.21 Understanding metaphor thus means holding this undulated meaning in its inherent tension symbolized in the formula: A is as B or A is as if B. This likeness, this as-if-ness, stands for the moment of interpretation.

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It is no surprise that early explications of the Qur’ān dwelled on the term mathal (likening /example/parable) and its rampant occurrences in Qur’ānic verses. The rise of such metaphors that permeate the Qur’ān, especially in the connection of this rise to al-mathal (the likeness of, the as-if-ness of, or the example of), gave rise to early debates among communities of believers on the meaning of such imagery. For instance, Abū Zayd makes reference both to a verse in the Cow Chapter (Q 2:26)—“inna Allāha lā yastaat an yaayaat mathalan mā ba‘ūū‘-t-an fa-mā fawqahā (Verily, God does not shy away from giving the example [likeness] of a mosquito and what is above it)—and to ‘Umar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb’s reported inquiry on the meaning of a certain verse that he found confounding. The verse reads as follows: Would someone among you wish to have a garden of palms, vine, and rivers running through it, where he has all kinds of fruit and [then] is overtaken by infirmity and has a weak offspring and it [the garden] is hit by a tornado of fire that burns it down? Thus Allah clarifies the signs/verses so that you might reflect [on them]. (Q 2:266)

The apparent farfetchedness of this verse is explained by Ibn ‘Abbās as a metaphor for people who begin their lives by doing good deeds and end them with vicious practices. Ibn ‘Abbās remarks that the key to understanding this metaphor is the word mathal, which appears in the verse preceding it, and states that Q 2:266 is to be read in the spirit of the majāz mode initiated in Q 2:265.22 In classical Arabic usage, majāz also means that which is not haqīqa (literalness). Ibn Jinnī, for instance, defines literalness as ma uqqira fī al-isti‘māl ‘alá aṣl waḍ‘ihi (that which becomes fixed in its usage and acquires its meaning based on its original intent).23 Majāz then becomes mā kāna bi-khilāf dhālik (whatever is different from that rule of literalness). Thus, when we find metaphorical language, we look for something that carries meaning differently, non-conventionally, or aesthetically. The third-century rhetorician Ibn Qutayba (d. 276) identifies majāz in language as follows: Majāz consists of units of expression that include isti‘āra (allegory), tamthīl (simile), qalb (inversion), ta’khīr (delay), taqdīm (anteriorization), hadhf (deletion), tikrār (repetition), ikhfā’ (connotation), iẓhār (denotation), ta‘rīḍ (implication), ifṣāḥ (explicitness), kināya (metonymy/synecdoche), īḍāḥ (vividness), addressing the one as many and the many as one, the one and



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the many as two, and the use of the particular to refer to the universal and the universal to mean the particular, in addition to other linguistic devices.24

It is with this reference to Ibn Qutayba that Abū Zayd launches an investigation into the genesis and development of metaphor in Arabic criticism. He then moves on to examine the struggle that ensued between the Ash‘arites and the Mu‘tazilites on whether or not, and to what extent, Qur’ānic language is metaphorical or literal.25 Abū Zayd concludes that deciphering Qur’ānic metaphor became the preoccupation of many classical exegetes, including Ibn ‘Abbās and Muqātil ibn Sulaymān, who, in a perfect adoption of ‘Alī ibn Abī Ṭālib’s famous saying about the Qur’ān, “fa-innahu dhū wujūh” (because it has many faces/meanings and interpretations), was the first to explain in his work Al-Ashbāh wa al-Naẓā’ir fī al-Qur’ān al-Karīm (Similitudes and Correlatives in the Noble Qur’ān) both tajsīm (embodiment/anthropomorphism) and the multiple significations that a verse may have.26 Other writers include Abū ‘Ubayda, the first to author a book including the title Majāz al-Qur’ān (Metaphor in the Qur’ān), which also coincided with the appearance of al-Farrā’’s Ma‘ānī al-Qur’ān (Meanings of the Qur’ān).27 Abū Zayd reminds us of important discussions that took place between those early scholars. For instance, the reason that prompted Abū ‘Ubayda to write Majāz al-Qur’ān is that a scribe for al-Faḍl ibn Rabī‘ had asked him about the meaning of the following verse: “ṭal‘uhā ka-annahu ru’ūsu al-shayāṭīni” (Q 37:65; “Its fruit is as if it were the heads of devils”). The scribe further exclaims that “both the promise and the warning are usually conveyed through a known likeness an as-if-ness that we are capable of recognizing. This one, however is unrecognizable.” Abū ‘Ubayda responds to this clever exclamation by confirming that it does not necessarily matter if the linguistic reference is not known because the logos allows for an imaginable trope that could be mentally conceived of: God has spoken to the Arabs in the same powers/capabilities of their own language. Haven’t you heard Imru’ al-Qays’s lines: ayaqtulunī wa al-mashrafiyyu muḍāji‘ī / wa masnūnatun zurqun ka-anyābi aghwāli (how could he kill me when the fine sword is by my side / and a shining blade like the teeth of ghouls) when the Arabs have never seen a ghoul but can relate to the frightful implications in the verses.28

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In the face of this linguistic conundrum, Abū ‘Ubayda was able to find, in the language of the Arabs and, in this case, the poetry of Imru’ al-Qays, a similar analogy that made it perfectly normal for God to address the Arabs using signifiers whose referents they did not know, as this trope is apparently familiar to the Arabs. Upon hearing Abū ‘Ubayda’s response, both al-Faḍl and his scribe appreciated it and found it illuminating. Indeed, this reason was good enough to prompt Abū ‘Ubayda to embark on a significant fulllength study of metaphor in the Qur’ān, which gave birth to Majāz al-Qur’ān (Metaphor in the Qur’ān). Still, the scribe’s question to Abū ‘Ubayda constitutes a moment of linguistic tension worthy of careful investigation. While compelling, Abū ‘Ubayda’s answer still poses many questions. But before addressing them, it is important to trace the thread of metaphorical thought that makes its appearance in Abū Zayd’s first quote. Abū Zayd continues, following Abū ‘Ubayda’s example, to trace metaphor in other writers, including al-Farrā’, al-Jāḥiẓ (in whose work the concept of metaphor reaches considerable maturity), al-Rummānī, and al-Qāḍī ‘Abd al-Jabbār. Abū Zayd accomplishes this task in order to finally link metaphor with the question of ta’wīl (interpretation) in Mu‘tazilite thought. This is the moment in Islamic thought when metaphor finds its apologists among non-Mu‘tazilite writers such as Ibn Qutayba, a contemporary of al-Jāḥiẓ, whose treatise Ta’wīl Mushkil al-Qur’ān (Interpreting the Intricacies of the Qur’ān) defends metaphor against its opponents and places it at the core of language formation centuries before Lakoff ’s cognitivist approach does the same in the English-speaking US academy.29 After coming very close to confirming that human language is impossible without metaphor and that metaphor is a ḍarūra (a necessity) for all utterances, Ibn Qutayba, however, shies away from supporting a complete Mu‘tazilite approach to Qur’ānic metaphor: Those who attack majāz (metaphor) claim that the Qur’ān is all lies because walls do not want (cf. Q 18:77) and villages do not ask (cf. Q 12:82). This is a case of profound ignorance which could only prove their misperceptions and mistakes in understanding the Qur’ān. If majāz were all lies and if every verbal agency attributed to inanimate beings were incorrect, then most of our language would be improper. We (the Arabs) say “the beans sprouted,” “the tree grew taller,” “the fruit ripened,” “the mountain stood up,” and “the prices went down.” We also say kāna Allāhu (God was). We use kāna (was)



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to indicate a happening. At the same time we are fully cognizant that God, in all His Power and Glory, is above time, that He is before all things, that He is without telos, that He has not happened [my italics], that He is, even after He was not (cf. Q 4: 137). God says fa-idhā ‘azama al-amru (when the matter resolved) (Q 47:21) while matters do not resolve (themselves) but are rather resolved. He says fa-mā rabiḥat tijāratuhum (their trade did not profit) (Q 2:16), while trades do not profit but people either profit or not profit from them. God also says wa-jā’ū ‘alà qamīṣihi bi-damin kadhibin (And they brought lying blood on his shirt) (Q 12:18) while blood in itself does not lie but is used as the vehicle for their (Yūsuf ’s brothers) lie.30

Abū Zayd contends that Ibn Qutayba’s disagreement, while supportive of metaphor, is an ideological one that clearly reflects his own theological affiliations. To Ibn Qutayba, certain Qur’ānic verses cannot be treated metaphorically, particularly verses of al-kalām (speech), for such verses demonstrate the question of how to treat speech, that is, that kalām is either min ṣifā-t- al-dhāt (one of the attributes of divine essence) or min ṣifā-t- al-af ‘āl (one of the attributes of divine deeds). Of course, such verses would have a different non-metaphorical status to an Ash‘arite such as Ibn Qutayba, who insists that in order for verbs to be considered metaphorical they should neither be emphasized by a gerund or a verbal noun, nor should they be simply reiterated.31 Take for instance two verses. In one verse, God addresses Moses, and in the other, He addresses the inferno. The first example includes a cognate object for emphasis, where the verb “to speak” is repeated as a noun “wa kallama Allāhu Mūsá taklīmaan” (And God has spoken to Moses indeed)” (Q 4:164). This verse would not be admitted to Ibn Qutayba’s school of metaphor because the root of the verb is used to form the cognate and is thus reiterated in the same sentence. In the second example, God speaks to the inferno and asks if it is ready, and the inferno speaks back and asks for more. The verb “to say” appears twice, prompting Ibn Qutayba to discredit the personification of jahannam (inferno), cum Mu‘tazila: “yawma naqūlu li-jahannama hall imtala’ti wa taqūlu hall min mazīdin” (when we say to Hell “are you full” and she says “is there more”) (Q 50:30). These two examples are not considered metaphorical for the same reasons, that is, the repetition of a term or the use of a word that denotes mukhāṭba and kalām (address and direct or indirect speech, e.g., words such as “say” and “speak”).

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The main point of Abū Zayd’s critique is twofold: that metaphor fell prey to theological wars and preconceptions and that the Mu‘tazilite school, now forgotten and demonized, is worthy of renewed critical attention and must be credited for seeking to defend the Qur’ān through figuration against its detractors’ accusations of linguistic errors and contradictions. But in reviving Mu‘tazilite theology to counter Ash‘arite approaches to metaphor, Abū Zayd provoked hostile reactions from Islamists. This is by no means surprising: given the new light his counter-hegemonic approach sheds on the discourse of Qur’ānic Studies, it is not hard to see how his work exposes the cloud of ideology that has enveloped eminent scholars in the Ash‘arite tradition, including founding figures such as Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī and al-Imām al-Shāfi‘ī. The question remains open as to whether such a critique of ideology will continue to be met with resistance or with further research and investigation. One particular difficulty in Abū Zayd’s genealogy of metaphor in early Islamic tradition deserves some consideration. The aforementioned incident— Abū ‘Ubayda’s use of Imru’ al-Qays’s line—has always been taken to confirm a figurative license when it comes to the Qur’ān addressing the Arabs in their very language and tropes. Even Abū Zayd employs such an incident as the ultimate example that puts an end to all doubts about the viability of metaphor in the Qur’ān. But a closer look at the metaphor and its lexical components still raises questions that further complicate the discourse of analogy in both Abū ‘Ubayda’s example and in Abū Zayd’s endorsement of it as irrefutable categorical evidence. The first question is one of signification: What if the signifier aghwāl in Imru’ al-Qays does not refer to a mythical signified after all? In fact, Ibn Manẓūr’s Lisān Al-‘Arab makes reference to the same poetic line to suggest that aghwāl in that particular plural sense, as opposed to the plural ghīlān,32 could also be used in pre-Islamic Arabic to denote ḥayyāt (giant snakes),33 a powerful metaphor—a tashbīh (simile) to be exact—in which the lethal blade of the sword is likened to the fatal venom excreted from a snake’s sharp teeth. What then if Abū ‘Ubayda, in his earnest defense of Qur’ānic metaphor, has unwittingly underestimated the powerful dominion of metaphor, and its suggestions of multiple meanings without asserting any? The difficulty here is that the primordial question of the scribe Ibn Ismā‘īl ibn Dāwūd al-Kātib would still remain unanswered. To be sure, a number of exegetes provide possible interpretations of this simile as seen in al-Ṭabarī,



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al-Farrā’, and al-‘Izz ibn ‘Abd al-Salām. But it is perhaps Qutāda, quoted in al-Ṭabarī, who provides the most comprehensive answer: One entity is likened to another entity as an indication of a relationship of proximity between the entity likened and the entity it is likened to, while what it is being likened to must always presuppose that one (the listener or the reader) must have knowledge of the two compared entities or at least one of them. But the fact remains that the disbelievers addressed in this verse had knowledge neither of the zaqqūm tree (cf. Q 17:60; Q 44:43; Q 62:65) nor of the heads of devils (cf. Q 62:65); in this case, they (the disbelievers) have seen neither the two entities together nor even one of them apart.

The second question, related to the first, is that a careful reading of Abū ‘Ubayda’s response to the scribe may justifiably lead to a closer examination of the word Abū ‘Ubayda provides in his response “‘alà qadr kalāmihim (in the same power of their own language/logos).” What is involved in this qadr exactly? Much hinges on this question. On the one hand, al-qadr in Arabic means both al-mablagh (the extent/end/destination) and al-ṭāqa (highest attainable point of one’s own power) and reveals bi-lisānin ‘Arabiyyin mubīnin (in a clarifying Arabic tongue); taken together, the meanings of both explain the logic behind Abū ‘Ubayda’s quotation in the first place. In other words, according to Abū ‘Ubayda, God speaks analogously—I am using this term very cautiously—to Arab ears and in an Arabic tongue, so that the metaphor is neither lost nor set outside the parameters of their linguistic competence. By competence I mean a native speaker’s innate ability to understand and comprehend a language without necessarily being able to perform it or produce it on the same rhetorical or linguistic level. On the other hand, the word qadr connotes exactness, proportionality, power, and capacity. In other words, while a Qur’ānic metaphor may lead to a “turn” of thought— conversion, perversion, subversion, and so on—to the extent that it is rational, that is, delivered within the logical dictates of the Arabic language, even if its signifiers remain unverifiable in the phenomenological world, the receiving listener/reader must not find the image contradictory. On the contrary, the reader may find the image consistent with the elastic powers of the Arabic language and its capacity to embrace the trope as a manifestation of a divine reason that is accessible to those who participate in the abstract logic of the language, its qadr (intellectual power), and not necessarily its verifiable

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ontological references. Discussing the imagery of Resurrection, Muhammad Asad has something brilliant to say about this particular turn in language: It is not enough for man to be told, “If you behave righteously in this world, you will attain happiness in the life to come,” or alternatively, “If you do wrong in this world, you will suffer for it in the hereafter.” Such statements would be far too general to appeal to man’s imagination and, thus, to influence his behavior. What is needed is a more direct appeal to the intellect, resulting in a kind of “visualization” of the consequences of one’s conscious acts and omissions and such an appeal can be effectively produced by means of metaphors, allegories and parables, each of them stressing, on the one hand, the absolute dissimilarity of all that man will experience after resurrection from whatever he did or could experience in this world; and, on the other hand, establishing means of comparison between these two categories of experience.34

Thus, mathal, be it a similitude, an allegory, or a symbolic parable of comparability, is a metaphorical use of language expressed in numerous stylistic patterns in the Qur’ān. Mathal takes different forms and variations, ranging from traditional tashbīh (simile), which uses the particle ka- to mean “like,” or the word mathal prefixed by the ka- particle, so it becomes ka-mathali (like the similitude of) (e.g., Q 2:264). Sometimes mathal appears in a phrase without the k- prefix, in examples such as “ḍaraba Allāhu mathalan” (e.g., Q 16:75) (God has set forth a similitude/a likening); sometimes it occurs passivized as in ḍuriba mathalun” (e.g., Q 22:73) (a similitude/likening is set forth), or it appears in a structure indicating that the similitude of such is like the similitude of such (e.g., Q 7:176), and so on. One could in fact distinguish at least seven types of these variations on the comparative mathal trope in the Qur’ān, which are tabulated in Table 6.1. In all these rhetorical variations, mathal becomes a metaphorical vehicle that approximates meaning but also suspends imagination. In the particular case of Q 37:65, a tree whose fruit resembles/takes the likeness of/is as if it were the heads of devils, sends the imagination into whirlpools of ungraspable horror—a horror too horrifying to visualize or even comprehend. What, then, is one to perceive in a non-perceivable trope? How do we make literal sense of a verse whose very message is based on a cognition that’s already been denied to us in the phenomenological world? The resolution lies in the simple fact that



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Table 6.1. Qur’ānic Tropes Imagery Type

Verses

1 God has set forth God has set forth a similitude of a slave the similitude [X] [who is] owned and incapable of of X and Y/or any action to do a thing and the one XY where X is/ [Y] whom We have blessed with our does something providence so he could spend from it and Y is or in secret and in public. Are these equal? does something Praise to Allah, as most of them do not else—are they the know. same? And God has set forth a similitude of two men [XY], one of them dumb [X] and incapable of any action, and who is a burden to his guardian who, wherever he directs him, does not bring any good. Is he equal to one [Y] who administers justice, and follows a straight path? 2 God has set forth God has set forth a similitude for the the similitude for disbelievers [X] disbelievers of the X [which is] Y wife of Noah [Y] and the wife of Lot and Y. [Y]. They were both spouses to two of Our righteous servants, but they both betrayed them. God has set forth a similitude for the believers [X] and the wife of Pharaoh [Y], who said, "My Lord, build for me near you a house in Heaven and deliver me from Pharaoh and his deeds and deliver me from wrongdoers, and Mary [Y], the daughter of ‘Imrān, who protected her chastity, so We breathed unto her of our Spirit. 3 The similitude Their similitude (the misguided) [X] is of X is like the like the similitude of the one who lit a similitude of Y. fire [Y], and as soon as it cast light to his surroundings, God took their light away and left them in darkness with no sight. The similitude of those who spend their money for the sake of God [X] is like the similitude of a seed which has grown seven spikes [Y], in each spike there are a hundred seeds and God multiplies to whomever He wills. Verify, the similitude of Jesus [Y] for God is like the similitude of Adam [Y].

