Book: Readings in the Qur’an

560 pages

• The impact of political conditions on Orientalism
• Tools of the contemporary researcher
• Monotheistic religions and modernity
• Four postulates governing traditional interpretation
• Four Orientalist trends
• Arkoun calls for a critical, scholarly reading
• Arkoun rejects separating the heart from the mind
• Arkoun calls for redefining the wondrous and captivating
• The crisis of Arab-Islamic critical thought
• Occasions of revelation frame the verses
• Occasions of revelation are not the context itself
• The legend of the People of the Cave between Christianity and Islam
• Principles of jurisprudence reinforce the authority of interpretation
• War verbs that signify violence
• A horizon of fragility and uncertainty
• The expressions of al-Fātiḥa are inexhaustible
• The Mother of the Book and the revealed books
• The importance of structure and rhythm
• The priority of historical and anthropological study
• Abraham as a new foundational construct
• Abraham brings together biblical and Arab elements
• Concealing factual data
• Projecting later concepts onto the text
• Ibn Mujāhid’s reform changed the history of the text
• A critical historical reconstruction of tradition
• Redefining the concepts of mind and heart
• The world is recreated at every moment
• Reopening ijtihād and critiquing reason
• Rereading the Qur’an historically
• The possibility of replacing the old Sharīʿa
• Denying the Qur’an’s historicity is linked to Hanbalism
• Historians’ neglect of mental and intellectual data
• The expansion of education remained quantitative
• The connection between religious reason and the human sciences
• Differences among legal schools in transmitted reports
• The impossibility of restoring the first Islam
• The impossibility of reaching God’s word directly
• Using the term Islam requires a finer distinction
• The stability of Qur’anic discourse
• The continuing need for meaning
• Religious discourse shares general features
• Meccan objection to revelation
• Reason coupled with imagination and memory
• The first verses as a general prelude
• Legislative verses in the Orientalist reading
• Legislative verses are not the only criterion of reading
• The legislative verse as an example of legal character
• The verse is linked to reflection
• Adab as a comprehensive epistemic concept
• Monotheistic religions mutually exclude one another
• Orthodoxy as accumulated history
• Orthodoxy keeps mediation at the level of faith
• Myth is a positive symbolic language
• Myth is a foundational concept
• Religious origins have social historicity
• The principles of jurisprudence are no longer sufficient
• Militant fundamentalism as political protest
• Fundamentalism and political threat
• Festivals support local particularities
• Festivals reveal the interweaving of multiple spheres
• Multiple systems in al-Rāzī’s reading
• Ideology mobilizes the masses
• Consensus is a socio-historical product
• Political Islam and violence
• Islam between theology and politics
• Islam and politics must be studied historically and critically
• The human being as a second addressee
• Ijtihād needs renewal
• The response to repentance determines inclusion and exclusion
• Colonialism, national movements, and authoritarian regimes
• Making use of the human sciences
• Suspicion toward the human sciences
• The objection regards separation as a modern projection
• The shift from ijtihād to modern criticism
• The transition from the spoken to the written
• The vertical and horizontal dimensions of the pilgrimage
• The binary structure of the Qur’anic world
• The narrative structure of the Qur’an
• Qur’anic structure is dialogical
• Extreme structuralism neglects history
• Juridical interpretation produces a particular Islam
• Popular and intermediate interpretations of myth
• History as the product of multiple interactions
• History as mediator between revelation and truth
• History shapes consciousness and social acts
• The inner religious experience is deeper than outward appearances
• The prophetic experience as a framework for founding Islam and politics
• Textual criticism raises decisive questions
• Linguistic-semiotic analysis reveals the unthought
• Grammatical analysis reveals the author
• The analysis focuses on linguistic functioning
• The political turn of modern ijtihād
• The social imaginary shapes societies
• The overlap between the religious and the social
• Translation is not the original text
• Synchrony and historicity are complementary
• Arabization limits epistemic openness
• Modern education after independence
• Heritage exegesis is testimony, not authority
• Traditional interpretation is historicist and materialist
