Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān

Reason no longer offers the certainty it once did; only philosophers still adhere to the primacy of critical reflection in the implicitly or explicitly assumed hierarchy of approaches (l'ordre des raisons) in every cognitive construction. The social sciences continue to produce their own isolated critical approaches to knowledge, the result being a reduction of epistemological exchange and confrontation and the rise of what J. Derrida calls teletechnoscientific reason, a disjointed conglomerate that claims to be the only reliable form of thinking in current scholarly discourse. On the other hand, P. Bourdieu has recently presented a trenchant criticism of scholastic reason (in Méditations pascaliennes), which is nevertheless unlikely to elicit any fruitful response from the great figures of the scholarly world since it is the systematic spread of this very scholastic reason on which their reputation has been based and continues to depend.

Every scholar lives within the confines of a speciality which can become a private kingdom, and thus strives to establish certain aims which lack any real basis, in order to publicize assumptions of meaning (effets de sens) or representations of them. These, in turn, are presented under the guise of meaning or truth as established by a scientific method and as recognized by the community of scholars. According to J.F. Lyotard, “Scientific reason is not questioned according to the criterion of (cognitive) truth or falsehood on the message/referent axis, but according to its (pragmatical) performative abilities on the messenger/recipient axis” (L'enthousiasme, 15).

European modernity, at least since the eighteenth century, has left us with the impression that reason would finally be liberated from the constraints of dogmatism for the service of knowledge alone, once a radical separation between every church and the “neutral” state was accomplished. When this latter body is free to exercise an undisputed sovereignty, it does not, how-ever, struggle with the same determination for such a radical separation between cognitive freedom and its own aims and rationality. This is not the place to explore this subject further; it is enough to recall now that in various Islamic contexts, reason multiplies the constraints which it had itself created for the sake of its initial independence in the face of the strict control of the state, a state which unilaterally proclaims itself the exclusive administrator of orthodox religious truth (q.v.).

Such are the two contexts in which the Qurʾān has been read, consulted and interpreted for fourteen centuries on the Muslim side and for some two centuries on the side of the modern West. This introduction of a hierarchy of approaches makes the debate on orientalism irrelevant as it has hitherto been conducted, i.e. apart from any preliminary critique, apart from scholastic reason (as defined above), and apart from recognition of the fact that cognitive reason has willingly accepted this utilitarian, pragmatic, teletechnoscientific reason. One must, however, remember two troublesome issues for the Western scholar of the Qurʾān who continues to be influenced by the tools and assumptions of a positivist and philological methodology: (1) With the exception of a handful of scholars who have had no lasting influence, all qurʾānic scholars have little regard for any methodological debate and reject, if they are not actually unaware of, questions of an epistemological nature. They are only sensitive to discussing the “facts” according to the meaning and in the cognitive framework which they themselves have chosen. (2) Apart from specialists who are themselves believers and bring their Jewish or Christian theological culture to bear on the question at hand, all who declare themselves agnostic, atheist or simply secular dodge the question of meaning in religious discourse and thus refuse to enter into a discussion of the content of faith (q.v.), not as a set of life rules to be internalized by every believer, but as a psycho-linguistic, social and historical edifice. Hence the essential question about truth, for religious reason as well as that of the most critical philosphical kind, remains totally absent in the so-called scientific study of a corpus of texts of which the raison d'être — the ultimate goal to which all rhetorical and linguistic utterances bear witness — consists in providing for its immediate addressees, who have multiplied and succeeded one another throughout the centuries, the unique, absolute and intangible criterion of Truth as a True Being, a True Reality and a True Sense of Right (al-Ḥaqq). Yet surely, this Ḥaqq has from the time it was first anounced orally between 610 and 632 c.e. until today developed in a way which history and cultural sociology must be willing to investigate and explain.

This is not a question of establishing the true meaning of texts as lived by the faithful, i.e. as sacred and revealed nor is it a matter of articulating the certitudes recorded in a long process of sacralization, transcendentalization, ontologization, spiritualization, etc., and systematized in the great products of theological, philosophical, legal or historiographical thought inherited from the Middle Ages. Rather, the task of the contemporary researcher is to problematize all systems which claim to produce meaning, all the forms, still existent or not, which offer meaning and assumptions of meaning. This is an essential distinction that encompasses many problems yet to be raised or, if they have been, only poorly or without full recognition. In the study of the Qurʾān and similar corpuses in other cultures — comparison must always be utilized — the scholar approaches the activity of the human spirit that most closely expresses its own utopian vision, its hopes, both those which are unfulfilled and those which recur, its struggle to push back the limits of its servitude and to attain the full exercise of its “will to know,” combined with its critical and creative freedom. The theme in the case of the qurʾānic corpus and its vast historical development is to test the capacity of reason to decipher the mysteries which it has itself produced.

Despite this shared reference to a utopian vision, it is important not to lose sight of the fact that contemporary qurʾānic studies lag considerably behind biblical studies to which it must always be compared (see scripture and the qurʾān ). This lag could be said to reflect the different concerns that emerged in the historical development of societies in which the Qurʾān continues to play the role of ultimate and absolute reference point and in which it has never been replaced as the sole criterion for the definition and function of all true, legitimate and legal value. In the violent and passionate rejection of what political Islam calls “the West,” the stakes lie less in the seizure of an ephemeral power than in the progress of the secular model of historical production which could ultimately render the “divine” model obsolete, as it has already done in the West. This point is important for any attempt to liberate the problematic of the Qurʾān from its isolation vis-à-vis the historical perspective of modernity as well as for any effort to address the religious problem, which has been at one and the same time appropriated by and disqualified by this political concern. The context is also essential for clarifying the strategy of mediating a solution and thus guiding the pedagogy of the reflective researcher (chercheur-penseur).