Chapters Q 17:75

Q 17:76

Q 66:10

Q 66:11–12

Q 2:17

Q 2:261

Q 3:59 (Continued )

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Imagery Type

Verses

4 The similitude of X is like Y.

The similitude of the two (opposing) groups [X] is like the blind and deaf, and the discerning and the quick-eared. Are they equal in example? And the similitude of a sinister word is like a sinister tree, uprooted from the surface of the earth with no roots. The similitude of Heaven [X] promised to the righteous, which has rivers of water unaltered, rivers of milk un-soured, rivers of wine ecstatic to those who drink, and rivers of pure honey, with all kinds of fruit and the forgiveness of their Lord, is this the same as (the similitude of those) who abide eternally in Hell [Y] and were given boiling water to drink that tore through their bowels? Learn that this life on earth [X] is play and idle talk, and a display, and immodesty among yourselves, and competition in wealth and children, like the similitude of rain which grew plants to the admiration of disbelievers but which then dried and grew yellow and became debris. The similitude of Heaven [X] promised for the righteous [has] rivers running underneath, its fruit everlasting, as well its shade.

5 Is the similitude of X, which has such and such, the same as the similitude of Y, which has such and such?

6 Y is like the similitude of X.

7 The similitude of X has the quality of Y.

Chapters Q 11:24

Q 14:26 Q 47, 15

Q 57:20

Q 13:35

metaphor appeals to our consciousness, to our intellect, which is alone capable of bridging the gap of non-referentiality and transferring it into cognitive knowledge, or al-majāz al-‘aqlī (intellectual metaphor), as al-Jurjānī would eventually surmise.35 It is bewildering for the imagination to phenomenalize or even visualize what looks like devils, let alone devils themselves. Yet, it is by means of this mental process of figuration that we come to understand the language of divinity, whether the object exists outside of it or not. In fact, not just horror, but faith itself is a covenant of non-referentiality, a pledge with al-ghayb (the unknown/the unseen/the unperceived) as it is clearly and unequivocally stated in the Qur’ān’s second sūra (Q 2:3). But it is precisely because we are examining a metaphor, that is, a figurative trope,



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that the absence of reference in the material world cannot be the end of our analysis; instead, absence must begin the process of interpretation. This conceptual practice allows for the formula to be clear, at least mathematically: A is to B as C is to D; the fruit to the tree is as the heads to the devils. This mathematical formula bears on the noncongruency, or what might be called the figural anticipation, between the signified and the signifier, or between a linguistic sign and a signified yet to come. This disruption, which opens up interpretation yet threatens to shut it down completely, is more than mere imaginative failure. Scriptural metaphor holds the license to speak to us in a language we may understand about things we cannot understand. It is the awareness of the inefficacy of analogical categories—Aristotle was never clear in his working of metaphor through categories36—that allows not so much for the assertion of the power of intellect to capture the metaphysical, but rather for the consciousness of its very failure to do so. The moment our intellect attempts to capture the metaphysical through categories originally designed to make it easy for us to conceptualize non-matter, intellect fails and becomes conscious of its failure—leading to what we call a crisis in intellect. In other words, the scribe’s confusion must remain a suspended confusion. The fact that we are unable to achieve the as-if-ness and satisfy the analogy in the material world is the very answer to his question. Andrew Rippin makes a salient point when he discusses the power of divine expressions. “In dealing with expressions related to the divine,” writes Rippin, “the subject of study becomes not a matter of one ‘thing’ being ‘symbolized’ as another in the manner of a literary figure. Rather, what is at stake is the way in which ‘things’ are ‘captured’ in language in a form which is necessarily symbolic due to the use of language itself.”37 Rippin rightly invokes Paul Ricoeur’s wellknown aphorism that “metaphor gives rise to thought,” a maxim which, as Rippin cogently emphasizes, yields its meaning in divine texts. “In expressing something in language,” Rippin concludes, “thinking about that ‘thing’ becomes possible.”38 To complicate Rippin’s point, Ricoeur also contends that “to impute a discourse common to God and to his creatures would be to destroy divine transcendence; assuming total incommunicability of meaning from one level to the other would condemn one to utter agnosticism.”39 Ricoeur introduces a solution that he refers to as a third modality of attribution, namely analogous attribution. This is a way to extend (after Aristotle) the concept of analogy to

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theology, an order of analogy where a term imitates another as far as it can, but does not equal it perfectly—this is the analogy between God and his creatures. Abū Zayd’s approach to metaphor, in my opinion, comes to full fruition in his 1992 article “Markaba-t- al-Majāz” (The Vehicle of Metaphor). In this article, he takes the question of figuration to a new horizon—to the extent that the encounter with the Qur’ān as dhū wujūh (suspended between varied possible meanings, interpretations, and shifting relations between signifier and signified) reopens the questions of whether and how we choose to read and make sense of the Qur’ān.40 For it is in al-taḥrīk al-dilālī (linguistic shift from the literal to the figural/metaphorical), Abū Zayd contends, on a hint from Ibn ‘Arabī, that the ṭarīq (path) of the restoration of divinity to humankind or humankind to divinity is traced.41 We might say that, along the path of this restoration, we continue to encounter dynamic versions of linguistic uncertainty that suspend us between certitude and the wujūh (the many faces) of language itself. It is not that metaphor undermines the divine, but that it is of the divine—this is what needs to be emphasized. Literary criticism dwells on metaphor because metaphor contributes to a condition in which we find ourselves responsible before judgment; it allows us to come to terms with and to transcend the opposing elements of our own subjective understanding. Abū Zayd is certainly aware of these oppositions, especially in a complex language such as Arabic, labeled as lugha-t- al-aḍdād (the language of opposites), where the same root is also often happily the opposite of what it signifies. The fault is thus in the nature of human reason, particularly in its confusion of the abstract with the concrete and its persistent presupposition that for spiritual content to take effect it must be presented in an apparently concrete and unambiguous manner. God can be approachable through metaphor (think, for instance, of Moses’s request to see God in Q 7:143); he can afford to speak to us in tropes, through particles like k-, ka’anna, and mathal. If this were not the case there would be a discrepancy between the word (or the letter) of the Qur’ān and its referent, between, for example, the symbolic function of the phrase ru’ūsu al-shayāṭīn (the heads of devils) and what it symbolizes. The only way we can fill the metaphysical gap in understanding God is through metaphor. The reason for this is not ideological or epistemological but purely linguistic—and that is the harshest reality to acknowledge.

Conclusion

I wrote this book with a mixed sense of urgency and hope. The urgency emanates from the negativities surrounding Islam today. In a post 9/11 world, and especially in the Trump era, I have contemplated the menace of fundamentalism as well as the harm done by Islamophobia. In particular, I have reflected on the miserable divide between, on the one hand, the hope for coexistence and the lofty aspirations of academia and, on the other, the rigid realities of our everyday life. As a Muslim and a humanist whose intellectual commitment is to an ethos of social justice and inclusivity, I cannot overemphasize the urgency of our need to break down dogmas in an increasingly polarized world. Hope is where we find a crack in the canonized walls of our own disciplines and our own ingrained prejudices, where the opportunities for peace on earth, civil discourse, and constructive dialogue break through the thick layers of divisiveness, racism, and culture wars, within our own borders and outside of them. This study has focused on a group of remarkable Muslim scholars of the Qur’ān in modern Egypt, scholars who have in various degrees played an important role in seeking to change Islamist dogma. The key to conscious and meaningful change lies with the revolutionary intellectuals of this world, including its Muslim societies. Nothing scares fundamentalists—Islamists or orientalists—more than intellectuals: rational people who lead with sound ideas and can change the course of history with a statement; who embrace a position and defend it on intelligible and epistemologically sound grounds; who stand outside their own institutions; who soar above the jargon of methodological abstraction; who revolt against the ‘aṣabiyya (unconditional solidarity/tribal bias) and prejudices of their own disciplines; and who are committed only to the advancement of reason and to communicating directly with the literate, educated public.

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The Qur’ān and Modern Arabic Literary Criticism has brought together five scholars of this revolutionary intellectual caliber. They participate simultaneously in four Arab-Islamic traditions: the literary, the rationalist, the religious, and the historical. Such range and openness is virtually impossible in our current hyper-sensitive and turf-guarding academic institutions. But for the pursuit of high scholarly distinction in the multilayered field of Qur’ānic Studies, rich with its varied intercultural and interdisciplinary histories, such a quadruple commitment is a basic prerequisite. Readers who want to examine presuppositions about the function and role of the Qur’ān in our culture can avail themselves of the fruits of the keen labor of these scholars. The general lack of familiarity with their work and the widespread assumption that one can somehow take the Qur’ān for granted or learn about it from the sheikh next door still baffles me. This book focuses on the question of whether rhetorical and aesthetic appreciation of the Qur’ān is a worthy and important pursuit; but its main concern is less with the form and the content of the Qur’ān than it is with exposing the presuppositions and prejudices of both Islamists and orientalists, who each approach the Qur’ān with their minds already set. This study may not change anything, as religious texts often inspire a level of devotion, or opposition, which is beyond reason. If one is willing only to see the Qur’ān through the Islamist lens of literalism, or to denigrate it from an orientalist perspective as a mere imitation of preexisting religions, any progress in understanding the Qur’ān or one’s fellow human beings will be impossible. However, if one is persuaded that the Qur’ān is dhū wujūh (diverse and tolerant of various possibilities of meaning and interpretations), as Imam ‘Alī ibn Abī Ṭālib has said of it, the results will be different. The issue, then, is not a trifling one, nor are the scholars engaged in this task a group of eccentrics or apostates. As one can see over vast areas of today's world, intolerance based on rigid understanding still holds sway over hundreds of millions, whether it be the intolerance of Muslims toward non-Muslims or other Muslims—or the intolerance of non-Muslims toward Muslims. Major epochs of the Islamic and Western civilizations have been built on such intolerance, and major cultures both high and low have developed out of them. A millennium ago, the world differed greatly from today. When Europe was still developing, Arabic was the lingua franca of the thirteenth and fourteenth

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centuries, and Islamic civilization was the epicenter of the world’s scientific discoveries, economic activity, military power, architectural mastery, and artistic resourcefulness. Islamic history has had its share of violence, tribalism, and aggression, but all the best achievements of Islam happened during periods of tolerance and pluralism, when Jewish and Christian savants worked hand in hand with Muslim scientists and when disagreements about whether God had a real hand or a metaphorical one or whether the Qur’ān was created or coeternal with God were all part of civil discourse. The theologian Wāṣil ibn ‘Aṭā’ (700–748), one of the major founders of the Mu‘tazilite School of Theology in opposition to the dominant Asha‘rite doctrine, did not suffer any of the humiliation, charges of apostasy, or demands that he divorce his spouse as did Abū Zayd in Egypt in the 1990s for discussing the former’s work and theological leanings in a scholarly venue. As Qur’ānic exegesis has always been intricately entangled with critical events in Islamic history, it has been affected by epistemological and political developments. In fact, one cannot begin to appreciate Qur’ānic exegesis without understanding the constant ebb and flow of these developments. The fanaticism visited upon most of the authors in this study has its roots in the current prevalence and perversity of Islamism in modern Egypt. However, the Western academy has had its own perverse role to play. Orientalist historians and Eurocentrist academics presume before they start that the origins of the Qur’ān are human, not divine, and that the Qur’ān, therefore, can only be examined in that light—thus dismissing the beliefs of 1.8 billion Muslims. That is why it is crucial today to read, to teach, and to learn from Ḥusayn, al-Khūlī, Khalafallāh, Bint al-Shāṭi’, and Abū Zayd. Their work has already initiated a promising shift in Qur’ānic scholarship and opened the gates for further enlightened perspectives on the Qur’ān and on Islamic history. We see their legacy already carried on in the work of luminaries such as the Algerianborn Mohammed Arkoun (1928–2010), the Egyptian ‘Alī Mabrūk (1961– 2016), and the Iranian Abdolkarim Soroush (1945–). But most important of all, vis-à-vis  the insipid fundamentalisms of Islamists and orientalists alike, their voices have been unparalleled in the articulation and cogency of their opposition to the tides of the time.

Notes Introduction 1 There are few important studies on Ḥusayn’s work. They include Pierre Cachia’s 1956 introductory work and Abdelrashid Mahmoudi’s 1998 study of Ḥusayn’s educational background. See Pierre Cachia, Ṭāhā Ḥusayn: His Place in the Egyptian Literary Renaissance (London: Luzac & Company, 1956) and Abdelrashid Mahmoudi, Ṭāhā Ḥusain’s Education: From the Azhar to the Sorbonne (Surrey, London: Curzon, Routledge, 1998). 2 An all-inclusive study addressing Qur’ānic exegesis in modern Egypt is to be found in J. J. G. Jansen’s The Interpretation of the Koran in Modern Egypt (Leiden: Brill, 1974). In his study, Jansen traditionally finds the starting point in Muhammad ‘Abduh, with whom he begins the first chapter, entitled “Muhammad Abduh’s Koran Interpretation.” Jansen then follows with a thematic division of approaches to Qur’ānic exegesis as the century progresses. These approaches, or various modes of “interpretation” as he calls them, include “Koran interpretation and natural history,” “Koran interpretation and philology,” and “practical Koran interpretation.” 3 Muḥammad ‘Abduh, Tafsīr al-Manār (Cairo: Dār al-Manār, 1954); Naṣr Ḥāmid Abū Zayd, Mafhūm al-Naṣṣ: Dirāsah fī ‘Ulūm al-Qur’ān (Casablanca: al-Markaz al-Thaqāfī al-‘Arabī, 2008). 4 See Roxanne L. Euben, Enemy in the Mirror: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Limits of Modern Rationalism: A Work of Comparative Political Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 53–83. See also Mohammad Salama and Rachel Friedman, “Locating the Secular in Sayyid Qutb,” Arab Studies Journal, vol. XX, no. 1 (Spring 2012): 104–31. To his credit, Qutb had attempted a literary interpretation of Qur’ānic imagery before his radicalization. His study, which is entitled Al-Taṣwīr al-Fannī fī al-Qur’ān al-Karīm (Artistic Imagery in the Holy Qur’ān), is a standalone mid-century work that shows Qutb’s talent as a literary critic. Although Qutb’s work falls outside the contours of this study, the dangerous epistemology that an ideological traditionalism and

120 Notes political interpretation of the Qur’ān embody in his later writings is neither the denunciation of colonial modernity nor the critique of the very foundations of the “enlightened” culture of Western Europe. Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Frantz Fanon did indeed critique or deconstruct the enlightenment thesis of Western Europe. Qutb’s radical political ideology and his reductionist understanding of the vast tradition of Islam, the religion in whose name he unleashes havoc on both the Islamic and non-Islamic world, has undoubtedly backfired. His limited and essentialist knowledge of the West itself, as well as his inability to transcend the contingency of the political moment that dictated his Islamist thought, has created an anti-Nasserist, anti-Arabist, and antiEuro-American Islam, which not only reinforces a damaging binary opposition between Islam and the West, but also between Islam and other versions of itself. This binary’s latent presence in public discourse will take decades if not centuries to repair. 5 See, for instance, Jamāl Aḥmad ‘Abd al-Ḥalīm al-‘Askarī, al-Ittijāhāt al-Dīnīyya fī Adab Ṭāhā Ḥusayn: al-Juz’ al-Awwal: Jadal al-Tārīkh (Cairo: al-Hay’a al-Miṣriyya al-‘Ᾱmma li-l-Kitāb, 2008). 6 For more on ‘Abduh and the question of modernity, see Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in a Liberal Age: 1798–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983; London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 130–59. 7 This perception is often set in opposition to Rashīd Riḍā (1865–1935), a leading disciple of ‘Abduh who is argued to have truncated or, oddly enough, radicalized ‘Abduh’s progressive and revolutionary ideas by adding a flavor of conservative Salafism to the latter’s posthumous published work. Riḍā takes a fundamentalist stand against Ḥusayn’s Abrahamic thesis in On Pre-Islamic Poetry and goes so far as to accuse him of apostasy. See Rashīd Ridā, al-Manâr, vol. XXVIII, no. 5 (Dhū al-Ḥijja 29, 1345/June 29, 1927), 368–80. See also Charles C. Adams, Islam and Modernism in Egypt: A Study of the Modern Reform Movement Inaugurated by Muhammad ‘Abduh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), 259. For more readings on the conservative position of Ridā, see Malcolm H. Kerr, Islamic Reform: The Political and Legal Theories of Muhammad ‘Abduh and Rashid Rida (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966); Richard Mitchell, The Society of Muslim Brothers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); and Aḥmad al-Sharabāṣī, “Rashīd Riḍā Ṣāḥib al-Manār” (Rashīd Riḍā, Founder of al-Manār Journal) (Cairo: Matābi’ al-Ahrām al-Tijāriyya, 1970). 8 See Jābir ‘Uṣfūr, “Mafhūm al-Naṣṣ wa al-I‘tizāl al-Mu‘āṣir” (The Concept of the Text and the Contemporary Mu‘tazilite Thought), Majallat Ibdā‘ (Cairo, March 1991), 30.

