Welcome! Our channel Noman Ali Khan connects you with spiritual insights and Islamic teachings. Here, we share lessons from the Quran, precious aspects of supplications, and narratives of religious guidance to illuminate your spiritual journey. Stay connected with us and embark on a path of tranquility and enlightenment in your life.
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00If you do an investigation of our own history, our own Fiqh tradition, our own Tafsir tradition,
00:05it's not as cut and dry black and white as we're presenting it post-colonialism.
00:11That kind of material, you know, later on you find, you know,
00:15Azhari scholars and even before them people like Ibn Kathir in his Tafsir,
00:20Al-Alusi in his Tafsir, who are very negative about Israeliyat.
00:24And if they see, you know, patriarchy as the source of all problems, then the Tafsir tradition
00:31just reflects that patriarchy. That is to say, it's all men talking from male perspectives and
00:37sidelining women perspectives because you don't find really in our
00:42history and tradition, you can barely, if at all, find a female Mufassira.
01:00So what are we doing now? Well, what are you reading? Who's that?
01:04Handsome fella. Yeah, I'm just, I saw myself in a book.
01:13Kool-Aid. So what's this book called?
01:17Muslim Quranic Interpretation Today, Media Genealogies and Interpretive Communities.
01:23So, of course, I knew that. I'm just asking you rhetorically. This is by Professor Yohanna Pink,
01:29who is the lead investigator on the Global Quran Project, which I was privileged to be part of for
01:36a little while. And I happen to know that she's written about you in here. And you had your first
01:41opportunity to meet her just recently at a conference. I did.
01:45So in general today, inshallah, we're talking about Western non-Muslim writings on the Quran,
01:53but it's actually a bit broader than that. Some of these people actually are Muslims.
01:57But it's also a little bit unfair to just lump it all together based on the religion of the author,
02:03because there are topics here that fit in with other things that we've talked about,
02:06and we could certainly have kept it in there. But I thought it might be helpful to look at it.
02:11Just as Western Academic Islamics.
02:13As a group to see some of the trends and the patterns and the issues that are being
02:20raised there. So I don't have that many such works in print, to be honest,
02:25but these are the ones that I do have. Based on the last discussion about Quran translations,
02:31this is one by Bruce Lawrence, which is the Quran in English, a biography. It's quite a nice
02:37treatment of the subject. I didn't steal it from a library. I bought it from an ex-library.
02:43This is one called The Art of Reciting the Quran by Christina Nelson.
02:48I read this when I found it in Cairo in 2004, and I was so surprised at this treatment of the issue
03:00of Quran recitation. It was so thoughtful and insightful, and the author actually interviewed
03:07some of the great famous Qurra'a, like I'm sure, I think Sheikh Al-Husri, Sheikh Al-Nashawi,
03:15and she examined the kind of overlaps but also distinction between Quran recitation and music.
03:24She herself is both an Arabist, you know, a student of Arabic cultures and language,
03:30and of ethnomusicology, as it's called, so different musical approaches. That's Sheikh
03:36Mustafa Ismail on the front, I'm pretty sure. So I actually invited her to come to do some lectures
03:41in the UK in 2006. So we did at Edinburgh, Cambridge, and at SOAS in London. So, lovely lady.
03:53God, a Man in the Quran by Izutsu. He's got a few important books
03:58looking at the semantics of the Quran, words, and how they're connected, the concepts.
04:04Semantic Fields is one of the key words in his Semantics of the Quranic Weltenschon.
04:13Oh, I had some this morning. So, this actually is a very influential book, and
04:20certainly useful. And I've seen over at Marcus Tafsir, they actually did like a kind of
04:27roundtable type thing on this book. Oh, really?
04:29Mm-hmm. Here are a few books from Edinburgh University Press. My own book,
04:34inshallah, will be coming out from them, so I'm interested in their back catalogue of
04:39works on the Quran. We've got How to Read the Quran by Karl Ernst. It's a very popular book,
04:45it's been printed a lot of times. Quran Historical Critical Introduction by Nikolai Sinai, whom
04:51you've also met a couple of times now. Correct, yeah.
04:53And Islam and Literalism by Robert Gleave. It's not specifically in Quranic studies,
05:00but definitely has a lot to do with literal expressions and what that means in the context
05:07of Quran and Hadith and so on. These are by a couple of Muslim brothers, actually,
05:13Ramon Harvey and Peter Coppins, both of them friends of mine. So, The Quran and the Just
05:20Society was Ramon's first book based on his PhD. His supervisor was Professor Abdel Halim,
05:24just like myself, and he's done a lot of great work since then. He continues to publish and also
05:31is the editor of a series on Islamic scripture and theology at Edinburgh University Press.
