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go back in one way or another to the ayats of the Qur’an. Thus, the Qur’an has always remained the main evidence base for all the theological and reli- gious-philosophical statements of the prominent Muslim thinker. Relatively recently, in January 2019, the list of sources that allow us to get acquainted with the peculiarities of Bigiev’s understanding and translation of the Qur’an has been supplemented by another valuable document. This is a Qur’anic study, which in its Turkish version is entitled “Kur’an-ı Kerime dair araştırmalar” (“Studies on the Precious Qur’an”). The publications under this title were published in 1949 in 26 issues of journal “Yeni Selâmet” (No. 12/80 to No. 37/165). This work covers the following topics: the Prophet and his Companions; the Qur’an and the Mushaf; memorization and writing of the Qur’an; the history of Qur’an collection and writing; the order of Suras according to the chronology of their revelation, etc. We offer to your attention the translation of the fragment of this work. The translation from the Old Tatar is by A. G. Khayrutdinov.

Ahmad Wahib

THE UPHEAVAL IN ISLAMIC THINKING

Ahmad Wahib (1942–1973) was an Indonesian thinker and a prominent representative of the Islamic renewal movement. In the last years of his life Wahib kept a diary, which was discovered only after his death. It was published by Djohan Effendi and Ismed Natsir under the title “The Upheaval in Islamic Thinking” (1981). The diary caused quite a stir, not least because of its criticism of the religious establishment and its condemnation of the “reactionary and primitive” attitude of fellow students toward the problems of modernity. It is Wahib’s diary that is the main source of information about his views on Islam, the Renewal movement, and the social situation in Indonesia. In addition to the classical problems of Islamic thought, Wahib’s diary contains a special dimension that can be characterized as a version of Islamic personalism or even existentialism. Staying on religious ground, Wahib comes as close as possible to a purely philosophical questioning. Wahib is paradoxical. His diary is a living thought. Here the existence of God is both assumed and questioned; the powers of reason are both broad and limited; faith is intertwined with reason; adherence to Islam is combined with a rejection of every kind of authority and “tradition,” etc.

We offer for your attention the Russian translation of all the philosophically significant fragments of the diary, constituting about half of the original edition (the other fragments are devoted to the “Renewal Group” and private questions of Indonesian life). The translation from the Indonesian is by T. F. o. Gadzhiev.

J. Pink

STRIVING FOR A NEW EXEGESIS OF THE QUR’AN

The article discusses Muslim attempts to develop innovative hermeneutical models for understanding the Qurʾan. It analyses the beginnings of reform in the XVIII and mid-XIX centuries and the sustained efforts, starting in the late XIX century, to bring the interpretation of the Qur’an in line with ideas of rationalism and modernism. On this basis, the chapter presents an overview of the most important modern hermeneutical approaches to the Qur’an, some of which focus on its literary qualities, its historical context, its major themes, or its main goals, while others emphasize the Qurʾān’s inimitability in new ways or seek to expose its immediate relevance for contemporary believers. The development of these new ideas, which have often provoked severe criticism, is situated in the structural context of the emergence of colonial and nation states, mass alphabetization, and new media.

M. Arkoun

HOW TO READ QUR’AN TODAY

This publication is a translation of the first and second chapters of Mohammed Arkoun’s “Readings of the Qur’an” (Lectures du Coran, 1982). These chapters are devoted to the deconstruction of classical hermeneutical strategies and approaches to the Qur’an, which, according to Arkoun, are similar to the Sancta Doctrina in Catholicism. The goal of the Algerian intellectual is to integrate the Qur’an into the general theoretical and methodological framework of understanding the phenomena of Scripture and revelation, which has been developed over the past centuries by the Christian and Jewish traditions in the West. A positive hermeneutic agenda, says Arkoun, must be based on recent developments in theology, the social sciences and the humanities, as well as take into account the results of philosophical research carried out by Western thinkers, especially in the XX century. In this context, the question of the meaning of Scripture becomes key. Noting that any claim to a definitive and exhaustive understanding of the meaning of revelation is unwarranted and dangerous, Arkoun suggests distinguishing between several points of comprehension of the meaning of the Qur’an — linguistic, anthropological and historical. The linguistic approach is based on the fact that the meaning of the individual conceptual and semantic units of the Qur’anic text must be grasped not on the basis of the relations these units

enter into in certain fragments of the text (inductive approach), but on the basis of the meaning these units receive at the level of the text as a whole — taking into account its inherent system of internal relations. From studying the structure of the Qur’anic language, Arkoun moves on to its anthropology and concludes that the language of the Qur’an has a mythical structure, like the language of the Old and New Testaments (while emphasizing the difference between these languages). Arkoun then moves on to an analysis of the historical moment — the scope and limits of all possible ways of historically conditioned interpretations of the Qur’an. The second chapter of the book, “The Problem of the Divine Authenticity of the Qur’an,” is thematically adjacent to this analysis. In this chapter, Arkoun formulates the old problem of exegesis of Scripture — the question of the authenticity of the text under study. The Algerian thinker shows that the question of the authenticity of the Qur’an must be posed and unfolded today on entirely new grounds, since it is one of the central issues both in the context of the Islamic tradition and in the broader perspective of the renewal of religious thought in general. The translation from the French is by G. V. Valiev.