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9 Fundamentalists rely on a ḥadīth attributed to the Prophet and narrated through Abd Allāh bin Mas‘ūd, al-Nasā’ī, Dāwūd, Aḥmad, Ibn Mājja, and Muslim, among others. The part of the ḥadīth relevant to this context goes as follows: The Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) said, “Verily there are two things—words and guidance. The best words are the words of Allah, and the best guidance in the guidance of Muhammad. Beware of newly invented matters, for every newly invented matter is bid‘a [innovation] and every bid‘a is a stray act, and every stray act is doomed to Hell.” In dominant Islamist discourses, this saying attributed to the Prophet is overused, if not abused, and is often quoted erroneously and out of context. The goal is to silence opposing viewpoints, quell debates, and to label as apostate or a disbeliever anyone who disagrees with common Islamist discourse or introduces a different perspective on ḥadīth or tafsīr. 10 Amīn al-Khūlī, Manāhij Tajdīd fī al-Naḥw wa al-Balāgha wa al-Tafsīr wa al-Adab (Innovative Methodologies in Grammar, Rhetoric, and Explication) (Cairo: Dār al-Ma‘rifa, 1961). 11 Abū ‘Ubayda ibn al-Muthanná, Majāz al-Qur’ān (Beirut: Maktaba al-Risāla, 1981). 12 For historical interpretations of Q 48:10, see the following: Abū Manṣūr al-Tha‘ālibī, Fiqh al-Lugha wa Asrār al-‘Arabiyya (Philology and the Secrets of Arabic), ed. Yāsīn al-Ayyūbī (Beirut: al-Maktaba al-‘Aṣriyya, 2000), 391; Amīn Dawīdār, Ṣuwar min Ḥayā-t- al-Rasūl (Takes from the Life of the Prophet) (Cairo, 1968), 465; al-Ṭabarī, Tafsīr al-Ṭabarī, vol. 22 (Cairo: Dār al-Ma‘ārif, 1954), 199. 13 See J. Tate, “On the History of Allegorism,” Classical Quarterly, vol. 28 (1934): 105–14. See also Naṣr Ḥāmid Abū Zayd, Falsafa-t- al-Ta’wīl: Dirāsa fī Ta’wīl al-Qur’ān ‘ind Ibn ‘Arabī (The Philosophy of Hermeneutics: A Study of Qur’ānic Interpretation in Ibn ‘Arabī) (Beirut: al-Markaz al-Thaqāfī al-‘Arabī, 2011). See in particular Chapter 1, “Al-Ta’wīl wa al-Wujūd” (Hermeneutics and Existence), 45–149. 14 Naṣr Ḥāmid Abū Zayd, al-Tajdīd wa al-Taḥrīm wa al-Ta’wīl (Renovation, Inhibition, and Hermeneutics) (Beirut: al-Markaz al-Thaqāfī al-‘Arabī, 2008), 148. 15 See Aḥmad Amīn, Ḍuḥá al-Islām (The Sunlight of Islam), vol.1 (Cairo: Maktaba-t- al-Usra, 2003) and Muḥammad ‘Imāra, al-Mu‘tazila wa Mushkila-tal-Ḥurriyya al-Insāniyya (The Mu‘tazalites and the Question of Human Freedom) (Beirut: al-Mu’assasa al-‘Arabiyya li-l-Nashr, 1972), 340–426. 16 See Yvonne Haddad, “Sayyid Qutb: Ideologue of Islamic Revival,” in Voices of Resurgent Islam, ed. John L. Esposito (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 67–98.

122 Notes 17 See Mahmoud Hussein, Understanding the Qur’ān Today, trans. David Bond (London: Saqi Books, 2013); see also Mohammad Salama’s review of Mahmoud Hussein, “Understanding the Qur’ān Today, SCTIW Review,” Journal of the Society for Contemporary Thought and the Islamicate World (October 14, 2014). 18 Reference here is to fundamentalist interpretations of the Qur’ān as reflected in works such as Sayyid Qutb’s, al-Taṣwīr al-Fannī fī al-Qur’ān (Artistic Imagery in the Qur’ān) (Cairo: Dār al-Ma‘ārif, 1963) and Fī Ẓilāl al-Qur’ān (In the Shades of the Qur’ān) (Beirut: Dār al-Shurūq, 1973–74). While Qutb sees taṣwīr (imagery) as “a fundamental vehicle in approaching the Qur’ān” (36), he restores the aesthetic to notions of social equity, justice, and equal rights, with subtle references to contemporary issues in Egyptian politics, thus restoring al-manhaj al-Jamālī (the aesthetic method) to al-manhaj al-fikrī (the ideological method). For more on the continuity thesis and the ideological aesthetics of Qutb’s approach to the Qur’ān, see Salāḥ Khālidī, Fī Ẓilāl al-Qur’ān fī al-Mīzān (Jeddah: Dār al-Manāra, 1986). 19 There are many approaches to the Qur’ān that fall within this paradigm. See, for instance, Michael Cook’s The Koran: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). In this study, Cook seeks to find a connection between the Qur’ānic word sirāṭ and the Roman strata in his translation of the Qur’ān’s first sūra (chapter). His myopic understanding of Arabic betrays a bankrupt method of attributing false etymologies and seeking to subsume Arabic under Latin when there is not necessarily a connection between the two words. For a more nuanced critique of Cook’s and other German-school approaches to the Qur’ān, see Walid Saleh’s important work “In Search of a Comprehensible Qur’ān: A Survey of Some Recent Scholarly Works,” Bulletin of the Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies, vol 5, no. 2 (Autumn/Winter 2003): 143–62. 20 See Angelika Neuwirth, Der Koran als Text der Spätantike. Ein europäischer Zugang (The Qur’ān as a Text of Late Antiquity: A European Approach) (Berlin: Verlag der Weltreligionen, 2010), 581–83. 21 Ṭāhā Ḥusayn, Fī al-Shi‘r al-Jāhilī (Cairo: Dār al-Ma‘ārif, 1962), 14. 22 An inherent problem with Tafsīr al-Manār is that it was published posthumously and edited and completed by ‘Abduh’s student, Rashīd Riḍā. R. Casper argues that Riḍā makes numerous attempts at traditionalizing ‘Abduh’s exegesis. See R. Casper, “Le Renouveau mo‘tazilite,” MIDEO, vol. IV (1957): 161. ‘Uthmān Amīn, likewise, observes that Riḍā at first follows ‘Abduh’s method but then deviates from it quite conspicuously and he begins to voice his own traditional views, especially toward the later sections of Tafsīr al-Manār. See ‘Uthmān Amīn,

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Muhammad ‘Abduh, Essai sur des Idées Philosophiques et Religieuses (Cairo: Imprimerie Misr, 1944), 168. 23 See, for example, Elie Kedourie, Afghani and ‘Abduh: An Essay on Religious Unbelief and Political Activism in Modern Islam (London: Frank Cass and Co., 1966). Khedouri makes the argument that ‘Abduh is a heterodox if not an undercover free thinker. 24 See Adams, Islam and Modernism in Egypt. Adams’s work is perhaps the first full biography of Muḥammad ‘Abduh written in English. 25 In his 1968 PhD thesis on ‘Abduh, Harun Nasution focuses on the influence of Mu‘tazilite theology on ‘Abduh’s theology of reason. See Harun Nasution, The Place of Reason in ‘Abduh’s Theology: Its Impact on his Theological System and Views (PhD diss., McGill University, 1968). 26 See Hourani, Arabic Thought in a Liberal Age, 135–42. Hourani pithily addresses ‘Abduh’s theological views and does not engage with his interpretation of the Qur’ān. 27 See Mark Sedgwick, Muhammad Abduh (Makers of the Muslim World) (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2010), xiii. 28 See Cachia, Ṭāhā Ḥusayn, 131–66. 29 Ibid., 137. 30 Ṭāhā Ḥusayn, Fī al-Adab al-Jāhilī (Cairo: Dār al-Ma‘ārif, 1962 [1927]), 332–33. 31 Reference is made to variations in certain verses and other prophets’ stories in the Qur’ān. Al-Khūlī makes the argument that there is a strong connection between the psychological condition of the prophet (fear, worry, anxiety, sadness, etc.) and revelation. 32 Muḥammad Aḥmad Khalafallāh, Al-Fann al-Qaṣaṣī fī al-Qur’ān al-Karīm (Narrative Art in the Holy Qur’ān) (Cairo: Sinā’ li-l-Nashr, 1999), 182. 33 Bint al-Shāṭi’, Tafsīr al-Bayānī li-l-Qur’ān al-Karīm (Cairo: Dār al-Ma‘ārif, 1968). 34 ‘Abd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī, Dalā’il al-I‘jaz fī ‘Ilm al-Ma‘ānī (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-‘Ilmiyya, 2005).

Chapter 1 1 Jacques Berque, Egypt: Imperialism and Revolution, trans. Jean Stewart (New York, Praeger Publishers, 1972), 352–62. See also “Judhūr Jāmi‘a-t- al-Qāhira” (The Roots of Cairo University), , and P. L. Vatikiotis, The History of

124 Notes Egypt from Muhammad Ali to Sadat (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 296–314. For an in-depth analysis of the cultural life of Egyptian intellectuals and expatriates in the early twentieth century, see Boutheina Khaldi’s seminal work, Egypt Awakening in the Early Twentieth Century: Mayy Ziyadah’s Intellectual Circles (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 2 For more on ‘Abd al-Rāziq’s book and its argument, see Israel Gershoni and James P. Jankowski, Egypt, Islam, and the Arabs: The Search for Egyptian Nationhood: 1900–1930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 55–74; Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 184–88; Nadav Safran, Egypt in Search of Political Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), 141–43; Hamid Enayat, Modern Islamic Political Thought (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982), 62–68; and Leonard Binder, “‘Ali ‘Abd al-Raziq and Islamic Liberalism,” Asian and African Studies, vol. 16 (1982): 31–59. 3 ‘Alī ‘Abd al-Rāziq, al-Islām wa Uṣūl al-Hụkm (Islam and the Principles of Governance) (Cairo: Maṭba‘at Miṣr, 1925), 36. 4 Fā’iq Muṣṭafá and ‘Abd al-Riḍá ‘Alī, Fī al-Naqd al-Adabī al-Ḥadīth (Iraq: Manshūrāt Jāmi‘a-t-al-Waṣl, 1989), 94. For more on Lanson’s influence on Ḥusayn, see Mahmoudi, Ṭāhā Ḥusain’s Education, 187–90. 5 See Ghālī Shukrī, Mādhā yabqá min Ṭāhā Ḥusayn? (What Remains of Ṭāhā Ḥusayn?) (Beirut: Dār al-Mutawwassiṭ li-al-Nashr wa al-Tawzī’, 1974), 49. 6 Ḥusayn, Ḥadīth al-Arbi‘ā’ (Wednesday Talk), vol. 2, 1925 (Cairo: Dār al-Ma‘ārif, 1976), 52. 7 Ḥusayn, Ḥadīth al-Arbi‘ā’, 53. 8 Ṭāhā Ḥusayn, Tajdīd Dhikrá Abī al-‘Alā’ (Cairo: Maṭba‘a-t- Miṣr, 1937), 16. 9 Ḥusayn, Fī al-Shi’r al-Jāhilī, 7. 10 Ibid., 88. 11 Ibid., 20. 12 Ibid., 28. 13 See, for example, Aḥmad Haykal, Fī al-Adab wa al-Lugha (Cairo: al-Hay’a al-‘Āmma li-al-Kitāb, 1998). 14 Ḥamid ibn Muḥammad al-Khaṭṭābī, al-Bayān fī i‘jāz al-Qur’ān (India: al-Qism al-‘Arabī, al-Jāmi‘a al-Islāmīyya, 1953); ‘Alī ibn ‘Isá al-Rummānī, al-Nukat fī i‘jāz al-Qur’ān (Delhi: Maktaba-t-al-Jāmi’a al-Millīyya, 1934); Muḥammad ibn al-Ṭayyib al-Bāqillānī, I‘jāz al-Qur’ān (Cairo: Dār al-Ma‘ārif, 1963); ‘Abd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī, Dalā’il al-I‘jaz fī ‘Ilm al-Ma‘ānī; Maḥmūd ibn ‘Umar al-Zamakhsharī, al-Kashshāf ‘an Ḥaqā’iq Ghawāmiḍ al-Tanzīl (Beirut: Dār al-Kitāb al-‘Arabī, 1947); and Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī, Tafsīr al-Jalālayn (Cairo: Mu’assasa-tal-Mukhtār, 2004).