05:39And this one on Seeing God in Sufi Quran Commentaries by Peter Coppins. He's very
05:44strong in tafsir studies and he's got a lot of interesting papers. One of his recent papers was
05:51about, I'm trying to remember the actual title of it, but it was about whether over time the
05:59appreciation for ambiguity and complexity wore off in works of tafsir. So he's looking at how
06:08the toleration and the respect for multiple opinions has actually remained more stable
06:13than people tend to think in the modern period. It just completely collapsed.
06:18I mean, in that regard, this is an important book. It's not specifically Quranic studies again, but
06:23this is an important book which I actually wanted to show you, especially, and I haven't read it yet.
06:31But to be honest, it's the title. The title for me carries so much meaning.
06:38Generally speaking, or broadly speaking, his argument, and this is written in German originally
06:43and then it's just recently been released in English as well, is that throughout Muslim
06:50history there's been a lot more acceptance of the fact that things can sometimes be a little bit
06:55indeterminate, a little bit ambiguous. And that even applies to a discussion, one of the
07:03discussions he does touch on was what we just said about qiraat and the fact that there are
07:10multiple ways of reading. And sometimes you can have even a discussion about, you know, is this
07:15the better way? Is that the better way? So there's a search for the best answer to that question,
07:22but not necessarily to say there is only one answer and every answer must be wrong,
07:26everything else must be deleted, everything else must be ignored. You're able to say, well,
07:32this is the qiraat that we read and we respect the other qiraat, you know, and they exist together.
07:37There's no sense of panic from that. And that applies in various different fields
07:45where, you know, an appreciation of ambiguity is actually something which is very healthy.
07:50So he's kind of making that argument, but he's also making a point that this appreciation,
07:55you know, plummeted in the later periods and that is part of the intellectual crisis that
08:01Muslims are suffering from today. So personally, I think there's a lot of value in his argument,
08:05even if, you know, one could debate over specifics. So I think you know some of these books already.
08:12So you must have read Neil Robinson. I have. Discovering the Qur'an.
08:18That contemporary approach to a veiled text, yes. One of the first western books I read on the Qur'an.
08:25And Professor Abdul-Halim, you might have read this one. He's got various of his essays that
08:29are compiled in a few. No, I haven't read that one. Books like this. So Professor Abdul-Halim,
08:35of course, has had a very important role in, you know, as being a professor of Islamic studies
08:45and Qur'anic studies in SOAS, University of London, has made space for plenty of other people,
08:51myself included, to be part of the Western Academy and to be part of those discussions.
08:59And, you know, showing that we can respect each other, we can have different methodologies and
09:04points of view, and we can we can get along one way or another. This is a friend of mine
09:10from Al-Azhar University. He did his PhD at Birmingham on a Qur'anic critique of terrorism.
09:17Quite a nice book. This is one which I haven't read yet, but the topic seemed so worthwhile that
09:27I bought this one. The Qur'an and the Aesthetics of Premodern Arabic Prose. So again, linking Qur'an
09:35within the broader study of literature and therefore, you know, helping to understand how
09:42claims about the Qur'an and its beauty and its perfection, you know, how they fit in.
09:48Oh, this is actually here the first, the first orientalist book on the Qur'an that I bought.
09:56So I don't remember when
10:00it was, but this was the first one of my pictures from Princeton University Press.
10:06Yeah, The Qur'an's Self-Image by Daniel Madigan.
10:10Does he mean by that the way the Qur'an describes itself?
10:13Yeah, how it presents itself and almost how it sees itself.
10:21So this has given rise to a number of other studies that followed from this.
10:26Self-referentiality of the Qur'an. There's at least one edited volume on that
10:31by Stephan Wilder. There is, we met a French scholar who's written one which
10:39the title is The Qur'an According to Itself.
10:45We've also met this author, a good friend of mine, Merijn van Putten.
10:50So this is his book, which has recently been released with Brill Press in the Netherlands.
10:56Qur'anic Arabic from its Hijazi origins to its classical reading traditions.
11:00So he takes a lot of interest in the history of the Arabic language.
11:03He's studying it from the perspective of a historical linguist and Arabist.
11:10And he is interested in looking at the, what you can understand from the language,
11:17understand about the language of the Qur'an from its manuscripts and from its consonantal text,
11:22and then from how people have vocalized and pronounced it according to the
11:26qiraat and the reading traditions.
11:29So from that he makes some novel claims as well about the language of the Qur'an.
11:36But importantly, this helps us to get past certain oversimplifications that we make about,
11:43oftentimes people think that classical Arabic equals Qur'anic Arabic.
11:46Of course, classical means that, you know, post-Qur'anic,
11:50how things were classicized and became standardized and rules were set in place.
11:56Once you look at those rules, as you know, and you look back at the Qur'an,
11:59you're like, oh, it's not following those rules.
12:02So then it can set you into disarray.
12:03And then you get people coming along saying, oh, the Qur'an is ungrammatical.
12:08So I have a video with Merijn, actually, where we talk about some things.