• Traditional interpretation and the framing narrative
• Traditional interpretation obscures the Qur’an’s historicity
• The old exegesis constructs a continuous interpretive narrative
• Inherited interpretation freezes meaning
• Sanctification is a permanent human tendency
• Tradition resists modernity
• The first reception cannot be recovered
• Distinguishing imagination from the imaginary
• Distinguishing between the two events
• Distinguishing between the oral and the written
• Distinguishing between the primordial and historical Qur’an
• Distinguishing between the immanent and the transcendent order
• Distinguishing between Qur’anic consciousness and later theology
• Lexical recurrence indicates a relative presence
• Repentance means religious and political submission
• The tension between religion and science in Islamic thought
• Verbal tensions reflect social conflict
• The three major Islamic currents
• The two currents confronting Islamic thought
• Popular culture contributed to shaping Islamic sensibility
• Theological binaries entrench a rejected logic
• The Abbasid revolution reflects broader social transformations
• The French Revolution and the transfer of legitimacy
• The first community becomes a recurring paradigm
• Al-Suyūṭī’s encyclopedic compilation
• Combining philology and history
• Bringing together the moments of reading
• Contemporary intellectual stagnation
• Jinn and angels as tangible material beings
• The need for a Qur’anic typology
• The need for channels of transmission and debate
• The need for multiple approaches
• The pilgrimage as a spiritual launch
• The pilgrimage as a religious and human phenomenon
• The pilgrimage as a multidimensional phenomenon
• The pilgrimage is not a geographical transfer
• The pilgrimage and the continuity of older elements
• The pilgrimage carries a semantic and ontological transformation
• The pilgrimage reveals the limitations of two readings
• European modernity as a violent intrusion
• Modernity changed religious legislation
• The Qur’anic event is not the Islamic event
• Caution against predefinitions
• Archaeological excavation between text and tradition
• Rational truth parallel to revelation
• Truth and violence
• Religious life as a composite history
• Islamic discourse uses the Qur’an politically
• Qur’anic discourse nourished protest imagination
• Qur’anic discourse is multidimensional
• Qur’anic discourse is multi-generic
• Qur’anic discourse as a positive mythic model
• Qur’anic discourse differs from Islamic discourse
• Qur’anic discourse aims at action
• Secondary discourses and the transformation of symbols
• Salvationism and the Mahdi
• Symbolic imagination in the Middle Ages
• A call for a critique of Islamic reason
• The Qur’anic call to rational reflection
• Religion was left to the men of tradition
• Religion, state, and worldly affairs as historical relations
• The Islamic vision makes God the measure of meaning
• Al-Rāzī interprets the verses using the prevailing sciences
• Al-Rāzī incorporates the sciences into interpretation
• Rejection severs the link with Qur’anic discourse
• Ideological censorship and freedom of inquiry
• Religious symbols as fuel for mobilization
• Eschatological time is higher than worldly time
• The new authority imitates the prophetic model
• Authority in Sūrat al-Tawba
• Hearing corresponds to direct human knowledge
• The Qur’anic sūra is read as a multi-unit symbolic structure
• The sūra as a linguistic exception
• Divine sovereignty and political legitimacy
• The original context of the discourse
• Legitimacy after the Prophet’s death
• A time slice is a condition for synchronic study
• Sharīʿa historically prevailed over rationality
• Sharīʿa alone is not sufficient for the age
• Rituals establish the identity of early Islam
• Rituals renew the presence of the sacred
• Historical totality has not been achieved
• Heritage testimonies reveal the accumulation of meanings of the pilgrimage
• Witnessing links history with salvation
• The real social conflict
• Historical conflict in sacred language
• The certitude-driven voice that rejects theories
• Pronouns perform an organizing function
• The symbolic energy of the Qur’an
• Al-Ṭabarī reconciles reports and readings
• The long historical path
• The Qur’anic phenomenon produces central binaries
• The Qur’anic mythic world
• Wonders are called signs
• The marvelous and astonishing as a field for divine manifestation
• The wondrous is a basic element of religious consciousness
• Linguistic presentation alone is not sufficient
• Religious solidarity instead of family solidarity
• Creeds later turn into certainties
• Traditional reason in monotheistic religions