During the years of struggle for political independence (1945-1970), one could have hoped that an opening toward modern historical criticism as shown in the Middle East and North Africa during the so-called Renaissance (Nahḍa, 1830-1940), would have grown to incorporate subjects as taboo as qurʾānic studies, including the sacralised areas of law appropriated by the sharīʿa and its legal statutes and rulings (see law and the qurʾān ), the corpus of ḥadīths (see ḥadīth and the qurʾān ) which enjoy the status of fundamental source (aṣl) as defined by al-Shāfiʿī (d. 204/820). Certain historical events, however, altered this potential course, beginning with the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran and its eventual global enlargement by so-called fundamentalist movements. This revived, in the already very complex and inadequately explored area of qurʾānic studies, the rather archaic combination of the violent and the sacred, a combination that was still able, with some effect, to bring its weight to bear upon the global civilization of disenchantment, desacralization and the supremacy of sciences over all dimensions of human reality. In order to enrich the questions of the social sciences and to radicalize their criticism in every area, including, of course, modernity, the reflective researcher must bear in mind the historical, sociological and psychological significance of the religious imagination. This is a reality which the assumptions of scientific socialism and militant secularism of the French kind believed it was possible to eradicate through teaching official atheism or through eliminating the concept of the religious event (fait religieux) from an educational system run by a state that self-proclaimed its neutrality. By agreeing to work within such assumptions, the social sciences have contributed to nourishing and even legitimizing recurrent wars between the forces, demographically in the majority, that support sacrality and sacralization and the so-called enlightened who support a rational process thought to be emancipatory. But this process actually has a hegemonic mission, since it continues to spread pragmatic truths while refusing to think philosophically about what is intolerable in relations between humans, cultures and civilizations (cf. Arkoun, Les sciences sociales).

Like Christians during the modernist crisis of the nineteenth century, Muslims have reacted — and still react — against earlier works marked by historicist-philologist positivism as well as against more recent research that is relatively free of the assumption of a triumphalist, even intolerant science. Under the pretext of not wanting to confuse different kinds of science, so-called pure researchers refuse to address the conflict between full-blown scientific reason and religious reason that is apparently vanquished intellectually or forced on the defensive despite its historical persistence. This refusal continues despite the many possible applications of an epistemological radicalization of the social sciences. These “pure” researchers steadfastly refuse to integrate theological reasoning — despite its popular persistence — into a methodological program for an epistemology of historical research (épistémologie historique) which could include all aspects and dimensions of reason and its products and in which relations between religious, philosophical and scientific reason could be examined. They also prefer simply to ignore even the mere suggestion of cooperation with a reflective researcher since he or she is dismissed as speculative and unable to respect particular evidence (which does, unfortunately, often happen) rather than as a rigorous academic committed to the establishment of facts. A necessary correction to this narrow perspective would mean moving toward the use of historical psychology, historical sociology and historical anthropology for vast territories of the past, long ignored by the historian interested in narration, description and taxonomy. The recently published work of J. van Ess (Theologie und Gesellschaft) shows all the richness of which we have been deprived and points to what will potentially escape into the future.

As a rather marginal academic discipline, the history of religions is looked at askance by both theological authorities, guardians of orthodoxy, and by secular states which propagate a political “neutrality” yet to be adequately examined philosophically and anthropologically. Furthermore, this field remains uncertain of its precise scope since it spills into many other disciplines. The same uncertainty applies to its intended objects of study which largely involve the invisible, the untouchable, the unnamable, the supernatural, the miraculous, the mysterious, the sacred, the holy, hope, love, violence and so on, as well as its instruments, analytical framework and inevitable relation to other disciplines, themselves groping their way forward in the dark. There is another rarely mentioned fact about the history of religions: Specialists writing for their colleagues are fully aware of the academic constraints by which they will be judged and admitted to the profession or excluded from it, no less differently than theologians who must practice self-censorship in order to obtain the imprimatur of doctrinal authorities. In any case, the populace at large, long confined to the discourse of oral culture, does not appear in scholarly writing, although they are the most directly concerned addressee of this research and form by far the largest and most convinced bloc of consumers of systems of belief and non-belief which science has submitted to its examination. Medieval élites (khāṣṣa) already taught openly that the masses (ʿawāmm) should be kept away from scholarly debates. Today it is left to the scorned popularizers of knowledge to transmit to a large audience bits and pieces of a highly specialized science. The distinctive feature of religion, however, is that it is a source of inspiration, hope and legitimatization for all and first of all for those who have not received instruction in critical thought. In the case of the contemporary Muslim world, this observation bears considerably on qurʾānic studies.

As far as what is commonly called the Qurʾān is concerned, it must be said that this term has become so heavily laden by theological inquiry and the practical goals of secular approaches that it must be subjected to a preliminary deconstruction in order to make manifest levels of function and significance that have been side-stepped, suppressed or forgotten by pious tradition as well as by text-oriented philology. As is well-known, this situation has a long history, extending from the moment the Qurʾān was written down through its centuries of propagation in manuscript form until its modern-day dissemination in print, an historical process which has encouraged the rise of the clerical class to political and intellectual power. The present conceptual burden of the term Qurʾān is at odds with the social and cultural conditions prevailing at the time of the emergence and growth of that which the initial qurʾānic discourse calls Qurʾān, the celestial Text (al-Kitāb, see book ), recited as a faith event, aloud and before an audience. This annunciation can be called prophetic discourse and establishes an arena of communication between three grammatical persons: a speaker who articulates the discourse contained in the celestial Text; a first addressee, who transmits the message of annunciation as a faith event; and a second addressee, the people (al-nās), who constitute the group, large or small according to the circumstances, whose members are nevertheless all equal and free in their status as addressee. They are equal because they share the same discourse situation, i.e. access to the same oral language used in the annunciation of the message. They are free because they respond immediately by assent, understanding, rejection, refutation or the demand for further explanation. More will be said about the crucial importance of the psycho-socio-linguistic analysis of what will henceforth be called prophetic discourse. (Justification will be given for the use of this qualification of “prophetic,” which, historically, is strongly contested by the first addressee, after the adage that “no one is a prophet in his own country.”) It must be remembered that all orientalist scholarship, in limiting itself to the curiosities of the task of a philological restoration of the text (grammar, morphology, lexicography, syntax) along with an historical reconstruction of the simple facts, has ignored the concepts of the structure of relations between persons (Benvéniste), of the discourse situation as conditioned by its context (as described by P. Zumptor for medieval literature by use of the term orature after the French écriture, “writing”), and of the dialectic between the powerful and the weak (dialectique des puissances et des résidus). This last-mentioned encompasses the interaction between orature and écriture, knowledge of the structure of myth and critical historical knowledge, in other words the functional solidarity among 1) the centralizing program of state education, 2) écriture, 3) the scholarly milieu and the clerics who produce and manage it, and 4) orthodoxy. Thus, four dynamic socio-historical forces can be seen to be dialectically related to four other forces in the social arena which appear universally, as in Mecca (q.v.) and Medina (q.v.) at the time of the emergence of the qurʾānic event (fait coranique) no less than in the social milieu of the contemporary nation-state: 1) segmented society which defies uniformity, 2) orature, 3) culture which is called popular and disintegrates into popu- list culture in the contemporary megalopolis, and 4) heterodoxies. This interconnected conceptual framework allows an integration of all levels at which qurʾānic discourse functions — linguistic, social, anthropological, along with all historical periods — into the project of analysis and interpretation. This is demonstrated in a reading of q 9, Sūrat al-Tawba (Arkoun).