12:11And the last point in the video was specifically about this question.
12:14Is there a grammatical error in the Qur'an?
12:16His answer was, well, there's no such thing as a grammatical error.
12:21So no, it doesn't.
12:24Just because for him as a linguist, the idea and the category of grammatical error...
12:27They don't look at grammar like that.
12:28They look at language as a natural flowing process.
12:32Modern linguists will say that Scottish English is just as valid as any.
12:39And why shouldn't it be?
12:42This is why you like Merijn.
12:43So we've got lots here, but maybe a kind of subset which is worth highlighting
12:53is that there are lots of books published in talking about gender in the Qur'an.
12:59And I don't have that many of them, but I have a few that I've picked up over time.
13:05So we have had the opportunity to meet at least one of these authors,
13:12Selim Ibrahim, her recent book on women and gender in the Qur'an.
13:15I haven't yet read it, but I plan to.
13:18And this one by Hadiya Mubarak, we saw a bit of her speech.
13:23This book...
13:25She was the one online?
13:26Yeah, she was online.
13:27I read a little bit of this book yesterday.
13:30It seems very interesting.
13:32So what I think is...
13:34She's trying to show due regard to the Seer tradition,
13:36which is strange for a Western academic, but that's what she's trying to do.
13:39I didn't get to her conclusions yet, but...
13:41So sometimes you do find with people who are writing in this kind of field
13:46that they have a certain disdain for the commentarial tradition.
13:52And if they see patriarchy as the source of all problems,
13:56then the Tafsir tradition just reflects that patriarchy.
13:59That is to say, it's all men talking from male perspectives
14:02and sidelining women perspectives,
14:05because you don't find really in our history and tradition
14:09you can barely, if at all, find a female Mufassirah.
14:15If they were doing that, then it just...
14:17It was interesting.
14:18So they didn't get published and so on.
14:20They had a session on women in the Qur'an at the convention
14:24and all these Western academics are sitting there, all of them female,
14:27and some of them, almost all of them,
14:30or no, two-thirds of them Muslim, at least, in the panel.
14:33Almost all of them, yeah.
14:34Yeah, and so a couple of them said,
14:37we have to let go of this narrative, it's unacademic.
14:41We just have to look at people in the Qur'an.
14:42Why are we looking at women in the Qur'an?
14:44Or putting a gender lens on this text,
14:48it's actually creating a bigger problem than solving it.
14:51Like, this was the internal conversation they're having.
14:54So it's interesting.
14:56There are certainly big conversations.
14:58I mean, I would say one of those conversations
15:00is represented by the fact that,
15:01well, these books, and in particular Hadi Mubarak's,
15:05is sort of saying that we need to give more attention
15:09to the craft of Tafsir than we have,
15:13and we shouldn't just dismiss that because...
15:15Yes, that's the point she was making in the second part.
15:17There are people who operate within the Tafsir paradigm,
15:20and she's particularly pointed to Ibn Ashur,
15:24who are able and show how you can come up with,
15:30in a way, novel interpretations and solutions that are yet...
15:33Within the framework of...
15:35In that frame, yeah.
15:37Legitimate Tafsir exercise, yeah.
15:39So, yeah, a lot of debate also surrounds this book.
15:43This book was quite a strong intervention,
15:45Aisha Hidayatullah's book on Feminist Edges of the Qur'an.
15:50And I've read some chapters of it,
15:52but basically the argument,
15:53and what caused the controversy is she,
15:56despite coming from a feminist perspective,
15:58is saying the attempt to read the Qur'an
16:02as fully egalitarian and therefore all about equality
16:07between men and women has sometimes gone too far.
16:11Sometimes the authors before her have gone too far
16:14in assuming that that's the case
16:16and therefore reading onto the text...
16:20Imposing that view onto the text.
16:21Pushing some views onto the text.
16:23So she's a bit more, let's say, pessimistic about the Qur'an
16:29fulfilling that need that some people have experienced
16:34to find that egalitarian spirit.
16:37So I think that we all probably would believe
16:42on some level, at least,
16:43that the Qur'an is advocating equality.
16:46It's just that in what forms, in what circumstances,
16:50in what manifestations,
16:52that's where interpretations differ.
16:55But I personally think that this field,
16:58in a way, is happening within Western academia
17:00more than it's happening as a Muslim conversation
17:05amongst Muslims.
17:06I don't know if that's fair to say,
17:08but it's just my observation.
17:10And I think that is a shame.
17:12I can understand how it's happened
17:14because I think just the fact
17:16that women's voices get marginalized,
17:19so then they have had to find a space
17:21where they can actually make the argument.
17:23This is an observation about what's happening
17:24in Western academic studies,
17:25but I have observations about this subject
17:28as per what I see in the Muslim world,
17:30whatever level I have traveled.
