Nouman Ali Khan – Western Quranic Studies Israiliyyat – Ep. 10 – The Quran Library
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If you do an investigation of our own
history, our own Fiqh tradition, our own Tafsir
tradition, it's not as cut and dry black
and white as we're presenting it post-colonialism.
That kind of material, you know, later on
you find, you know, Azhari scholars and even
before them people like Ibn Kathir in his
Tafsir, Al-Alusi in his Tafsir, who are
very negative about Isra'iliyyat.
And if they see, you know, patriarchy as
the source of all problems, then the Tafsir
tradition just reflects that patriarchy.
That is to say, it's all men talking
from male perspectives and sidelining women perspectives because
you don't find really in history and tradition.
You can barely, if at all, find a
female Mufassira.
So what are we doing now?
Well, what are you reading?
Who's that?
Handsome fella.
Yeah, I'm just, I saw myself in a
book.
So what's this book called?
Muslim Qur'anic Interpretation Today, Media Genealogies and
Interpretive Communities.
So, of course, I knew that.
I'm just asking you rhetorically.
This is by Professor Johanna Pink, who is
the lead investigator on the Global Qur'an
Project, which I was privileged to be part
of for a little while.
And I happen to know that she's written
about you in here, and you had your
first opportunity to meet her just recently at
a conference.
I did.
So in general today, inshallah, we're talking about
Western non-Muslim writings on the Qur'an,
but it's actually a bit broader than that.
Some of these people actually are Muslims.
But it's also a little bit unfair to
just lump it all together based on the
religion of the author, because there are topics
here that fit in with other things that
we've talked about, and we could certainly have
kept it in there.
But I thought it might be helpful to
look at it.
Just as Western Academic Islamics.
As a group to see some of the
trends and the patterns and the issues that
are being raised there.
So I don't have that many such works
in print, to be honest, but these are
the ones that I do have.
Based on the last discussion about Qur'an
translations, this is one by Bruce Lawrence, which
is the Qur'an in English, a biography.
It's quite a nice treatment of the subject.
I didn't steal it from a library.
I bought it from an ex-library.
This is one called The Art of Reciting
the Qur'an by Christina Nelson.
I read this when I found it in
Cairo in 2004, and I was so surprised
at this treatment of the issue of Qur
'an recitation.
It was so thoughtful and insightful.
And the author actually interviewed some of the
great famous Qur'an reciters, like I'm sure,
I think Sheikh Alhusri, Sheikh Minshawi, Abul Basir,
and she examined the kind of overlaps, but
also distinction between Qur'an recitation and music.
She herself is both an Arabist, a student
of Arabic cultures and language, and of ethnomusicology,
as it's called, so different musical approaches.
That's Sheikh Mustafa Ismail on the front, I'm
pretty sure.
So I actually invited her to come to
do some lectures in the UK in 2006.
So we did at Edinburgh, Cambridge, and at
SOAS in London.
So, lovely lady.
The Man in the Qur'an by Yusuf.
He's got a few important books, looking at
the semantics of the Qur'an, words and
how they're connected, the concepts.
Semantic fields is one of the key words
in his semantics of the Qur'anic.
Oh, I had some this morning.
So this actually is a very influential book,
and certainly useful.
And I've seen over at Marcus Tafsir, they
actually did like a kind of roundtable type
thing on this book.
Oh, really?
Here are a few books from Edinburgh University
Press, my own book, inshallah, will be coming
out from them.
So I'm interested in their back catalogue of
works on the Qur'an.
We've got How to Read the Qur'an
by Karl Ernst.
It's a very popular book.
It's been printed a lot of times.
Qur'an Historical Critical Introduction by Nikolai Sinai,
whom you've also met a couple of times.
And Islam and Literalism by Robert Gleave.
It's not specifically in Qur'anic studies, but
definitely has a lot to do with literal
expressions and what that means in the context
of Qur'an and Hadith and so on.
These are by a couple of Muslim brothers,
actually.
Ramon Harvey and Peter Coppins, both of them
friends of mine.
So the Qur'an and the Just Society
was Ramon's first book based on his PhD.
His supervisor was Professor Abdul Halim, just like
myself.
