Customer Reviews

Discovering the Qur'an, Second Edition: Discovering the Qur'an: A Contemporary Approach to a Veiled Text

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The book contains thorough considerations of remarkable features of the text (the sophistication and precision of its use of language) that have been recognised by Muslim scholars for centuries, but to which Western Islamicists have usually been blind. I was disappointed by the discussion of the Prophet's miracles -- every Western author assumes that the Quran expilictly denies that the Prophet could work any visible miracles, on the basis of certain verses, but nobody bothers to examine, even casually, the way in which the great Muslim scholars and exegetes of the past have understood those verses. For example, when the unbelievers are quoted as demanding a sign, this has usually been understood to mean that they were demanding signs *in addition to* those that had already come to them (and which they dismissed, according to the Quran, as "evident sorcery" -- 37:14)-- so that the fact that those demands were not met does not mean that no miracles were performed by the Prophet, nor that God did not bless him in any miraculous ways during the course of his mission. Again, Robinson is wrong to argue that because the Quran doesn't give any detail about the splitting of the moon, or the night journey, that all the traditional accounts of those two miracles are to be dismissed as fabrication -- the Quran very often doesn't go into any detail about contemporary events, and uses a concise , elliptical style to allude to them, presumably because people at that time were familiar with all the details. The theories of Crone and Crook, which are so implausible that it's hard to state them without seeming to caricature them, are clearly debunked, as are the speculations of M. Watt on the Quran's use of "We" (here, Robinson could have pointed out that if many statements of the form "We do such-and-such" were meant to be understood as spoken by the angels rather than God, then they would almost certainly be followed by a phrase like "by God's leave" -- the Quran is jealous of God's unity and absolute power, and attributing actions to angels without referring to God in a pagan environment runs the risk of encouraging popular beliefs about the angels being deities, whereas the Quran stresses that they are servants and nothing more). Well worth reading.

Neal Robinson has provided an exceptional addition to the field of Quranic studies that is helpful to a reader of any background on a journey to discovering the Quran.

Robinson's book provides thoughtful direction to many of the intricacies of the Quran that are absent in English renderings of interpretations of Quranic meaning.

Though I may disagree with the author on a small number of points, if there is any fault in the book it is that its well developed consideration of very important topics only increases your desire for more of it!