17:32So the reality of it is,
17:34there's a conservative, normative Islam
17:40that's spread across a huge chunk of our population
17:43that says we don't need to.
17:44We already had this figured out.
17:46There's no reason to revisit these issues.
17:48We're fine the way we are.
17:49I don't know why you need to bring this discussion
17:51on our shores and our homes.
17:54Islam gave equality 1400 years ago.
17:55Islam already took care of all of this.
17:57We already solved this problem.
17:58This is not our problem.
17:59This is somebody else's problem.
18:00Great.
18:02Of course, it's not a problem at all.
18:03It's not a problem at all.
18:04Everything is fine.
18:05Yeah.
18:06So there's the everything is fine narrative.
18:10At the same time,
18:11you have young men and women
18:13and actually even working professional men and women
18:15in Muslim countries
18:17in massive numbers
18:19that are completely disenfranchised
18:21from what they know about Islam on the issue of gender.
18:25They're thinking it in their own circles.
18:28They're saying it.
18:28If you provide them the freedom to speak their mind,
18:30then they're saying it also.
18:32I've experienced this firsthand on multiple accounts.
18:35And they need a room for that conversation
18:39that is not allowed to take place.
18:44So what that does,
18:45if there's a need to discuss something,
18:47figure something out,
18:48talk it out,
18:49explore it even academically
18:52at an ilmi level
18:53and at a level that everybody can participate in,
18:56then you get enough people
18:58that are just being suppressed so much.
19:00The analogy I give is
19:02if you press down on a spring
19:03and you keep pressing and keep pressing,
19:05then eventually something will give
19:08and it will explode.
19:09So there's an element
19:10within the Muslim population now
19:12in different countries
19:13that's exploded.
19:15And they're like,
19:16you know what,
19:16away with Islam,
19:18away with this patriarchal nonsense.
19:21And there's like
19:22far left feminism or death,
19:27kind of like almost a militancy.
19:31And we look at those women
19:34that are protesting and speaking out and all of it.
19:37And we look at them as the problem.
19:38They're not the problem.
19:39They are actually
19:43the result of an unaddressed pain point
19:45as far as I'm concerned.
19:46Like there's an issue,
19:47there's a discussion,
19:49there's a narrative that needed addressing,
19:50there were questions that needed to be answered.
19:52And the answers that were being provided,
19:55we say that they represent Islam.
19:56I say that we chose the convenient copy paste answers
20:01and not realizing that those answers aren't enough
20:04and that requires more investigation.
20:06And those answers that were comfortable
20:08to those who are comfortable being comfortable,
20:12which for the most part,
20:14I'm saying men.
20:16So we don't have to revisit anything
20:17because it doesn't affect men.
20:19You'd be surprised.
20:20It's also a good number of women
20:21that are in a traditional setting
20:23and they're comfortable with tradition the way it is.
20:25Now the question is,
20:26when we say we need to revisit some issues,
20:28you could think of this as,
20:29oh, this is a liberal agenda.
20:30This is rethinking Islam.
20:32There's re-evaluating
20:34what the Quran and Sunnah say, etc, etc.
20:37The problem with that account is that
20:38a lot of what we consider traditional values,
20:43if you do an investigation of our own history,
20:45our own fiqh tradition,
20:46our own tafsir tradition,
20:48it's not as cut and dry black and white
20:51as we're presenting it post-colonialism.
20:54There is in fact an intellectual decline
20:56and some positions are being dishonestly presented
20:59as the only position
21:01or the most convincing position
21:03when in matter of fact,
21:05it's not the most convincing position.
21:07So this has happened on a number of occasions with me
21:09and in order for me to grapple with this problem,
21:13instead of coming up with a conclusion,
21:14what I decided to do was in private
21:17sit with traditional ulama,
21:19sit with experts and muhadithin
21:22and say, hey, this issue,
21:23what I'm studying is leading me to conclusion X.
21:26Can you help me understand where I'm going wrong here?
21:29Like help me figure this out.
21:31And to my shock,
21:36more often than not,
21:37very conservative,
21:38very traditional ulama
21:41are in agreement with what I'm saying,
21:43but only in private settings.
21:46And the reason for that is not because they're dishonest.
21:48The reason for that is we have a mafia mentality
21:50in certain fragments of the Muslim community
21:53and if even scholars speak their mind on something
21:57based on their years of exhaustive study,
22:00not because they've become some puppet of a liberal agenda,
22:04because they've studied something,
22:05but they're going to say something
22:07that goes against the mob's emotional comfort zone.
22:12Unfortunately, there's more than one mob.
22:14If you say anything,
22:15you're either a simp or you're ISIS.
22:18This is life on Twitter.
22:20If you say anything,
22:21the people on the other side
22:25are going to just throw everything at you.
22:27So here we are.
22:28We've been discussing our tradition.
22:30We've been discussing our scholarship.