One can still be grateful, in fairness to orientalist scholarship, for the efforts and achievements of such pioneers as J. Wellhausen, H. Grimme, T. Nöldeke, F. Schwally, G. Bergsträsser, O. Pretzl, I. Goldziher, T. Andrae, A. Guillaume, A. Jeffery, M. Bravmann, whose work has been continued by R. Paret, R. Blachère, H. Birkeland, R. Bell, W.M. Watt, J. Burton, J. Wansbrough, A.T. Welch, U. Rubin and so on. It should also be noted that for an area of studies which is so rich and vital, the names of those who really matter in this past century are quite few, as can be seen in bibliographies. The current generation seems promising, but the number and isolation of the researchers remain the same, along with the meager size of the projects and the less than considerable importance of the publications. Two additional remarks can elaborate these assessments:

(1) The question of an epistemological perspective — reductionist, scientist, positivist — that goes so far as to support, openly and aggressively, an atheism that does not acknowledge itself to be merely one simple doctrinal option, must be examined, especially where it concerns comparative history and the anthropological analysis of religion. This problem has to be addressed repeatedly and discussed in relation to every scholarly production concerning the religious event. (2) A scholar such as J. Van Ess, whose contribution to Islamic studies is exceptionally rich, represents another perspective, belonging to that school which undertakes to censor itself, constantly and strictly, when it comes to the arena of faith, going so far as to respect the expression of this faith which proclaims itself to be orthodox by virtue of the sole fact of its sociological influence and political dominance. Against both perspectives, it must be emphasized that the deconstruction of every form of orthodoxy falsely rendered sacred by historical figures who happened to succeed politically is one of the most essential critical tasks for the social sciences. Within this context the following quotes from J. van Ess prove instructive: “I could have brought examples from the Muʿtazila (see muʿtazilīs ), but since they were considered to be heretics by the majority of Sunni Muslims afterward, I would have to reckon with the objection that they were ultimately not representative for Islam… He [i.e. Bishr al-Marīsī] is an interesting man, but, as in the case of the Muʿtazilites, I do not want to put the Islamic view of history upside down. This would be something for the Muslims themselves to do” (in Verbal inspiration? Language and revelation in classical Islamic theology, a lecture given on November 21, 1994 at the plenary session of the annual conference of the Middle Eastern Studies Association (MESA) and published in Wild, Text, 180-1). He adds, “As an historian and non-Muslim, I should not ask who was right, and who was wrong…. Indeed, whoever believed the recitation to be uncreated committed a sacrifice of intellect” (184-5). This is not the place to comment further on these two citations from the perspective of the necessary epistemological commitments of reason in the domain of religious studies in general and that of Islamic studies in particular. The possibility of securing such commitments and the way of defining this territory will be clarified in the remainder of this essay.

From the vantage point of a kind of re- search which is always accompanied by a critical return to procedures, a process of cutting and pasting, theoretical constructions, explanations and meaningful results, it can be concluded that the Qurʾān is only one among a number of events that have the same level of complexity and the same abundance of meanings. Others would be the Bible, the Gospels and founding texts of Buddhism and Hinduism, all of which have already known and may in the future know still more historical growth. It is necessary to ask what would finally serve to distinguish the religious corpus just mentioned from the vast Platonic and Aristotelian corpus with all its different forms in Islamic and later European contexts or from the corpus of the French Revolution or that of the October Revolution of 1917 (cf. the works of F. Furet). It is nevertheless clear that the invocation of a religious dimension, which can act, as a corrective, to remind us of the dangers of reductionist readings and the scholarship of cutting and pasting, ought not lead to any concession to dogmatic definitions as advanced by believers in the name of their sacred writings (which in fact are sacralized and sacralizing). The constructions of faith which aim to build and manage the heritage of symbols possessed by every community will be considered cultural manifestations and defining premises in the type of history produced with the attitude of the believer. There should be no question of screening these constructions of faith from historical research or from a critical assessment of the arguments of the authors who have defended them, the historical actors who have promoted them and the managers of orthodoxy who have perpetuated their point of view in scholastic traditions marked more or less by a dogmatic spirit. Belief is in itself a domain of human reality which has been either ignored or insufficiently integrated into larger undertakings of historical and philological research. Historical psychology, the discipline which ought to treat this subject, has only begun its first steps of exploration. Is it appropriate to fragment, under the pretext of inevitable specialization, this contiguous and indivisible domain which prophetic discourse has wrought and which believers perceive and express daily?

By way of concluding these introductory remarks, it will be helpful to ask whether scholarly experience as amassed by orientalist scholarship enables us to pass to a new phase of qurʾānic studies. What would then be the epistemological orientations, the methodological choices and the appropriate programs of this new stage? Such new fields of scholarly investigation of the qurʾānic event must obviously meet two requirements: (1) Many more Muslim reflective researchers should be urged to participate, by increasing the possibilities and places for the exchange and confrontation of thoughts, in order to make progress in what is bound to be a long-term enterprise with the ultimate goal, indeed, of comprehensive thinking and knowing (la noèse et la gnoséologie); (2) Room should be given to previous and contemporary scholarship of Muslim believers. But which scholarship? What positive knowledge, independent of theological requirements, can be derived from it? Will it be possible, from this heterogeneous but undivided reality that is the Qurʾān, the revealed word of God, to separate data that can be declared objective from the psychological burdens and the content of faith which believers attach to the Qurʾān in their daily use and which are still experienced as correct? Is it necessary to classify all Muslim (or Christian or Jewish…) discourse as prior or alien to the modern disposition towards reason, as merely documentation for psychological and historico-sociological inquiry? This would lead to the placement of a scientific goal, entirely artificial, next to the exuberant and effervescent production of history by the strong dialectical exchange between human faith (itself the fruit of the interaction between the social imagination, the imagined, reason and memory) and the forces of upheaval in what can be only partially expressed by our concepts of speech, discourse, text, Qurʾān, revealed word and so on.

