Between Hermeneutic Provenance and Textuality

The Qur'an and the Question of Method in Approaches to World Literature

Dados Bibliográficos

ID22318947
AutoresAyman A El-Desouky (SOAS University of London), Ayman El-Desouky (University of London, autor correspondente)
Ano2014
Volume16
Fascículo3
Páginas11-38
Data de publicação2014-10-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoJournal of Qur'anic Studies (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 1465-3591 • E-ISSN: 1755-1730
EditoraEdinburgh University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.3366/jqs.2014.0164
OpenAlexW2071239548
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas5
Referências citadas22

In literary approaches to the Qur'an, Qur'anic voice is relegated to the unknowability of its divine ‘provenance’, its issuing source of voice, which is implicitly taken to be outside of the text. The fundamental hermeneutic task, which is that of investigating how a text produces meaning, is principally a theological task, but it is assumed in most literary approaches to the Qur'an to be other than the literary critical task. And yet it is this latter task that is seen to reveal the religious meaning of the text. The Qur'an's textuality and unique naẓm may be differently conceived, not as that which is necessarily (and it is the comparative approaches that tend to produce such necessities) the result of the structures of language in the rhetorical and canonical sense, but as the texture of a voice that deploys singular and discontinuous modes of speech beyond the philological assumptions of textuality and the comparative literary assumptions of narrative. What vision of ‘literature’ is then projected? The theoretical move from the assumptions of textuality to the hermeneutical possibilities of voice reposits the classical Islamic approaches that viewed the Qur'an as both the eternal and temporal word of God through the projection of a fundamentally Islamic hermeneutics of proclamation. The exploration of such a hermeneutics of naẓm, it is argued here, should lead to a reconsideration of questions of the literary. As such, the Qur'an can offer a radical modality for addressing the question of crossings in the recent debates on approaches to World Literature

Art · Epistemology · Hermeneutics · Linguistics · Literary criticism · Literary science · Literature · Rhetorical question · Textuality · Education and Islamic Studies · Historical and Linguistic Studies · Islamic Studies and History · Philosophy