22:33Now we're looking at also Western scholarship
22:35and there's other things we have to discuss.
22:37But like we have to really make a conscious decision
22:42to hold on to
22:43لَا نَخَافُ فِي اللَّهِ لَوْمَ تَلَائِمُ
22:46Right?
22:46Like here's what we're finding.
22:48Here's what we're going to discuss.
22:50We're open to being corrected,
22:52but we're not open to being intimidated into silence,
22:54not by Western criticism
22:56because it doesn't match their sensibilities,
22:59and not by some social norms
23:02that have been established in the Muslim community
23:04that don't want to hear
23:05what actual investigation into the Qur'an,
23:09into Islam is saying
23:10because we don't want to hear that.
23:11That's not what I heard when I was growing up.
23:15Sorry.
23:15I'm actually not sorry.
23:16We've got to discuss it.
23:19So speaking of discussing,
23:22we need to have platforms and avenues
23:26through which serious research can be published.
23:29So we have got...
23:31Do you like the transition?
23:32It was okay.
23:34I'll give it 5 out of 10.
23:35So examples can be journals within the Muslim world,
23:41or of course there are Western journals as well.
23:44So I've just got a few examples of that genre of works here.
23:48So this one I think is from Egypt,
23:52but published in London if I remember correctly.
23:56Called المجلة الدولية للدراسات القرآنية
23:59It's not a very famous one,
24:00but there are actually bigger ones that come out of Saudi.
24:04But this has some quite prominent authors,
24:06if you have scanned through the names you may recognize.
24:09And this was one that we picked up when we went to Malaysia.
24:12The University of Malaya have this journal called Quranica.
24:16They don't know, but they stole that name from me
24:18because my organization Quranica...
24:19Used to be, yes.
24:21That's how it was introduced to you.
24:23مجلة عالمية لبحث القرآن
24:26So this is a quite old edition that I happen to have with me.
24:31But you know it's just examples of research on the Quran that gets published.
24:35And you know it can be in all sorts of topics.
24:38It can be about historical topics,
24:40or indeed can be on things that pertain to the here and now and the future.
24:47Using the Quran as you know the basis for our explorations.
24:51This was a conference that I attended in Istanbul.
24:57They have a whole series on Ottoman...
25:00This particular one is about Ottoman Tafsir.
25:05And then they have got Ottoman Hadith studies,
25:08Ottoman Kalam studies, Ottoman...
25:10Interesting.
25:11Also different ones.
25:12So this one all about Tafsir.
25:15Most of it is in Turkish.
25:16There were a few in Arabic and then a few in English.
25:19So I have a paper in here which I presented there about...
25:25It's called the Digital Mufassir.
25:26So it's about the Tafsir of Al-Alusi.
25:30That was so that I can get into the Ottoman conference.
25:32I was like I'll make it about Al-Alusi,
25:34but I'll also make it about something future-facing.
25:37So I didn't want to look at it purely historically.
25:40So what I discussed in there is...
25:43Imagine, it's reimagining the Tafsir of Al-Alusi for a new era.
25:46So I said imagine that we managed to bring Al-Alusi to our modern day using a time machine,
25:55or we went back to his time with the tools that we have.
25:59Have us flick through if you want.
26:01And he wanted to compose this Tafsir.
26:04How could we use digital tools to support the production of that Tafsir?
26:10So the reason for asking that question is to say,
26:12well if we wanted something as good as or even greater than Al-Alusi in the future,
26:17how can digital approaches to authorship be brought to bear?
26:21Instead of just doing the same old book approach,
26:25which was the limit of what they were able to use at their time.
26:31So sometimes slightly zany ideas.
26:34These are a few issues I have of the Journal of Quranic Studies.
26:38I have a few myself, yeah.
26:40Which comes out of SOAS and is printed in Edinburgh.
26:44So these are the ones typically that I've got a paper in.
26:50Yes, so...
26:50Sahibzade, the Shaheen Affair and the Evolution of Usul Tafsir.
26:54Yeah, we talked about that one.
26:55Yeah.
26:56About Abdus Sabur Shaheen and the evolutionary reading of the Quran.
27:00So that was in 2018?
27:042019.
27:0419.
27:05And then this year I had this one called Fights and Flights,
27:10Two Underrated Alternatives to Dominant Readings in Tafsir.
27:14So yeah, the Journal of Quranic Studies, the chief editor is Professor Abdul Haleem.
27:20So, you know, it's got a special place in my heart.
27:24But generally we, as academics,
27:28try to publish in multiple journals and reach multiple audiences.
27:33So that's journals.
27:36Now, you ready for another smooth transition?
27:39I'm so ready.
27:40So having talked about some of the Western writings,
27:43we have here also Gabriel Saeed Reynolds has got a couple of books
27:48which are very significant and important for us to consider.
27:53The Quran and its biblical subtext.