I will attempt to answer these questions under the following subtitles: (1) Priorities and limits of historical-anthropological interpretation; (2) Linguistic, semiotic and literary interpretation; (3) Religious interpretation, (4) Final proposals.

The short list, given above, of pioneering researchers in the field of qurʾānic studies includes only orientalists. The choice to exclude Muslim authors is, in itself, enough to disqualify this study in the eyes of orthodox believers (by which is not meant Muslims in general since this generic name includes practising believers as well as the many individuals who make claims upon a culture, a sensitivity, a spirituality, in other words an Islamic ethos without confining their thought to the dogmatic enclosure of a single orthodoxy). Mention will be made of Islamic contribution to qurʾānic studies in the third part, though it is fitting to state here that no arbitrary boundary has been drawn. The epistemological criterion used here is open to debate provided that the essential distinction between the disposition of belief and that of critical reason be respected. While no claim can be made for the superiority of one over the other, there are important differences separating the two states of cognition in terms of function, choice, aims, interests and results. Furthermore, the confrontation between these two attitudes and their respective products is necessary for a fuller awareness of the dimensions of cognition.

The criterion is as follows: The Qurʾān as an object of research is a collection of initially oral utterances put into writing in historical conditions not yet elucidated. These utterances were then elevated, by the industry of generations of historical figures, to the status of a sacred book which preserves the transcendant word of God and serves as ultimate and inevitable point of reference for every act, every form of behavior and every thought of the faithful, who themselves are to be considered as communally interpreting this heritage. In this framework of study, a number of operative concepts and problems exist and still await a sufficiently objective, well-considered and inclusive elucidation so as to appeal not only to the community of reflective researchers but also to those believers who consider themselves practising and orthodox Muslims. This is a crucial point if one wants to overcome the arrogance of scientific reason which provides believers with no opportunity to speak and which interprets, cuts and pastes, categorizes and judges without actually elucidating the mechanisms, the omnipresence, the results and significance of belief for every human person. The task of the reflective researcher is to include in his or her field of investigation and analysis all that is said, experienced, constructed and emerges inside the dogmatic enclosure. To refuse today to enter these laboratories, so full of liveliness and significant events, which have become the societies remade by so-called religious revolutions, would deprive the social sciences of essential data to renew their theoretical positions and strategies of intervention.

It will be seen later how the fact and products of belief can be integrated into such scholarship while also submitting it to critical analysis of the most fruitful kind. In a spirit of equity, it is necessary to mention something of the still relevant achievements of orientalist scholarship. In Lectures du Coran, this author has presented three comparative tables which clarify the relations and differences between the Muslim approach as synthesized by al-Suyūṭī in his Itqān fī ʿulūm al-Qurʾān, the orientalist approach as summarized and followed by A.T. Welch (Ḳurʾān) and the approach, still in the process of elaboration, of the social sciences which are themselves subject to the ever evasive challenges of a comparative history of religions, conceived and written as an “anthropology of the past” and an “archaeology of daily life” (G. Duby, J. Le Goff, A. Dupront). Although not without problems, the theoretical project proposed by this last category of approach ought not to be too hastily reduced. For example, the synchronic linguistic exploration of qurʾānic discourse, combined with an anthropological analysis, has recently been used in an excellent monograph to be discussed later (Chabbi, Le seigneur). This third approach is made possible by the progress of the social sciences and by the accumulative achievements of orientalist scholarship.

The taboo that orthodoxy has always laid on qurʾānic studies was more easily lifted during the period of historical-philological positivism than it is today because the euphoria of positivist reasoning was boosted by colonial rule. Hence, the battle for a critical edition of the text of the Qurʾān, including most notably a chronological ranking of the sūras (see chronology and the qurʾān ), is not as persistent as it was in the period between T. Nöldeke and R. Blachère. All the same, this initiative has lost nothing of its scientific relevance since it implies a more reliable historical reading less dependent on suppositions, hypotheses and the quest for the plausible. (Despite the trust she puts in her methods, J. Chabbi cannot avoid writing in the conditional mood). Unless more incontrovertible manuscripts related to the history of the text are found, which is still possible, it seems better to draw the conclusion that an irreversible situation has been created by the systematic destruction of precious documents or by the lack of interest of people today in all that has become essential for modern historical knowledge.

This field of research does not seem to have broadened its horizons or inquiries, if one is to judge by three collections of articles bearing carefully chosen signatures: Approaches to the history of the interpretation of the Qurʾān, ed. Andrew Rippin, Approaches to the Qurʾān, ed. G.R. Hawting and Abdul-Kader A. Shareef, and The Qurʾān as text, already cited above, the title of which does not fulfill its promises, as its editor, S. Wild, has admitted. The articles in each volume seem to be limited to verifying the continuity of historicist problematics, philological procedures and peripheral curiosities. This syndrome, clarified by J. van Ess, is apparent in the work of the researchers who contribute to these collections, each of whom considers him or herself to be an expert in a well-defined domain but who is never a reflective researcher vis-à-vis an object of knowledge that demands precise intervention on all levels and manners of production and propagation of meaning and assumptions of meaning. This critique can be addressed to those involved in the collections under examination as well as to other interpretations, including those which circulate among the community interpreting its heritage (la communauté interprétante).