And he's done a lot of great work
since then, continues to publish and also is
the editor of a series on Islamic scripture
and theology at Edinburgh University Press.
And this one on Seeing God in Sufi
Qur'an Commentaries by Peter Coppins.
He's very strong in tafseer studies and he's
got a lot of interesting papers.
One of his recent papers was about, I'm
trying to remember the actual title of it,
but it was about whether over time the
appreciation for ambiguity and complexity wore off in
works of tafseer.
So he's looking at how the toleration and
the respect for multiple opinions has actually remained
more stable than people tend to think in
the modern period.
It just completely collapsed.
I mean in that regard there's an important
book, not specifically Qur'anic studies again, but
this is an important book which I actually
wanted to show you, especially.
And I haven't read it yet, but to
be honest it's just the title.
The title for me carries so much meaning.
Part of the history of Islam, interesting.
Generally speaking or broadly speaking his argument, and
it's written in German originally and then it's
just recently been released in English as well,
is that throughout Muslim history there's been a
lot more acceptance of the fact that things
can sometimes be a little bit indeterminate, a
little bit ambiguous.
And that even applies to a discussion.
One of the discussions he does touch on
was what we just said about qiraat and
the fact that there are multiple ways of
reading.
And sometimes you can have even a discussion
about is this the better way, is that
the better way.
So there's a search for the best answer
to that question, but not necessarily to say
there is only one answer and every answer
must be wrong, everything else must be deleted,
everything else must be ignored.
You're able to say well this is a
qiraat that we read and we respect the
other qiraat and they exist together.
There's no sense of panic from that.
And that applies in various different fields where
an appreciation of ambiguity is something which is
very healthy.
So he's kind of making that argument but
he's also making a point that this appreciation
plummeted in the later periods and that is
part of the intellectual crisis that Muslims are
suffering from today.
So personally I think there's a lot of
value in his argument even if one could
debate over specifics.
So I think you know some of these
books already.
So you must have read Neil Robinson.
I have.
Discovering the Quran.
Contemporary approach to a veiled text, yes.
One of the first western books I read
on the Quran.
And Professor Abdel Halim, you might have read
this one.
He's got various of his essays that are
compiled in a few.
No I haven't read that one.
Books like this.
So Professor Abdel Halim of course has had
a very important role as being a professor
of Islamic studies and Quranic studies in SOAS,
University of London.
He has made space for plenty of other
people, myself included, to be part of the
Western Academy and to be part of those
discussions.
And you know showing that we can respect
each other, we can have different methodologies and
points of view and we can get along
one way or another.
This is a friend of mine from Al
-Azhar University.
He did his PhD at Birmingham on a
Quranic critique of terrorism.
Quite a nice book.
This is one which I haven't read yet
but the topic seemed so worthwhile that I
bought this one.
The Quran and the aesthetics of pre-modern
Arabic prose.
So again linking Quran within the broader study
of literature and therefore helping to understand how
claims about the Quran and its beauty and
its perfection, how they fit in.
Oh this is actually here the first orientalist
book on the Quran that I bought.
So I don't remember when it was but
this was the first one.
I'm pretty sure it's from Princeton University Press.
The Quran's self-image by Daniel Madigan.
Does he mean by that the way the
Quran describes itself?
Yeah, how it presents itself and almost how
it sees itself.
So this has given rise to a number
of other studies that followed from this.
Self-referentiality of the Quran.
There's at least one edited volume on that
by Stefan Wilder.
We met a French scholar who's written one
which the title is the Quran according to
itself.
We've also met this author, a good friend
of mine, Merijn Van Poota.
So this is his book which has recently
been released with Brill Press in the Netherlands.
Quranic Arabic from its Hijazi origins to its
classical reading traditions.
So he takes a lot of interest in
the history of Arabic language.
He's studying it from the perspective of a
historical linguist and Arabist and he is interested
in looking at what you can understand about
the language of the Quran from its manuscripts
and from its consonantal text and then from
how people have vocalized and pronounced it according
to the qiraat and the reading traditions.
So from that he makes some novel claims
as well about the language of the Quran.
But importantly this helps us to get past
certain oversimplifications that we make.
Oftentimes people think that classical Arabic equals Quranic
Arabic.
Of course classical means that post-Quranic how
things were classified and became standardized and rules
were set in place.