27:55Yeah.
27:55And this one, the Quran and the Bible,
27:58which is kind of, you know,
28:01it's a translation of the Quran by Ali Quli Qara'i.
28:05His name is Ali Quli Qara'i.
28:09He's a Shiite translator of the Quran.
28:12But the footnotes here or the notes that he's added,
28:17Gabriel Reynolds has added,
28:18are essentially what Western academics have identified
28:24in terms of intertexts or connecting passages.
28:28From the Bible.
28:29You know, potentially sources from the Bible or elsewhere,
28:32according to their perspective, I mean.
28:34Yeah.
28:34So then, of course, you know, for Muslims,
28:37it's very straightforward and simple to think that
28:40it's not a source but merely, you know,
28:42something in common because Allah revealed the Quran
28:46and he revealed the books before.
28:48Yeah, from which these things appear.
28:52But of course, this ties closely with a genre
28:54which I'm sort of pulling up here,
28:57which is called Isra'iliyat.
29:00Roughly speaking, Judaica or Judeo-Christian materials.
29:06And, you know, in the early periods, especially,
29:09and even later,
29:12Mufassirun would include such things in their commentaries.
29:15So where you have stories of the prophets, for example,
29:19and the Quran can often be very brief
29:21and leave out a lot of the detail
29:23for very high wisdom reasons.
29:27Yet, somehow, when you are writing a commentary,
29:31it feels unsatisfactory to just sort of say,
29:34and we don't know this and we don't know that.
29:35They'd rather say, well, you know,
29:38we have some information that we heard
29:40that this prophet, actually, this person was called that
29:43and this was their name and this is where they lived.
29:45And so they add extra details.
29:48And the source of that, you know,
29:50typically isn't from the Prophet, Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam,
29:52himself, which would make it hadith and authoritative,
29:55but it comes from, you know,
29:57those who were around who knew about the previous scriptures,
30:00converts from the people of the book,
30:02or even maybe sometimes not converts even,
30:04but discussions and things that would circulate.
30:08So that kind of material, you know,
30:10later on you find, you know, Azhari scholars
30:14and even before them,
30:15people like Ibn Kathir in his Tafsir,
30:18Al-Arusi in his Tafsir,
30:19who are very negative about Israeliyat,
30:23especially when they become very extensive
30:25and, you know, elaborate and beside the point
30:29of what the Qur'an is focusing on.
30:32But if you go to the early period,
30:34you find they were fairly easy with this.
30:37Like they didn't necessarily say,
30:39these texts and narrations
30:43are the authority to interpret the Qur'an,
30:45but they just saw it as reading it alongside,
30:48you know, it does no harm.
30:50I think Western academics, at least,
30:52they didn't realize they were doing this for me,
30:54but they did.
30:55They got me thinking about Israeliyat a certain way.
30:58So the old way was,
30:59we shouldn't rely on them
31:00because we can't trust what the Bible is telling us
31:02and we shouldn't use that to fill the gaps
31:04in the story of the being told by the Qur'an well and good.
31:08The Western academics come along
31:09and the first thing they notice
31:10is the Bible is clearly being contradicted
31:13by the Qur'an in the same story.
31:14The Qur'an is telling the story of Noah and Abraham
31:17and Jesus and whoever else in very different ways.
31:20So they're common ground
31:22and there's also these divergences, right?
31:24So the first wave in Western academics
31:26that I have got familiarized with
31:28was that the Qur'an simply got it wrong.
31:31There's the Bible account,
31:33there wasn't very good plagiarism.
31:35So it's plagiarized from the Bible
31:36but not a very good job.
31:38Later waves in Western academics comes along and says,
31:41actually, this doesn't look like plagiarism at all.
31:44This looks like a retelling.
31:46So they call it the Qur'anic retelling.
31:48What that means to them
31:49is that the Bible has a story
31:51and the Qur'an seems to put a new spin on that story.
31:54I look at it from a confessional, iman point of view.
31:57And what I look at it as is,
31:59so the Qur'an is taking an existing story
32:02that was not only found in the Bible
32:04among the Christian and Jewish communities
32:06but that's somehow also spread in the Arabian region.
32:09There is interaction between Jewish Christians
32:12and other faith communities.
32:13Surat al-Kahf was an interesting example of that.
32:15It's not a biblical story,
32:16it's a post-biblical story of saints
32:19that was popular among a certain section of Christians.
32:23So what the Qur'an is doing is,
32:26it is taking something that people are vaguely familiar with
32:30and then not in great detail
32:33to contradict everything that they've heard before
32:35but actually tell the most important parts of the story
32:39that number one highlights
32:41what has been corrupted from what's become popular, right?
32:45So then, okay, so it's clearly diverging.
32:49Which means the details about names and lineage and location
32:52and all of that stuff is fine.
32:55But now, oh, that's what really happened.