The problem must be reiterated: We are dealing with a corpus of which the primary constitutive function of its linguistic articulation is to express the true meaning of human existence — the objective, ideal, intangible, insurmountable norms which have to be strictly observed to keep this existence in line with its true meaning. We are also dealing with secondary corpuses derived from the first, of which the linguistic articulation has, in its long history, functioned in a similar fashion (the yaqūlu llāhu of the exegetes and of current discourse or jāʾa fī l-ḥadīth) to perpetuate, throughout the long course of history, the illusion of a lived continuity between the revealed norms and meanings and the accumulated interpretations and plans used by the living tradition of the community of believers. We are thus dealing with such an existential structure as translated into multiple, developing existential realities. Is the researcher permittted to sever systematically knowledge of marginal facts from the critique of prophetic discourse as a discourse of existentiation (the Arabic term, ījād, renders the causative function more explicit) which gives shape, content and orientation to the actual existence of the believers. This is the problem toward which the reflective researcher directs his or her sights, in reaction against the dominance of scholastic reason which imposes its manner of cutting and pasting the heritage, not on the basis of an intellectual authority — which would create a debt of meaning in its regard, but by the mechanisms of academic power which are intertwined with and dependent on the political philosophy of modern states, just as the clerics who create and guard religious orthodoxies, were enmeshed with these state powers before the secular revolution.

The concepts introduced here as well as those used previously are likely to alienate quite a number of readers or even researchers not familiar with the discourse used in the social sciences and in a Christian theology attentive to the challenges of the modern criticism of religious thought. Doubtlessly in deference to these pioneering theologians, J. van Ess leaves to Muslims the responsibility of accomplishing the same theological tasks. There remains, however, an objection to this reticence on the epistemological and gnoseological level: The advances of critical thought, as brought to light by the example of their application to the Qurʾān, will certainly benefit from the conceptualization of thought and thinking as a general effort of the human spirit that can push back against the limits encountered by reductive critical analysis. In any event, it is important to recall the distinct absence of a prospective conceptual framework in the most recent and best informed writings on the Qurʾān and the Islamic tradition.

It is appropriate to say something now about J. Chabbi's contribution before analyzing it more fully later on. In brief, it is a welcome example of historical analysis of the Qurʾān which illustrates the possibility of crossing an epistemic and epistemological threshold in the progress towards the desired disposition of the reflective researcher. The author traces the insurmountable boundary between the normative code of the professional historian and the domain of the thought and knowledge of the believer, while still incorporating this methodologically separate domain into the field of historical inquiry. The result is real progress, not only in historical writing as such, but first and foremost in the elucidation of the linguistic and historical processes which generated this belief. The author works with a recognition that this belief has become the inexhaustible source and ever powerful force of all the combined efforts and mental projections for understanding an inaugural moment (moment inaugurateur) and its mythological, ideological, semantic and semiotic ramification and enlargement, as well as its intellectual, institutional and artistic creations which continue and become increasingly complex. By using anthropological catego- ries such as myth and social imagination, the historian can, from the same critical analytic perspective, gather the diverse transformative dialectics reflected in the Meccan utterances of the Qurʾān, carefully restore them to their context, thus liberating them from the overly determined sense which subsequent religious readings have projected onto them. As such, one can retrace the inchoate manifestations of a supra-tribal rationality and the formation of a nascent conceptual framework, as expressed in the linguistic usage, belief and the account of the foundation of the defined social group (nās, ʿashīra, qawm) that was meant to be the addressee. One can see how this addressee gradually became the dialectical protagonist and the involuntary agent of an historical transformation which had been fought, refused and denied in Mecca before imposing itself in Medina through a doubly armed prophet who added the weapon of revelatory speech to that of military arms. The religious interpretation of these events, which historians and anthropologists seek to reconstruct by archaeological investigation, was later transformed into a conglomerate of actors in a vast and long-lasting foundation story — opponents in Mecca, helpers in Medina (the kāfirūn, munāfiqūn, vs. the muʾminūn, muhājirūn and anṣār of orthodox terminology; see opposition to muḥammad; emigrants and helpers; hypocrites and hypocrisy ) — which also requires the same kind of archaeological investigation to distinguish between historical and sociological reality and the subsequent mythical enlargment of the religious imagination.

It is now becoming possible to see how one might step out of the scientist rigidity of the historical critical method which, since the nineteenth century, has imposed its judgments, chronological and thematic categories, divisions of reality and objects of study, etymologism and quest for origins and relations of ideas and accounts onto highly charged and creative contexts (e.g. the reduction of the Qurʾān to biblical and Hebraic sources to the detriment of its literary and spiritual creativity which transforms language and thought dynamically under the twofold horizon of fundamentally utopian thoughts and concrete action meant to actualize these thoughts in history). Yet J. Chabbi is not entirely successful in escaping all of these shortcomings despite the fact that she criticizes them sharply. For example, she was unsuccessful in clarifying the anthroplogical problems, like the tribal and political organization often used as key references for her impressionist interpretations, but not analyzed on the level required by her ambitious theorizations. Even in this enhanced scholarly environment, the philological concern is still unavoidable, but it can now be enriched by the contribution of linguistics so as to give place to the distinctive characteristics of the oral announcement (l'énonciation orale) in relation to written accounts (énoncés écrits) and to replace etymologism by the reconstruction of semantic fields and networks of language connotation. This is done through patient microanalysis which combines archaeological excavation (see archaeology and the qurʾān ) with vocabulary, ethno-linguistic inquiry and ecological, sociological, cultural and political recontextualization. All this must be attained by using sources known for their precariousness and insufficiency as well as disguise, selection, transfiguration, sublimation, transcendentalization, essentialization, sacralization, mythologization and, now today, gross ideologization. This is not the place to specify the significance for the historical method of this set of concepts, intentionally grouped together, which are often used to mark the substitution of a principle of interpretation which is careful to employ social dialectics and their effects on the relation between language and thought with a principle at once rigid, ignorant of these dialectics and with the tendency to turn developing ideas, contingent representations, the assumptions of truth, precarious power relations and functional or arbitrary categories into eternal essences, intangible substances, ontological and transcendent truths, and ethical and juridical norms immune to every human intervention.

