Ziauddin Sardar’s Approach to the Qur’an: Timely Lessons from Sura Al-Baqara

Abstract

In Reading the Qur'an: The Contemporary Relevance of the Sacred Text of the Qur'an, Ziauddin Sardar etches his worldview as a progressive traditionalist. In order to map his own in-betweenness, someone perpetually moving between tradition and modernity, using the one to redefine the other, he relies on scripture. His distinctive strategy for reading an alluring yet complex sacred text reflects his own self-definition as a cultural critic who engages post-modernism but also espies its limits. Uniquely Zia charts how the template for reading the Qur’an as a moral guidebook is already evident in the second and longest chapter, Sura Al-Baqara.

Keywords:

• In-betweenness
• cosmopolitan scripturalist
• middle community
• pluralism
• postmodernism
• progressive traditionalist
• Sura Al-Baqara

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See Critical Muslim 02, 2012.

2 All further intext references are to: Sardar (2011).

3 A leading Qur’an scholar, Mustansir Mir, has noted that the trend is now moving in the direction of synchronic readings of the sacred text. “Modern Qur’anic scholarship seems to be attaching considerable attention to a synchronic study of the Qur’an,” argues Mir, “and it is not inconceivable that the hitherto dominant diachronic study of the Qur’an will require a re-examination of its results and conclusions…” (especially) “if an independent analysis of the Qur’anic corpus in its received form (that is, the1924 Cairo edition), shows this corpus to be possessed of significance and sophisticated structure” (Mustansir Mir, 2020).

4 See Yuskaev (2017) for a full analysis of Fazlur Rahman as an influential scholar-activist in Anglo-American academia. In Yuskaev’s view, Rahman approached the Qur’an ‘with a double movement’ akin to a dance, a dance in which one moves backward in time to understand the original contexts of Qur’anic revelations and highlight ethical themes but then one sashays forward to apply these same ethical dicta in contemporary contexts.

5 All three books echo the title of Rahman’s work yet move in different directions: Mona Siddiqui (2007) views Rahman as a pioneering Muslim modernist who argues for the ongoing need to have moral guidance “since man not become mature in the sense that he can dispense with divine guidance” (p. 36). Muhammad Abdel Haleem (1999) offers an overview of multiple topics, but cites Rahman as his antecedent model for disproving the Qur’an is “no more than an echo of Judaism or Christianity” (viii), especially when offering Biblical and Qur’anic perspectives on Adam and Eve and the prisoner prophet Joseph (pp. 123–157). Methodologically attuned to Rahman is Abdullah Saeed (2014). Abdullah Saeed cites Rahman extensively, with special emphasis on the latter’s insistence that the raison d’etre of the Qur’an is, above all, guidance for humankind, with the cosmos a mere backdrop “to elucidate humankind on their position in the order of being,” accenting above all the need for moral action (pp. 96–97). At the outset of his own book, Zia mentions Siddiqui and Saeed as well as Rahman (pp. 21–29), while Abdel Haleem is cited for his popular translation of the Qur’an (pp. 51–52) and choice of words for describing nushuz in Q 4:34 (pp. 306–307).

6 In Lincoln’s view, “religion is: (1) A discourse whose concerns transcend the human, temporal and contingent, and that claims a similarly transcendent status. (2) A set of practices whose goal is to produce a proper world and/or proper human subjects, as defined by a religious discourse to which these practices are connected. (3) A community whose members construct their identity with reference to a religious discourse and its attendant practices. (4) An institution that regulates religious discourse, practices, and community, reproducing them over time and modifying them as necessary, while asserting their eternal validity and transcendent value” (Lincoln, 2006, pp. 5–8).

7 “The quality of the Quran is judged from the findings on its individual verses.” Al-Jurjani here epitomized in Navid Kermani (2007, p. 223).

8 See an interesting parallel in Robert A. Campbell (2009, pp. 171–172). Like Zia, Campbellconfirms a higher truth: the value of reading the Qur’an synchronically rather than diachronically, in this case, linking the message of the initial two suras. This Christian admirer of the Qur’an noted that the final three verses constitute not just an epilogue but also a prayer, providing a structure for framing Q 2 Sura Al-Baqara that allows it to supplement and complement Q 1—Sura Al-Fatiha. “When viewed as a prayer,” notes Campbell, “the epilogue can be understood as a parallel to The Opening, with the two sequences (1:1–7 and 2:285–286) forming a prologue and epilogue to the second surah…” (Campbell, 2009, p. 171).