Omid Safi

Monotheistic traditions of the Abrahamic variety have commonly conceived of the Divine interactingwith this world through the Divine Word. No surprise, then, that the Qur’an refers to the Jews, Christians, and Muslims as “People of the Book” (Ahl al-Kitab). Yet the task of seeking and finding God is not as simple as opening a book, even the Book. Reading religious words necessitates some self-awareness about the revelation’s context, the history of interpretations that stands between us and the text, and our own situatedness. What follows is a series of musings on these principles.

Nevin Reda

Using contemporary ideas of intertextuality, this study investigates the Qur’anic story of Talut (2:246-51), the first Israelite monarch, as it is set against the background of the Biblical account. A verse-by-verse analysis yields the Qur’anic sequence of events, which includes Talut’s nomination, the Ark’s appearance, crossing the river, Goliath’s defeat, and David’s succession. The Biblical counterparts, located within the books of Joshua, Judges, and I Samuel, feature such characters as Joshua, Gideon, Samuel, and Saul. The Qur’an is thereby reading the books of Joshua, Judges 6-8, I Samuel 1-7, and I Samuel 8-31 synoptically, and the Talut story is a harmonized account of these narratives. Reading between the two texts enhances the Qur’anic story, showing how it functions as a blueprint for the synoptic reading, in addition to furthering our understanding of Talut, who provides a typological prefiguration for Muhammad. However, the synoptic reading also enhances the Biblical story, showing the skill with which the multiple consecutive narratives implicitly argue for judgeship as opposed to kingship in the post-exilic context.

Rasheed El-Enany, London and New York: Routledge, 2006. 255 pages.

In his Orientalism (Vintage Books: 1978), literature teacher and cultural critic Edward Said claimed that the entire corpus of academic, literary, and artistic knowledge about the Orient in general and theMuslim world in particular that the West had accumulated and shaped was built up solely to serve its desire to conquer, control, and subjugate the Orient. His thesis was widely discussed and influenced the study of the Middle East and the attitudes of numerous scholars.According to Said, theWest depicts the Orient as stagnant, static, exotic, submissive, and retarded, in contrast to the supposedly enlightened and superior West.

Umer O. Thasneem

This paper studies the quest for self and identity in the works of Muhammad Asad and Kamala Das (known as Kamala Surayya after she embraced Islam) from a broadly comparative perspective. The first section discusses this theme in the context of Muhammad Asad’s epochal The Road to Mecca, and the second section focuses on the poems of Kamala Das. I explore how these two authors, belonging to two disparate geographical and cultural milieus, found refuge in Islamic monotheism from the existential crisis that haunts modern humanity. Questions concerning self and existence have baffled humanity ever since people became conscious that each one of them has a self. Does life make any sense in or beyond itself? Does it have any definable aim or goal? What differentiates human beings from other animals, apart from their status as a “talking biped”? These questions, which arise from issues lying at the core of this concern, are treated with the utmost negativity and skepticism in the works of existentialist authors, who attribute no inherent value or significance to human destiny.