The principle of interpretation for the qurʾānic text should be equally applied to all sources with the same set of requirements: the ḥadīth collections, the works of exegesis, the biographical literature, the expanding biblical-qurʾānic imagination in mystical experience, the Isrāʾīliyyāt, the lives of the prophets, the integration myths of symbolic founding figures, like Abraham (q.v.) in the pantheon and Arab rituals associated with the Kaʿba (q.v.). These rich sources can be reviewed and reinvested in an archaeological excavation, now writ large, where there is no question of quarreling over the sources or debating their authenticity and the truth of positive facts liberated from the superstitions of the straightjacket of legends, popular stories and the ramblings of a pious imagination. This is what historicism has long done, reinforced by dialectic materialism at a time when Marxist rhetoric made its prejudice of rationality prevail in all domains of knowledge. The great classical commentators are no longer consulted — as many orientalists have done and still continue to do — as reliable authorities in clearing up the semantic contents of qurʾānic vocabulary. All commentaries are treated as corpuses which must be read within the changing contexts of their production, reception and reproduction.

It will be useful to elaborate on Chabbi's monograph since it furnishes a relatively convincing illustration of both the methodological priority and the limits of the historical-anthropological approach applied to a corpus which lays the foundation of a religion. The limits are those which the historian imposes on himself in deciding when the work of scrutinizing and exploiting the documents is finished. One can see clearly that, regarding the question of contemporary critical practices and the Qurʾān, the historian is here caught within an extreme tension between two different attitudes of the human spirit: that of limiting knowledge to theoretical and practical pieces of information artificially constructed by scholarly disciplines or that of recognizing the reliable and potentially universal teaching of these disciplines while also creating space for a policy of hope, a concept that enables the integration of theological developments about the history of salvation, the quest for salvation and eschatological hope into historical psychology and religious sociology.

To clarify: If the present resources of historical inquiry are willing to concede, in accordance with a scientifically acceptable manner, that the Qurʾān, when viewed in the ecological, ethno-linguistic, sociological and political theater of tribal life (see tribes and clans ) in Mecca and Medina at the beginning of the seventh century c.e., cannot but change its cognitive status, a whole new field of work will be possible. This raises the question of whether a historian can do justice to two clearly different realms of cognition: 1) that of a Meccan Qurʾān restored to its concrete historical and linguistic reality as distinct from the Medinan corpus as well as from the universal corpus later imposed under the name of muṣḥaf (q.v.), and 2) that of this muṣḥaf which would be more aptly named the Closed Official Corpus (see collection of the qurʾān; codices of the qurʾān ). It is this later corpus that the interpreting community has accepted and will continue to accept for the foreseeable future as a tanzīl, a revealed given (donné révélé) that abolishes — in interpretation and in experience, i.e. in the course of history — the status of the corpus as unveiled by historians.

One cannot dodge this question by saying that this later corpus is the concern of believers because it is the historian who uncovers the new status of belief to the extent that his or her achievements as a historian are recognized to be intellectually compelling. A first answer would consist in widening the same inquiry with the same deconstructive procedure to the entire history of societies in which this revealed given has been received, interpreted and translated into ethical, juridical, political, semantic, esthetic and spiritual codes. This author has proposed the concept of societies of the book-Book (sociétés du Livre-livre), including the Jewish and Christian examples, in order to integrate the revealed given into the productive forces of the history of these societies before it was disqualified, marginalized and even eliminated by scientific and political revolutions. It is possible that the historian's refusal — by leaving to the theologian and the philosopher a task lying within the scope of the historian's responsibility — to enlarge the working domain reflects a philosophical commitment to the fait accompli of the eighteenth century political revolutions in Europe and America. This would explain the difficulties of dialogue between historians, anthropologists, theologians and philosophers on these delicate subjects. This author has shown, with the example of the work of C. Cahen, that historians have until now not assumed the responsibilities that ensue from a historical-anthropological reading of the Meccan and Medinan Qurʾān (Arkoun, Transgresser, déplacer, dépasser, in Arabica 1996.1).

One should not forget that these battles and debates take place within the historical trajectory of European thought as it has developed since the sixteenth century, i.e. with the first challenges to the medieval heritage by the Reformation and Renaissance. Within the Islamic context, these questions are still suppressed and considered unimagineable. One can see the disarray in the human spirit wherever there is a failure in the indispensable work, assigned to philosophy and anthropology, of taking charge of the domains of thought left in ruins by the social sciences which limit themselves to working on divided fragments of an undivided reality.

These approaches have produced far less foundational or innovative work than the historical approaches. Semiotics was in fashion in France between 1960 and 1980 with the support of A.J. Greimas and a number of his disciples. A relatively small number of doctoral theses on the Qurʾān have appeared in France during that period, but it has not been possible to publish any of them in contrast with studies on the Bible and the Gospels that have abounded and been published. Linguistic approaches to the Qurʾān, especially in the domain of discourse criticism, are not well represented either, despite the fact that studies of Arabic linguistic history have flourished especially during the last twenty years. One can see this paucity as clear proof of an intellectual timidity, itself nourished by the researcher's ‘prudent’ reluctance to study the Muslim sacred text. At the Sorbonne, many have preferred to renounce subjects which had aroused their intellectual curiosity but which also aroused their fears of rejection in their countries of origin. Among the few exceptions is C. Gilliot who has been willing to work on the common Islamic imagination as found in al-Ṭabarī's (d. 310/923) commentary, although limiting himself to the classical scholarly track in which he continues to make substantial contributions.

