Scriptural Polemics

What a quirk of irony that this study, purporting to delve into the issue of Scriptural polemics, is itself nothing short of a polemical work directed against the Qur’an! For Mun’im Sirry’s main interest is to analyse those Qur’anic passages which appear to him as ‘obstacles to interreligious relations’ (p. 1). While positing this thesis, Sirry conveniently disregards the incontrovertible historical fact that non-Muslims, particularly Jews and Christians, have led their lives in peace and security down the millennia in the Muslim world. Sirry’s ingenuity, however, consists in his depicting of the Qur’an as somewhat an anathema to today’s pluralistic world while taking recourse to what he triumphantly parades as the “Reformist” Muslim interpretations of “problematic” Qur’anic passages. Approvingly, he identifies the following as representative “Reformist” Muslim scholars of the Qur’an: i) Jamal al-Din al-Qasimi (d. 1914) from Syria, ii) Rashid Rida (d. 1935) from Egypt, iii) Abu’l Kalam Azad (d. 1958) from India, iv) Muhammad Jawad Mughniyyah (d. 1979) from Lebanon, v) Muhammad Husayn Taba’taba’i (d. 1981) from Iran, and vi) [Abd al-Malik Karim Amrullah (d. 1981) from Indonesia.