The Quran Beheld

Reviewed by: Ahmad Khan, American University in Cairo, Egypt

Published by: Stanchion Press, Istanbul 2022, lvi+731pp. ISBN: 9781909460973.

Interpretation lies at the heart of consummate translation. Any serious rendering of Divine Writ into a different language must engage with hermeneutics—methods of interpretation. For over a millennium, Muslims have developed and sustained a sophisticated hermeneutic with the stated aim of opening up to readers the Qur’an’s manifold layers of meaning. Tafsir was the name of the science dedicated to this lofty pursuit, and by the tenth–eleventh centuries a growing consensus emerged among scholars of Qur’anic Arabic that the linguistic disciplines of rhetoric and meaning ([ilm al-balaghah and [ilm al-ma[ani) were paramount to the discovery of Qur’anic intent. This hermeneutic witnessed a watershed moment with the brilliant Qur’anic commentary of al-Zamakhshari (d. 538/1144). His tafsir was the first to establish an insurmountable argument for the primacy of the linguistic sciences of balaghah and ma[ani in uncovering the connotations of the Qur’an. Henceforth, tafsir’s discovery of Qur’anic meaning was shaped by a penetrating analysis of the Qur’an’s eloquence, semantics, syntactical structures, verbal patterns, prepositions, emphatic particles, and much else.