Discovering the Qur'an: A Contemporary Approach to a Veiled Text
When I think about critical theory, I am immediately reminded of two equally unpleasant images. The first is my high school English teacher (who resembled a lanky adolfo becquer (both in his moustache and his maudliness)) attempting to get his 11th graders psychoanalyze Stephen Crane stories (his personal literary canon was limited to American transcendentalists and John Steinbeck) and read libidinal imagery into Mark Twain (although I always imagined the Mississippi river more as America's cleaved vaginal watershed). The second image is a blurred one. Blurred because my eyes usually cross anytime I try to read a quote by Derrida, such as:
if the alterity of the other is posed, that is, only posed, does it not amount to the same, for example in the form of the "constituted object" or of the "informed product" invested with meaning etc.?
So reading Discovering the Qur'an by Neal Robinson was a welcome relief. Literary theory doesn't have to be cockamamy chasing of semantic tails if you are actually trying to discover biographical and historical setting that led to the textual imperfections and literary devices used in such books as the qur'an. In neatly arranged chapters (the books anti-bullshit cut to the chase style governs even its chapter organization) Robinson shows how such things as alliteration, metaphor, and rhyme lend clues to both the historical origin of surahs as well as the Qur'an's seemingly mystical ability to captivate listeners, reciters, and readers. He shows where you can actually see mistakes in structure. You begin to be able to tell the rhetorical tone of meccan and medinan surahs from one another. He does a line by line analysis of a surah to show how these literary devices create dramatic tension, etc. It is an awesome introduction to secular analysis of the Qura'n. When I got done reading I thought "what the hell is Arkoun bitching about." In the unthought in comporary islam" he says he wants to "introduce ways of 'problematising' the larger category of revelation through the example of the Qur'an and propose a program of research aimed at constructing a new field for the comparitive study of revelation as a historic, linguistic, cultural and anthropological articulation of thought." I guess what he means is that there is a disconnect between the very fleshed out secular analysis of the qur'an that has already been performed, the desacralization of the text, and the continuance, by everyone else, or treating the exegesis, mythology, ethics, and political witchhunting (the sword verse comes into mind) as somehow free from the nitty-gritty contextualization of all the verses they treat as sources. It is always weird when either side of the Islamic debate uses quotes. I took a whole idiotic class on islamic peace paradigms that plucked ayats out in order to show how realpolitik and sufi-eco-drum-cirlce-universalism found support in the holy text. Some verses are so specifically relevant to the political turmoil of the medinan community, that extracting them in this way is like practicing hermeneutics on an old issue of a small town newspaper. Does Arkoun mean we should realize the inherent silliness of treating the text as being a semantic swiss army knife? All I know is that Robinson seems to make it all seem very easy and matter of fact, that studying the use of alliteration is more useful, if not more interesting, in understanding Islam. Less worrying about diffe'rance, more about how many times they (Allah, Gabriel, Muhhamad) could rhyme the word ma3ood (mashhood, a5dood, waqood, qa3ood, shahood).
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