Coming to Terms with the Qur'an: A Volume in Honor of Professor Issa Boullata.

• Author: Reynolds, Gabriel Said
• Position: Book review

Coming to Terms with the Qur'an: A Volume in Honor of Professor Issa Boullata. Edited by KHALEEL MOHAMMED and ANDREW RIPPIN. North Haledon, N.J.: ISLAMIC PUBLICATIONS INTERNATIONAL, 2008. Pp. xxiii + 358. $39.95 (cloth), $29.95 (paper).

Coming to Terms with the Qur'an is a Festschrift to celebrate the seventy-fifth birthday of Issa Boullata. Most of the volume's contributors, including its editors Khaleel Mohammed and Andrew Rippin, are former students of Boullata at McGill University. While Boullata is known for his work on various periods and genres of Arabic literature, the Festschrift is dedicated exclusively to the Qur'an. It is divided into three sections: "Problems in Reading the Qur'an," "The Qur'an in History," and "The Qur'an in the Modern World." The work includes a general index, an index of Qur'anic verses (but no bibliography), and has the virtue of a reasonable price. Overall, this is a well-conceived and useful book with a number of important studies. The level of scholarly sophistication, however, varies significantly through the work. Such variation presumably reflects the efforts of the editors to gather a large and diverse group of contributors.

The first section ("Problems in Reading the Qur'an") opens with an article by Eltigani Hamid entitled "The Concept of Reform in the Qur'an." Hamid argues' that the Qur'an speaks of reform (At. islah) in a manner different from the meaning of the term in Modern Standard Arabic and in classical Islamic thought. The Qur'anic notion of islah relates to the human state of salah (the opposite of fasad). In the Qur'an this state involves goodness, or wholeness, including biological well-being. The Qur'an's notion of islah reflects a high anthropology by which the human is ahsan taqwim, "the best form." In "The Identity of the Qur'an's Ahl al-Dhikr," Khaleel Mohammed argues against the apologetical notion that ahl al-dhikr refers to Muslims, proposing that it refers instead to the Jews. To this end he traces the Qur'an's allusions to Jews m passages referring to ahl al-dhikr, and examines the connection between dhikr in the Qur'an and the cognate Hebrew verb zakhar in the Old Testament. In the second half of the article Mohammed examines ahl al-dhikr in Muslim exegesis.

Perhaps the most insightful article in this section is Andrew Rippin's contribution on "Metaphor and Authority of the Qur'an." Rippin examines in detail the Qur'an's references to the physically blind and its use of...