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15 Ḥusayn, Fī al-Shi’r al-Jāhilī, 47. 16 Ibid., 68. 17 Ibid., 332–33. 18 Ḥusayn’s application of Descartes is a soft one in that he does not dismiss the initial assumption of the existence of God in order to maintain an absolutely fresh start. However, Descartes’s own claim to annul all preknowledge and to assume a groundless beginning has been called into question. Many thinkers, including Heidegger, Freud, Lacan, and especially Foucault and Derrida, have in various degrees of contestation raised questions on whether the Cartesian “I” is compatible with the method of doubt or whether Descartes’s doubt was indeed doubt and not an exercise in self-deception. See Jacques Derrida, Resistances of Psychoanalysis, trans. Peggy Kamuf, Pascale-Anne Brault, and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 1978); Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings, trans. John Reddick (London: Penguin Books, 2003); and Michel Foucault, History of Madness, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa (London: Routledge, 2006). See also Judith Butler, “How Can I Deny That These Hands and This Body Are Mine?” in Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory, eds. Tom Cohen, Barbara Cohen, J. Hillis Miller, and Andrezej Warminski (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2004), 254–73. 19 Ḥusayn, Fī al-Shi‘r al-Jāhilī, 32–33. 20 Tāḥā Ḥusayn, ‘Alà Hāmish al-Sīra (On the Margins of the Prophet’s Biography) (Cairo: Mu’assasa-t- Hindāwī li-l-Ta‘līm wa al-Thaqāfa, 2012), 15–21. 21 Ḥusayn, Fī al-Shi‘r al-Jāhilī, 34. 22 Ibid., 35. 23 René Descartes, René Descartes: Meditations on First Philosophy: With Selections from the Objections and Replies, ed. and trans. John Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) (Third Meditation, 52), 35. See also Gilles Deleuze’s critique of Descartes’s irreducible individuality in Différence et Repetition (Paris: PUF, 1968), 154. 24 See David Samuel Margoliouth, The Relations between the Arabs and Israelites Prior to the Rise of Islam, (London: Published for the British Academy by H. Milford, Oxford University Press, 1921); Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). For more on the topic of Hagarism and early Islamic sources, see Gregor Schoeler, “The Codification of the Qur’ān: A Comment on the Hypotheses of Buton and Wansbrough,” in The Qur’ān in Context: Historical and

126 Notes Literary Investigations into the Qur’anic Milieu, eds. Angelika Neuwirth, Nicolai Sinai, and Michael Marx (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 779–94. See also S. L. Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); R. Irwin, For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and their Enemies (London: Allen Lane, 2006); N. Robinson, Discovering the Qurʾan: A Contemporary Approach to a Veiled Text (Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 1996) and “The Ideological Uses of Islam,” Past & Present, vol. 203 (2009): 205–28; Fred Donner, Narratives of Islamic Origins: The Beginnings of Islamic Historical Writing (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998) and Muhammad and the Believers: At the Origins of Islam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); S. Shoemaker, “In Search of ‘Urwa’s Sira: Some Methodological Issues in the Quest for ‘Authenticity’ in the Life of Muhammad,” Der Islam, vol. 85 (2011): 257–344; J. Koren and Y. D. Nevo, “Methodological Approaches to Islamic Studies,” Der Islam, vol. 68 (1991): 97–107; A. A. Duri, The Rise of Historical Writing among the Arabs, trans. L.I. Conrad (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983); T. Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought in the Classical Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); J. Johns, “Archaeology and the History of Early Islam: The First Seventy Years,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, vol. 46 (2003): 411–36; and R. Hoyland, “New Documentary Texts and the History of the Early Islamic State,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, vol. 69 (2006): 395–416. 25 Numerous Islamists have considered Ḥusayn’s book to be the mother of all battles against secular thought, and some even dedicated their scholarship to diminishing Ḥusayn’s legacy. See Anwar al-Jundī, Ṭāhā Ḥusayn: Ḥayātuhu wa Fikruhu fī Mīzān al-Islām (Ṭāhā Ḥusayn: His Life and Thought on the Scale of Islam) (Cairo: Dār al-I‘tiṣām, 1976); Jamāl al-Dīn al-Alūsī, Taha Ḥusayn bayn Anṣārihi wa Khuṣūmihi (Ṭāhā Ḥusayn between Proponents and Opponents) (Baghdad: Maṭba‘a-t- al-Irshād, 1973); Sāmiḥ Kurayyim, Ṭāhā Ḥusayn fī Ma‘ārikihi al-Adabiyya (Ṭāhā Ḥusayn at His Literary Quarrels) (Cairo: al-Hay’a al-Miṣriyya al-‘Āmma li-l-Kitāb, 1974); Jābir Rizq, Ṭāhā Ḥusayn: al-Jarīma wa al-Idāna (Ṭāhā Ḥusayn: The Crime and the Condemnation) (Cairo: Dār al-I‘tiṣām, 1985); Ibrāhīm ‘Awaḍ, Ma‘araka-t- al-Shi‘r al-Jāhilī (The Skirmish over Pre-Islamic Poetry) (Cairo: Maṭba‘a-t al-Fajr al-Jadīd, 1987). For a historical/ archival approach to Ḥusayn’s cultural legacy, see Abū Bakr ‘Abd al-Rāziq, Wathā’iq Qaḍiyya-t- Ṭāhā Ḥusayn (The Documents in Ṭāhā Ḥusayn’s Case) (Beirut: al-Maktaba al-‘Aṣriyya, 1991).

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26 Herbert Schneidau, Sacred Discontent: The Bible and Western Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 248. 27 See Descartes, René Descartes: Meditations on First Philosophy: With Selections from the Objections and Replies (First Meditation, 18), 24. In other words, the Cartesian task involves the impartial disavowal of not only the subject’s/ Descartes’s own opinions, but also of the past and one’s own personal recollections and memories. 28 My reference here is to Michel Foucault’s seminal essay on how power relations from Descartes and the Enlightenment have exploited reason for political power and created a false sense of subjectivity and individualism: “We have to promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality which has been imposed on us for centuries” (Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 8, no. 4 [Summer, 1982]: 785). 29 While it has no recorded or traceable documentation, this statement in now a renowned and deeply honored slogan in Egyptian culture. Ḥusayn is reported to have said it in his annual address to the Egyptian Parliament when he served as minister of education in 1952. It was part of his argument for increasing the budget for education in order to make it accessible and free to Egyptians on all levels, elementary, secondary, and postsecondary. 30 Louis de Bonald, Mélanges littéraires, politiques et philosophiques, vol. 3 of Œuvres completes (Paris: Migne, 1859), 1071. 31 Ibid., 1071. 32 Khayrī Shalabī, Muḥākama-t- Ṭāhā Ḥusayn [The Trial of Ṭāhā Ḥusayn] (Beirut: al-Mu’assasa al-‘Arabiyya li-l-Dirāsāt wa al-Nashr, 1972), 69–70. 33 Ḥusayn, Fī al-Shi‘r al-Jāhilī, 39. 34 Using what he calls “literary analysis,” Wansbrough argues that the Qur’ān was not produced during Prophet Muhammad’s time, but combined as a closed canon of scripture over a period of 200 years. He further argues that it originated in Iraq instead of Mecca. See John Wansbrough, Quranic Studies: Sources and Methods of Scriptural Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), xi, 44. See also his following book, The Sectarian Milieu: Content and Composition of Islamic Salvation History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 119. 35 Paul De Man, Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism: The Gauss Seminar and Other Papers, eds. E. S. Burt, Kevin Newmark, and Andrzej Warminski (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 191. 36 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences, trans. Anonymous (London: Tavistock Publications Ltd., 1970 [1966]), 261–62.

128 Notes

Chapter 2 1 See Jihād Fāḍil, “Tajdīd al-Fikr al-Dīnī ‘ind al-Shaykh Amīn al-Khūlī (Renewing Religious Thought in Shaykh Amīn al-Khūlī),” Al-Rāya (May 11, 2011): www. raya.com/news/pages/047f9d0f-bb8d-4f98-9683-c8beb8b33fc0. 2 René Descartes, Discourse on Method (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1998), 35. 3 To be sure, al-Khūlī’s call for moving Arabic into the center of exegetical studies is not new. Ibn Khaldūn had argued in the Muqaddima (Prolegomena), “fa-‘lam anna al-Qur’ān nuzzila bi-lughat al-‘Arab, wa ‘alá asālīb balāghatihim fa-kānū kulluhum yafhamūnahu” (“learn that the Qur’ān was revealed in the language of the Arabs and according to the style of their rhetoric; so all of them understood it”). This argument, however, has never really sat well with many scholars. Even before Ibn Khaldūn, Ibn Qutayba argued in his treatise Al-Masā’il wa al-Ajwiba (Issues and their Answers) that the Arabs are not equal in knowing everything in the Qur’ān, especially the gharīb (foreign) and the mutashābih (intricate), and some are better than others at assimilating Arabic. This point was not news to Ibn Khaldūn, who contended that there are verses in the Qur’ān in need of explication, and that during his life Prophet Muhammad was the authority in deciphering al-mujmal (the ambivalent), al-mutashābih (the intricate), al-nāsikh (the abrogating verses), and al-mansūkh (the abrogated verses). That is why some scholars contend that a proper study of tafsīr must begin with ḥadīth (collected sayings of the Prophet), which is commonly known as tafsīr al-riwāya (exegesis based on the concatenation of narration detailing the sayings of the Prophet) or tafsīr atharī (exegesis based on the Prophet’s life and legacy). This group of scholars includes Ibn ‘Abbās, al-Ḍaḥḥāk, Ibn Muzāḥim al-Hilālī, and ‘Aṭṭiya ibn Ṣa‘d al-‘Ufī, among others. Regardless of whether Ibn Khaldūn was correct or somewhat presumptuous about all Arabs’ understanding of the Qur’ān, the idea that a divine text deliberately uses the tongue/language of the community in which it is revealed implies that this community will enjoy an easier grasp of the message and fresher access to understanding the book than, say, a community situated 1000 years later, when many words have become obsolete and new words have been invented, or when words have acquired completely different denotations and connotations from their intended meaning in the first Muslim community. 4 Cf. Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003).

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5 Mahmoud Darwish, “Mural,” in Mural (New York: Verso, 2009), 15. 6 Amīn al-Khūlī, Manāhij Tajdīd fī al-Naḥw wa al-Balāgha wa al-Tafsīr wa al-Adab, 152. It is quite likely that al-Khūlī approaches the emotional affect unaware of the inherent conflict between empathy and critical distance. Rei Terada makes an excellent point when she writes: “By emotion we usually mean a psychological, at least minimally interpretive experience whose physiological aspect is affect. Feeling is a capacious term that connotes both physiological sensations (affects) and psychological states (emotions). Although philosophers reserve ‘feeling’ for bodily conditions, I use it when it seems fruitful to emphasize common ground of the physiological and the psychological” (Rei Terada, Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the “Death of the Subject” [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001], 4). “Respect for the power of emotion,” she continues, “should encourage scholars to inquire closely into their assumptions about their own. Of course, this does not mean there is anything unreal about the emotionality of experience, or that we could or should trade our emotions for the empty lucidity of a neutral world” (ibid., 15). In following Terada, I position myself against both facile lucidity and political neutrality. 7 Amīn al-Khūlī, Manāhij Tajdīd fī al-Naḥw wa al-Balāgha wa al-Tafsīr wa al-Adab, 211. 8 See Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, Mafātīḥ al-Ghayb, vol. 6 (Cairo: al-Matba‘a al-Miṣriyya al-Amīriyya, 1862), 541–43. 9 al-Rāzī, Mafātīḥ al-Ghayb, 212. 10 Ibid., 213. 11 Ibid., 217. 12 Amīn al-Khūlī, Manāhij Tajdīd fī al-Naḥw wa al-Balāgha wa al-Tafsīr wa al-Adab, 304. 13 Ibid., 233. 14 See Ḥāmid Muḥammad Amīn Sha‘bān, Amīn al-Khūlī wa al-Baḥth al-Lughawī (Amīn al-Khūlī and the Linguistic Research) (Cairo: Maktaba-t- al-Anglū al-Miṣriyya, 1980), 166–228. 15 See Amīn al-Khūlī, Mushkilāt Ḥayātinā al-Lughawiyya (Issues of Our Linguistic Life) (Cairo: al-Hay’a al-Miṣriyya al-‘Āmma lil-Kitāb, 1987), 61–62. For more on the absence of historical changes to lexicon in Arabic dictionaries, see Tammām Hassān’s important study on Arabic lexicography: Al-Lugha al-‘Arabiyya: Ma‘nāhā wa Mabnāhā (The Arabic Language: Its Meaning and its Structure) (Cairo: al-Hay’a al-Miṣriyya al-Āmma lil-Kitāb, 1973). See more specifically his chapter on al-Ma‘ājim (Arabic Dictionaries), 311–34. See also Hassān’s essay on

130 Notes the methods of research in Arabic dictionaries in his book, Manāhij al-Baḥth fī al-Lugha (Methodologies in Language) (Casablanca: Dār al-Thaqāfa, 1973), 258– 73. In his essay, Tammām refers to many Arabic dictionaries as well as lexiconbased studies including al-Siyūṭī’s al-Muzhir and al-Jurjānī’s Dalā’il al-I‘jāz to draw attention to the urgent need for researching etymological references in Arabic dictionaries: “European dictionaries such as the Oxford Dictionary of the English Language associate the meaning of words with specific centuries or historical periods. Current texts and studies of Arabic dictionaries lack such important etymological reference and semantic shifts. It is to be hoped that future scholarship will address this gap.” Tammām, Manāhij al-Baḥth fī al-Lugha (Methodologies in Language), 269–70. 16 This is where al-Khūlī departs from Muḥammad ‘Abduh. ‘Abduh believes that the main purpose of tafsīr is ‘iẓa and hidāya (exhortation and guidance). 17 Al-Khūlī disagrees fundamentally with Qutb’s characterization of the secular as anti-Islamic. See Kāmil Sa‘fān, Amīn al-Khūlī fī Manāhij Tajdīdih (Amīn al-Khūlī in his Renovation Methods) (Cairo: n.p., 1977), 12. See also Salama and Friedman, “Locating the Secular in Sayyid Qutb,” 104–31. 18 Amīn al-Khūlī, Manāhij Tajdīd fī al-Naḥw wa al-Balāgha wa al-Tafsīr wa al-Adab, 225. 19 With a view toward the political ramifications of this space, Judith Butler writes that bodies that act together emerge “from the ‘between,’ a spatial figure for a relation that both binds and differentiates” (Judith Butler, Notes toward a Performative Theory of Performative Assembly [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015], 77). Furthermore, Butler suggests that we find ourselves in two additional “spaces”: (1) where we have been named—even if we seek a better name, or even if we “endeavor to live in the interstices among all the names” and (2) where we are “invariably joined to those we never chose” (Ibid., 61; 99). 20 See Ḥātim Muḥammad Zakī, Amīn al-Khūlī bayna al-Islām wa al-Dārwiniyya (Amīn al-Khūlī between Islam and Darwinism), al-Qāhira al-Yawm, May 15, 2012): www.masress.com/alkahera/3922. 21 Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), 17. 22 A good application of al-Khūlī’s manhaj (method/approach) eventually takes place in the writings of Bint al-Shāṭi’. In addition, analytical extensions of his approach, especially the unpacking of rhetoric into two major subclassifications of metonymy and metaphor, is to be traced in the writings of his student

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Muḥammad Aḥmad Khalafallāh and his intellectual disciple Naṣr Ḥāmid Abū Zayd, as I expound in the following chapters. 23 Cook, The Koran, 8. 24 Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 12. 25 Amīn al-Khūlī, Manāhij Tajdīd fī al-Naḥw wa al-Balāgha wa al-Tafsīr wa al-Adab, 23. 26 Aziz Al-Azmeh, “Implausibility and Probability in Studies of Qur’anic Origins,” International Qur’anic Studies Association (November 2013), 1–2. 27 See Michael Cook, The Koran, 9. See also Walid Saleh, “In Search of a Comprehensive Qur’ān,” 144–52. In his survey, Saleh provides a measured and brilliant debunking of Cook’s false etymological premises as well as other scholarly works on the Qur’ān from the German School and beyond. 28 Cf. C. Brockelmann, Geschichte der Arabischen Litteratur, S I 509; for example, Muḥibb al-Dīn al-Ḥamawī, Tanzīl al-Āyāt ‘alà al-Shawāhid ‘an al-Abyāt (Cairo: al-Bābī al-Ḥalabī, 1968). Quoted in Jansen, The Interpretation of the Koran in Modern Egypt, 59. 29 Al-Suyūṭī, Ṭabaqāt al-Mufassirīn, nr. 43; F. Sezgin, Geschichte des Arabischen Schrifttums, i 45. Quoted in Jansen, The Interpretation of the Koran, 59. 30 Abū ‘Ubayda, Majāz al-Qur’ān (Metaphor in/of the Qur’ān), vol. 1, ed. Muḥammad Fū’ād Sezgin. Preface, Amīn al-Khūlī (Cairo: n.p., 1954), 16.