32:59So the Qur'an isn't focused on all of it,
33:00it's focused on the part that needs attention.
33:06And it's recalibrating it
33:07and bringing it back to a purposeful story.
33:09So it's no longer just history or interesting facts
33:12or interesting legends or stories,
33:14now it's purposeful.
33:16So studying the biblical account
33:19is actually really beneficial
33:20in not that oversimplistically
33:24coming back to the Muslim attitude.
33:25Oh, we don't take the seer from these sources
33:28because we can't trust them.
33:30Actually, I think we should look at it from a different lens.
33:33The Qur'an is offering us
33:34by doing this biblical subtext study
33:37an insight into how did the mind of the Jewish
33:40and the average Jew and Christian
33:42and the rabbi and the priest,
33:43how are they processing these stories?
33:46And when the Qur'an came along,
33:48how did they see that the Qur'an
33:50is hitting at some really key pain points
33:55that the most knowledgeable among them know about?
33:59So it's doing something really remarkable here.
34:01Now, one of the places that I thought
34:04was the most fascinating
34:06because Musa is such a huge topic in the Qur'an
34:09and Moses is a huge chunk of the Old Testament.
34:14He's a central figure really of the Old Testament.
34:19We have a story of him that they don't have.
34:21We have the Musa and Khadir story
34:24and it's nowhere to be found.
34:27I thought it was profoundly interesting
34:29that this occurs in Surah Al-Gahaf
34:32where if we are to trace our narrations
34:35and our tafasir about
34:36what's in the backdrop of Surah Al-Gahaf,
34:39there's an attempt to prove
34:40the prophet is not very knowledgeable.
34:42So ask him riddle questions, right?
34:45And Allah remarkably tells a story
34:48that the supposedly knowledgeable of their own prophet
34:51aren't knowledgeable of regarding their own prophet, right?
34:56Because there's no subtext for the Musa story.
34:59And Orientalists are like,
35:00is this Gilgamesh?
35:02Is this taken from this legend or that legend?
35:05I look at it as Qur'an is doing something
35:07completely different here.
35:08It's saying,
35:09yep, I'll tell you something
35:10you didn't even know about your own prophet.
35:12A journey he took that clearly
35:14he didn't see fit to tell you about.
35:18So it seems that the approaching these things,
35:21whether you want to term this
35:23the study of Isra'iliyat
35:25or you want to think of it as subtext of the Qur'an,
35:28it's a very rich field.
35:29There's also a need for greater precision
35:34in the approaches.
35:35And I think you've done your own muraja,
35:37that is to say you've revised your own stance
35:40on that over time as you've seen more.
35:42There are scholars also in the Arab world,
35:44like this group of scholars
35:46led by Dr. Ibn Sa'ad At-Tayyar
35:48in Markas Tafsir published this one,
35:50Muraja'at fil Isra'iliyat.
35:53And here they're making the argument to
35:55an Arab scholarly audience that
35:57we need to sort of wind back
35:59some of the negativity towards Isra'iliyat
36:01and recognise a role that they can play.
36:04So I think that there's a further conversation to be had,
36:07especially with things that we've gleaned
36:09from our experiences and our readings in
36:12Western academia.
36:12Maybe we should discuss when the time comes
36:13with Markas Tafsir and this group,
36:16what we did with Surah Yusuf.
36:18Because that was a really interesting exercise of
36:22the biblical subtext and how the Qur'an diverges.
36:24And from what I came to know later,
36:26even non-Muslim academics
36:28and actually even Christian missionaries
36:30and people in the confessional space,
36:33in the Christian space and the Jewish space
36:35were actually interested in what we were doing
36:37with Surah Yusuf and Joseph in the Bible.
36:40Yeah, so there's a richness to engaging with those texts,
36:45but not just simply throwing things on top of each other.
36:48That's right.
36:50So let's conclude this with a work
36:53that I know that you're familiar with.
36:55This is the English version of it.
36:57It's called the Onomastic Miracle in the Qur'an.
36:59It's a strange word.
37:00I don't think many people know onomastic,
37:02but it's to do with proper names in the Qur'an,
37:05especially names of the prophets and so on.
37:08And it's Arabic title.
37:10So the same author summarized it in English.
37:14That's what's happened here,
37:14but it's called من اعجاز القرآن في اعجمي القرآن.
37:20So he makes a very surprising kind of argument.
37:23Yeah, he does.
37:25And quite bold claims actually,
37:28which I know some people find almost disqualifying
37:31right in the beginning
37:32that he sees that all languages descend from Arabic.
37:35Yeah.
37:36This cannot really stand.
37:37But regardless of that,
37:39what he does on a micro level
37:41is he looks at individual names of,
37:46for example, Ibrahim Islam.
37:50And he says, well,
37:51here's how Hebrew scholars have tended to analyze that name,
37:56and this is what they think it means.
