Book Review: Nicolai Sinai: Key Terms of the Qurʾān
Key Terms of the Qur’an: A Critical Dictionary could have been a major contribution to the field of academic study of the Qurʾān if Nicolai Sinai had actually produced the content befitting the title; as it is, the grand scheme elaborated in the introductory pages, promising “a historically oriented dictionary of key Qur’anic terms and phrases”, dissolves into vacuous and tiringly old discussions on whether a certain term has pre-Qurʾānic valence or Biblical precedent. When one digs into the actual content of the Key Terms, one finds a well-planned structure of the selected Qurʾānic key terms, but very little content, because the author’s actual sources are not the rich ocean of scholarly reflection on the key terms of the Qurʾān but watered-down, often petrified stagnant pools of “modern hermeneutical concerns” to which the author has consciously and willingly thrown his grand project (p. xi). Is it because he does not have the facility to read classical Arabic scholarship on the subject (Rāghib, Zarkashī, Zamakhsharī, et al for instance) or because he really believes that the shallow waters gathered by the likes of Josef Horovitz are really a wellspring to study the Qurʾānic vocabulary, even if one discounts the “uninviting surface” of “disparaging remarks about Muhammad and the Qur’an” (p. xii)? It is hard to understand how a twenty-first century scholar of the Qurʾān could show such reverence to a discredited Jewish German orientalist like Josef Horovitz (1874 1931), whose main concern in his academic work was Arabic poetry, rather than the Qurʾān itself, even though one can justify—to some extent—Sinai’s appreciation of Horovitz in reference to his own project because the study of the pre-Islamic Arabic poetry is a sine qua non for the study of the Qurʾānic vocabulary and terms, but why would one go to Horovitz for that purpose instead of a Zamakhsharī and a Bayḍāwī, who masterfully explain not only the Arabic poetry they cite but also its extension, and in many cases, reversal of the meanings of the poetical usages, when employed in the Qurʾān?
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Muzaffar Iqbal |
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