As for the literary approach, there is nothing in qurʾānic studies equivalent to N. Frye (The great code), not to mention the abundant research which has enriched and renewed biblical studies. I have personally planned to treat the use of the metaphor in the Qurʾān in order to correct an intolerable shortcoming, one that has lasted since the medieval battles over accepting or totally rejecting the metaphorical dimension in the interpretation of God's word. A book by Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya (d. 751/1350), bearing the eloquent title, “Thunder Bolts Sent in Refutation of the Sectarian al-Jahmiyya and al-Muʿaṭṭila” (al-Ṣawāʿiq al-mursala fī l-radd ʿalā al-Jahmiyya wa-l-Muʿaṭṭila), clearly sets out the stakes in the debate over the theology of revelation. I have not abandoned this rich project; but the terrain left to be cleared is immense and the few works available on this subject are largely irrelevant. Muslims are themselves scandalised at hearing of this shortcoming and refer with pride to al-Bāqillānī (d. 403/1013), al-Jurjānī (d. 471/1078), Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 606/1210), al-Sakkākī (d. 629/1231) and to the immense iʿjāz literature of which the apologetic dimension still weighs heavily on contemporary works (e.g. Muṣṭafā Ṣādiq al-Rāfiʿī, Sayyid Quṭb, Muḥammad Shaḥrūr). These fail, however, to mention the current hostility to metaphor and the fact that the doctrine of the created Qurʾān (see createdness of the qurʾān ) has prevailed since the fourteenth century. For this reason, it is the literary approaches which triumph today. Studies of Arabic rhetoric and literary criticism are quick to scrutinize the positive and negative consequences of the influence exerted by theological tenets on linguistic, semiotic and literary approaches to the sacred text. Among the positive results is the possibility of enjoying, at one and the same time and with the profound attention of an undivided conscience, the spiritual emotion, ethical beauty and pleasure of the text, whether read or recited. It is one of the distinctive characteristics of prophetic discourse to bring together these three values — the true, the good and the beautiful — in order to draw the human subject more surely to the salvific utopia. This is exactly what Greek literature did before the intervention and victory of Aristotelian logocentrism. Additionally, there remains the simple fact that the foundational texts of religions never lose their initial status as oral announcement. Thus do the faithful identify with them through liturgical recitation, ritual conduct and quotations in current conversation (Graham, Beyond; see recitation of the qurʾān; ritual and the qurʾān; everyday life, the qurʾān in ).

It is therefore important to consider the possibilities of literary criticism itself lest religious discourse monopolize the methods and issues found in modern works. For example, beyond prophetic discourse, what status should be assigned to the immense corpus left by a figure like Ibn al-ʿArabī (d. 638/1240)? Religious and literary qualifications alone do not allow for an account of the exceptional richness and dimensions of such a written text, one for which the exact status has yet to be defined.

How to take up these scientific challenges? It is not enough to denounce the shortcomings of apology and the repression of innovation by the guardians of orthodoxy. To take one case, Naṣr Ḥāmid Abū Zayd, the first Muslim scholar to face the Arabic world directly by writing in Arabic while teaching at Cairo University, tried to break the many taboos which prohibit the application of the most relevant achievements of contemporary linguistics to the Qurʾān. Before him, Muḥammad Khalafallāh tried to apply literary criticism to narrative in the Qurʾān, and in spite of its modest scientific span, his essay caused a major upheaval. The works of Abū Zayd contain nothing revolutionary if one places them within the scholarly production of the last twenty years, since they explain quite straightforwardly the conditions necessary for applying the rules of defining and analysing a text to the Qurʾān (Mafhūm al-naṣṣ). Once more, the violent reaction to attempts intending only to popularize knowledge long since widely accepted, underlines the area in contemporary Islamic thought of what cannot be and has not been thought.

The concept of an interpreting community leads to a wide range of possibilities for the use of speech that has become text and of a text that was laid down in the Closed Official Corpus but which is still invoked and experienced as speech. The range runs the gamut from the most learned exegesis to daily liturgical recitation and the spontaneous quoting of the text in current conversation, in controversy or at joyful or somber events. Qurʾānic studies has been chiefly interested in scholarly exegetical readings that offer historical information, cultural insights or grammatical and lexical explanations which could enrich the understanding of the text as given in the Closed Official Corpus. Insufficient account has been taken of the cognitive status of the many other religious approaches to the text as these are interpreted by and for the community. There are two major reasons for this: Firstly, all approaches and all appropriations are confined within a dogmatic enclosure; secondly, the great commentaries which were given authorization over the historical development of the living tradition function as orthodox corpuses of interpretation.

Not only are believing Muslims imprisoned in this dogmatic enclosure, orientalist scholarship has also long contented itself with transferring to European languages the exegetical orthodoxy of the dominant Sunnī Islam before doing the same with Shīʿī Islam (and that at a time when political events enabled political scientists to dispute the supremacy of expertise claimed by scholars of Islam). Those, for example, who attempted to tackle the question of the authenticity of the prophetic tradition have instead used this material to prop up artificially constructed historical argumentation. In so doing, they are careful to protect their scholarly status with certain rhetorical techniques: “according to Muslim tradition,” “according to Muslim faith,” etc., and thus does the dogmatic enclosure remain untouched and free to operate without restraint.

The term “dogmatic enclosure” applies to the totality of the articles of faith, representations, tenets and themes which allow a system of belief and unbelief (q.v.) to operate freely without any competing action from inside or outside. A strategy of refusal, consisting of an arsenal of discursive constraints and procedures, permits the protection and, if necessary, the mobilization of what is presumptuously called faith (q.v.). It is well known how scrupulously the profession of faith (ʿaqīda, see creeds ) is translated and described, but no green light has ever been given to a deconstruction of the axioms, tenets and themes that hold together and establish the adventurous cohesion of every faith. The point is not to demonstrate the scientific validity or the irrationality of the articles of faith but rather to trace their genealogy from Nietzsche's perspective of the criticism of values as well as their psychological functions and decisive role in the construction and formation of every human subject. All this is a matter for historical psychol- ogy with its curiosity and inquiry which has, as previously mentioned, not yet been integrated into historical-anthropological methodology. A realization of this direction of research is greatly to be desired and could proceed by exploring the shared Islamic imagination as represented in the great corpuses of interpretation such as those of al-Ṭabarī, Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, Muḥammad al-Ṭāhir Ben ʿAshūr (d. 1867), and Muḥammad Ḥusayn Ṭabāṭabāʾī (d. 1980) amongst others. As long as faith and spirituality are the object of simple narrative and descriptive accounts — be it with the agnostic's cold distance (in the style of H. Laoust) or with the warm and exhorting empathy of the believer (in the style of J. Jomier or Kenneth Cragg) — qurʾānic studies and, more generally, the comparative history of religions will be unable to achieve the exhaustiveness and relevance expected of them.

