Structure and Quranic Interpretation: A Study of Symmetry and Coherence in Islams Holy Text.

• Author: Lawson, Todd
• Position: Book review

Structure and Quranic Interpretation: A Study of Symmetry and Coherence in Islams Holy Text. By RAYMOND FARRIN. