The Qurʾān, A New Annotated Translation, by A. J. Droge

Equinox recently published a new translation and annotation of the Qur’an which has attracted considerable interest and which may become a useful textbook in the field of Islamic Studies. Details on the book and an option to order can be found on the book home page. Customers in North American can order directly from Equinox’s US distributor, here.

(With thanks to Equinox Publishing Ltd)

(With thanks to Equinox Publishing Ltd)

Book Description*

This new, annotated translation of the Qur’ān is specifically designed to meet the needs of students of religion, and provides them with a one-volume resource comparable to what is available for the Jewish and Christian scriptures. The meticulously crafted translation affords readers not only a better sense of what the Qur’ān says, but how it says it, in a rendition that strives to remain faithful to the way it was originally expressed. Accompanying the translation is an extensive set of annotations. These are keyed to the text for ready reference, and divided according to their boldface topical headings at the bottom of each page. The annotations offer a wealth of linguistic and historical detail to enhance the understanding and appreciation of the text. They also contain abundant references to parallel passages within the Qur’ān, as well as comparatively among the ‘scriptures’ of Judaism and Christianity. With an introduction, map, timeline, guide to further reading, and comprehensive index, this is the edition of the Qur’ān all students of religion – beginning as well as advanced – will want to possess for their exploration of Islam’s central text.

The Author

A. J. Droge is the author of Homer or Moses? Early Christian Interpretations of the History of Culture and, with James Tabor, of A Noble Death: Suicide and Martyrdom among Christians and Jews in Antiquity. You can hear prof. Droge pesent at IQSA’s meeting in Baltimore.

* Accessed from the publisher’s product page.

© International Qur’anic Studies Association, 2013. All rights reserved.

Who is The Real Speaker?

By Maryam Mosharraf

Numerous grammatical tropes and rhetorical mysteries of Sura al-Fatiha have always been a great point of interest. We are not going to take a grammar course however, we want to talk to God. But is there any real dialogue  with God in the seven verses of al-Fatiha which Muslims use in their daily prayer, if so, who is the real speaker? Many times I have asked my self, who is saying “In the Name of God?” Is God talking on behalf of His believers or even unbelievers? If so, is God swearing to His own name? It does not make sense! why on the other hand, are there no verbs here, what is that supposed to mean? Is that “Me” who is saying: “I should begin this or that job or task in the name of God?” Or, is this God who says: “ Read! Start! or Make love…however, do it in the Name of God?

(choralnet.org)

(choralnet.org)

What is supposed to fill this empty space of verbs and predicates? If there were a pronoun or adverb or any deictic indicating space and time in this verse, it would focus our minds on a more limited setting. Later in the same Sura, “Thee alone we worship and thee alone we ask for help” (Q 1:5), verbs and pronouns focus the reader’s attention automatically on the human act of serving God. In other words, in this way the mind of the reader/speaker accepts a kind of limitation and in this limitation s/he looks upon God. This confinement sets the ground for religious discipline which is of great importance in the spiritual life of any believer or within any religion. In this limitation the act of worship is manifested within the verb and pronoun.

Although the speaker’s point of view is inward here : ‘we’, it must be borne in mind that the real speaker is the one who intends to focus our minds on worship. So there is a hidden speaker here, who is trying to focus the reader’s words and mind on a certain act, on worship.

Such a limitation is not seen in the beginning verses, the mind and subjectivity are allowed to float in an unconfined space and feel free to call God in any form that the magnetism of desires would let it go. The phrase “in the Name of God” can be attached to anything, since it is detached from everything: beautifully free.

This freedom and mind suspension is applied in the next three verses of al-Fatiha where timelessness and boundlessness, plus the absence  of verbs creates an abstract mood which cannot be identified with anything save the Sacred. Here the speaker is free of any certain worldly affiliation. While in the following verses, the verbs direct the attention of the speaker towards the relationship between God and Humankind.

Thus, we face a double layered structure in al-Fatiha: in the first part (Q 1:1-4) we face a sense of detachment, a sense which in the second part (Q 1:5-7) turns into attachment. A binary structure: God versus/by side of Human.

Does this structure help us to understand who the real speaker is? Who is the one that focuses our mind by putting emphasis on the things He wills. In the first part, it is in fact God Himself, who speaks in behalf of the reader, and asks to be seen with His attribute of bounty. But at the same time He gives form to a hidden speaker beneath the words and the  style of phrases. This hidden speaker shapes another addressee, who is going to be God himself. The real speaker is the one who shapes this double structure;  A structure which shapes a dialogue, like a question and an answer, or a request and a reponse. So , based on this structure, the speaker is either God or Human. It is this ambiguity that gives the Sura an important peculiarity, according to which God speaks on behalf of Humankind and Humankind speaks in place of God.

