This study addresses the riddle of al-Baqara’s internal organization, utilizing new insights from literary theory and Biblical Studies to identify the sura’s structure and unifying themes. It also explores the possible added value in approaching al-Baqara as a whole compositional unit, as opposed to a conglomeration of isolated verse-groups. The dissertation begins with a historical overview of coherence-related approaches, commencing with the classical naẓm- and munāsaba-discourses as observed in the writings of Jāḥiẓ, Bāqillānī, Biqā῾ī and others, and extending to the modern period and the work of scholars such as Amīn Aḥsan Iṣlāḥī, ῾Abd al-Muta῾āl al-Ṣa῾īdī, and Matthias Zahniser. This overview is followed by a discussion of methodology, locating this study within the reader-oriented, synchronic, intertextual approaches, and showing methodological parallels with Biblical Studies. A new reading framework for the sura is developed, utilizing in part some of the theories of the Russian literary theorist and philosopher, Mikhail Bakhtin. The sura’s structure is identified by means of analyzing its distinctive repetitions, a known structuring device in oral texts. Incremental inclusios, alternations and chiasms delineate al-Baqara’s compositional subunits. The overall structure of the sura emerges as chiastic, following the pattern ABC/B’C’A’/C’’B’’A’’, where A is a section having the character of a test, B a section containing instructions and C a story portraying primeval origins. The repetitions are of increasing length, the general escalating character of the devices focusing attention on the last panel (C’’B’’A’’). In a first reading, the central theme is identified by means of the sura’s Leitwort, a leading keyword distinguished by its special location, high concentration and even distribution within the sura. Reading the sura for what it reveals about the deity, the Leitwort, ‘guidance’, indicates a common theme of ‘God as guide’. In a second reading, the sura is read for its pedagogical content and the central theme becomes ‘first lesson in the new religion’. The added value in approaching the sura as a whole, as a totality, is in seeing how each theme is progressively developed and elaborated by every one of the sura’s various panels and how these themes hold the sura together as a unit.

Tawātur is the concept that if we obtain the same information through a sufficient number of independent channels, we reach certainty about that data. When applied to the transmission of Qur'ān and hadith texts, tawātur can serve as a means by which to assert the truth of a source-text, which in turn has implications for correctness of the religious belief or practice that is conveyed by the text, and hence the orthodoxy of one accepting or rejecting it. / Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations

"Entrelacs des origines. Tapis jardin et paradis coranique. Poïétique du voyage dans l'art contemporain" m'a permis de conceptualiser ma démarche artistique. Que serait l'impact de la migration sur mon travail plastique ? Que serait le rapport entre l'exil et le contenu de l'œuvre ? Comment s'inspirer des allées et venues entre deux pays pour enrichir son travail plastique ? Les lignes aériennes, comment deviennent-elles entrelacs sur la surface d'un papier de dessin, d'un tissu ? Comment ce qui semble léger, insaisissable, forme un enrichissement? Comment répondre aux appels de l'enfant qui est en nous, l'autre part demeurée sur l'autre continent ? Ma lecture de "Qu'est- ce que le contemporain ?" de G. Agamben. me propulse dans une obscurité étoilée. Je me réfère à G. Bachelard afin de conceptualiser les images rêvées. "Les mille et une nuits" et "Les aventures des trois princes de Serendip" font de mes expériences un voyage, initié par "Pèlerinage d'un artiste amoureux" de A. Khatibi. Sur le chemin labyrinthique de mes recherches, j'ai rencontré l'histoire du prince de Karaman. Cet aïeul est à l'origine du nom Soltana. Son destin est semblable à celui de Hassan El Ouazzan, présenté par A. Maalouf dans "Léon l'africain". Je tisse un tapis des origines, ayant pour noeuds la Turquie, l'Égypte. Malte, la Tunisie et la France. Mes lectures ne sont plus une fiction. Elles me regardent. De l'obscurité étoilée, surgit la sphère de l'intime que développe H. Arendt. / "Interlacing roots. Carpet garden paradise Qur'an. Poetic travel in contemporary art" allowed me to conceptualize my artistic approach. What would be the impact of migration on my plastic work ? What would be the relationship between exile and content of my work? How to learn the comings and goings between the two countries to enrich my plastic work ? How Airlines become tracery on the surface of a drawing paper , tissue? What it seems light , elusive, form an enrichment ? How to respond to the calls of the child in us, the other remained on another continent? I read "Qu 'est-ce que le contemporain ?" G. Agamben, propels me into a starry darkness. I refer to G, Bachelard to conceptualize images dreamed . "The Arabian Nights" and "The Adventures of Three Princes of Serendip" are my experiences traveling, initiated by "Pèlerinage d'un artiste amoureux" of A. Khatibi . The labyrinthine path of my research , I encountered the story of Prince of Karaman . This ancestor is the origin of the name Soltana . His fate is similar to that of Hassan El Ouazzan presented by A. Maalouf in "Leo the African" . I weave a carpet of origins, whose nodes Turkey , Egypt , Malta, Tunisia and France. My readings are no longer fiction. They look at me . The starry darkness arises the sphere of intimacy that develops H. Arendt

