Discovering the Quran: A Contemporary Approach to a Veiled Text

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Summary: An excellent guide to discovering the Quran!
Review: Neal Robinson has provided an exceptional addition to the field of Quranic studies that is helpful to a reader of any background on a journey to discovering the Quran.

Robinson's book provides thoughtful direction to many of the intricacies of the Quran that are absent in English renderings of interpretations of Quranic meaning.

Though I may disagree with the author on a small number of points, if there is any fault in the book it is that its well developed consideration of very important topics only increases your desire for more of it!

Rating:
Summary: A Nice Reference
Review: Neal Robinson's "fair and balanced" (to use the political correct jargon) treatment of the Qur'an is surprisingly fair and balanced. When no-Muslim scholars approach the Qur'an they often do so in such a way that results in violence to the text. Now the Qur'an is not en easy phenomena to understand. Its meanings elude Muslims and non-Muslims alike. To put it plainly, the Qur'an is veiled (as the title suggests) by fourteen hundred years of religiosity and politics. Extracting the principals which constitute Islam from this text is painstakingly difficult. I remember reading the most profound approach to the Qur'an in the book "Science and Civilization in Islam" by Seyyed Hussain Nasr. In it he cites Umar Khayyam regarding the process through which the intended meaning of the Qur'an is accessible to the wayfarer: "[They] do not seek it through meditation or by discursive thought, but by the purgation of their own inner being and the purification of their dispositions." Reading Robinson's book, I am reminded of this statement again and again. Here Robinson tries to tackle many issue of academic inquiry, such as: Why were the surahs organized in the way which they appear in the Uthmani codex, Why the constant change in the first, second or third person pronoun in the speaker, Western attempts at dating the surahs, the structure of Medinan surahs versus Meccan surahs, and the order of the surahs as they were revealed. While these topics are quite complex, Robinson navigates through them pretty well. I enjoyed some of the organization in the work. Robinson ends his postscript by stating that there are still many more topics to be explored and that he intends to take up these tasks in the future. He then says, "Insh'allah" (God willing), so I assume that Robinson, like so many others in the academic fields is a seeker, looking for that thing which will fill the void of the heart. I will look forward to other titles by Robinson.

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Summary: A major advance on the state of Quranic studies in the West.
Review: The book contains thorough considerations of remarkable features of the text (the sophistication and precision of its use of language) that have been recognised by Muslim scholars for centuries, but to which Western Islamicists have usually been blind. I was disappointed by the discussion of the Prophet's miracles -- every Western author assumes that the Quran expilictly denies that the Prophet could work any visible miracles, on the basis of certain verses, but nobody bothers to examine, even casually, the way in which the great Muslim scholars and exegetes of the past have understood those verses. For example, when the unbelievers are quoted as demanding a sign, this has usually been understood to mean that they were demanding signs *in addition to* those that had already come to them (and which they dismissed, according to the Quran, as "evident sorcery" -- 37:14)-- so that the fact that those demands were not met does not mean that no miracles were performed by the Prophet, nor that God did not bless him in any miraculous ways during the course of his mission. Again, Robinson is wrong to argue that because the Quran doesn't give any detail about the splitting of the moon, or the night journey, that all the traditional accounts of those two miracles are to be dismissed as fabrication -- the Quran very often doesn't go into any detail about contemporary events, and uses a concise , elliptical style to allude to them, presumably because people at that time were familiar with all the details. The theories of Crone and Crook, which are so implausible that it's hard to state them without seeming to caricature them, are clearly debunked, as are the speculations of M. Watt on the Quran's use of "We" (here, Robinson could have pointed out that if many statements of the form "We do such-and-such" were meant to be understood as spoken by the angels rather than God, then they would almost certainly be followed by a phrase like "by God's leave" -- the Quran is jealous of God's unity and absolute power, and attributing actions to angels without referring to God in a pagan environment runs the risk of encouraging popular beliefs about the angels being deities, whereas the Quran stresses that they are servants and nothing more). Well worth reading.