© International Qur’anic Studies Association, 2013. All rights reserved.

Update – Public Lecture on Tuesday, July 9

By Emran El-Badawi and Gabriel Reynolds

On April 9th we announced our first international meeting to be held in St. Andrews, Scotland this July. We would like to share with you an update concerning the public lecture on Tuesday, July 9th. Dr. Alain George–senior lecturer of Islamic Art at the University of Edinburgh–will do us the honor of delivering a talk “On an Early Qur’anic Palimpsest and its Stratigraphy: Cambridge Or. 1287.” Details can be found below.

Quran and Islamic Tradition in Comparative Perspective
Joint Session With: International Qur’anic Studies Association, Quran and Islamic Tradition in Comparative Perspective
7/09/2013
3:00 PM to 4:15 PM
Room: Auditorium – MBS (17)

Gabriel Said Reynolds, University of Notre Dame, Presiding

Alain George, University of Edinburgh
On an Early Qur’anic Palimpsest and its Stratigraphy: Cambridge Or. 1287 (45 min)

Break (5 min)

Discussion (25 min)

Alain George, Univ. Edinburgh

Alain George, Univ. Edinburgh

Alain George received his first degree from the London School of Economics before moving on to study Islamic Art at the University of Oxford, where he completed his Ph.D. in 2006. He was recently awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize. His publications include The Rise of Islamic Calligraphy. London: Saqi Books (2010).

© International Qur’anic Studies Association, 2013. All rights reserved.

The Traditions on the Composition of ‘Uthmān’s muṣḥaf.

By Viviane Comerro

Viviane Comerro is Professor of Islamic Studies at INALCO (Paris). This blog is a synopsis of its French book titled “Les traditions sur la composition du muṣḥaf de ‘Uthmān”, Orient-Institut Beirut, 2012

When and how did the Quran become a book? Even though paleography and codicology provide us with useful elements that shed light on this question, we should not overlook the study of Islamic literary sources which, through the diversity of their accounts on the writing of the Quran and the richness of their glosses on the Quranic text itself, remain bolder and more informed testimonies than any collection of manuscripts.

(ukaz.com.sa)

(ukaz.com.sa)

How should we address Islamic sources which provide us with numerous pieces of information on this issue? An initial historical approach based on the transmission of texts could lead us to follow the Ancients in their investigative endeavor by privileging the historical veracity of the version adopted by al-Bukhārī (d. 256/870) in his Ṣaḥīḥ.

A second, historical and critical approach has already achieved its full potential: drawing out a core that is common to the various versions of the account of the event so as to gain some certainty or extracting this historical core from its legendary, theological or ideological gangue.

Reflection upon the literary nature of sources that has developed alongside this approach has resulted in a transitory suspension of the “naively” historical approach. In fact, a tradition always provides the event and its interpretation as closely related. This is a khabar, information, as well as a hadith, an event set as an account. Thus, it is in taking into consideration the twofold nature of a tradition that I have read afresh the totality of the accounts on the writing of the Quran by paying very close attention to the variants and their meanings.

By placing back the received version of the event – the one Bukhārī kept in his Ṣaḥīh – in this totality, it appears as made up of several motifs that also exist in isolation as independent traditions. This version is therefore the result of a combination that selects some pieces of information while discarding others.

The author of this combination, or common link in the vernacular of the modern specialists of transmission, is Ibn Shihāb al-Zuhrī (d. 124/742), who certainly did not invent this story but combined different pieces of information on the writing of the Quran, as he did for other accounts.

Beyond this stage, the hadith of Zuhrī evolved even further since a version that is quite different from Bukhārī’s is to be found in the introduction to his Tafsīr by the great compiler of the 3rd century of Hegira, Ṭabarī (d. 310/923).

Apart from the issue of authenticity, wherever we place this version in the chain of transmission, what seems to matter is the reason why such a well-informed exegete as Tabarī chose this version of Zuhrī’s account rather than another one. This question led me to question Bukhārī’s stance and Ṭabarī’s regarding the status of Quranic recitation in the intellectual debates of their time. I came to the conclusion that, to some extent, the issue of the isnād was of secondary importance. What really matters is the content of each account.

For Ṭabarī, who claims that ‘Uthmān reduced the various recitations of the Quran to a single ḥarf in the official muṣḥaf, it is important to note that the Quranic text is not the result of a collection but the writing of a single man, Zayd b. Thābit.

