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

This study opens with an introduction to the transpersonal orientation, which Boucouvalas presents as a meta-framework of the transpersonal field that includes individual, group/societal, and planetary/cosmic domains. Three major theoretical perspectives of the field framed the study: the hierarchical stages of development, spiral path, and participatory. I offer a philosophical hermeneutic reading of the Qur'an to trace the development of human collective consciousness as a construct of the interaction between the autonomous and homonomous self at the individual, group, and cosmic levels on one plane of reality with the Divine on the other. This analysis, which utilizes Gadamer's conceptualization of philosophical hermeneutics as a research philosophy, concludes that this process of collective human development is comprised of three clearly distinct representations: familial, national, and cosmic/planetary. I articulate development and growth as a process of the expansion of collective consciousness. The cosmic/planetary human consciousness represents the ultimate reach of this expansion, for it assimilates the national and familial types while simultaneously transforming and transcending them within its reach. Based on the historical development of human consciousness in the Qur'an depicted in this study, I propose that human collective consciousness has reached the domains of cosmic consciousness, which began at the time of the Qur'an being read by Muhammad. However, individuals and groups may still operate within the limiting boundaries of national consciousness in the form of religious, ethnic, racial, and nation states. The Qur'an, and possibly other religious texts, should be understood within this expanded cosmic/planetary consciousness reach because they represent humanity's collective heritage. Moreover, those individuals operating within a strictly national consciousness should not be entrusted with explaining these texts to humanity at large or imposing their own limiting understanding on the world. I conclude by outlining some implications for adult education as a process, a program and a movement. I presented the possible contribution of a transpersonal adult learning theory based on this study's meta-framework as a comprehensive worldview to adult education and learning combining multiple dimensions of being, including the rational, affective, spiritual, imaginative, somatic, and sociocultural domains through relevant experiences of body-mind-spirit. / Ph. D.