Histories of tafsīr in South Asia have been mainly focused on identifying extant works of Qur’anic scholarship in the region. There are only a few academic works that explore the primary sources in detail. Surveys of the present state of the study of modern Qur’anic commentaries also highlight the lacunae in our knowledge of regional tafsīr and Qur’anic hermeneutics. Focusing on Urdu and Arabic works, the current study as a work of intellectual history is the first systematic attempt to open a new area of inquiry. Building on the earlier historiography of the pre-modern tafsīr in South Asia, it charts the development of Qur’anic hermeneutics in British India by focusing on the works of Sayyid Aḥmad Khān (d. 1898), Ashraf ʿAlī Thānawī (d. 1943), and Ḥamīd al-Dīn Farāhī (d. 1930), along with larger exegetical literature that emerged in North India. Looking beyond the artificial dichotomy of modernity and tradition and of reform and revivalism, as forces making an impact on Muslim Qur’anic thought, the current study focuses on two questions. What were the continuities and shifts in Qur’anic hermeneutics in British India since the latter half of the nineteenth century? Why did Qur’anic hermeneutics evolve the way it did in the multiple milieux of colonial India? The thesis also investigates an ancillary question: In developing their positions on Qur’anic hermeneutics, how did Muslim scholars in the period under examination conceive their relationship with the Muslim intellectual tradition in terms of their continuity or discontinuity? The study demonstrates the impact of historical forces and Muslim creative thinking on the development of modern Qur’anic hermeneutics in South Asia. Disagreeing on some key points with the current scholarship on modern Qur’an commentaries and Muslim scholarship in British India, the study shows that the period witnessed to the rise of new approaches to the study of the Qur’an in addition to the continuation of earlier trends. Moreover, it shows that Muslim scholarly ideas on the nature of the Muslim intellectual tradition in general, including Qur’anic exegesis, had a decisive impact on the development of thinking about the Qur’an in this period. / Graduate / 2021-12-22

<p>This dissertation examines the translation and printing of the Qur'an in the late Ottoman Empire and the early years of the Republic of Turkey (1820-1938). As most Islamic scholars deem the Qur'an inimitable divine speech, the idea of translating the Qur'an has been surrounded with concern since the first centuries of Islam; printing aroused fears about ritual purity and threatened the traditional trade of the scribes. This study examines how Turkish Muslims challenged these concerns and asserted the necessity to print and translate the Qur'an in order to make the text more accessible.</p><p>With the spread of the printing press and literacy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Qur'an translations have become increasingly important as means of transmitting the meaning of the text to expanding audiences. I investigate the rise of Qur'an translation through a historical survey of Ottoman and Turkish language translations and an examination of the debates surrounding them waged in periodicals, government archives, and monographs. While Turkish translations have often been construed as a product of nationalism, I argue that the rise of translation began with a renewed emphasis on the Qur'anic theme of intelligibility bolstered by the availability of printed books, the spread of state schools, and increased knowledge of European history and intellectual currents. Turkish nationalists later adopted and advocated the issue, reconstruing the "Turkish Qur'an" as a nationalist symbol. </p><p>Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the meaning of Qur'an translation itself has changed and incorporated a variety of new concerns. Asserting translation of the Qur'an in the late Ottoman Empire became synecdoche for a new vision of Muslim authority and modernity that reduced the role of the ulama and created space for interpretive plurality on an unprecedented scale. Meanwhile, some Turkish intellectuals came to appreciate the symbolic value of Turkish renderings for the assertion of national identity in the Islamic sphere. While the notion of translation as replacement has withered, in practice, translations have come to play a robust role in Turkish Muslim life as supplement and counterpoint to the Qur'anic text.</p> / Dissertation