Once you look at those rules as you
and you look back at the Quran you're
like oh it's not following those rules.
So then it can set you into disarray
and then you get people coming along saying
oh the Quran is ungrammatical.
So I have a video with Merijn actually
where we talk about some things and the
last point in the video was specifically about
this question.
Is there a grammatical error in the Quran?
And his answer was well there's no such
thing as a grammatical error.
So no it doesn't.
Just because for him as a linguist the
idea and the category of grammar like that
they look at language as a natural flowing
process.
Modern linguists will say that Scottish English is
just as valid as any.
And why shouldn't it be?
That's yeah this is why you like Merijn.
So we've got lots here but maybe a
kind of subset which is worth highlighting is
that there are lots of books published in
you know talking about gender in the Quran
and I don't have that many of them
but I have a few that I've picked
up over time.
So we have had the opportunity to meet
at least one of these authors.
Yeah we did.
Selene Ibrahim a recent book on women and
gender in the Quran.
I haven't yet read it but I plan
to.
And this one by Hadiya Mubarak.
We saw a bit of her speech.
Yeah.
This book she was the one online.
Yeah she was online.
Yeah I read a little bit of this
book yesterday.
It seems very interesting.
So what I think is she's trying to
show due regard to the Seer tradition which
is strange for a western academic but that's
what she's trying to do.
I didn't get to her conclusions yet but.
So sometimes you do find with people who
are writing in this kind of field that
they have a certain disdain for the commentarial
tradition.
Yeah.
And if they see you know patriarchy as
the source of all problems then the Tafseer
tradition just reflects that patriarchy.
That is to say it's all men talking
from male perspectives and sidelining women perspectives because
you don't find really in our history and
tradition you can barely if at all find
a female Mufassirah.
If they were doing that then it just.
It was interesting.
So we're at this.
It didn't get published and so on.
They had a session on women in the
Quran and at the convention and all these
western academics are sitting there all of them
female and some of them almost all of
them or no two-thirds of them Muslim
at least.
Almost all of them yeah.
Yeah and so a let go of this
narrative.
It's unacademic.
We just have to look at people in
the Quran.
Why are we looking at women in the
Quran or putting a gender lens on this
text.
It's actually creating a bigger problem than solving
it.
Like this was the internal conversation they're having.
So it's interesting.
There are certainly big conversations.
I mean I would say one of those
conversations is represented by the fact that well
these books and in particular Hadi Mubarak's is
sort of saying that we need to give
more attention to the craft of Tafsir than
we have done.
We shouldn't just dismiss that because yes that's
the point she was making.
There are people who operate within the Tafsir
paradigm and she's particularly pointed to Ibn Ashur
who are able and show how you can
come up with in a way novel interpretations
and solutions that are yet within the framework
of legitimate Tafsir exercise.
So yeah a lot of debate also surrounds
this book.
This book was quite a strong intervention.
Aisha Hidayatullah's book on feminist edges of the
Quran and I've read some chapters of it
but basically the argument and what caused the
controversy is she despite coming from a feminist
perspective is saying you know the attempt to
read the Quran as fully egalitarian and you
know and therefore all about equality between men
and women has sometimes gone too far.
Sometimes the authors before her have gone too
far in assuming that that's the case and
therefore sort of reading into reading onto the
text.
Imposing some views onto the text.
So she's a bit more let's say pessimistic
about the Quran you know fulfilling that need
that some people have you know experienced to
find that egalitarian spirit.
So I think that we all probably would
believe in some level of you know on
some level at least that the Quran is
advocating equality.
It's just that in what forms, in what
circumstances, in what manifestations that's where interpretations differ.
But I personally think that this field you
know in a way is happening within western
academia more than it's happening within you know
as a Muslim conversation amongst Muslims.
I don't know if that's fair to say
but it's just my observation and I think
that is a shame.
I can understand how it's happened because I
think just the fact that women's voices get
marginalized so then they have had to find
a space where they can actually make the
argument.
So this is an observation about what's happening
in western academic studies but I have observations
about this subject as per what I see
in the Muslim world whatever little I have
traveled.
