The present study covers the causes of victory and defeat in the light of chapter eight of the Holy Qur'an. It has been prompted by the current situation facing Muslims in many parts of the world, which is characterized by despair, reversals and loss, This study is thus reflexive in nature. In order to obtain a satisfactory response to this predicament, the relevant text in addition to several of its commentaries were scrutinized. The latter search remained unsatisfactory since their focus of inquiry was merely exegetical and failed to reveal any didactic element, which is crucial for obtaining guidance. This work has successfully managed to deduce this aspect from the text which amplifies the importance of extensive sacrifice for gaining glory. / Religious Studies and Arabic / M.A. (Islamic studies)

Islamic Jurisprudence comprises of the laws that govern a Muslims daily life. The Prophet Muhammad explained and practically demonstrated these laws. The jurists studied the Quran and the Prophet's life and they adopted a refined methodology which they used to extract legal rulings and verdicts. This methodology is known as the Principles of Jurisprudence. The jurists expanded on this methodology with some differences among them on the usage and the application of some aspects as acceptable forms of evidence. Eventually, the Muslim world was left with four schools of jurisprudence that are present to this day. There are differences between these schools on some issues but these differences never caused conflict, instead it provided us with a wealth of knowledge. We need to study these schools and its principles together with the objectives and intent of the Shariah and utilize this to find solutions to all new issues that arise. / Religious Studies and Arabic / M. A. (Islamic Studies)

The main purpose of the thesis is to investigate the possibility of bridging the dichotomy between Islam and the criteria of modern society by means of reinterpreting the principles (foundations) of Islam. The reformists Abdolkarim Soroush, Sedigheh Vasmaghi and Tariq Ramadan seek to prove that the methods keeping strictly within the boundaries of tradition interpreting the Quran along the lines of previous generations is not necessarily the sole means of coming to an understanding of the Quran’s message. The thesis discusses these reinterpreters’ critique of tradition and their arguments for the possibility of uniting the principles of Islam with the prerequisites of modern society. In conjunction with this, the question whether modern society presupposes a strict division between the private and the public sphere is problematized from a point of departure in Jeffrey Stout’s Democracy and Tradition. The thesis attempts to show potential conceptions of a modern society based on the principles of Islam.

My goal in this thesis is to concentrate on the origins of Islam as we can understand it from the Quran itself, without using other, later sources. At the same time, I am interested in the relationship between pre-Islamic Arabia and early Islam. My method will be based primarily on Mary Douglas and her grid- group analysis. This British anthropologist attempted to analyse different social situations, in which various systems of understanding the world are formulated, using the parameters of "group" (the degree to which the borders of a group are defined) and "grid" (the number of rules by which an individual is controlled). These two parameters then made it possible for her to classify different cosmologies according to their ideas and their social reality. Applying this method, I will attempt to extract from the Quran - not primarily a narrative text - a description of the change of early Muslims' social situation and development of their religious ideas which is connected to it, and I will attempt to use Mary Douglas' anthropology to explain how such a transformation happened and could happen. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

La tradition musulmane rapporte que l’une des caractéristiques les plus fondamentales du Coran est qu’il est un texte polysémique par excellence (ḥammāl dhū wujūh, porteur de plusieurs visages). Si le Coran est polysémique et que ses exégèses ne sont que des lectures possibles, il s’ensuit que ses traductions en sont également autant de lectures possibles et complémentaires. L’accumulation des traductions contribue ainsi à exprimer la polysémie du texte d’origine, même si ces traductions, dans leur diversité, restent en deçà de la diversité des exégèses.La thèse prend la sourate Al-Ḥajj comme exemple de cette problématique. Elle est articulée autour de deux axes de recherche :I. une étude de la polysémie du texte de départ.II. une étude de la polysémie du texte d’arrivée qui montre comment la traduction réduit et/ou modifie la polysémie.Le corpus est constitué de 18 traductions représentatives de toutes les tendances et de toutes les périodes de l’histoire de la traduction française du Coran depuis 1647 jusqu’à 2010.Constituant un espace clos qui évolue indépendamment de l’exégèse vers plus de littéralité, les traductions se rejoignent, se complètent, reflètent dans leur diversité avec légère modification une grande partie de la polysémie réunie et concentrée dans le texte de départ mais sporadique, éparse et dispersée dans les traductions. / According to Islamic tradition, one of the core characteristics of the Quran is that it is a polysemic text par excellence (ḥammāl dhū wujūh, bearer of several faces). To say that the Quranic text is polysemic implies that its various exegeses are as many possible readings of it, which implies in turn that its translations are also as many readings that complete each other. The accumulation of translations is thus another expression of the polysemy of the original text, even if the diversity of these translations does not match that of the exegeses.The thesis deals with the analysis of the Surah of Al-Ḥajj and it is based on two research axes:I. a study of the polysemy of the original text (Surah of Al-Ḥajj).II. A study of the polysemy of the final text (18 French translations) to show how translation reduces and/or modifies polysemy. The corpus of translations (18 translations) covers all the periods of the history of the translation of the Koran from 1647 until 2010 in order to see the evolution of the translation of the Koranic text.As a closed space that evolves independently from exegesis to more literality, the translations meet and complement each other, reflecting in their diversity with slight modification a large part of the polysemy united and concentrated in the original text but sporadic, sparse and Dispersed in the translations.