abstract: In this dissertation I attempt to find elements of education and curricular perspective in the Qur'an. I argue that there is little research in the field of curriculum instruction that discusses the Qur'an's educational aspects and, as a result, much ignorance of the Qur'an's material that deals with education and curricular perspective in the Qur'an. Researchers may find many materials that deal with reading, memorizing, and reciting the Qur'an, along with references that deal with science and math in the Qur'an. Therefore, this dissertation answers the question: What curriculum exists within the Quran? This dissertation is divided into five chapters exploring various aspects of the curriculum. The word "curriculum" is used in one chapter to mean developing the person as a whole in all aspects of life whether spiritual, social, or mental while in the other chapter curriculum is used to refer to methods of instruction. I concluded that curriculum in the Qur'an uses different methods of instructions to develop the individual as a whole in all aspects of life while granting freedom of choice. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Curriculum and Instruction 2013

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / The study of sound symbolism, phonetics and semantics has been of major concern for linguists since the Greeks and the Romans in the fifth century before AD. The idea of sound symbolism - the existence of correspondence between the sound of letters (or linguists, such as Ibn Jinni (942-1002 AD), and modern Arabic linguists, including al- Badráwi (1999), and Na'aim Alwia (1984), have attempted to elucidate this phenomenon, providing detailed description and some examples from Arabic and the Holy Qur'an. Modern Western linguists such as Magnus (1999) have discussed the correspondence between the sounds of letters and the sense in Western languages. Jespersen (1962) and Badráwi (1999) have recommended that this phenomenon needs further detailed study and have indicated the need of more examples to be used as reference theory. Using Ibn Jinni's model, this study is an attempt to build on the theory of the correspondence between sound and meaning using the Holy Qur'an as an example. While Jinni's focus was on the correspondence of sound and meaning at the word level, this study will focus on the individual sound segments within the word, and the effect of the word within the Surat. The argument is that it is the individual distinctive features of each phoneme in a word that give the word its distinctive sound quality, and also has have an impact on the meaning of the word. Any correspondence between sound and meaning in a word should therefore be assigned to a particular significant distinctive feature. Given that the focus on the presumed direct relationship between sound and meaning, recourse will be made to the principal of onomatopoeia. Therefore, the objective of this study is to investigate the relationship between the distinctive features of the sounds that form Arabic words and the meaning of such words as used in the Holy Qur'an. In particular, the study will analyze the distinctive features, such as a sound being a consonant or a vowel, voicing, manner and place of articulation, airstream mechanism, among others (singly or combined) of the sounds in Arabic words, and relate this to the meaning of the words. This phenomenon will be investigated using descriptive methods and the Holy Qur' an as the object of study.

ABSTRACT This dissertation examines the concept of faith and its relation to the righteous deeds as discussed in early Islamic theology and in response to those discussions, develops a theory of faith and righteous deeds from the Qur’an. The major claim of the dissertation is that the faith theories that were developed in early Islamic theology aimed to identify the minimum necessary qualities for the constitution of faith whereas the Qur’anic theory of faith aims to identify the perfecting qualities for faith. Likewise, the faith theories of early Islamic theology visioned a mereological relation between faith and righteous deeds. However, the Qur’an sets a cyclical relation between the two. In this respect, the dissertation offers an avant-garde theory of faith and righteous deeds based on the Qur’an. It proposes a faith theory that aims for perfection, provides a thick definition for the concept of righteous deed, and dissects the cyclical relation between faith and righteous deeds. To propose a complete Qur’anic theory of faith and righteous deeds, it finally discusses the righteous people and their rewards as depicted in the Qur’an. / Religion

No description available.