So the reality of it is there's a
conservative you know normative Islam that's spread across
the you know a huge chunk of our
population that says we don't need to we
already had this figured out there's no reason
to revisit these issues.
We're fine the way we are.
I don't know why you need to bring
this discussion on our shores and our homes.
Islam gave equality 1400 years ago.
Islam already took care of all of this.
We already solved this problem.
This is not our problem.
This is somebody else's problem.
Great.
Of course no problem at all.
It's not a problem at all.
Everything is fine.
Yeah so there's the everything is fine narrative.
At the same time you have young men
and women and actually even working professional men
and women in Muslim countries in massive numbers
that are completely disenfranchised from what they know
about Islam on the issue of gender.
They're thinking it in their own circles.
They're saying it if you provide them the
freedom to speak their mind then they're saying
it also.
I've experienced this firsthand on multiple accounts and
they need a room for that conversation that
is not allowed to take place.
So what that does if there's a need
to discuss something, figure something out, talk it
out, explore it even academically at a level
and at a level that everybody can participate
in then you get enough people that are
just being suppressed so much.
The analogy I give is if you press
down on a spring and you keep pressing
and keep pressing then eventually something will give
and it will explode.
So there's an element within the Muslim population
now in different countries that's exploded and they're
like you know what away with Islam, away
with this patriarchal nonsense and there's like far
left feminism or death kind of like you
know almost a militancy and we look at
those women that are protesting and you know
speaking out and all of it and we
look at them as the problem.
They're not the problem.
They are actually the result of an unaddressed
pain point as far as I'm concerned.
Like there's an issue, there's a discussion, there's
a narrative that needed addressing, there were questions
that needed to be answered and the answers
that were being provided we say that they
represent Islam.
I say that we chose the convenient copy
-paste answers and not realizing that those answers
aren't enough and that requires more investigation.
And those answers that were comfortable to those
who are comfortable being comfortable which for the
most part I'm saying men.
So we don't have to revisit anything because
it doesn't affect men.
You'd be surprised it's also a good number
of women that are in a traditional setting
and they're comfortable with tradition the way it
is.
Now the question is when we say we
need to revisit some issues you could think
of this as oh this is a liberal
agenda.
This is rethinking Islam.
There's re-evaluating you know what the Qur
'an and Sunnah say etc.
The problem with that account is that a
lot of what we consider traditional values if
you do an investigation of our own history,
our own fiqh tradition, our own tafsir tradition
it's not as cut and dry black and
white as we're presenting it post-colonialism.
There is in fact an intellectual decline and
some positions are being dishonestly presented as the
only position or the most convincing position when
in matter of fact it's not the most
convincing position.
So this has happened on a number of
occasions with me and in order for me
to grapple with this problem instead of coming
up with a conclusion what I decided to
do was in private sit with traditional ulama,
sit with experts and muhaddithin and say hey
this issue what I'm studying is leading me
to conclusion x.
Can you help me understand where I'm going
wrong here like help me figure this out
and to my shock more often than not
very conservative very traditional ulama are in agreement
with what I'm saying but only in private
settings and the reason for that is not
because they're dishonest the reason for that is
we have a mafia mentality in certain fragments
of the muslim community and if even scholars
speak their mind on something based on their
years of exhaustive study not because they've become
some puppet of a liberal agenda because they're
they've studied something but they're going to say
something that goes against the the the mob's
emotional comfort zone.
Unfortunately there's more than one mob you know
so yeah there's anything you either you're a
simp or you're isis right that's this is
life on twitter right so okay if you
say anything the people on the others you
know the other side are going to just
throw everything at you.