This is a study of Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī’s al-Durr al-manthūr fi-l-tafsīr bi-l-ma’thur (The scattered pearls of tradition-based exegesis), hereinafter al-Durr. In the present study, the distinctiveness of al-Durr becomes evident in comparison with the tafsīrs of al-Ṭabarī (d. 310/923) and Ibn Kathīr (d. 774/1373). Al-Suyūṭī surpassed these exegetes by relying entirely on ḥadīth (tradition). Al-Suyūṭī rarely offers a comment of his own. Thus, in terms of its formal features, al-Durr is the culmination of tradition-based exegesis (tafsīr bi-l-ma’thūr). This study also shows that al-Suyūṭī intended in al-Durr to subtly challenge the tradition-based hermeneutics of Ibn Taymīyah (d. 728/1328). According to Ibn Taymīyah, the true, unified, interpretation of the Qurʼān must be sought in the Qurʼān itself, in the traditions of Muḥammad, and in the exegeses of the earliest Muslims. Moreover, Ibn Taymīyah strongly denounced opinion-based exegesis (tafsīr bi-l-ra’y). By means of the traditions in al-Durr, al-Suyūṭī supports several of his views in contradistinction to those of Ibn Taymīyah. Al-Suyūṭī’s traditions support the following views. First, opinion-based exegesis is a valid supplement to tradition-based exegesis. Second, the early Muslim community was not quite unified. Third, the earliest Qur’ānic exegetes did not offer a unified exegesis of the Qur’ān. Fourth, Qur’ānic exegesis is necessarily polyvalent since Muslims accept a number of readings of the Qur’ān, and variant readings give rise to various interpretations. Al-Suyūṭī collected his traditions from a wide variety of sources some of which are now lost. Two major exegetes, al-Shawkānī (d. 1250/1834) and al-Ālūsī (d. 1270/1854), copied some of these traditions from al-Durr into their Qur’ān commentaries. In this way, al-Suyūṭī has succeeded in shedding new light on rare, neglected, and previously scattered traditions.

From fourteenth century medieval literature to contemporary American and African American literature, researchers have singled out and analyzed writing from every genre that is prophetic in nature, predicting or warning about events, both revolutionary and dire, to come. One twentieth-century American whose work embodies the essence of warning and foretelling through history-laden literature is Toni Morrison. This modern-day literary prophet reinterprets eras gone by through what she calls “re-memory” in order to guide her readers, and her society, to a greater understanding of the consequences of slavery and racism in America and to prompt both races to escape the pernicious effects of this heritage. Several critics have recognized and written about Morrison’s unique style of prophetic prose. These critics, however, have either taken a general cursory analysis of her complete body of works or they are only focused on one of her texts as a site of evidence. Despite the many critical essays and journal articles that have been written about Morrison as literary prophet, no critic has extensively investigated Morrison’s major works by way of textual analysis under this subject, to discuss Morrison prophetic prose, her motivation for engaging in a form of prophetic writing, and the context of this writing in a wider general, as well as an African-American, tradition. This dissertation takes on a more comprehensive, cross-sectional analysis of her works that has been previously employed, concentrating on five of Morrison’s major novels: The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, Beloved, Jazz and Paradise, in an order to assess how Morrison develops and infuses warnings and admonitions of biblical proportions. This investigation seeks to reveal Morrison’s motivation to prophecy to Americans, black and white, the context in which she engages with her historical and contemporary subjects, and the nature of the admonitions to present and future action she offers to what she sees as a contemporary generation of socially and historically oblivious African Americans, using literary prophecy as the tool by which to accomplish her objectives. This dissertation also demonstrates—by way of textual analysis and literary theory—the evolution through five novels of Morrison’s development as a literary prophet.