This Dissertation is on the reception of the Qur'an as it elaborates the place of the Qur'an in a non-Arabic speaking community in Indonesia. The Qur'an is the scripture and the primary source of Muslim teachings, a universal text in terms of time and place. The Qur'an was revealed during the life of Muhammad (pbuh) and has been transmitted and preserved in Arabic as its only language as all the prophets in Islam had been sent in the language of its immediate people. For its universal purpose, its target audience is all humankind regardless of their language or even religious affiliation. For Muslims, not only does it urge them to respond to its message and information, but also to believe in it. Indonesia is the most populous Muslim country in the world. Although Arabic is not the language of the people of this country, they perceive and share the Qur'an in Arabic as other Muslims do all over the world, and place it in the context of their local needs and situation. This study addresses two main issues: how Indonesians, in the case of The Banjars, the primary inhabitant of Banjarmasin, the Capital of South Borneo, as non-Arabic speaking Muslims perceive the Arabic Qur'an and how they appropriate the Qur'an for themselves in both their local contexts and its universal meaning. In both questions it identifies strategies of local community in claiming a universal value of the scripture (the Qur'an) as well as keeping their local identity. These strategies provide explanations of modes of reception of the Qur'an in various aspects of their life. In order to answer the questions, the Qur'an is placed in the axis of Muslims life. This scripture is a product of a revelation process during the era of the Prophet Muhammad and his Companions composing the early Muslim community. This community is regarded as the models for perceiving and practicing the Qur'an. On the other side of the axis, contemporary Muslims perceive and practice the Qur'an in their particular contexts. In the distance of time and space, they may read the models and universal values, while they may also create new practices to fit particular contexts. So, during this period, contemporary Muslims may perform a dual appropriation, namely appropriating their reading and practices to the past as a model and universal value and to the present as an actual need and strategy to respond to their own context. Using a phenomenological approach, this study finds that Muslims as a community of faith perceives the Qur'an as a written as well as recited text, which each form of it has different but related structures to be received. As the implied readers of the Qur'an, Muslims receive perspectives from those structures, while entertain their own perspectives responding the text in "structured act". In the case of this study, the Qur'an has been in the lives of Banjars extensively. The Qur'an fills in most critical situations of Banjar lives, exemplified by its presence in various life passages rites from cradle to grave. Dealing with language barriers, the main mode of reception of the Qur'an among the Banjars is through recitation. It emphasizes the oral tradition of the Qur'an, which is perceived as a way to invite the blessing, rewards, and devotional values of the Qur'an, rather than its guidance value. Any parts of the Qur'an recited would be valuable and efficacious to meet their material and spiritual needs. In most--if not all--rites, the recitation is followed by supplication in which they leave the case to God's final destiny to be followed wholeheartedly. By this mode of reception, the Banjars in the case of this study, in general preferred functional reception with performative functions of the Qur'an. However, it is not necessarily that their functional reception is totally free from the exegetical tradition. The latter might come through the layers of works, or extra-Qur'anic texts, inciting the practices and the role of local religious leaders as cultural brokers. Such works range from a thorough explanation of the meaning, excellences, and practices of the Qur'an to handbooks of particular use of the Qur'an. The local leader might play a role to connect the provided information to popular practices in order to justify, found, or transform the performative functions of the Qur'an. In the second problem of this study, the Banjar use a dual appropriation: they appropriate themselves to the model and also the current local context. They can relate themselves to the model and idealized past through tradition, which keeps their memory as well as structures of the model. Materially, they have kept a long-lasting tradition of knowledge preservation and transmission in Islam through ijazah (sacred pedigree). As a cultural broker, a religious leader who has personal ijazah infuses the communal tradition and practices of the Qur'an. The tradition can also be transmitted communally through the consulted works on the practices. It can be merely substantial by considering the general value of practices in the past to be appropriated in a totally new situation. The Qur'an is then appropriated into their local context to answer their specific needs and ends through creative reading of the past presented in several layers of extra-Qur'anic texts. / Religion