So here we are we've been discussing our
tradition we've been discussing our scholarship now we're
looking at also western scholarship and there's other
things we have to discuss but like we
have to really make a conscious decision to
hold on to right like here's what we're
finding here's what we're going to discuss we're
open to being corrected but we're not open
to being intimidated into silence not by western
criticism because it doesn't match their sensibilities and
not by some social norms that have been
established in the muslim community that don't want
to hear what actual investigation into the quran
into islam is saying because we don't want
to hear that that's not that's not what
i heard when i was growing up sorry
i'm actually not sorry we've got to discuss
it you know so speaking of discussing yeah
um you know we need to have platforms
and avenues through which serious research can be
published so we have got do you like
the transition was you know it was okay
i'll give it five out of so examples
can be journals within the muslim world or
of course there are western journals as well
so i've just got a few examples of
that genre of works here so this is
um this one i think is from egypt
but published in london if i remember correctly
called it's not a very famous one but
there are actually bigger ones that come out
of saudi um but this has some quite
uh prominent authors if you have scanned through
the names you may recognize yeah and this
was one that we picked up when we
went to malaysia the university of malaya have
this journal called quranica they don't know but
they stole that name from me because my
organization quranica used to be yes yes um
that's how i was introduced to you so
this is a quite old edition that i
happen to have with me um but you
know it's just examples of research around the
quran that gets published and you know it
can be in all sorts of topics um
it can be about historical topics or indeed
can be on on things that pertain to
the here and now and the future um
using the quran as you know the basis
for our explorations um this was a conference
that i attended in istanbul they have a
whole series on ottoman this this this particular
one is about ottoman tafsir and then they
have got ottoman hadith studies ottoman kalam studies
ottoman interesting you know also different ones so
this one all about tafsir most of it
is in turkish there were a few in
arabic and then a few in english so
i have a paper in here which i
presented there about it's called the digital mufasir
so it's about the tafsir al-alusi that
was so that i can get into the
ottoman conference i was like i'll make it
about alusi but i'll also make it about
something future facing so i didn't want to
look at it purely historically so what i
discussed in there is um imagine as it's
reimagining the tafsir of al-alusi for a
new era so i said imagine that we
managed to bring al-alusi to our modern
day using a time machine or we went
back to his time with the tools that
we have have this flick through if you
want and he wanted to compose this tafsir
how could we use digital tools to support
the production of that tafsir so the reason
for asking that question is to say well
if we wanted something as good as or
even greater than al-alusi in the future
how can digital approaches to authorship be brought
to bear instead of just doing the same
old book approach which which was the limit
of what they were able to to use
at their time uh so sometimes slightly zany
ideas these are a few issues i have
of the journal of studies i have a
few myself yeah which comes out of suas
and is printed in edinburgh um so these
are the ones typically that i've got a
paper in yes so so i'm sorry the
shaheen affair and the evolution of us all
of us here yeah we talked about that
one yeah uh about the solution and the
evolutionary reading of the quran so that was
in 2018 2019 and then this year i
had this one called fights and flights two
underrated alternatives to dominant readings in tafsir so
yeah journal of quranic studies uh the chief
editor is professor abdul halim so you know
it's got a special place in my heart
but um generally we uh as academics try
to publish in multiple journals and reach multiple
audiences so that's journals now you're ready for
another smooth transition i'm so ready so having
talked about some of the western writings we
have here also uh gabriel side reynolds has
got a couple of books uh which are
very significant and important for us to consider
the quran and its biblical subtext yeah and
this one the quran and the bible which
is kind of uh you know it's a
translation of the quran by ali quli and
karai his name is ali quli karai um
he's a shia translator of the quran but
the footnotes here or the notes that he's
added uh gabriel reynolds has added are essentially
what um western academics have identified in terms
of intertexts or connecting passages from the bible
you know potentially sources from the bible or
elsewhere according to their perspective i mean yeah
um so then of course you know for
muslims it's very straightforward and simple to think
that it's not a source but merely you
know something in common because allah revealed the
quran and he revealed the books uh before
yeah from which these things appear but of
course this ties closely with a genre which
i'm sort of pulling up here which is
called israeli um roughly speaking judaica or judeo
-christian materials um and you know in the
early periods especially and even later uh would
include such things in their commentaries so when
you have stories of the prophets for example
and the quran can often be very brief
and leave out a lot of the detail
for very uh high wisdom reasons yet somehow
when you are writing a commentary it feels
