How to Read the Qur'an
A New Guide, with Select Translations
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- USD 24.99
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- USD 24.99
Descripción editorial
For anyone, non-Muslim or Muslim, who wants to know how to approach, read, and understand the text of the Qur'an, How to Read the Qur'an offers a compact introduction and reader’s guide. Using a chronological reading of the text according to the conclusions of modern scholarship, Carl W. Ernst offers a nontheological approach that treats the Qur'an as a historical text that unfolded over time, in dialogue with its audience, during the career of the Prophet Muhammad.
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Acknowledging the difficulty that many, including scholars, have in reading the Qur'an, a complicated work, Ernst (Following Muhammad) offers this elegant guide on how to read and understand the text sacred to Muslims. Ernst, a religious studies professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is not a theologian, but more a reverse architect, exposing the bricks and foundations of the Qur'an and then reassembling it, having educated the reader. He clearly explains several scholarly concepts behind Qur'anic understanding, including abrogation (the explanation of inconsistent Qur'anic passages as one verse superseding the other) and the interweaving and symmetrical structure of the book. The chapters, or suras, of the Qur'an have parallel structures and rhymes and call upon the imagery of other suras. This logical analysis actually provides a fresh take on the controversy of the "Satanic verses," two extratextual lines that Muslim tradition holds were prompted by Satan. While the myth behind them has grown, Ernst's analysis shows that the verses were probably never a part of the Qur'anic text to begin with. Ernst's straightforward exposure of Qur'anic structure shows the Qur'an to be an astonishing text.
