Review

Reviewed Work(s): The Qurʿân’s Self‐Image: Writing and Authority in Islam’s Scripture by
Daniel A.  Madigan
Review by: Jane Dammen McAuliffe
Source: Journal of Near Eastern Studies , Vol. 65, No. 3 (July 2006), pp. 207-208
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/508577

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BOOK REVIEWS*
The Qurªân’s Self-Image: Writing and Authority
in Islam’s Scripture. By Daniel A. Madigan.
Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University
Press, 2001. Pp. xv + 236. $45.
This book presents a substantial and remark-
ably productive exercise in semantic analysis. Not
since the groundbreaking work of Toshiko Izutsu,
which was published almost forty years ago, has
this methodology attracted such an able prac-
titioner. In reading the Qurªan for lexical con-
nections and disruptions, Madigan’s work is also
an exegetical endeavor, a form of contemporary
Qurªanic commentary and one that relies exten-
sively on a time-honored aspect of that activity,
interpreting the Qurªan from within (tafsir al-
Qurªan bi-l-Qurªan). Intratextual exegesis allows
Madigan to formulate strong and convincing re-
sponses to some key concerns of contemporary
Qurªanic scholarship. These could be formu-
lated as a series of provocative questions: did
Muhammad think he was producing a book, i.e.,
promulgating a scripture calqued on earlier Near
Eastern models? Does the Arabic word kitab, fre-
quently translated as “book,” convey that notion
as its primary signification in the Qurªan? If not,
does semantic field and structural analysis pro-
vide us with an adequate understanding of the
word’s polyvalence? What associated vocabulary
should be examined to expand and enrich this
inquiry? Can the accumulated results of these
investigations clarify the concept of Qurªanic
self-understanding?
That final phrase, “qurªanic self-understanding,”
has a curious ring to it, as does Madigan’s title
term “self-image.” A number of recent studies,
including some of my own, have drawn attention
to the self-reflexive nature of Qurªanic discourse,
the frequent self-referencing that is a distinctive
feature of this text. Discussions of this phenom-
enon almost invariably fall into a discourse of
* Permission to reprint a book review in this section
may be obtained only from the author.
207
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textual personification. Coupled with this is the
present, predominant tendency of Western schol-
arship to cite from the Qurªan with a preparatory
“the Qurªan says” or “the Qurªan states,” seeking
to find a neutral ground between the believer’s
form of citation, “God says,” and that of the non-
believer who wishes to assert Muhammad’s
authorship. Taken together, these perceptions
and practices have created a new manner of
speaking, one in which the Qurªan becomes an
active subject capable of a full range of verbal
engagement, as Madigan frequently demonstrates.
While metaphorically collapsing the author and
the work to form a single subject is a common-
place in literary discussions, ordinarily it does not
involve either the theological sensitivity or the
acknowledgement of textual self-reflexivity that
characterizes this instance.
I draw attention to this because any tendency
toward Qurªanic personification cuts against the
central insight of this study, the assertion that
kitab, as a description or designation of the Qurªan,
points to a process not a product. Madigan builds
this insight on the distinction that can be made
between writing as storage or display and writing
as composition. He would argue that emphasizing
the former signification, in the manner of much
Western scholarship, skews the consequent judg-
ments. Madigan captures this by recalibrating
our common conceptualizations of umm al-kitab,
nudging them from a notion of some static pri-
mordial repository to that of an all-inclusive sense
of God’s knowledge and will as an active pres-
ence and force. Madigan concludes the two intro-
ductory chapters of his book thus: “To say that a
people has been given the kitâb is not to say they
have been vouchsafed some great work of refer-
ence that contains all they need to know and act
upon; rather it means that they have entered into
a new mode of existence, where the community
lives in the assurance and expectation (or perhaps
even the fear) of being personally addressed by
the divine authority and knowledge” (p. 77).
208 Journal of Near Eastern Studies
It is to the elaboration of this overriding
insight that the author devotes himself in five
central chapters of his book. Drawing upon the
methodology of Izutsu’s seminal study from the
sixties, Madigan works through multiple Qurªanic
instances of kitab and its cognates as well as of
key connectives such as ºilm and hukm/hikma.
Analysis of such associated vocabulary as furqan,
qurªan, dhikr, zabur, rahma, tanzil, and wahy de-
pends the realization of continuing divine-human
engagement and of a humanity utterly dependent
upon God’s knowledge and authority. The in-
vestigation is solidly intra-Qurªanic with only an
occasional reference to al-Tabari or one or two
other classical commentators.
Identifying the core Qurªanic meaning of kitab
as the ever-unbounded knowledge and authority
of God underscores the open-endedness of both
the activity of divine guidance and of the human
reception and interpretation of that guidance. The
suggestive implications for present and future
commentary on the Qurªan are obvious. The
danger of what Mohammed Arkoun has dubbed
the “Official Closed Corpus” or, better, of the
imaginaire that has produced that retrospec-
tive reification, haunts the history of exegetical
activity, Muslim and non-Muslim alike. The re-
sults of Madigan’s reconceptualization of kitab,
built upon a process of painstaking textual
analysis, point in the direction of intellectual
regeneration and interpretive renewal.
In both its retrieval of an important but little-
used methodology as well as in its thoughtful and
well-reasoned argumentation, Madigan has pro-
duced a fine new addition to the growing library
of contemporary Qurªanic studies. It is a book
that the scholars will pull down from their shelves
often and will recommend to their students with
enthusiasm.
Jane Dammen McAuliffe
Georgetown University
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Vol. 65 No. 3
Fables of the Ancients? Folklore in the Qurªan.
By Alan Dundes. Lanham, Maryland: Row-
man & Littlefield Publishers, 2003. Pp. xiv +
88. $19.95.
It is a sad reflection on the literalism and
obscurantism that still permeates much of Islam
when a sympathetic folklorist has to beware of
offending anyone by suggesting that the Qurªan
uses folktale material. In the words of the Clear
Book itself, “In this Qurªan, We have set forth
all manner of parables, but man is the most con-
tentious of creatures” (18:54). Only a few years
ago, a teacher in Pakistan was defenestrated by
his students for stating that the Prophet, before
he was called to preach Islam, was a pagan. Self-
evident? Not to those who resist education be-
yond the here and now of pious slogans. After
mentioning cases of scholars who were perse-
cuted in both East and West, from 1926 to
1995, for daring to treat the Qurªan as literature
(pp. 10–13), Dundes wades warily into these
dangerous waters. He emphasizes the essential,
self-proclaimed orality of the Qurªan as a textus
receptus, an aide-memoire for oral performance,
and proposes to divide his short study into two
parts: an application of Oral-Formulaic Theory
to the text of the Qurªan (pp. 15–54) and an ex-
emplification of folktale types in the book
(pp. 55–64).
Each of these endeavors is something of a
disappointment. The first begins with an account
of the well-known theory of Milman Parry and
Albert Lord, based on study of epic singers in
Yugoslavia, that long oral narratives may typi-
cally include formulas for the depiction of stock
events, with formulaic variants stemming from
individual narrators, thus demonstrating that the
performers do not memorize their material word-
for-word but significantly recompose it each
time, within the bounds of the established oral
formulas. The theory has been successfully
applied to several contemporary genres, such as
African-American sermons. There has been re-
sistance to applying it to works with an estab-
lished literary text (such as Homer’s epics and
Firdawsi’s Shahnama)—based on solid literary-
critical grounds, according to the objectors, and
more on proprietary outrage, in the eyes of its
proponents. Dundes sees the danger in this case
as a charge of Orientalism, i.e., attempting to