unsatisfactory to just sort of say and we
don't know this and we don't know that
they'd rather say well you know we have
some information that we heard uh that this
prophet actually this person was called that and
this was their name and this is where
they lived and so they add extra details
and the source of that you know typically
isn't from the prophet sallallahu alaihi wasallam himself
which would make it hadith and authoritative but
it comes from you know those who were
around who knew about the previous scriptures converts
from the people of the book or even
maybe sometimes not converts even yeah but discussions
and things that would circulate so that kind
of material you know later on you find
uh you know azhari scholars and even before
them people like ibn kathir and his tafsir
al-alusi and his tafsir who are very
negative about israeliyat especially when they become very
extensive and you know elaborate and beside the
point of what the quran is is focusing
on but if you go to the early
period you find they were fairly easy with
this like they didn't necessarily say these uh
texts and narrations are the authority to interpret
the quran but they just saw it as
reading it alongside you know does no harm
i think western academics at least they didn't
realize they were doing this for me but
they did they got me thinking about israeliyat
a certain way so the old way was
we shouldn't rely on them because we can't
trust what the bible is telling us and
we shouldn't use that to fill the gaps
in the story of the being told by
the quran well and good the western academics
come along and the first thing they notice
is the bible is clearly being contradicted by
the quran in the same story the quran
is telling the story of noah and abraham
and jesus and whoever else in very different
ways so they're common ground and there's also
these divergences right so the first wave in
western academics that i that i have got
familiarized with was that the quran simply got
it wrong there's there's the bible account there
wasn't very good plagiarism so it's plagiarized from
the bible but not a very good job
later waves in western academics comes along and
says actually this doesn't look like plagiarism at
all this looks like a retelling so they
call it the retelling what that means to
them is that the bible has a story
and the quran seems to put a new
spin on that story i look at it
from a confessional iman point of view and
what i look at it as is the
so the quran is taking an existing story
that was not only found in the bible
among the christian and jewish communities but that's
somehow also spread in the arabian region there
is interaction between uh jewish christians and other
other faith communities so it was an interesting
example of that it's not a biblical story
it's a post-biblical story of saints that
was popular among a certain section of christians
so what the quran is doing is it
is taking something that people are vaguely familiar
with and then not in great detail to
contradict everything that they've heard before but actually
tell the most important parts of the story
that number one highlights what has been corrupted
from what's become popular right so then okay
so it's clearly diverging which means the details
about names and lineage and location and all
of that stuff is fine but now oh
that's what really happened so the quran isn't
focused on all of it it's focused on
the part that got needs attention that needs
attention and it's recalibrating it and bringing it
back to a purposeful story so it's no
longer just history or interesting facts or interesting
legends or stories now it's purposeful so studying
the biblical account is actually really beneficial in
not that over simplistically coming back to the
muslim attitude oh we don't take the seer
from these sources because we can't trust them
actually i think we should look at it
from a different lens the quran is offering
us by doing this biblical subtext study an
insight into how did the mind of the
jewish and the christian average jew and christian
and the rabbi and the priest how how
were they processing these stories and when the
quran came along how did they see that
the quran is hitting at some really key
pain points that the most knowledgeable among them
know about right so it's it's doing something
really remarkable here now one of the places
that i thought was the most um fascinating
because musa is such a huge topic in
the quran and moses is you know a
huge chunk of of the old testament is
is a cent he's a central figure really
of the old testament um we have a
story of him that they don't have we
have the musa story and there's it's nowhere
to be found i thought it was profoundly
interesting that this occurs in surat al-ghaf
where if we are to trace our narrations
in our tafasir about what's in the backdrop
of surat al-ghaf there's an attempt to
prove the prophet is not very knowledgeable so
ask him riddle riddle questions right and allah
remarkably tells a story that the supposedly knowledgeable
of their own prophet aren't knowledgeable of regarding
their own prophet because there's no subtext for
the musa story and orientalists are like is
this gilgamesh is this taken from this legend
or that legend i look at his quran
is doing something completely different here it's saying
yep i'll tell you something you didn't even
know about your own prophet a journey he
took that clearly he didn't see fit to
tell you about you know so it seems
that the you know approaching these things whether
you want to term this the study of
israeliyat or you want to think of it
as subtext of the quran it's a very
rich field there's also absolutely uh a need
for for greater precision in the approaches and
i think you've you've done your own moraja
