I was grateful to have read the Introduction and Chapter One at the beginning of the Qur'an class that I took, but the later chapters ended up kind of over my head. A greater familiarity with the structure of the Qur'an and with the surahs within Ernst's subcategories would have helped. I think I would have gotten more out of these later sections if I'd read them after doing more work reading the Qur'an and other thematic interpretations/exegesis. ( )

After reading Michael Sells’ Approaching the Qur’an: The Early Revelations, I wanted another book that would help me understand the Qur’an from a literary-historical perspective. Ernst, a scholar of Islam at UNC, made headlines in 2002 when (under his recommendation) the university assigned Sells’ book as required reading for all freshman students. Ernst held the audacious belief that students should understand the religion of the terrorists America was fighting against — that we should learn something about Islam beyond the headlines about al Qaeda.

In that spirit, he has written this book, a kind of “Qur’an as literature” book explaining the genesis of the text and outlining what he calls a “post-Orientalist” approach to the text. Ernst wants to use the historical and literary tools of European Enlightenment scholarship while still respecting traditional Islamic modes of reading the Qur’an. This book is an argument for that fusion and a look at some of the scholars, such as Fred Donner, Andrew Rippin, Michel Cuypers, and Jane Dammen McAuliffe, who are doing so.

Muslims believe that the Qur’an was revealed verbatim to Muhammad from 610 to 632. Yet Muslims acknowledge that the surahs (chapters) of the Qur’an can be categorized by the period in which they were revealed during the prophet’s life. Generally there are three main categories: the early Meccan surahs, the middle and later Meccan surahs, and the Medinan surahs. These three categories of surahs differ in length, structure, and main themes. The early Meccan surahs, written when Muhammad was just beginning his prophetic ministry, tend to be short and highly apocalyptic. Later surahs expanded and focused more on the revelation’s legitimacy and on retellings of biblical narratives. By the Medinan period, when Muhammad was the leader of a powerful political-religious movement, surahs grew even longer and began to include rules for the newly formed religion.

Can you tell that I enjoyed this book?

But there are loose ends in Ernst. For example — one traditional Muslim hermeneutic for the Qur’an is called the doctrine of abrogation. This is how Muslims harmonize verses in the Qur’an that appear to contradict. The verse revealed later takes precedent and supersedes the earlier one. Ernst argues that this approach to the text is too propositional — it takes verses out of context, piecemeal, like a fundamentalist Christian reads the Bible. He argues instead that when read in context, many of these supposedly contradictory verses are in fact just parts of a multifaceted tapestry. Is he right? I am not sure. I do not know enough to assess. But this book has given me a lot to think about!