Seeing God in Sufi Qur’an Commentaries

Pieter Coppens’ published Utrecht doctoral dissertation – supervised by Professor Christian Lange within his European Research Council project The Here and the Hereafter – makes a number of serious contributions in the field of Islamic studies beyond athe confines of the particular topic and the title within the new Edinburgh Series on Islamic Apocalypticism and Eschatology. It is a sophisticated study of Sufi Qur’an exegesis (and engages with the theoretical question of what that entails) making a strong claim for the importance of exegesis for intellectual history, it engages with the old kalam problem of the vision of the divine, and it contributes to our further understanding of Muslim eschatologies. But most interesting it shows that the Sufi emphasis on the now and the ability of experiencing and tasting reality allows them to transgress the supposedly rigid boundaries between this world and the hereafter. In this sense the theological question of the vision of God becomes an issue for the immediate as well as a deferred question of its possibility in the afterlife – when is eschatology an actual account of the present ontology of the Sufi?