37:58But in the Qur'an,
38:00we have a pointer towards another kind of meaning.
38:04So he makes an argument based on his knowledge of Semitics.
38:07It's interesting.
38:07He adds something else.
38:08So he says, he makes the claim sometimes
38:11that biblical scholars got it wrong.
38:12So he'll say about Ibrahim,
38:13it's not a Hebrew name because he wasn't a Hebrew.
38:18He is in ancient Babylonia.
38:21So it's a Babylonian name.
38:22So we have to look at the Babylonian language
38:25to try and do the etymology of his name.
38:26He'll say about Musa,
38:28instead of looking at موشي,
38:30which is something along the lines of something in the water,
38:33and Shay,
38:34Jewish, Hebrew closeness to مو and Shay,
38:39which fits the story, right?
38:40But he says, no,
38:41they wouldn't have named him in Hebrew
38:43because he was raised in the Pharaoh's castle as a prince.
38:47So he must have been named in the language of the master,
38:50because he wasn't raised as a slave.
38:52So the name given to him
38:53must not have been in the slave language, right?
38:56So he says, well, maybe if we want to look at,
38:57explore Musa,
39:00we should look at ancient Egyptian
39:02to figure out what Musa means.
39:03So he traces, I think, five or six languages
39:08that he says that foreign names in the Qur'an,
39:11non-Arab names in the Qur'an can be traced back to.
39:14The second part of his argument
39:16is that the Qur'an is situating these names in contexts.
39:22Which explain the meaning.
39:23Which explain the meaning of the name.
39:25So what he's saying, for example,
39:27with Ismail is actually,
39:30he does trace it to Hebrew, this one.
39:32And he says it's Yashma'il or Yishma'il,
39:35which is actually,
39:36il is their word for God, like Allah.
39:39And then Yashma' is like Yasma'u, to listen.
39:43And Yasma'ullah is Allah listens.
39:47So Ismail is actually God listens.
39:49And the story is when the baby was born,
39:50Abraham is overjoyed and he says God listens
39:52and that becomes his name, right?
39:56But that's, I think,
39:58within the Jewish understanding as well.
40:01Yes, yes.
40:02But with Ibrahim, for example,
40:04he says, well, it actually means Imam-un-Nas.
40:07Yeah, of Ramham, yeah.
40:08I remember what he said.
40:09Then he says, then in the first mention of Ibrahim.
40:11Leader of many.
40:13Leader of many is what he breaks it up as.
40:16Yeah, but then he gives an Arabic,
40:18Imam-un-Nas, because it's like in the ayah itself,
40:21the first mention of Ibrahim.
40:24Inni ja'alu kul-un-Nasi, Imam-un-Nas.
40:26So there's a pointer within the text towards the meaning.
40:29So that's what he was doing with Ismail
40:31when he says, Rabbana taqabal minna
40:32innaka anta al-samee'u al-'alim, you listen.
40:35Right.
40:35So he's made these kinds of correlations
40:38with about 60 names in the Quran.
40:40So I think it's a very ambitious project
40:42and one which, again,
40:44like when we said about the one by Bassam Assa'i,
40:49where it's quite a radical proposition.
40:51It throws new ideas onto the table
40:55which deserve to be reckoned with.
40:57And then you might find that...
40:59Not everything holds up.
41:00But even if 50% of what he says is solid and sound,
41:04it would still be an amazing thing.
41:06So one really cool one that comes to mind is David,
41:10which David, which is Dawood to us, right?
41:13And David is actually...
41:15David is might.
41:18And David is the one of might.
41:21And the Quran uses Dhul-Aid.
41:25Dhul-Aid, which, you know,
41:26kind of translates Dawood in that way.
41:31He's got some interesting ones.
41:33I asked Sharif on our team
41:35to evaluate some of his work.
41:37And he has criticisms of some of it.
41:38He approves of some of it.
41:39So it was interesting to see.
41:41I put together a kind of a work group
41:45to go through it bit by bit.
41:47I have summarized notes on it if you want them.
41:54So this was our look at Biblical studies.
42:00There's a section you wanted to do about Ikhtilafat.
42:03Yeah, so that's next.
42:05That's next.
42:05Okay, inshallah.
42:06So we'll talk about that next.
42:07Jazakumullahu khairan everyone.
42:08I hope you guys are enjoying it.
42:09We certainly are.
42:11Goodbye.
42:14Maghrib out.
42:17How would you like to explore
42:19the heart of the Quran, Surah Yaseen,
42:21guided by an important Mufassir
42:24of the 20th century, Muhammad al-Tahir ibn Ashur.
42:27We've put on a special course
42:28at the Ibn Ashur Center,
42:30going through Surah Yaseen
42:31with a new translation and a new commentary
42:34based on the important insights
42:35of this great exegete.
42:37Head on over to ibnashur.com
42:39slash academy to find out more.