For Bukhārī, it is important to take a stand in a critical debate of his time: that of the created or uncreated Quran, which goes on long after the end of the Miḥna by claiming that the writing of the Quran is created, in contrast with the Hanbali scholars.

Besides, the stance differs from one Ṣaḥīḥ to the other. Muslim (d. 261/875), Bukhārī’s contemporary, who frequented the same circles as him, apparently avoids to take a stand in this debate. Nowhere does he mention the account transmitted by al-Zuhrī. On the other hand, he mentions traditions on the various recitations of the Companions Ubayy, Ibn Mas‘ūd and Abū Mūsā. In this selection of information, one can detect a stand in another significant debate that lasted for centuries about the diversity of Quranic recitations theorized in the form of a prophetic hadith: Unzila l-qur’ān ‘alā sab‘ati ahruf. In this controversy, a stance became more and more a minority, yet it lasted for a long time: it was allowed to liturgically recite ancient qirā’āt, especially that of Ibn Mas‘ūd, due to the fact that the companions of the Prophet and the Successors did it, even though these “readings” were not in keeping with the ‘Uthmānian rasm. It seems that in the 3rd century, prior to Ibn Mujāhid’s reform, the traditionist Muslim was inclined to favor such a stance.

The discrepancies between the accounts about the writing of the Quran, which are already impressive regarding what comes from Zuhrī, are even more so when all the traditions are taken into consideration. They are so not only for the researcher who considers he should not side with the traditionists, now as in the past, but also because all these accounts excluded by the strict selection of the Ṣaḥīḥ reappear in the margin of a commentary or an argumentation by the early (or modern) authors among the most interested in orthodoxy.

Historical description is not the main goal of traditionists, who rather try to solve theological/juridical problems. The diversity of the accounts related to the writing of the Quran, which mostly took place under ‘Uthmān’s caliphate, could result from the traditionists’ worry about the composition of the muṣḥaf in an unfavorable historical context: a challenged caliphate in a time troubled by strong dissensions. The attested circulation of different maṣāḥif of the Quran, one of the sources of legitimacy and authority in the fullest sense of this dīn as the foundation of the new community, represented a danger for Medina’s power. After the historical situation changed, though it was never forgotten, the prime preoccupation concerned the conditions of transmission of the prophetic proclamation. The selection of the ḥarf of Zayd, a man related to ‘Uthmān, had not been consensual. And what to do with the maṣāḥif of Ubayy, Ibn Mas‘ūd, Abū Mūsā, Miqdād and others? Several responses to these unexpressed worries arose in the large corpus of narrative traditions on the writing of the Quran. I have suggested classifying these accounts according to the kind of solution they provided to ensure the faultless transmission of the muṣḥaf.

After this investigation in literary sources, it is to be noted that there is no received version of the writing of the muṣḥaf despite the status acquired by the Ṣaḥīḥ of Bukhārī and the repetition, book after book, century after century, of his hadith on the collection of the Quran, a “thing the Prophet had not done.” In this way, although a 12th century traditionist such as Abū Muḥammad Ḥusayn al-Baghawī reports Bukhārī’s account in his Sharḥ al-Sunna, in his commentary he carries out a rewriting of the event with the memory of other accounts. He claims that the composition of the muṣḥaf is an act involving the Companions as a collective actor of the ijmā‘: they are those who decided together with ‘Uthmān and those who wrote. This rewriting is as perceptible in the 15th century when al-Suyūṭī began his chapter of the Itqān devoted to the collection of the Quran by the blunt assertion that at the time of the Prophet’s death “the Quran had not been collected.” Throughout the text and in the conclusion of the chapter, it appears that the “thing the Prophet had not done” had in fact been accomplished since the muṣḥaf, organized as verses and suras, is exactly the same as that instituted by Muḥammad after the angel’s dictation.

In my book, I left the question of the writing of the Quran at the time of the Prophet open-ended owing to the scarcity of traditions that mention it. This question pertains to another kind of investigation on the oral/written composition of the Quranic text (Angelika Neuwirth) and could rest on the works of linguists and anthropologists dealing with orality and writing.

In conclusion, the study of traditions informs us on some crucial elements of the history of the text: the plasticity of its composition and oral transmission; the antiquity of its writing; the fixation of a model written under ‘Uthmān; its gradual canonization; the preservation of textual variants as a reflection of the original oral diversity and then the philologists’ interest; the parallel theologizing of the history of transmission.

Yet this study chiefly enables us to understand the Tradition that lends their full weight to the actors of transmission. Through selection, combination, additions or deletions, and when the text is permanently fixed in its letter, through their glosses, commentaries and interpretations, these actors contribute to the fluctuation in meaning in the preservation of religion.