Conferences, Workshops and Speeches
| The Meaning of the Word: Lexicology and Tafsir, A Pre-Conference Workshop Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) Atlanta, Friday 29 October 2010, 9.30am - 2.00pm Venue: Marriot Marquis – International 5 Building on the successful Tafsir Workshop run by Karen Bauer at the American Academy of Religion (AAR) conference project in Chicago 2008, this workshop explored how exegetes approach the meanings of individual words in the Qur’an, and debated how religious beliefs are informed by discussions of lexicology. This area of tafsir encompasses many different disciplines, and is too difficult a task for an individual to undertake. The workshop brought a number of scholars together with wide-ranging expertise and is part of the Institute’s commitment to promote scholarship in Qur’anic and Tafsir Studies.
The IIS hosted a Bookstand in the Book Exhibit Hall. 9.20 Opening Remarks
11.15 Panel 2: Hermeneutics and the Development of Lexicology (Chair: Shakwat Toorawa)
13.15 Lunch with Closing Remarks
14.00 Close Jamal Ali Abu Hatim al-Razi (d. 322/934) was an Ismaili preacher (daʿi) known for his Kitab al-Islah and Aʿlam al-Nubuwwa. He was also the author of Kitab al-Zina, a glossary of Qur’anic and Islamic words. The Kitab al-Zina, which has never been published in its entirety, is noteworthy for several reasons. Among these are Razi’s stubborn unwillingness to openly declare any sort of Ismaili ideas anywhere in the book. Despite this, Razi nonetheless manages to express Ismaili ideas, but in a hidden, secretive way. Razi’s use of these Ismaili approaches in organizing his book is exemplified in his treatment of the word kalima (‘word), which demonstrates many aspects of the overall approach that he takes in Kitab al-Zina. He gives numerous ideas that had been circulating in his time regarding the meaning of kalima, most of which stem from attempts at Qur’anic interpretation. He also includes one treatment of the word which hints at Ismaili Neoplatonic thought, but he does not declare outright that he believes in a Neoplatonic metaphysics. A second benefit to examining Razi’s approach to the word kalima is that it clarifies a debate that has taken place over the centuries regarding the differences between this word, its plural form kalim, and the associated verbal noun kalam. The debate began with attempts to explain Qur’anic usage of each of these variants in the Qur’an, but expanded to become a full debate in its own right. Using Razi as a starting point, we are able to trace this dispute back to the early grammarians.
Hebert Berg ʿAbd Allah b. ʿAbbas, cousin of Muhammad and ancestor of the Abbasid caliphs, came to be seen as the single most authoritative early mufassir in Sunni Islam. According to his biography, he transmitted information from 30 people, including Muhammad and the first four caliphs, and transmitted this knowledge and his own teachings to six family members, at least four Companions, and over 75 others, including major exegetes such as ʿIkrima, Saʿid b. Jubayr, Qatada, Mujahid, and the fourth Shi‘i Imam. With such an influence (whether real or imagined), one would expect an exegetical ‘School of Ibn ʿAbbas’. By examining a few passages of the Qur’an and their exegesis by Ibn ʿAbbas and by a number of his ‘students’, this paper makes the provisional conclusion that in terms of interpretation and methodology, there was no such school. Moreover, Ibn ʿAbbas’s authoritative status seems a product of later mufassirs, not his ‘students’. Ayesha Chaudhry This paper compares the exegetical treatment of the term nushuz as it appears in the Qur'anic text in reference to wives and husbands. While pre-modern exegetes acknowledge that in both cases the root of n-sh-z means to rise, this rising is interpreted in completely different ways with regard to its application to husbands and wives. The manner in which exegetes interpret nushuz for husbands and wives tells us a great deal about their understanding of the marital relationship. I argue that the fact that pre-modern exegetes interpreted wifely and husbandly nushuz to have different meanings suggests that they were less concerned with maintaining a cohesive, consistent definition of nushuz and were more concerned with interpreting nushuz to fulfill their vision of an appropriate marital relationship. That this conception, with varying definitions of nushuz for husbands and wives, was consistently held across vast expanses of time and geography, as well as across juridical and theological schools indicates not only that a hierarchical vision of the marital relationship was closely connected to the social and historical reality of patriarchy in which the exegetes lived, but that this context played a central role in how pre-modern exegetes interpreted nushuz.