Chapter 3 1 Khalafallāh, al-Fann al-Qaṣaṣī fī al-Qur’ān al-Karīm, 31. 2 Ibid., 32. 3 Al-Khūlī’s influence on Khalafallāh does not just stop at his dissertation, but can be detected in most of the latter’s writings, in such works as: Muḥammad wa al quwwa al-muḍādda (Muhammad and the Counterpower); al-Qur’ān wa mushkilā-t- Ḥayātinā al-Mu‘āṣira (The Qur’ān and the Problems of Our Contemporary Life), al-Qur’ān wa al-Dawla (The Qur’ān and the State), al-Islām wa al-‘Urūba (Islam and Arabism); al-Jadal fī al-Qur’ān (Argumentation in the Qur’ān), al-Uṣuṣ al-Qur’āniyya li-l-Taqaddum (Qur’ānic Principles for Progress); Mafāhīm Qur’āniyya (Qur’ānic Concepts); and a seminal introduction to three classical works on Qur’ānic apologetics, Thalāth Rasā’il fī i‘jāz al-Qur’ān (Three Treatises on the I‘jaz of the Qur’ān), in addition to numerous contributions to

132 Notes literary journals such as al-Yaqaẓa al-‘Arabiyya, where he was the editor in chief, as well as Rūz al-Yūsif. 4 For more details on the media uproar that took place in 1947, see the Egyptian weekly literary magazine al-Risāla, Issue No. 741 (September 15, 1947). See also Issue No. 742 (September 22, 1947), Issue No. 743 (September 29, 1947), Issue No. 744 (October 6, 1947), Issue No. 745 (October 13, 1947), and Issue No. 746 (October 20, 1947). The latter includes two articles by Khalafallāh and Muḥammad ‘Alam al-Dīn. Al-Dīn critiques Khalafallāh and accuses him of blasphemy. In Issue No. 747 (October 27, 1947), Khalafallāh offers a response to ‘Alam Al-Dīn. Other scholars contributed to the debate. Issue No. 748 (November 3, 1947) and Issue No. 749 (November 10, 1947) include articles by ‘Abbās Maḥmud al-‘Aqqād and ‘Abd Al-Fattāḥ Badawī. Badawī in particular accuses Khalafallāh of misrepresenting the views of Muḥammad ‘Abduh and Abū Bakr al-Rāzī. In Issue No. 750 (November 17, 1947), Khalafallāh refutes Badawī’s allegations. The same issue includes a statement by the Syrian judge Ṭanṭāwī who rebukes Khalafallāh for relying on foreign sources to disparage Islam. Issue No. 752 of December 1, 1947, details the criminal investigation launched to reassess Khalafallāh’s dissertation. A new committee consisting of Islamists such as ‘Abd al-Wahhāb Khallāf, Zakī Muḥammad Ḥasan, and Muḥammad ‘Abd al-Mun‘im al-Sharqāwī replaced the original dissertation committee, which included academics such as Aḥmad Amīn and Aḥmad al-Shāyib. While al-Khūlī still remained on the committee as Khalafallāh’s advisor and vindicator, all but him concluded that the dissertation was in contradiction of the principles and teachings of Islam and the Qur’ān. 5 Naṣr Ḥāmid Abū Zayd, “Ma’zaq al-Muqāraba al-Adabiyya li-l-Qur’ān,” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, vol. 23 (2003): 10. 6 See Abū al-Fatḥ Muḥammad ibn Abī al-Qāsim al-Shahrastānī, al-Milal wa al-Niḥal, vol. 1 (Cairo: Muʼassasa-t- al-Ḥalabī, n.d.), 64. Quoted in marginalia in Abū Muḥammad ‘Alī ibn Aḥmad Ibn Ḥazm, al-Faṣl fī al-Milal wa al-Ahwā’ wa al-Niḥal, vol. 3 (Cairo: Maktaba-t- al-Salām al-‘Ālamiyya, n.d.), 10. 7 Abū ‘Uthmān ‘Amr ibn Baḥr al-Jāḥiẓ, Al-Bayān wa al-Tabyīn (The Book of Clarity and Clarification), ed. Abd al-Salām Muḥammad Hārūn (Cairo: Maṭba‘at-Lajna-t- al-Ta’līf wa al-Tarjama wa al-Nashr, 1948). 8 ‘Abd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī, Dalā’il al-I’jāz (Evidence of Inimitability), ed. Maḥmūd Muḥammad Shākir (Cairo: Maktaba-t- al-Khanjī, 1989), 98. See also al-Jurjānī, Asrār al-Balāgha (Secrets of Rhetoric), ed. Muḥammad ‘Abd al-Mun‘im Khafājī and ‘Abd al-‘Azīz Sharaf (Beirut: Dār al-Jīl, 1991), 144–45.

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9 Khalafallāh, al-Fann al-Qaṣaṣī fī al-Qur’ān al-Karīm, 182–210. 10 Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad, Contemporary Islam and the Challenge of History (New York: State University of New York, 1982), 49. 11 Khalafallāh, al-Fann al-Qaṣaṣī fī al-Qur’ān al-Karīm, 182. 12 Ibid., 188. 13 In this example, God immediately causes the man to perish for a hundred years, then resurrects him and asks him how long he has been asleep. The man responds that he must have slept for a day or so. God tells him that he actually has been asleep for a hundred years and asks to take a look at his food and his drink, which has not perished despite the passage of time. God then shows the man the bones of his dead donkey and how He alone is able to raise him from the dead and fill him with life and flesh. God makes the disbelieving man, who then turned into a believer, an example for the whole of humanity. See Q 2:259. 14 Muḥammad ‘Abduh, Tafsīr al-Manār, vol. 3, 53. Cited in Khalafallāh, al-Fann al-Qaṣaṣī fī al-Qur’ān al-Karīm, 207fn3. 15 Ibid., 361. 16 Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Richard Janko (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 12. 17 Khalafallāh, al-Fann al-Qaṣaṣī fī al-Qur’ān al-Karīm, 372. 18 See, for instance, the entry for the Arabic root s / ṭ / r in Ibn Manẓūr, Lisān al-‘Arab, vol. 7 (Tongue/Language of the Arabs) (Beirut: Dār Ṣādir, 2003). 19 Ibid., 182. 20 Abū al-Fidā’ Ismā‘īl ibn ‘Umar ibn Kathīr, Tafsīr al-Qur’ān al-‘Aẓīm (Explication of the Glorious Qur’ān), ed. Sāmi Muḥmmad al-Salāma, vol. 6 (Dār Ṭība li-lNashr wa al-Tawzī’, 1999), 94. 21 See Q 6:25; Q 8:31; Q 16:24; Q 23:83; Q 25:5; Q 27:68; Q 46:17; Q 68:15; and Q 83:13). 22 See Khalafallāh’s response to the Azharite Shaykh Muḥammad al-Ghazālī, who denigrates literature and accuses it of prompting lies. Al-Ghazālī calls for banning literary authors from engaging religious themes. Khalafallāh’s response, which uses al-Ghazālī’s admonition as an ironic title for his own rebuttal, is respectful yet irreverent. “Ahl al-Adab li-al-Adab wa Ahl al-Dīn lil-Dīn” (Let the People of Literature Do Literature and the People of Religion Do Religion), Adab wa Naqd, Issue 74 (October 1, 1991), 25–26. 23 Khalafallāh, al-Fann al-Qaṣaṣī fī al-Qur’ān al-Karīm, 32. 24 See Abū Zayd, Mafhūm al-Naṣṣ, 160, 122. 25 A cursory reading of some Qur’ānic narratives makes the metaphysicality and ahistoricity of the Qur’ān pronouncedly clear. See, for instance, the reference

134 Notes to the nocturnal journey where God transports Muhammad from Mecca to Jerusalem (Q 17:1), the account of the Prophet’s ascension to Heaven (Q 53:5–18). See also the account of the dwellers of the cave who were sent into slumber for more than three hundred years and then reawakened (Q 18:9–26), or the account of the pious man with superhuman knowledge initiating Moses into the science of ghayb and predestination (Q 18:60–82). For more exegetical reflections on the latter account in relation to human history, see Norman O. Brown, The Challenge of Islam: The Prophetic Tradition (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2009), 55–59. See also Mohammad Salama, “The Untranslatability of the Qur’ānic City,” in The City in Arabic Literature: Classical and Modern Perspectives, eds. Nizar Hermes and Gretchen Head (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018). 26 Emmanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J.H. Bernard (New York: Hafner Press, 1951), § 26, p. 90. 27 See the editor’s introduction to the first edition of Asrār al-Balāgha. Muḥammad Rashīd Riḍā, “Muqaddima-t- Nāshir al-Kitāb,” in ‘Abd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī, Asrār al-Balāgha, ed. Muḥammad Rashīd Riḍā (Cairo: Maṭba‘a-t- al-Taraqqī, 1903), ‫ز‬. See also Khalafallāh, al-Fann al-Qaṣaṣī fī al-Qur’ān al-Karīm, 23. 28 Riḍā, “Muqaddima-t- Nāshir al-Kitāb,” ‫ـه‬ . 29 Khalafallāh, al-Fann al-Qaṣaṣī fī al-Qur’ān al-Karīm, 220–21. 30 Ibid., 28, 199. 31 Ibid., 169. 32 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 158.

Chapter 4 1 Amīn al-Khūlī, Manāhij Tajdīd fī al-Naḥw wa al-Balāgha wa al-Tafsīr wa al-Adab, 114. 2 ‘Abduh, Tafsīr al-Manār, vol. 1 (Cairo: Dār al-Manār, 1954), 399. 3 Amīn al-Khūlī, Manāhij Tajdīd fī al-Naḥw wa al-Balāgha wa al-Tafsīr wa al-Adab, 229. 4 Ibid., 304. 5 Bint al-Shāṭi’, al-Tafsīr al-Bayānī li-al-Qur’ān al-Karīm, vol. 1 (Cairo: Dār al-Ma‘ārif, 1966), 11. 6 Bint al-Shāṭi’, al-Tafsīr al-Bayānī li-al-Qur’ān al-Karīm, 18.

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7 Ibid., 19. 8 Ibid., 20. 9 Ibid., 24. 10 Ibid., 25. 11 Ibid., 26. 12 Ibid., 26. 13 See http://al-hakawati.net/arabic/Civilizations/diwanindex4a36.pdf, p.7. 14 Shukrī ‘Ayyād, Al-Ahrām (June 22, 1966). 15 Ibid. 16 Bint al-Shāṭi’ addresses the question of rhetoric more squarely, perhaps in a belated response to ‘Ayyād’s critique, in the following study which she dedicates to the rhetorical magnificence of the Qur’ān. See Bint al-Shāṭi’, al-I‘jāz al-Bayānī li-al-Qur’ān wa masā’il Ibn al-Azraq (Rhetorical Inimitability of the Qur’ān and the Issues of Ibn al-Azraq) (Cairo: Dār al-Ma‘ārif, 1971), 11, 12, 18, 39, 46, 54–55. 17 See, for instance, Q 3:138, 16:89, 55:4, and 75:19. 18 ‘Ayyād, Al-Ahrām (June 22, 1966). 19 For more on the mysterious majesty of Qur’ānic eloquence, the history of the doctrine of inimitability, and an overview of the i‘jāz theories, see Issa J. Boullata, “I‘jaaz,” The Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Mircea Eliade, vol. 7 (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 87; G. E. von Grunebaum, “I‘djāz ,” in Encyclopedia of Islam, Second Edition, ed. H.A. R. Gibb et al., vol. 3 (Leiden: Brill, 1971), 1018– 20; Abdul Aleem, “I‘jaaz zu’1-Qur’aan,” Islamic Culture, vol. 7 (1933): 74–82, 215–33; and Na‘īm al-Himṣī, “Tārīkh fikra-t- I‘jāz al-Qur’ān mundhu al-bi‘tha al-nabawiyya ḥattá al-‘aṣr al-ḥāḍir, ma‘a naqd wa ta‘līq,” Majalla-t- al-Majma‘ al-‘Ilmī al-‘Arabī, vol. 27 (1952): 240–63, 418–33, 571–86; vol. 28 (1953): 61–78, 242–56; vol. 29 (1954): 104–14, 239–51, 417–24, 573–79; vol. 30 (1955): 106–13, 299–311. See also Yusuf Rahman’s seminal study, “The Miraculous Nature of Muslim Scripture: A Study of ‘Abd al-Jabbār’s ‘I‘jāz al-Qur’ān,” Islamic Studies, vol. 35, no. 4 (Winter 1996): 409–24, and Sophia Vasalou, “The Miraculous Eloquence of the Qur’an: General Trajectories and Individual Approaches,” Journal of Qur’anic Studies, vol 4, no. 2 (2002): 23–53. 20 Bint al-Shāṭi’, al-I‘jāz al-Bayānī li-al-Qur’ān wa masā’il Ibn al-Azraq (Rhetorical Inimitability of the Qur’ān and the Issues of Ibn al-Azraq) (Cairo: Dār al-Ma‘ārif, 1971), 601. 21 Some of the verses in the Qur’ān that directly call for that challenge include the following: “Or do they say that he fabricated it [the Qur’ān], Say if so then come up with one sūra like it and summon [the help of] whomever you wish besides

136 Notes God, if you were indeed honest” (Q 10:38); “Or do they say [that] he fabricated it, Say if so then come up with ten fabricated suwar like it that are fabricated and summon whomever you wish besides God, if you were indeed honest” (Q 11:13); and, “Say if humankind and the jinn came together to bring something like this Qur’ān, they would fail to bring something like it, even if they worked in full support of each other” (Q 17:88).

Chapter 5 1 Part of this chapter was presented at Columbia University in November 2013. My sincere thanks to Muhsin al-Musawi for his kind invitation. I am also grateful to Peter Gran for his insightful suggestions, to Ferial Ghazoul for reading the first draft and offering valuable comments, and to Ebtehal Younes for our continued conversations on Abū Zayd. 2 In Arabic, fundamentalism derives from the root ’ / ṣ / l, which denotes origin or genesis. The root also connotes purity and unsullied sources, or the desire to return to such sources through emulation. But as any search for a linguistic origin is a futile pursuit of ever-fleeting and evasive signifiers, religious fundamentalism tends to jettison all that is “new” in its ardent search for origins. This religious zealotry still marks an ineluctable clash between the native and the foreign, or the sacred and the profane in the broader sense of those terms, where fundamentalists believe unequivocally that their pure and undefiled origins have been corrupted and hijacked by secular modernity and its proponents. 3 See al-‘Arabiyyah: Rawāfid “Naṣr Ḥāmid Abū Zayd wa Aḥmad ‘Alī”: www. youtube.com/watch?v=vN7T2_QNsr0. 4 Amal Dunqul, al-A‘māl al-Shi‘riyya al-Kāmila (Cairo: Maktaba-t- Madbūlī, 1987), 270–71. 5 Ḥisba is a legal claim that holds Muslims accountable for their actions in public. The term derives from the edict “al-amr bi-al-ma‘rūf wa al-nahy ‘an al-munkar” (the promotion of good and the prevention of evil). In Muslim communities, ḥisba is regarded as a religious obligation for affirmative action against matters perceived to be in flagrant violation of the principles and commandments of Islamic faith. 6 See Jābir ‘Usfūr, “Hawāmish li-l-Kitāba: Miḥna-t- Naṣr Hāmid Abū Zayd bi-Dalālātihā (Margins for Writing: The Crisis of Nasr Hamid Abū Zayd and its Significations),” Al-Ḥayā, July 14, 2010.

