Images of the Qur’an in Western scholarship: a socio-narrative approach

Abstract

Despite the huge body of research that has developed around the Qur’an in the West, there is still a dearth of research on how this scholarship represents the Qur’an and could contribute to feeding dominant narratives about Islam and Muslims in the West. To fill this gap, and drawing on socio-narrative theory, the present article analyzes the textual choices made in two works published in the well-established journal Arabica: Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies, namely Christiansen’s ‘The Dark Koran: A Semantic Analysis of the Koranic Darknesses (ẓulumāt) and their Metaphorical Usage’, and Boisliveau’s ‘Polemics in the Koran: The Koran’s Negative Argumentation over its Own Origin’. Analysis reveals that the different discursive choices made by the authors draw on the anti-Islamic polemical tradition and activate a century-old narrative with much currency in the West. The article concludes that while Western scholarship on the Quran has provided valuable insight into this text, its historical context, and relationship to other religious texts, it produces contingent and situated knowledge that can still bear the traces of orientalist representations and misconceptions.

Keywords:

• Orientalism
• socio-narrative theory
• Qur’anic studies
• framing
• conceptual narratives
• representation of Islam

REVIEWING EDITOR:

• Lincoln Geraghty, School of Media and Performing Arts, University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, United Kingdom

SUBJECTS:

• Religion in Context; Religion & Sociology; Cultural Studies; Language & Linguistics

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 While Said acknowledges that all cultures tend to make sense of the ‘other’ through narratives and imageries, he aptly points out that in the West-Islam case, such imagery obscured all the details that did not align with it, including Muslims’ high culture and learning, to create a monolithic and essentialized Islam. The latter thus became ‘an image […] whose function was not so much to represent Islam in itself as to represent it for the medieval Christian’ (p. 60).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sanaa Benmessaoud

Sanaa Benmessaoud is Assistant Professor of Translation at the University of Sharjah. Her research interests are interdisciplinary and include the sociology of translation, representation and (gendered) identity in translation, postcolonial literature and critical discourse analysis. She published several articles and book chapters, including on the representation of Arab women in translation.

Shehdeh Fareh

Shehdeh Fareh is a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sharjah. His research interests include contrastive linguistics, translation and TEFL. He authored a series of books on teaching English as a foreign language, published more than 40 articles and translated over 20 books from English into Arabic and vice versa.

Leila Abidi

Leila Abidi is Assistant Professor of Arabic Literature at the University of Sharjah. Her research centers on classical Arabic literature and women in Arab-Islamic thought. She authored several books and articles, including on the Arabian Nights and Arab-Islamic tradition. She won the Sheikh Zayed Book Award for her book Humor in Islam.