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Khaleel Mohammed/Andrew Rippin (eds.), Coming to Terms with the Qur'an. A Volume in Honor of Professor Issa Boullata, McGill University. North Haledon: Islamic Publications International, 2008, 358 pp. (Johanna Pink)
This volume is a collection of articles published in honor of Issa Boullata, professor of Islamic Studies at McGill University and a leading figure in Qur'änic Studies. Most of the contributions, as can be expected from a festschrift, have been written by colleagues, former students, and friends of Issa Boullata with diverse scholarly, regional, and religious backgrounds. All of the papers included in the volume are related to the Qur'än and its interpretation; within this broad framework, they cover a wide variety of themes and approaches. The introduction does little more than briefly summarize the contents of the papers. As such, this is really a festschrift sui generis, rather than a conceptual volume based on a clearly defined set of questions.
The four papers in the first part deal with the text of the Qur'än itself. Most of them combine the textual study of certain aspects of the Qur'än with a certain normative interest in the results that can be obtained by reading the Qur'än in a specific way.
In pursuit of a definition of the concept of "reform" in Islam, Eltijani Hamid discusses the terms isläh and other derivations from the root s-l-h in the Qur'än and their opposite, fasäd. He concludes that the ideas of both self-improvement and the improvement of society are part of the Qur'än and can, therefore, serve as a basis for Islamic reformist thought.
Following a rather different, and less normative, approach, Khaleel Mohammed analyzes the term ahl al-dhikr in the Qur'än, both with regard to its textual meaning and the development of later exegesis. He states that the term first referred to the Jewish mazkirim ("recorders of the past") and was an expression well known to Muhammad's contemporaries. While early exegesis reflected this meaning, it was unknown to later exegetes who were unfamiliar with the early Arabian religious environment and the Jewish religious culture. Thus, the term came to be understood to include Christians, and was then restricted to those Jews and Christians who had converted to Islam. In recent times, it is usually considered to denote a...