The purpose of this study is to examine the medial depiction of Muslims in the case of Pastor Terry Jones' intention to burn the Quran. Our study is based on theoretical framework regarding an alleged clash of civilizations, how that leads to global conflicts and controls the world politics. It’s also based on the western way of characterize Muslims as violent, irrational human beings, and how mass media have a tendency to depict Muslims as “the others”. The questions we aim to seek answers to are: How were Muslims portrayed in CNN's and Al-Jazeera's reporting regarding Terry Jones plan to burn the Quran? Which discourses exist about Muslims in each news channel and what are the main differences between them? The qualitative method used is a critical discourse analysis on empirical data consistently of twelve articles. A profound thematic and schematic analysis of each article is applied in order to make interpretations and relate the result to our theoretical framework. The result of the study shows that Muslims are, to a high level, portrayed as violent or dangerous with a strong connection to terrorism. A slight difference existed in the themes and discourses between each news channel. CNN objectified Muslims, as a whole, as a safety threat to the western community when Al-Jazeera, on the other hand, had the similar portraytion, but with an explanatory approach.

The purpose of this thesis is to identify the reasons for Israeli and Palestinian religious objections to peaceful co-existence in a two-state solution to the conflict over the land between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea. Developing an understanding of the basic religious requirements and precedents, while consistently considering religious impact in politics, may help to open dialogue between Jewish Gush Emunim and Muslim Palestinian Hamas, strong opponents to land compromise. Arguments by Gush Emunim and Hamas from the two major religious works, the Jewish Tanakh and the Muslim Qur’an, and associated commentaries, the Jewish Talmud and Muslim Hadith, are compared and evaluated for religious insights into the disputed areas. Contemporary interpretations of each major writing and political objections based on religious argumentation create a strong context for modern conflict. The requirements and precedents for peace that come from religious texts also promote open dialogue. This thesis suggests ways to open dialogue between the Israeli and Palestinian cultures, comparing religious texts, interpretations, and concepts, in an effort to promote peaceful co-existence and build an effective strategic narrative.

This is a study of Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī’s al-Durr al-manthūr fi-l-tafsīr bi-l-ma’thur (The scattered pearls of tradition-based exegesis), hereinafter al-Durr. In the present study, the distinctiveness of al-Durr becomes evident in comparison with the tafsīrs of al-Ṭabarī (d. 310/923) and Ibn Kathīr (d. 774/1373). Al-Suyūṭī surpassed these exegetes by relying entirely on ḥadīth (tradition). Al-Suyūṭī rarely offers a comment of his own. Thus, in terms of its formal features, al-Durr is the culmination of tradition-based exegesis (tafsīr bi-l-ma’thūr). This study also shows that al-Suyūṭī intended in al-Durr to subtly challenge the tradition-based hermeneutics of Ibn Taymīyah (d. 728/1328). According to Ibn Taymīyah, the true, unified, interpretation of the Qurʼān must be sought in the Qurʼān itself, in the traditions of Muḥammad, and in the exegeses of the earliest Muslims. Moreover, Ibn Taymīyah strongly denounced opinion-based exegesis (tafsīr bi-l-ra’y). By means of the traditions in al-Durr, al-Suyūṭī supports several of his views in contradistinction to those of Ibn Taymīyah. Al-Suyūṭī’s traditions support the following views. First, opinion-based exegesis is a valid supplement to tradition-based exegesis. Second, the early Muslim community was not quite unified. Third, the earliest Qur’ānic exegetes did not offer a unified exegesis of the Qur’ān. Fourth, Qur’ānic exegesis is necessarily polyvalent since Muslims accept a number of readings of the Qur’ān, and variant readings give rise to various interpretations. Al-Suyūṭī collected his traditions from a wide variety of sources some of which are now lost. Two major exegetes, al-Shawkānī (d. 1250/1834) and al-Ālūsī (d. 1270/1854), copied some of these traditions from al-Durr into their Qur’ān commentaries. In this way, al-Suyūṭī has succeeded in shedding new light on rare, neglected, and previously scattered traditions.