Notes

137

7 For more on Abū Zayd’s case, its documents, and legal proceedings in connection with the constitution and Islamic law, see George N. Sfier, “Basic Freedoms in a Fractured Legal Culture: Egypt and the Case of Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd,” Middle Eastern Journal, vol. 52, no. 3 (1998): 402–14. 8 Saba Mahmood, “Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire: The Politics of Islamic Reformation,” Public Culture, vol. 18 (2006): 337. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid., 339. 12 Ibid., 340–41. 13 Ibid., 339. 14 For a contextual explication of Abū Zayd’s thesis in Naqd al-Khiṭāb al-Dīnī (Critique of Religious Discourse), see Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab, Contemporary Arab Thought: Cultural Critique in Comparative Perspective (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 183–94. See also Navid Kermani, “From Revelation to Interpretation: Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd and the Literary Study of the Qur’ān,” in Modern Muslim Intellectuals and the Qur’ān, ed., Suha Taji Farouki (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 169–92. 15 Mahmood, “Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire,” 340–41. 16 See Abū Zayd’s Chapter Two: “al-Turāth bayn al-Ta’wīl wa al-Talwīn: Qirā’a fī Mashru‘ al-Yasār” (Tradition between Interpretation and Extrapolation: Reading the Leftist Project), in Naqd al-Khiṭāb al-Dīnī (Critique of Religious Discourse), 2nd edn. (Cairo: Ṣīnā‘ li-al-Nashr, 1994), 137–85. 17 Mahmood, “Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire,” 337, n. 34. 18 Charles Hirschkind, “Heresy or Hermeneutics: The Case of Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd,” Stanford Humanities Review, vol. 5 (1996): 37. 19 Ibid., 35. See also Mahmood, “Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire,” 337. 20 Macbeth (Act V, Scene II: 20–22). 21 Stathis Gourgouris, “Antisecularist Failures: A Counterresponse to Saba Mahmood,” Public Culture, vol. 20 (2008): 454. 22 Mahmood, “Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire,” 340. A good example is Abū Zayd’s deconstruction of Hanafi’s reformist project of the Islamic Left in the second chapter of the former’s Critique. In this lengthy chapter, Abū Zayd criticizes Hanafi’s adoption of “epistemological neutrality” and “scientific objectivity” in reevaluating Islamic tradition and points to a deeply troubled process of de-historicization and a lack of context in the former’s work. Abū Zayd even dismisses Hanafi’s project as an unsubstantiated “colorful” reimagining of

138 Notes Islamic past in order to appeal to the Ash‘arite sensibilities of a predominantly Sunni contemporary Egypt. It is simply imprecise to argue that Hanafi makes “a similar argument” to Abū Zayd about the Qur’ān and Islamic tradition, as Mahmood claims (Ibid., 337–38). 23 Aamir R. Mufti, “Why I am not a Postsecularist,” Boundary 2, vol. 40 (2013): 3. 24 Jābir ‘Usfūr, Ḍidd al-Ta‘aṣṣub (Beirut: al-Markaz al-Thaqāfī al-‘Arabī, 2001), 35. ‘Usfūr’s reference here is to the 1993 legal claim against Abū Zayd at Giza’s First Instance Court, Personal Matters, Case #11. 25 Mohammad Salama and Rachel Friedman, “Locating the Secular in Sayyid Qutb,” 104–31. The onslaught of Western secularism on political and personal affairs in British-occupied Egypt has led many Islamists, notably Sayyid Qutb of the Muslim Brotherhood, to wage a pseudo-intellectual war in the name of Islam against the notion of the secular. 26 Eric S. Waterhouse, “Secularism,” in Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1954), 348. 27 Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991), 124. 28 As soon as he took office, Morsi began to Islamicize his presidential cabinet as a clever move—though one that worked eventually to his peril—to preempt any action to depose him. Seen within the context of the Egyptian political system, the Egyptian Army’s recent contravention of democracy and constitutionality and Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s rise to power may indeed appear to some to be the only hope for saving democracy from falling into a hopeless precipice of theocracy. Indeed, there is no democracy in theocracy, and Morsi’s failure to respond to the pulse of the Egyptian street—that is, his exclusive partisanship—has ended the legacy of the Muslim Brotherhood and condemned them to a vicious yet familiar underground. But even though Morsi, during his short and unfinished term, did Egypt the worst service by continuing to solidify his Islamist base more strongly and seeking to transform the country into an obedient and compliant Islamist theocracy, I am nevertheless led to ask: Is a military coup or so-called “assisted removal” of a democratically elected president indeed the correct response? Should Morsi have been impeached through legal channels? While the popular upheaval of June 30, 2013, al-Sisi’s subsequent overthrow and imprisonment of Morsi, and most recently (the court’s?) sentencing him to death have indeed crippled the Muslim Brotherhood’s authority in future affairs for generations to come, history teaches us that military intervention is just another variation on the theme of despotic fundamentalism as well as an unfortunate testimony of Egypt’s failure to sustain the core principles of its hard-fought revolution.

Notes

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29 On August 3, 2014, Egypt’s Public Censorship Council banned yet another book by Abū Zayd, Madkhal ilá al-Simūtīqā (An Introduction to Semiotics), http:// albedaiah.com/node/58625. 30 ‘Usfūr, “Hawāmish li-al-Kitāba.” 31 See Shawqī Ḍayf, al-‘Asr al-Jāhilī (Literature of Pre-Islamic Era) (Cairo: Dār al-Ma‘ārif, 1960); Al-‘Aṣr al-‘Abbāsī al-Awwal (Literature of the First Abbasid Era) (Cairo: Dar al-Ma‘ārif, 1966); ‘Aṣr al-‘Abbāsī al-Thānī (Literature of the Second Abbasid Era), 2nd edn. (Cairo: Dar al-Ma‘ārif, 1975); and ‘Aṣr al-Duwal wa al-Imārāt, al-Jazīra al-‘Arabiyya (Literature of Era of Countries and Emirates, The Arab Peninsula), 5th edn. (Cairo: Dar al-Ma‘ārif, 1995). 32 Kilian Bälz, “Submitting Faith to Judicial Scrutiny through the Family Trial: The Abū Zayd Case,” Die Welt des Islam, vol. 37 (1997): 135–55. 33 Naṣr Abū Zayd and Esther R. Nelson, Voice of an Exile: Reflections on Islam (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2004), 54–55. 34 While Ṭāhā Ḥusayn was not indicted because there was no conclusive evidence of criminal (i.e., sacrilegious) intent, he was persecuted and lost his post. Al-Khūlī was also fired from his position, and Khalafallāh was expelled from the university and prohibited from completing his dissertation on al-Fann al-Qaṣaṣī fī al-Qur’ān al-Karīm (Narrative Art in the Qur’ān). 35 That is, my claim is not to reinscribe external or internal boundaries vis-à-vis tradition(s), instead suggesting some kind of pseudo-position that does not already begin from tradition(s). From my claim, it follows that, for example, Abū Zayd cannot be simply considered “outside of ” an Arabic or Islamicate tradition of criticism; it also follows that my critique itself is immanent. 36 See Ṭāhā Ḥusayn, Fī al-Shi‘r al-Jāhilī (Cairo: Dār al-Madà li-al-Thaqāfa wa al-Nashr, 2001 [1926]), 47 and Fī al-Adab al-Jāhilī, 68. 37 Abū Zayd and Nelson, Voice of an Exile, 57. 38 Naṣr Abū Zayd, Mafhūm al-Naṣṣ: Dirāsa fī ‘Ulūm al-Qur’ān (Cairo: al-Hay’a al-Miṣriyya al-‘Āmma li-l-Kitāb, 1990), 219–37. 39 Ibid., 141–239. 40 The influence of Amīn al-Khūlī on Abū Zayd is evident here. Referring to Q 18: 109, al-Khūlī argues, probably with a hint from al-Ghazālī’s Jawāhir al-Qur’ān (Gems of the Qur’ān), that the Qur’ān makes it abundantly clear that the volume and magnitude of God’s words are limitless, unthinkable, and uncontainable: “Say: If the sea were to become a supply [writing ink] for the words of my Lord, that sea would run dry before the words of my Lord were finished, even if We were to bring another [sea] to supplement it.” See Amīn al-Khūlī, Manāhij al-Tajdīd fī al-Naḥw wa al-Balāgha wa al-Tafsīr wa al-Adab, 287–88. For more on

140 Notes the mystical hermeneutics of al-Ghazālī’s interpretation of the Qur’ān, see Abū Zayd’s last chapter in Mafhūm al-Naṣṣ, 243–97. 41 Despite different scholastic affiliations, major authors such as the poet and philologist al-Khaṭṭābī (A.H. 319–388/A.D. 931–998), the Mu‘tazilite al-Rummānī (A.H. 296–386/A.D. 908–996), and the Sunni jurist al-Bāqillānī (d. A.H. 403/A.D. 1012) would use similar characteristics in their arguments for Qur’ānic inimitability. These characteristics include the hitherto unsatisfied Qur’ānic challenge to produce something like itself as well as the notion of al-Ṣarfa, namely, the belief that God prevented the Arabs from being able to meet the Qur’ān’s challenge by imitating it. See Q 2:23–24; Q 10:38; Q 11:13; Q 17:88; and Q 52:33–34. The matter of al-Ṣarfa is discussed at length in both al-Khaṭtābī’s Bayān I‘jāz al-Qur’ān and al-Rummānī’s al-Nukat fī I‘jāz al-Qur’ān. For secondary sources in Arabic, see ‘Abd al-Karīm al-Khaṭīb, I‘jāz al-Qur’ān fī Dirāsa Kāshifa li-Khaṣā’iṣ al-Balāgha al-‘arabiyya wa ma‘āyīrihā (2 vols. Cairo: Dār al-Fikr al-‘Arabī, 1964). For an in-depth study of al-Ṣarfa in English, see Sophia Vasalou’s insightful essay “The Miraculous Eloquence of the Qur’ān: General Trajectories and Individual Approaches,” Journal of Qur’ānic Studies, vol. 4, no. 2 (2002): 23–53. See also Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought, 151–58. 42 Abū Zayd, “Markaba-t- al-Majāz, man Yaqūduhā wa ilà Ayn? (The Vehicle of Metaphor, Who is Driving it, and Where to?),” ALIF: Journal of Contemporary Poetics, vol. 12 (1992): 50–74; Mafhūm al-Naṣṣ, 137–57. 43 Abu al-Ḥasan ‘Alī (b. ‘Ῑsā) al-Rummānī, Thalāth Rasā’il fī I‘jāz al-Qur’ān li-al-Rummānī wa al-Khaṭṭābī wa ‘Abd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī, eds. Muḥammad Khalafallāh and Muḥammad Zaghlūl Sallām (Cairo: Dār al-Ma‘ārif, 1976), 80–94. For example, though there was a degree of diversity within representatives of each school, the Basran Mu‘tazilites, interested in preserving the rationality of the prophetic miracle, argued against the popular belief that contemporary figures could perform real miracles like iʿjāz al-Qur’ān. Further, as al-Rummānī’s al-Nukat fī iʿjāz al-Qur’ān demonstrates, the Mu‘tazilites emphasize metaphorical readings of the Qur’ān. 44 For more on the topic of the i‘jāz and kalām, see the following: Kamal Abu Deeb, Al-Jurjani’s Theory of Poetic Imagery (Oxford: Aris & Phillips Ltd., 1979); George Hourani, Islamic Rationalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971); Wilferd Madelung, “The Origins of the Controversy Concerning the Creation of the Koran,” Orientalia Hispanica, vol. I (1974): 504–25; G. E. von Grunebaum, “I‘djaz,” Encyclopaedia of Islam, new edn., vol. III (1979), 1018–20; and Montgomery Watt, “Early Discussions about the Qur’ān,” Muslim World, vol. 40 (1950): 27–40.

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45 Al-Jāḥiẓ, “Hujaj al-nubuwwa,” in Rasā’il al-Jāḥiẓ 3, ed. ‘Abd al-Salām Muḥammad Hārūn (Cairo: Maktaba-t- al-Khānjī, 1979), 221–81. This belief is alluded to in al-Jāḥiẓ’s writing, echoing the popular belief that while magic was Moses’s miracle and healing was Jesus’s, the Qur’ān itself was Muḥammad’s miracle. 46 Abū Zayd, Mafhūm al-Naṣṣ, 152. 47 Abū Zayd, Dawā’ir al-Khawf, 6. 48 Ibid., 5. 49 Abū Zayd, al-Ittijāh al-‘Aqlī fī al-Tafsīr, 11–42, 190–239. 50 Ibid., 241. 51 Ibid., 223. 52 Abū Zayd, “Markaba-t- al-Majāz,” 71–72. 53 Ferial Ghazoul, “Nasr: A Key to the World,” Akhbār al-Adab, July 8, 2011.

Chapter 6 1 I. A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939), 92. 2 Kristine Brooke-Rose, The Grammar of Metaphor (London: Secker and Warburg, 1958). 3 Winifred Nowottny, The Language Poets Use (London, 1965), 59. 4 Aristotle, Poetics, 1457b. 5 Imru’ al-Qays, “Mu’allaqa,” in Dīwān Imru’ al-Qays (The Collected Poems of Imru’ al-Qays), ed. Aḥmad Ṣaqr (Cairo: Dār al-Ma‘ātif, 1961), 18. 6 Muhsin Jassim al-Musawi, The Postcolonial Arabic Novel: Debating Ambivalence (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 388. These linguistic reflections eventually gave rise to post-structuralist and deconstructive theories that not only position metaphor in the center of all figuration, but also tie it essentially to an ontological postHeideggerian philosophy of language. Such works include Jacques Derrida’s essay “La mythologie blanche,” Poetique, vol. 5 (1971): 1–51; Paul Ricœur’s The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello, S. J. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978); Paul de Man’s Aesthetic Ideology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008 [1996]); as well as works of cognitivists such as George Lakoff, whose collaborative work on conceptual metaphor with Mark Johnson and Mark Turner, respectively, includes Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1980) and More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). See also Max

142 Notes Black, Models and Metaphors: Studies in Language and Philosophy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962); Max Black, “Metaphor,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series, vol. 55 (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1954–55): 273–94; and Donald Davidson, “What Metaphors Mean,” in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984). 7 Saadi A. Simawe, “Modernism and Metaphor in Contemporary Arabic Poetry,” World Literature Today, vol. 75, no. 2 (2001): 277. This argument has been emphasized by many modern Arabic critics. See, for instance, Muḥammad ‘Azzām, Muṣṭalaḥāt Naqdiyya min al-Turāth al-‘Arabī (Damascus: Manshūrāt Wizāra-t- al-Thaqāfa, 1995), 67–78. 8 Adūnīs, Al-Naṣṣ al-Qur’ānī wa Āfāq al-Kitāba (The Qur’ānic Text and the Horizons of Writing), (Beirut: Dār al-Ādāb, 1993), 22. 9 See Kate Zebiri, “Towards a Rhetorical Criticism of the Qur’an,” Journal of Qur’anic Studies, vol. 5, no. 2 (2003). 10 Zebiri, “Towards a Rhetorical Criticism of the Qur’an,” 95. 11 Ibid. 12 Wolfhart Heinrichs, “Metaphor,” in Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature, ed. Julie Scott Meisami and Paul Starkey (London: Routledge, 1998). For more on Wolfhart Heinrichs’s work on classical Arabic metaphor, see The Hand of the Northwind: Opinions on Metaphor and the Early Meaning of Isti‘āra in Arabic Poetics (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1977). 13 Jābir ‘Uṣfūr, al-Ṣūra al-Fanniyya fī al-Turāth al-Naqdī wa al-Balāghī ‘inda al-‘Arab (Artistic Imagery in Arabic Critical and Rhetorical Tradition) (Beirut: al-Markaz al-Thaqāfī al-‘Arabī, 1973), 8. 14 ‘Uṣfūr, al-Ṣūra al-Fanniyya. 15 Naṣr Ḥāmid Abū Zayd, Al-Ittijāh al-‘Aqlī fī al-Tafsīr: Dirāsa fī Qaḍiyya-tal-Majāz fī al-Qur’ān ‘ind al-Mu‘tazila (Beirut: Dār al-Tanwīr, 1982). 16 Naṣr Ḥāmid Abū Zayd, “Markaba-t- al-Majāz: Mān Yaqūduhā wa-ilá Ayn?” (The Vehicle of Metaphor: Who is Steering it and to What Destination?) ALIF: Journal of Comparative Poetics, vol. 12 (1992). 17 Quoted in Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī, al-Itqān fī ‘Ulūm al-Qur’ān (Mastery in/of Qur’ānic Sciences), ed. Muṣṭafá al-Qaṣṣāṣ, vol. 2 (Beirut: Dār Iḥyā’ al-‘Ulūm, 1987), vol. 1, p. 142. In Abū Zayd, Al-Ittijāh al-‘Aqlī fī al-Tafsīr: Dirāsa fī Qaḍiyya-t- al-Majāz fī al-Qur’ān ‘ind al-Mu‘tazila, 96. 18 Muḥyī al-Dīn ibn ‘Arabī, al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya (The Meccan Openings/ Revelations), vol. 3 (Beirut: Dār Ṣādir, n.d.), 147. 19 Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī, al-Itqān fī ‘Ulūm al- Qur’ān, 489.