K. Bauer

EMOTION IN THE QUR’AN: AN OVERVIEW

In the Western academic study of the Qur’an, very little has been written about emotion. The studies that do acknowledge the power of emotion tend to concentrate on emotion as a response to the text’s aesthetics. And yet emotion is a central part of the Qur’an: fostering the correct emotions is a part of pietistic practice, emotion helps to convince believers to act as they should, and emotional words and incidents bring unity to this synoptic text.

This article has four parts. It begins by reviewing approaches that have been taken in History and Biblical studies, in order to clarify the nature of emotions. I argue that emotions are universal but that they have socially constructed elements and a social function. Also, control of emotions can be as revealing as emotional expression. Part Two describes the overall message of emotions in the Qur’an. Humans must cultivate God-fearingness, while God bestows mercy/compassion and love, or anger and displeasure. Believers are distinguished by their emotional sensitivity to God’s word, and their ability to form an emotional attachment to God, and thus emotional control is a key pietistic practice. In Part Three, I propose a new method for analysing emotion within Qur’anic suras, which is to trace emotional plots. This method involves identifying the emotional journey undertaken or described in a passage of text. Part Four examines the resonance that is created by the use of specific emotion words in different suras.

H.Algar

Q.21: 78–9: A QUR’ANIC BASIS FOR IJTIHĀD?

The article deals with the verses Q. 21: 78–79. Verse 78 of Surat al-Anbiyā relates a deliverance of judgement by Dāwūd and Sulaymān concerning the matter of a field into which sheep belonging to persons unnamed had strayed at night, causing damage to the crop. As is almost always the case with Qur’anic narratives concerning the prophets, the mufassirūn and still more the authors of books belonging to the genre of qisas al-anbiyā’ offer a rich variety of partially conflicting detail concerning the matter and the way in which it was resolved. Of greater exegetical interest, however, is a conclusion apparently to be drawn from the stories concerning verse 78 once they are combined with the opening words of the succeeding verse (‘and We inspired in Sulaymān understanding of the matter’): that Dāwūd and Sulaymān offered differing judgements and that it was the judgement of the latter that proved correct, despite his tender years. This has drawn many mufassirūn to suggest that the two prophets in question were engaged in ijtihād, the result of the father’s ijtihād being erroneous and that of his son’s correct. Insofar as ijtihād can yield only zann, a supposition of correctness, its attribution to prophets is, however, viewed by other exegetes as problematical.

N. V. Efremova

AVICENNIAN THEOLOGIZATION

OF THE METAPHYSICS OF ARISTOTLE

The essay is devoted to the development of metaphysical / philosophical theology in the work of the greatest classic of Muslim philosophy, Ibn Sina (Avicenna, 980–1037). The primary focus is on the philosopher’s efforts to reform Aristotelianism from the perspective of Islamic monotheism. In addition to the philosophical justification of God’s being as a creator (i.e., the producing cause of beings, and not only a target cause), His unity (denying both numerical multiplicity and inner composition) and the main affirming/cataphatic attributes, the Avicenna version of cosmogenesis, theodicy, prophetology and eschatology (or rather, soteriology) — immortality of soul and its afterlife fate — is presented here.

D. Howard

BERGSON AND THE MUSLIMS

This publication is a chapter from American scholar D. Howard’s book “Being Human in Islam: The Impact of the Evolutionary Worldview” (2011), which deals with the reception by Islamic thinkers, especially Muhammad Iqbal, of the heritage of French philosopher Henri Bergson. Howard asks the question of what motivated Iqbal’s appeal to Bergson’s philosophy: was he seeking in Islamic thought the precursors of an evolutionist approach or, conversely, was he seeking to reorient Islam toward evolutionism? The author gives the following answer: both statements are partly true. Iqbal unambiguously identifies Bergson’s “life impulse” with God and consistently constructs precisely the Islamic theological scheme, denying the identification of the cosmos and God. The main point of divergence between Iqbal and Bergson is seen by the American researcher in the question of the duality of the self: it appears to Iqbal as an anthropological flaw with which a Muslim cannot come to terms. Howard examines other thinkers as well, such as Mohammed Aziz Lahbabi (1922–1993), whose elitist personalism lacks practicality of judgment and whose application of a scrupulously developed scheme of intersubjectivity to the Islamic tradition has proved, in Howard’s view, too ambitious a project that never reached its logical conclusion. The American researcher also analyzes Turkish Bergsonism, noting that it followed an entirely different path, since here the thought of the French philosopher was used not to develop a modernization project or theological schemes, but to offer an alternative to the chosen course of modernization, and in this case Bergson’s vitalism was in the service of the conservative wing of Turkish political life. For the Egyptian thinker Muhammad Haykal (1888–1956), however, Bergson’s philosophy was a powerful confirmation of the anticipated decline of the West and revival of the East. Haykal saw Bergson as the leader of the “spiritualists” of Europe. The Iranian intellectual and revolutionary theorist Ali Shariati (1933–1977) agreed with Bergson on a radically dualistic interpretation of man: man is an incessant movement from inferior nature to divine nature, and thus his duality will never find final resolution. Finally, the chapter examines the Senegalese mathematician and philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne (b. 1955), who admired Iqbal and, through him, adopted Bergsonism. For Diagne, Bergsonian Islam is a “Promethean” endeavor involving radical renewal. The analysis leads Howard to the paradoxical conclusion that, by and large, Bergson proved to be a paralyzing rather than a progressive force for Islam, and that his ideas could hardly have contributed to a reformist consensus among Muslims comparable to the effect they had among Catholic thinkers.