Michael Pregill In his influential discussion of the development of exegesis in Qur’anic Studies, Wansbrough notes that certain important surviving works of the 2nd/8th century contain anachronistic material that he characterizes as “editorial intrusions.” This seems to be the case with the lexicographic work of the grammarian al-Farraʾ (d. 208/822), Maʿani al-Qurʾan. Wansbrough observes the pervasive ‘tension’ in the work between ‘haggadic’ or narrative elements and the “masoretic” – i.e. grammatical and text-critical – material that should dominate in a work in the genre of ʿilm al-lugha. However, one might argue that the “intrusion” of “haggadic” elements in the work signals something different, namely the increasing dominance of a narrativistic approach (that is, tafsir ‘proper’?) in ʿulum al-Qur’an as the disciplines were coalescing in the time of al-Farraʾ. It is possible that as the various branches of scholarship dealing with the Qur’an crystallized into their mature forms in the 3rd/9th century, the professionalization of tafsir as a discipline, in which the narrative approach had historically dominated, led scholars engaged in other discourses (lexicographers, muhaddithun, historians, etc.) to defer to the mufassirun, their opinions, and their approaches more and more over time. This initial accommodation of the narrativistic approach in the lexicographic discipline was probably only the first stage in a much larger and drawn-out process in which lexicography and tafsir – originally distinct discourses – came together and then drew apart repeatedly over the centuries. Devin Stewart A number of the terms that have puzzled interpreters of the Qur’an may be explained as instances of poetic license, and more specifically as instances of what I have termed cognate substitution, and this possibility has often been dismissed, deemed unlikely, or under-emphasized by commentators. Cognate substitution involves the replacement of a hypothetical, underlying term with a cognate word of a different form, such as taḍlil for an underlying ḍalal, for the sake of end-rhyme. I will examine a number of these cases where root consonants are preserved but the form is altered for the sake of rhyme, including those identified by Friedrun Müller in Untersuchungen zur Reimprosa im Koran (Berlin, 1969), and others, including what appear to be proper nouns such as tuwa, tasnim, laẓa, etc. In some cases, the exegetes do not recognize the connection with a cognate of a different form, while in others they do. A well-known crux of this type is al-Ṣamad (Q. 112:2), which has been interpreted in very many ways, as Rosenthal has discussed in an article devoted to that single word. Some of these interpretations recognize a connection with an underlying term ṣamid or ṣamud, though they do not explicitly claim that ṣamad is a result of cognate substitution for the sake of rhyme. Brett Wilson Debates surrounding the translation of the Qur’an led to discussion of the very nature of language and the epistemology of interpretation. Lexicography played a pivotal role in the interpretation and translation of the Qur’an in the late Ottoman Empire. In addition to the challenge of comprehending the Qur’an, Ottoman and Turkish interpreters grappled with the problem of rendering the text into Turkish, a language undergoing rapid change in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In fact, several intellectuals complained that Turkish lacked an adequate modern linguistic apparatus in terms of having formal dictionaries and grammars. Given that some translators and interpreters of the Qur’an lacked madrasa training, dictionaries –Arabic and Turkish as well as Persian and French - were indispensible in this venture. This paper will examine the use of lexicography in Turkish renderings of the Qur’an and probe selected interpretations of Qur’anic words and phrases. Travis Zadeh An anonymous manuscript fragment, Mashhad MS 2309, edited by Ahmad ʿAli Rajaʾi (Tehran, 1974), preserves an early example of translating the Qur’an into Persian using rhymed, metered prose. Based on stylistic and linguistic evidence this particular rhyming translation appears to date to the tenth century. While this fragment has received attention in regard to its significance for the development of New Persian poetics, relatively little has been said about its importance for the history of Persian exegetical literature, its relationship to the larger theological discourse concerning the linguistic inimitability of the Qur’an, or its reflection of homiletic and didactic uses of Persian within the sphere of scriptural hermeneutics. Of particular interest are the paraphrastic, and largely rhetorical means employed throughout the translation of engaging with various lexical problems. The paraphrastic character of the translation addresses questions of meaning and signification obliquely, balancing exegetical expansion with a homiletic use of rhyme and rhythm. My paper situates these practices of equivalence making and interpretive expansion in relation to later rhyming and verse translations, and to the broader development of Persian exegetical literature. 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