The religious interpretation as applied to foundational texts is also the place where creativity of meaning, assumptions of meaning, representations and mythological or ideological construction emerge and erupt in accordance with the cultural contexts of different social groups. This is equally true for medieval approaches now considered sacred and treated as obligatory classical reference works as well as for contemporary approaches. The functional relation between the Closed Official Corpus (including the ḥadīth collections), promoted to the rank of primordial foundational text, and the corpuses of interpretation to which the Closed Official Corpus gives rise remains the same whether these be religious corpuses, as in the societies of the book-Book, or secular corpuses, or those of modern political revolutions. The latter two categories, however, benefit from historical clarity and from tools of analysis which exclude any possibility of resorting explicitly, as does the first category, to mystery, the supernatural, transcendence and the miraculous, where the operation of sacralization, mythification, sublimation, transfiguration, ontologization and even mystification rests. Still, the historian has to determine the various forms of reason used (grammatical, theological, juridical, historiographical or philosophical reason) as well as the kind of rationality, imagination and modes of intervention and creative imagination, recognizing their diversity in figures such as al-Ḥallāj (d. 309/922), al-Tawḥīdī (d. 414/1023), Ibn al-ʿArabī (d. 638/1240), Mullā Ṣadra Shīrāzī (d. 1050/1604), Sayyid Quṭb (d. 1966), etc.

It is now possible to see in what way the integration of religious interpretation into the enlarged domain of the historian can enrich historical knowledge while also restricting speculative criticism of religious reason that, as demonstrated here, is only a modality of the reason of belief. At the same time, it has been shown that the various kinds of interpretation discussed here lead to the same acknowledgment, namely that the progress of qurʾānic studies has depended on the orientalist scholarship of the nineteenth century. (The term scholarship is used to underscore the orientalists' refusal to commit epistemologically their accumulated knowledge to a criticism of religious reason that would include all known examples in the societies of the book-Book). The refusal of the historian, anthropologist, sociologist, psychologist, literary critic and semiotician to identify and answer the challenges of prophetic discourse and the logical universe it generates, will lead finally to the degeneration of these disciplines themselves. As for Muslim scholarship, it continues to inflict upon itself limitations, mutilations and prohibitions that only accentuate the dependency and backwardness of qurʾānic studies. What it has produced since the nineteenth century has more of a documentary inter- est for a history of religious psychology and the enlargement of the imagination of religious discourse, especially in the domain of politics, than any intellectual and scientific merit which could enrich our knowledge of the qurʾānic event and of the Islamic event and, beyond those, of the religious event in general. The recently published volume by Muḥammad Shaḥrūr , “The Book and the Qurʾān” (al-Kitāb wa-l-Qurʾān), has had a success that bears witness to both the intolerable pressure of dogmatic control on qurʾānic studies and the limits within which every discourse with hopes of innovation must be pursued.

The project of publishing an Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān that is conceived and realized with respect for the critical order of rational processes is long overdue. This delay confirms this article's position on the historical and epistemological discrepancy between philosophic and scientific reason, as practiced today in the West and elsewhere, and Islamic reason as it asserts itself in its positions on Islam as well as in political action, legal codes, educational systems and behaviors which encourage the traditional. As long as the Islamic logical universe continues to function within the dogmatic enclosure of its historical form as received since the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, there will be a place for a parallel Islamic encyclopedia of Islam and, all the more, an Islamic encylopedia of the Qurʾān. The Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān constitutes a basis of data that will undoubtedly, like every work of scholarship, be subject to discussions, additions and revisions. It will, however, be impossible to ignore, particularly by people who pursue the cognitive project of understanding the religious event in a universal way.

To sustain this project within that perspective, it would be helpful to conclude with the following proposals: It is necessary to open up the qurʾānic fact by situating it in a comparative approach not only within the three monotheistic religions but also within a historical anthropology of the religious event in its geo-historical and geo-cultural ambiance that can, for the time being, be qualified as Mediterranean. The historical phase of what historians explore under the name of the Near East should always be kept in sight, although not in order to rediscover so-called origins or to reconstruct linear relations of ideas, representations, linguistic forms and rituals of expression. The aim should be to deepen our knowledge of constituent elements common to the monotheistic religious conscience in its global historical genesis and manner of differentiation. This should include attention to inaugural moments and new departures from cultural codes that engender logical universes, dogmatic enclosures, societies of the book-Book and communities of election who have been promised salvation in contrast to anonymous groups destined to stray and be damned. In brief, it is a matter of deepening our knowledge of all these historical formations that the ethnographic view imprisons in so-called identities and encloses in alleged regions, traditions and cultures.

The concept of the Closed Official Corpus provides a good example of the comparative approach that will enable Muslim readers of the Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān to better assess the stakes in a scientific problematization of the orthodox vocabulary inherited from a theological theory of values resistant to every critical examination. The Jewish and Christian traditions have similarly had a before and an after to what has been called the fait accompli of the Closed Official Corpus. Christians today are willing to read the apocryphal writings left out by the church between the fourth and the sixteenth centuries (cf. their publication in the Pléiade series by F. Bovon and P. Geoltrain). The results have not functioned in the same way before and after the triumph of a Closed Official Corpus in each tradition: Scholarly research without the burden of dogma creates more favorable conditions for historical re-readings of the texts that have been selected as sacred and thus untouchable. One can therefore understand why the concept of a Closed Official Corpus is more effective for a comparative history of the religious event in its prophetic trajectory.

Two more gaps are left that must be mentioned: The theological and philosophical attitudes of reason in the so-called societies of the book-Book should be the object of the same comparative historical approach within the perspective of a critical historical epistemology. Tackling such a task requires constant vigilance, not only to check the use of all conceptual frameworks which have been protected from the critique of deconstructionism but also to introduce and refine more inclusive concepts which are more productive from the perspective of a critique of religious reason beginning with its formulation by Jews, Christians and Muslims.

In that which concerns the Qurʾān more directly, it is clear that what is called for here is a protocol of interpretation that is free from both the dogmatic orthodox framework and the procedural disciplines of modern scientism which is, it must be admitted, no less constraining. It is an interpretation which wanders, in which every human, Muslim or non-Muslim, gives free rein to his or her own dynamic of associating ideas and representations, beginning from the freely chosen interpretation of a corpus of which the often imputed disorder, so often denounced, favors the freedom to wander. This approach is able to extricate itself definitively from every kind of arbitrary rhetoric, artificial and allegedly logical reconstruction, and delusive coherence later imposed by juridical, theological, apologetic, ideological and fantastic interpretations. One potential model here is, of course, the creative freedom of the likes of Ibn al-ʿArabī; but now the desired freedom is more subversive since it would include all forms and experiences of subversion that were ever attempted by mystics, poets, thinkers and artists.