that is to say you've revised your own
stance on that over time as you see
more there are scholars also in the arab
world like this group of scholars led by
dr al-sa'ad al-tayyar and marcus
tafsir published this one and here they're making
the argument to an arab scholarly audience that
you know we need to sort of wind
back some of the negativity towards israeli and
recognize a role that they can play so
i think that there's a further conversation to
be had you know especially with things that
we've gleaned from our experiences and our readings
in in western academia discuss when the time
comes with marcus tafsir and this group what
we did with surat yusuf because that was
a really interesting exercise of the biblical subtext
and how the quran diverges and from what
i came to know later even non-muslim
academics and actually even christian missionaries and people
in the confessional space in the christian space
and the jewish space were actually interested in
what we were doing with surat yusuf and
joseph in the bible yeah so there's a
richness to engaging with those texts but not
just simply throwing things on top of that's
right um so let's conclude this with a
work that i i know that you're familiar
with yeah this is the english version of
it is called the onomastic miracle in the
quran it's a strange word i don't think
many people know onomastic but it's to do
with proper names in the quran especially names
of the prophets and so on and it's
arabic title in the so the the same
author summarized it in english that's what's happened
here but it's called min air jazz the
quran um so he makes a very surprising
kind of argument yeah he does um and
quite bold claims actually which i know some
people find almost disqualifying right in the beginning
that he sees that all languages descend from
arabic yeah this cannot really stand but regardless
of that what he does on a micro
level is he looks at individual names of
for example ibrahim islam and he says well
here's how hebrew scholars have tended to analyze
that name and this is what they think
it means but in the quran we have
a pointer towards another kind of meaning so
he makes an argument based on his knowledge
of semitics and it's interesting he adds something
else so he says he makes the claim
sometimes that biblical scholars got it wrong so
he'll say about abraham it's not a it's
not a hebrew name because he wasn't a
hebrew he is he's in ancient babylonia so
it's a babylonian name so we have to
look at the babylonian language to try and
do the etymology of his name he'll say
about musa instead of looking at mu shay
which is something along the lines of something
in the water ma and shay jewish hebrew
closeness to to mu and shay which fits
the story right but he says no they
wouldn't have they wouldn't have named him in
hebrew because he was raised in the pharaoh's
castle as a prince so he must have
been named in the language of the master
not the because he wasn't raised as a
slave so the name given to him must
not have been in the slave language right
so he says well maybe if we want
to look at explore musa we should look
at ancient egyptian to figure out what what
musa means so he's he he's he traces
i think five or six languages that he
says that foreign names in the quran non
-arab names in the quran can be traced
back to uh the the second part of
his argument is that the quran is situating
these names in contexts which explain the meaning
which explain the meaning of the name so
what he's saying for example with ismail uh
is actually he is does trace it to
hebrew this one and he says it's yashmail
or yashmail which is actually il is their
word for god like allah and then yash
yashma is like yes to listen and yes
my allah is allah listens so ismail is
actually god listens and the story is when
the baby was born abraham is overjoyed and
he says god listens and that becomes his
name right so but that's i think uh
within the jewish understanding as well yes yes
but with the ibrahim for example he says
well it actually means imam yeah i remember
then he says then in the first leader
of many leader of many is what he
breaks it up as yeah but then but
then he gives an arabic imam because it's
like in the in the ayah itself the
first mention of yeah there's a there's a
pointer within the text towards the meaning that's
what he was doing with ismail when he
says you listen right so so he so
he's made these kinds of correlations with about
60 names in the quran so i think
it's a very ambitious project and one which
um again like when we said about the
uh the one by bism massai where it's
quite a radical proposition it throws you know
new ideas onto the table yeah which deserve
to be reckoned with and then you might
find that not everything holds up but even
if 50 of what he says is is
solid and sound it would still be an
amazing thing so one really cool one that
comes to mind is uh david which david
which is daoud to us right and david
is actually deed is um might and david
is the the one of might and the
quran uses aid aid which you know kind
of translates daoud in that way yeah he's
got some interesting ones uh i asked sharif
on our team yeah to evaluate some of
his work and he has criticisms of some
of it he approves of some of it
so it was interesting i put together a
kind of uh a work group to go
through it a bit by bit i have
summarized notes on it if you want them
yeah so so alhamdulillah so this was our
our look at biblical studies there's there's another
there's a section you wanted to do about
yeah so that's that's next that's next okay
inshallah so we'll talk about that everyone hope
you guys are enjoying it we certainly are
goodbye now get out how would you like
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