The Sublime Qur'an and Orientalism By Muhammad Khalifa. Karachi: International Islamic Publishers (Pvt.) Ltd., 1989, 262pp., second edition.

Abstract

The Qur'an, being central to both the Islamic faith and its practice, has
been studied in a plethora of orientalist writings-ranging from such a crudely
polemical one as Alexander Ross's English translation of the Qur'an entitled
The Alcoran of Mahomet . . . for the Satisfaction for all those who Desire
to look into the Turkish Vanities (1649) to those with scholarly pretensions
and claiming to be "objective" studies, such as Noldeke's Geschichte des Qorans
(1860), Goldziher's Die Richtungen der islamischen Koranauslesung (1920),
Bell's The Quran translated with a Critical Rearrangement of the Surahs
(1937-39), Wansbrough's Quranic Studies (1977), and Burton's The Collection
of the Quran (1977).
The book under review, first published in 1983, recounts the full tock
of the orientalists' misconceptions, down the ages, about the Qur'an-their
outlandish theories about its authorship (pp. 7-18), their assaults on its textual
history and its arrangement (pp. 52-63), their brazen attempts at twisting
its meaning in their Qur'an translations (pp. 64-92), and their bizzare views
on abrogation in the Qur'an (pp. 93-104). Khalifa deserves every credit for
assembling so much information. What is more remarkable is that it is followed
by a stout refutation of these allegations about the form and contents of the
Qur'an and an extensive, authentic exposition of the Qur'anic teachings,
concepts, and morals, all of which constitutes the second part of the book
(pp. 111-205). In elucidating the Qur'anic worldview, Khalifa's discussion is
subtle, in large part persuasive, tenaciously pursued, and well presented.
Appended to the book are two highly informative appendices on the order
of the Qur'an's surahs.
This well-intentioned and detailed scholarly study, however, does not
really succeed in delivering what its title promises. In discussing the orientalists'
ventures into establishing the chronology of Qur'anic surahs, Khalifa says
little about Gustav Fli:lgel's Corani Textus Arabiscus (1834) and the theories
propounded by Grimme and Hirschfield's New Researches in the Composition
and Exegesis of the Quran (1902). More serious is the lack of any reference
to a host of orientalists' writings on the philological and lexical aspects of
the Qur'an, namely Baljon's Modern Muslim Quran Interpretation (1961),
Torrey's The Commercial-Theological Terms in the Quran (1892), Watt's ...