Notes

143

20 Ibn Manẓūr, Lisān al-‘Arab (The Tongue/Language of the Arabs), vol. 5 (Beirut: Dār Ṣādir, 1883), 327. 21 Paul Ricoeur, La métaphore vive (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1975), 209. Ricoeur defines this triple status of metaphor as a relationship of partiality, in absentia and in praesentia. The English translation goes as follows: “the two terms are present together, as well as the mark of their partial identity. So to discuss metaphor properly speaking is to consider (1) suppression-addition; (2) parital; and (3) in absentia.” Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello, S. J. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), 164. 22 Abū Ja‘far Muḥammad Ibn Jarīr al-Ṭabarī, Jāmi’ al-Bayān fī Ta’wīl Āy al-Qur’ān (Tafsīr al-Ṭabarī), ed. Mahmūd Muḥammad Shākir, vol. 5 (Cairo: Dār al-Ma‘ārif, 1954), 544–45. 23 Abū al-Fath ‘Uthmān ibn Jinnī, al-Khaṣā’iṣ (The Characteristics), vol. 2, ed. Muḥammad ‘Alī al-Najjār (Beirut: Dār al-Hudá li-l-Ṭibā‘a wa al-Nashr, 1958), 442. 24 Abū Muḥammad ‘Abd Allāh ibn Muslim ibn Qutayba, Ta’wīl Mushkīl al-Qur’ān (Interpreting the Intricacies of the Qur’ān), ed. Al-Sayyid Aḥmad Ṣaqr (Cairo: Dār al-Turāth, 1973), 20–21. 25 Abū Zayd, Al-Ittijāh al-‘Aqlī fī al-Tafsīr: Dirāsa fī Qaḍiyya-t- al-Majāz fī al-Qur’ān ‘ind al-Mu‘tazila, 93. 26 Muqātil ibn Sulaymān, Al-Ashbāh wa al-Naẓā’ir fī al-Qur’ān al-Karīm (Similitudes and Correlatives in the Noble Qur’ān), ed. ‘Abd Allāh Maḥmūd Shiḥāta (Cairo: al-Hay’a al-Miṣriyya al-‘Āmma li-l-Kitāb, 1975). 27 Mu‘ammar ibn al-Muthanná Abū ‘Ubayda, Majāz al-Qur’ān (Metaphor of/in the Qurān), ed. Muḥammad Fu’ād Sarkīn (Cairo: Maktaba-t- al-Khanjī, 1970); Yaḥyá b. Ziyād al-Farrā’, Ma‘ānī al-Qur’ān (Beirut: ‘Ālam al-Kutub, 1983). 28 Abū ‘Ubayda, Majāz al-Qur’ān, 12. See also Yāqūt ibn ‘Abd Allāh al-Ḥamawī, Mu‘jam al-Buldān (A Lexicography of Counties), vol. 19 (Beirut: Dār al-Fikr al-‘Arabī, n.d.), 158–59. 29 ‘Abd Allāh ibn Qutayba, Ta’wīl Mushkil al-Qur’ān, 132. 30 Ibid., 133. 31 Ibid., 133. See also Abū Zayd, Al-Ittijāh al-‘Aqlī fī al-Tafsīr, 171. 32 The term ghūl appears in the plural form ghīlān in other classical Arabic poems, including the poetry of ‘Ubayd ibn Ayūb al-‘Anbarī, Ta’abbaṭa Sharran, and al-Shanfará.

144 Notes 33 Ibn Manẓūr, Lisān al-‘Arab, vol. 11, 508. Ibn Manẓur does not miss referring to the pre-Islamic and early Islamic conception that devils and demons were perceived to embody large snakes (Ibid., 507–08). 34 Muhammad Asad, The Message of the Qur’an: Translated and Explained by Muhammad Asad, Appendix 1 (London: The Book Foundation, 2003), 980, http://docslide.us/documents/message-of-Qur’ān-muhammad-asad-islamtranslation.html. 35 ‘Abd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī, Dalā’il al-I’jāz, 227–28. See also al-Jurjānī, Asrār al-Balāgha, 346–47. 36 Aristotle, Poetics, 1457b, 6–9. 37 Andrew Rippin, “God,” in The Blackwell Companion to the Qur’an, ed. Andrew Rippin (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 224, http://sufibooks.info/Islam/ Blackwell_Companion-to-the-Qur’ān_Andrew-Rippin.pdf. 38 Rippin, “God.” 39 Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 273. 40 Abū Zayd, “Markaba-t- al-Majāz,” 68–72. 41 Ibid., 65.

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Index ‘Abbās, Ibn  48, 102, 104, 105, 128 ‘Abd al-Rāziq, ‘Alī 18 al-Islām wa Uṣūl al-Hụkm 18 ‘Abd al-Ṣabūr Shāhīn  79–80, 86, 94 ‘Abduh, Muḥammad  2, 4, 9, 10, 12, 13, 54, 56, 59, 60, 63, 64, 67, 119 n.2, 120 n.7, 132 n.4 Tafsīr al-Manār  4, 122 n.22, 128 n.3 Abraham  26, 27, 28–31 Abu-Deeb, Kamal  101 Abū ‘Ubayda  48 Majāz al-Qur’ān  105, 106 Abū Zayd, Naṣr Ḥāmid (1943–2010)  1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, 9, 15, 16, 18, 27, 37, 51, 53, 62, 77–95, 97–114, 117, 137 n.22 academic life  79 al-‘Arabiyya: Rawāfid  136 n.3 Al-Ittijāh al-‘Aqlī fī al-Tafsīr: Dirāsa fī Qaḍiyya-t- al-Majāz fī al-Qur’ān ‘ind al-Mu‘tazila  97, 102 Al-Tajdīd wa al-Taḥrīm wa al-Ta’wīl  121 n.14 approach to Qur’ānic metaphor  97, 102, 105, 114 Arabic criticism  92, 94 Falsafa-t- al-Ta’wīl: Dirāsa fī Ta’wīl al-Qur’ān ‘ind Ibn ‘Arabī  121 n.13 in Holland  79 Mafhūm al-Naṣṣ: Dirāsa fī ‘Ulūm al-Qur’ān 15 “Markaba-t- al-Majāz, Man Yaqūduhā wa ilà Ayn?”  140 n.42 “Ma’zaq al-Muqāraba al-Adabiyya li-lQur’ān”  132 n.5 between traditionalism and postsecularism 77–95 Voice of an Exile: Reflections on Islam  139 n.33 adab (literature)  65, 73, 74 aesthetics of  14

Adams, Charles C.  12 Adorno, Theodor  17, 120 n.4 Adūnīs 100 aghwāl  108 agoreuein (to speak in assembly)  99 ‘Ᾱ’isha ‘Abd al-Raḥmān (al-Shāṭi’, Bint)  1, 2 alà qadr kalāmihim 109 ‘Ᾱlamaniyya 84 al-‘aql al-manfī (exiled reason)  87 al-‘Aqqād, ‘Abbās Maḥmud  132 n.4 al-Ash‘arī, Abū al-Haṣan 53 Al-Ashbāh wa al-Naẓā’ir fī al-Qur’ān al-Karīm 105 al-Azhar  6, 18, 38, 63, 83 Al-Azmeh, Aziz  47 al-Bannā, Ḥasan 84–5 al-Bāqillānī  24, 34, 53, 91, 92, 140 n.41 I‘jāz al-Qur’ān  14, 25, 91 al-Baṣrī, al-Ḥasan 93 Al-Ibāna ‘an Uṣūl al-Diyāna 146 al-bayānī 75 al-da‘wa ilá Allāh (the call to God)  60 al-Dīn, Muḥammad ‘Alam  132 n.4 al-Fann al-Qaṣaṣī fī al-Qur’ān al-Karīm (1947/8) 51 al-Farrā’  105, 106, 109 alfāẓ [utterances]  62 al-Ghazālī, Abū Ḥāmid 108 al-Ḥamawī, Muḥibb al-Dīn (Yāqūt) Mu‘jam al-Buldān  143 n.28 Tanzīl al-Āyāt ‘alà al-Shawāhid ‘an al-Abyāt  131 n.28 al-Ḥudaybiya event  8 ‘Alī, Aḥmad 78 ‘Alī ‘Abd al-Rāziq 18 al-I‘jāz al-Bayānī li-al-Qur’ān wa masā’il Ibn al-Azraq 75 al-Ikhwān (the Brothers)  84 al-Islām wa Uṣūl al-Ḥukm (Islam and the Principles of Governance)  18

156 Index Al-Ittijāh al-‘Aqlī fī al-Tafsīr: Dirāsa fī Qaḍiyya-t- al-Majāz fī al-Qur’ān ‘ind al-Mu‘tazila  93, 97, 102 al-ittijāh al-‘aqlī wa al-ittijāh al-naqlī (rationalist versus revelationist approaches) 10 al-Jabbār, al-Qāḍī ‘Abd  106 al-Jāḥiẓ  53, 106 Al-Bayān wa al-Tabyīn  132 n.7 “Ḥujaj al-Nubuwwa”  141 n.45 al-Jubbā’ī, Abū Hāshim 53 al-Jurjānī, ‘Abd al-Qāhir (1010–79 or 1082)  16, 24, 53, 63, 91, 97, 112 Asrār al-Balāgha  132 n.8, 134 n.27 Dalā’il al-I‘jaz  123 n.34, 124 n.14, 130 n.15 al-kahf wa al-raqīm 58 al-Kātib, Ibn Ismā‘īl ibn Dāwūd 108 al-Khaṭṭābī 24 al-Khawārij 101 al-Khūlī, Amīn (1895–1966)  1, 2, 4, 6, 9, 18, 27, 37–49, 51–2, 54–5, 61, 63, 66, 71, 73, 117, 123 n.31, 128 n.3, 129 n.6, 130 n.16, 139 n.40, 131 n.3 Manāhij Tajdīd (Methods of Renovation) 6 philological rationalism  6, 38 al-lafẓ wa al-ma‘ná 53 allegory  56, 99, 104, 110 allos (other)  99 al-Ma‘arrī’  21, 22 al-mablagh 109 al-majāz 103 al-manhaj al-Jamālī  122 n.18 al-mansūkh (the abrogated verses)  128 n.3 al-Marṣafī, Ḥusayn 19 Al-Masā’il wa al-Ajwiba  128 n.3 al-mujmal (the ambivalent)  128 n.3 al-mutashābih (the intricate)  128 n.3 al-Mu‘tazilūn al-Judud (Neo-Mu‘tazilites), 5 al-Mu‘tazz, Ibn  99 al-Mutanabbī 22 al-Muthanná, Abū ‘Ubayda ibn  8 al-muttaqūn (the righteous/ pious people of God)  47 al-naqd al-adabī (literary criticism)  14, 65 al-naql wa al-isnād 52 al-nāsikh (the abrogating verses)  128 n.3

Al-Naṣṣ al-Qur’ānī wa Āfāq al-Kitāba 100 al-Naẓẓam, Abū Isḥāq Ibrāhīm Ibn Sayyār Ibn Hāni‘ (c. 775–c. 845)  53 al-Nuzūl, Asbāb 58 al-Qāḍī Abu al-Ḥasan ‘Abd al-Jabbār (d. 415 A.H/1024 A.D.)  91 al-qadr 109 al-Qays, Imru’  92, 99, 106, 108 Al-qiṣṣa al-usṭūrriyya 58 al-Raḥmān, ‘Ᾱ’isha ‘Abd (al-Shāṭi’, Bint) (1913–98)  1, 65 al-Rāzī, Abū Bakr  132 n.4 al-Rāziq, ‘Alī ‘Abd  60, 63 al-Rummānī  24, 106 Al-Nukat fī I‘jāz al-Qur’ān  124 n.14, 140 n.41 al-sābiqīn 58 al-Sakkākī, al-Imam  42 al-Salām, al-‘Izz ibn ‘Abd  109 al-ṣarfa 53 al-Sayyid, Aḥmad Luṭfī 19 al-Shāfi‘ī, al-Imām 108 al-Shahrastānī  132 n.6 Al-Milal wa al-Niḥal  132 n.6 al-Sisi, Abdel Fattah  138 n.28 al-Ṣūra al-Fanniyya fī al-Turāth al-Naqdī wa al-Balāghī ‘ind al-‘Arab 101 suṭūr 59 al-Suyūtī  24, 103 Al-Itqān fī ‘Ulūm al-Qur’ān  142 n.17, 142 n.19 Ṭabaqāt al-Mufassirīn  131 n.29 al-Ṭabarī 109 Jāmi’ al-Bayān fī Ta’wīl Āy al-Qur’ān  143 n.22 al-Tafsīr al-Bayānī li-al-Qur’ān al-Karīm  15, 65, 66, 68, 114 al-ṭāqa 109 Al-Taṣwīr al-Fannī fī al-Qur’ān al-Karīm  119 n.4 al-Tha‘ālibī  121 n.12 Fiqh al-Lugha wa Asrār al-‘Arabiyya  121 n.12 al-Zamakhsharī  24, 41, 45, 48 Al-Kashshāf ‘an Ḥaqā’iq Ghawāmiḍ al-Tanzīl  124 n.14 Am lam yunabb’ bimā fī ṣuḥifi Mūsà. Wa Ibrāhīm al-ladhī waffà 60

Index anti-essentialist Egyptian reformists  3 anti-rationalism 32 apostasy/apostate  3, 6, 77, 78, 79, 80, 8, 116, 117, 121 n.9 ‘Arab Musta‘riba 27 Arabic criticism  2, 4, 12, 15, 16, 21, 24, 25, 33, 80, 92, 94, 102, 105 Arab intellectual of the break see Ḥusayn, Ṭāhā Aristotle The Poetics 101 theory of poetry  57 Arkoun, Mohammed (1928–2010)  117 ‘aṣabiyya (blood solidarity)  6, 115 asālīb balāghiyya (rhetorical tropes)  64 asāṭīr  57, 59 asāṭīru al-awwalīna 59 asbāb al-nuzūl  38, 39, 44, 69, 89 Ash‘arites 53 aṣḥāb al-kahf (the People of the Cave)  57, 63 asṭār 59 asṭur 59 ‘Aṭā’, Wāṣil ibn (700–748)  117 aw ka-alladhī marra ‘alá qaryatin wa hiya khāwiyatun ‘alá ‘urūshihā qāla anná yuḥyī hādhihi allāhu ba‘da mawtihā 56 Ayoub, Mahmoud  101 ‘Ayyād, Shukrī 73–4 Badawī, ‘Abd Al-Fattāḥ  132 n.4 balāgha (rhetoric)  42, 46, 56 bankruptcy of eschatological narratives 26 bayān 74 bayānī (rhetorical)  73 bayāniyyūn (Rhetoricians), 2, 5 belles lettres  14, 65 Benjamin, Walter  120 n.4 bid‘a (innovation)  121 n.9 Bint al-Shāṭi’  1, 2, 14, 15, 18, 39,40, 48, 65–76, 117, 135 n.16 al-I‘jāz al-Bayānī li-al-Qur’ān wa masā’il Ibn al-Azraq 75 and al-Khūlī’s dual approach  66 al-Tafsīr al-Bayānī 68 al-Tafsīr al-Bayānī li-al-Qur’ān al-Karīm 65

157

education 66 five-part method of tafsīr bayānīi 69 language-based approach  66 on the wa  71, 72 Book of Genesis  78 Boullata, Issa  101 Butler, Judith  130 n.19 Cachia, Pierre  119 n.1 Cantwell Smith, Wilfred  84, 138 n.27 “Cartesian” investigation of classical Arabic literature  26 Cartesianism  9, 13, 27, 31 Charybdis 81 classical Arabic literature, Cartesian investigation of  26 classical poetry  22 colonial orientalism  81 Cook, Michael  30, 47, 122 n.19 coupures éspistémologiques 98 Crone, Patricia  30 ḍaraba Allāhu mathalan 110 ḍarūra 106 Darwish, Mahmoud  40 Dawā’ir al-Khawf (Circles of Fear) 92 Dawā’ir al-Khawf: Qirā’a fī Khiṭāb al-Mar’a (Circles of Fear: Reading the Discourse on Women, 1999)  79 de Boland, Louis  33 Deleuze, Gilles  125 n.23 de Man, Paul  35, 46 Derrida, Jacques  47, 64 Descartes, René  25, 29, 31–2 dhū wujūh  114, 116 disinterestedness  15, 65 “divine guarantee”  29 dīwān al-‘Arab (the Book of the Arabs)  91 Djaout, Tahar  86 ḍuḥá (forenoon)  68, 70 dūn waṣāṭa (sans médiation) 2 Dunqul, Amal  78 ḍuriba mathalun 110 Egypt  51, 61, 115 in 1920s  18, 19 Qur’ānic exegetes in  10 Qur’ān in twentieth-century  6 twentieth-century  10, 13, 18, 34, 77

