“Approaches to the qur'anic text in the contemporary western literature: The searchings for the unity of the text”

ARSİN KEBEKJİ

Abstract Of Title

The structure of the Qur'anic text has been one of the most attention-grabbing subjects of the Western Qur'anic studies since the nineteenth century. The concept of "scattered text" with the aforementioned period continued until the 1980s. Since then, new approaches have appeared on the basis of the assumption that the Qur'an is a "holistic text". In this context, a significant literature has emerged which can be expressed as the search for the unity in such levels from short Meccan suras to the whole of the text. The reasons for this differentiation in the Western conception of the Qur'anic text can only be revealed by illuminating the historical and theoretical background of the Western Biblical and Qur'anic studies. Considering this aspect, it is seen that historical-critcal methods are effective on the aforementioned fields from the 19th to the last quarter of the twentieth century. As a result of this influence, a period in which the Qur'an is analyzed as a historical text is witnessed. In this process, the fact that the Qur'an is seen as the most authentic history text to illuminate its own history has brought about the search for the chronological order of the text because the Qur'an, which has many literary "flaws" in its current composition, is far from presenting a historical flow as well. However, the studies on the chronological order of the Qur'anic text have not produced notable results in terms of either the historical flow or the solution of presumed literary problems of the Qur'anic text. This fact brought new searches for the solution of "the problem of text structure". After the 1950s, there have been significant developments in the contemporary literary theories and Biblical studies. The emergence of text-centered approaches during this period and the fact that the text itself became a more powerful authority than its author and history encouraged a literature focusing on the logic of the Mushaf arrangement of the Qur'anic text. According to the first of the three prominent approaches in this background, the Qur'an must be subjected to an intertextual reading in its history in order to determine the unity of the text. To do this, rather than Islamic literature, it should be applied to such "external" datum as kâhin sayings, qasîda and the Bible. In the second approach, the unity of the Qur'anic text, largely independent of its history, should be analyzed with the help of its themes, expressions of addressee, formulaic expressions, repetitions and some rhetorical elements. In the third approach, it is highlighted that the Qur'an is not a Greek but a Semitic text and in the semitic rhetoric, texts are composed of symmetrical (cyclic) structures rather than linear (prologue-development-epilogue) ones. In this approach, it is also claimed that some surahs and verse passages contain the message of religious pluralism based on the supposed symmetrical structures. In addition to significant findings, it turns out that all these approaches, at certain points, have some weaknesses such as subjectivity, generalization, reductionism, eclecticism and shortage of historical data.

Information Of Title

Lnaguage: Turkish - Type: Thesis - Number of pages: 344 - Date: 2019 - Country: TR