158 Index eloquence (ḥusn al-bayān) 74 émigré  77, 79 enfant terrible, 33, 84 essentialism  7, 46, 82 essentialist  83, 88, 120 Eurocentric/Eurocentrism  3, 5, 6, 7, 10, 11, 13, 30, 38, 45, 81, 117 Europe-educated cultural critics  18 extrinsic study of the Qur’ān 39 fa-innahu dhū wujūh 105 fa-khāṣimhum wa lā tuḥājjihim bi-alQur’ān fa-innahu dhū wujūh wa lākin khāṣimhum bi-al-Sunna 101 “false attribution of poetry”  26 Fanon, Frantz  120 n.4 Farouk, King (1936–52)  85 Fī al-Adab al-Jāhilī  26 Finnegans Wake (Joyce, James)  62 First Meditation  32 Fī al-Shi‘r al-Jāhilī (Ḥusayn, Ṭāhā)  4, 9, 12, 17 Fī Sh‘ir al-Jāhilī (Ḥusayn) 14 Fī Ẓilāl al-Qur’ān (Qutb, Sayyid)  4, 45 Foda, Farag  86 Frye, Northrop  36 Fundamentalism  5, 16, 32, 38, 86, 98, 115, 117, 136 n.2, 138 n.28 gharīb (foreign)  128 n.3 ghayb (knowledge of the unknown)  57–8, 59, 112, 134 n.25 ghaybī 71 Ghazoul, Ferial  95, 136 n.1 ghīlān  108, 143 n.32 ghūl  143 n.32 Gourgouris, Stathis  82 Gran, Peter  136 n.1 “guarding texts”  2 Haddad, Yvonne Yazbeck  54 ḥadīth  30, 89, 121 n.9, 128 n.3 Ḥadīth al-Arbi‘ā’ (Wednesday Talk)  20 Hagarism  29–30, 60 ḥalāwa 62 Ḥanafī, Ḥasan  80, 81 ḥaqīqa (literal)  16, 60, 97, 104 Ḥarakat al-Taṭhīr (The Purification Movement)  9, 37 Harūn (Aaron)  56

Ḥāshiya ‘alá Sharḥ Jalāl al-Dawwānī li-l‘Aqā’id al-‘Aḍūdiyya 12 Hassān, Tammām  129 n.15 ḥayyāt 108 Heaven 57 hegemonic discourse, of Islamism  103 Heinrichs, Wolfhart  101, 102 hermeneutical inevitability  7 hidāya (guidance to the straight path) 44–5 ḥīl 28 ḥiss al-Qur’ān 74 ḥissī 71 historical criticism  31, 38 historicism 52 historiography  62, 87 Holyoake, G. J.  84 Horkheimer, Max  120 n.4 hors-texte 64 Hourani, Albert  12 hudá li-l-nās (guidance to humankind) 67 Ḥusayn, Ṭāhā (1899–1973)  1, 2, 4, 7, 12, 15, 17–36, 51, 64, 65, 66, 117, 119 n.1, 125 n.18 Alà Hāmish al-Sīra  125 n.20 Arabic criticism  25 Cartesianism 31 education in France  31 Fī al-Shi‘r al-Jāhilī 17 Ḥadīth al-Arbi‘ā’  20, 124 n.6 On Pre-Islamic Poetry 35 in Paris  34 premonition 30 Tajdīd Dhikrá Abī al-‘Alā’  21, 124 n.8 theory of critical philology  13 theory of naḥl al-shi‘r (poetic forgery) 22 ḥusn al-bayān 74 Ḥusyan, Ṭāhā  139 n.34 hypónoia 8 ibdā‘  5, 101 ibdā‘/bid‘a 5 Ibn ‘Arabī  58, 102, 114 Ibn Ḥazm  132 n.6 Al-Faṣl fī al-Milal wa al-Ahwā’ wa al-Niḥal  132 n.6 Ibn Jinnī  14, 104 al-Khaṣā’iṣ  143 n.23

Index Ibn Khaldūn  6, 7, 24, 128 n.3 Ibn Kathīr 59 Tafsīr al-Qur’ān al-‘Aẓīm  59, 133 n.20 Ibn Manẓūr 40, 59, 108, 144 n.33 Lisān al-‘Arab  40, 108, 133 n.18, 144 n.33 Ibn Qutayba  104, 105, 106, 107, 128 n.3 Ta’wīl Mushkīl al-Qur’ān  143 n.24 Ibn Sulaymān (Muqātil) 105 Al-Ashbāh wa al-Naẓā’ir fī al-Qur’ān al-Karīm  143 n.26 ‘ibra (exhortation)  63 i‘jāz (Qur’ānic apologetics)  8, 10, 11, 24, 34, 40–2, 46, 53, 75, 91 i‘jāz al-Qur’ān  14, 25, 91 “il n’y a pas de hors-texte” (there is no outside-text) 64 ilḥād (atheism)  84 ‘Ilmāniyya 84 imagery 56 inimitability  8, 24, 46, 61, 90 “inna Allāha lā yastaat an yaayaat mathalan mā ba‘ūū‘-t-an fa-mā fawqahā 104 inna ‘araḍna al-amāna-ta- ‘alá al-samāwāti wa al-arḍi wa al-jibāli, fa-abayna an yaḥmilnahā wa ashfaqna minhā wa ḥamalahā al-insānu innahu kāna ẓalūman jahūla 56 intellectual poverty  1 intellectual terrorism  81 intention (ma‘ná bayān) 75 The Interpretation of the Koran in Modern Egypt (Jansen, J. J. G.)  119 n.2 intrinsic study of the Qur’ān 39 description of tafsīr 43 emphasis on the Arabic language  46 as Imam of the Egyptian Embassy in Rome 46 knowledge of psychology  44 orientalism 47 irony of intellect  11 Ishmael  26–9, 33 Islamism  45, 61, 84, 86, 88, 93, 95, 103, 117 Islamophobia 115 isti‘āra (metaphor)  64, 99 Izutsu, Toshihiko  101

Jansen, J. J. G.  119 n.2 January Revolution of 2011  83 Jawāhir al-Qur’ān  139 n.40 jāwaza 103 jāza 103 Joyce, James (Finnegans Wake) 62

jahannam (inferno)  107 jāhilī  24

Lakoff, George  106, 141 Metaphors We Live By  141 n.6

159

Ka‘ba  27, 29 kadhiba (lie)  59 kalām  90, 107 kamā/ka-ḥāl 73 Kant, Emmanuel  134 n.26 Kathīr, Ibn  59 Kermani, Navid  101 Khalafallāh, Muḥammad Aḥmad (1916–98)  1, 2, 3, 15, 18, 39, 48, 51–64, 117, 131 n.3, 132 n.4, 133 n.22 “Ahl al-Adab li-al-Adab wa Ahl al-Dīn lil-Dīn”  133 n.22 Al-Fann al-Qaṣaṣī fī al-Qur’ān al-Karīm  123 n.32 al-Khūlī-inspired steps  55 on allegorical narrative of Qur’ān 56 on art of narrative in the Qur’ān 57, 62 on corrective explication on the Qur’ān’s narrative  60–1 dissertation of  54–5, 59 on historical narrative of Qur’ān 55–6 historicist dissertation  53 on Jewish community  57 on mythical narrative of Qur’ān 56 opposition raised in work of  53 on Qur’ān representing the People of the Cave  58 richness and value of work of  61 on thematic accumulation of stories 55 Khaldūn, Ibn  6, 7, 24, 128 n.3 khudā‘ (deception)  59 khurāfa (myth/fable)  58–9 khuza‘bala (fabrication)  59 kināyāt (metonymic acts)  63, 64 The Koran: A Very Short Introduction (Cook, Michael)  122 n.19

160 Index More than Cool Reason  141 n.6 la mission civilatrice  7, 38 The Language Poets Use (1969) (Nowottny, Winifred) 98 Lanson, Gustave  19, 25, 34 l'à-venir 62 Lisān al-Arab (The Tongue/Dictionary of the Arabs)  40, 103, 108 literary analysis  17, 20, 61, 72, 127 n.34 literary criticism, aesthetic realm of  20 literary dogmatism, Ḥusayn’s critique of 13 lugha-t- al-aḍḍād 114 luminaries  81, 117 ma‘ānī [meaning]  62 Mabrūk, Alī (1961–2016)  117 Mafhūm al-Naṣṣ (Abū Zayd, Naṣr Ḥāmid)  4, 15 Mahfouz, Naguib  86 Mahmood, Saba  80, 81, 82 Mahmoudi, Abdelrashid  119 n.1 majaddidūn (Renovators), emergence of 5 majāz (metaphor)  15, 16, 60, 97, 98, 99, 103, 104 majāza 103 Majāz al-Qur’ān  105, 106 Makkī 70 mā lā yatimm al-wājib illā bihi fa-huwa wājib 54 ma‘ná (meaning or lucidity)  74 ma‘ná bāṭin (hidden meaning)  67 Manāhij Tajdīd (Methods of Renovation)  6, 37, 43 Manẓūr, Ibn  40, 59, 108 Margoliouth, David Samuel  27, 29 Marxism of swallowing  36 Marxist theory  80 mathal (example/likeness of)  60, 104, 110 ma uqqira fī al-isti‘māl ‘alá aṣl waḍ‘ihi 104 Meccan society  28, 29, 43 Meccan sūras 10 Medinan chapters  10 metaphor  16, 62, 93, 97–114 see also majāz (metaphor) metaphysicality 47 min ṣifā-t- al-af ‘āl 107

Mir, Mustansir  101 modernism  13, 98, 100 Morsi, Mohamed  83, 85, 138 n.28 Moses  39, 56, 60 Mu‘jam Alfāẓ al-Qur’ān al-Karīm (A Dictionary of the Words of the Glorious Qur’ān) 49 Muslim Brotherhood  6, 9, 38, 45, 83, 84, 85, 86, 138 n.25, 28 Mu‘tazilism 81 Mu‘tazilite  3, 15, 53, 90, 93, 94, 97, 103 Mu‘tazilite–Ash‘arite debate on Qur’ānic interpretation 3 Mu‘tazilite school of theology  93 Mufti, Aamir R.  83 Muhammad, Prophet  30, 36, 55, 57, 61 mujaddid 5 Mujaddidūn (renovators)  5, 6, 8, 15, 65 mukhāṭba 107 murtadd (apostate)  83 Muslim Brotherhood  38, 84, 85, 86, 138 n.28 establishment of  45 sociopolitical activism of  9 mutashābih (intricate)  128 n.3 naḥw (grammar)  74 Naqd al-Khiṭāb al-Dīnī (Critique of Religious Discourse) 80 Nasser, Gamal Abdul  9, 84, 85 Nasserism 6 Nasution, Harun  12 nationalism  6, 9, 14 Naẓm al-Qur’ān 53 Neuwirth, Angelika  101 1919 Revolution  18, 19 Noah, Prophet  55 nonlinguistic “historical” approaches  11 On Pre-Islamic Poetry (Ḥusayn, Ṭāhā) 2, 4, 17, 19, 21, 24, 35, 38, 65 Orientalism/Orientalists  54, 56, 59, 60, 63, 81, 115, 116, 117 orthodox Salafism  52 Ottoman Caliphate  18 Ottoman Empire  19 Paris Peace Conference in 1921  18 People of the Cave  58, 59, 63

Index The Philosophy of Rhetoric (I. A. Richards) 98 poetic language  22, 25 positivist Eurocentrism  10 post-nationalism, emergence of  9 Pre-Islamic history  26–7 pre-Islamic Meccan society  28 pre-Islamic poetry  2, 4, 13, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23, 17, 22, 30, 33, 91 anteriority of  24–5 traditional understanding of  18 psychological emphasis, and the Qur’ān 44 “the psychology of reception”  13, 38 psychology of the Prophet  55, 68 qadīm  42–3, 49, 90 qā‘ida uṣūliyya 53 qaṣaṣ  59, 63 qaṣīda  14, 22, 65 Qur’ān, the (Q) Q 2:23–24  140 n.41 Q 2:26  104 Q 2:62  60 Q 2:127–134  28 Q 2:163  68 Q 2:249  103 Q 2:259  56, 133 n.13 Q 2:264  110 Q 2:265  104 Q 2:266  104 Q 2:3  112 Q 3:44  59 Q 4:164  107 Q 6:19  68 Q 6:25  57 Q 7:138  103 Q 7:143  114 Q 7:176  110 Q 8:31–32  57, 59 Q 10:38  136 n.21, 140 n.41 Q 10:90  103 Q 11:120  60 Q 11:13  136 n.21, 140 n.41 Q 14:36–39  28 Q 16:2  68 Q 16:24  57 Q 16:75  110 Q 16:96  68

161 Q 17:88  136 n.21, 140 n.41 Q 18:9–26  134 n.25 Q 18:22, 18:26  57 Q 18:60–82  134 n.25 Q 18:62  103 Q 20  75 Q 22:73  110 Q 25:5  59 Q 26:193–195  40 Q 28:44–46  59 Q 33:72  56 Q 37:4  68 Q 37:65  105, 110 Q 48:10  8, 121 n.12 Q 52:33–34  140 n.41 Q 53:36–37  60 Q 55:26  68 Q 93  68

Qur’ānic Arabic  11, 47, 103 Qur’ānic Chapter of the Cow (Q 2)  47 Qur’ānic exegesis  1, 10, 17, 44, 66, 68, 77–95 Qur’ānic inimitability  91 Qur’ānic lexicons  12, 39 Qutayba, Ibn  104, 105, 106, 107 Qutb, Sayyid  4, 6, 45, 85, 119–20 n.4, 122 n.18 Rahman, Fazlur  101 Rahman, Yusuf  101 raison d'être of alfāẓ 62 raqīm 58 rationalism  32, 38, 62 Reformation of Islamic Thought (2006) 79 reformism thesis  12 Rethinking the Qur’ān (2004)  79 Riḍā, Rashīd (1865–1935)  120 n.7, 122 n.22 “right thinking”  1 Rippin, Andrew  101, 113 ru’ūsu al-shayāṭīn 114 Rushdie, Salman  87 Sadat, President  86 Ṣāḥib al-Manār 56 Salafism  16, 52, 95 Salafist  53, 80

162 Index Saleh, Walid  122 n.19, 131 n.27 Satanic Verses (Rushdie, Salman)  87 Saudi Arabia  30 Schneidau, Herbert  31 Scylla 81 secularism  80, 81, 84 Sells, Michael  101 Shahid, Irfan  101 Shaykh, Azharite  18 ṣifa/na‘t (modifier)  24 “Sifr al-Takwīn” (The Book of Genesis) 78 Simawe, Saadi  100 similes  69, 104, 108, 109, 110 skepticism 31 Smith, Wilfred Cantwell  84 Soroush, Abdolkarim  80, 81, 117 Sulaymān, Muqātil ibn  105 sūra  70, 112, 122 n.19 syntactic lexicography of the Qur’ān 40 ta‘addī ‘alá al-ḥudūd  32 ta’wīl (interpretation)  7, 90, 103, 106 Ta’wīl Mushkil al-Qur’ān 106 tafsīr (Qur’ānic explication)  1, 14, 37, 39, 42, 90, 103, 59, 63, 66, 67, 70, 71, 74, 128 n.3 Tafsīr al-Manār (Abduh)  4, 122 n.22, 128 n.3 tafsīr atharī  128 n.33 tafsīr bayānīi 69 Ṭāhā (Q 20)  75 Taine, Hippolyte  25 tajdīd (renovation)  5, 61, 101 Tajdīd Dhikrá Abī al-‘Alā’ (Renewing the Memory of Abū al-‘Alā’ [al-Ma‘arrī]) 21 Tajdīd School  16 tajsīm 105 ṭal‘uhā ka-annahu ru’ūsu al-shayāṭīni 105 ṭalāwa (cadence)  62 Ṭālib, ‘Alī ibn Abī  101, 103, 105

tamthīl, wa allāhu a‘alam 56 tanzīl (Revelation)  68 ṭarīq (path)  114 tartīb al-nuzūl  52, 55 tartīb al-tilāwa 52 tashbīh  108, 110 ta’wīl (interpretation)  7, 90, 103, 106 tayyār al-tajdīd (Renovation Current)  5 temporalization 47 theory of Muhammad  48 Third Meditation  29 totalitarianism 79 trope 99 ‘Ubayda, Abū  8, 48, 49, 105–6, 108, 109 ultraconservatism 16 Umayyad  72, 93 unheimlich 11 ‘Usfūr, Jābir  84, 101–2 usṭūra  56, 58–9 usṭūrī 57 Voice of an Exile  88 von Grunebaum, G. E.  135 n.19, 140 n.44 wa  71, 72, 73 wa kallama Allāhu Mūsá taklīmaan 107 wa qālū asāṭīru al-awwalīna iktatabahā 59 wa‘d wa wa‘īd (promise of Paradise and warning of Hell)  44 Wahhabism  32, 81 Wansbrough, John  35 Watt, Montgomery  101 wāw al-ḥāl 72 wāw al-tamthīl 72 wujūh  114, 116 yajūzu 103 ẓāhir 68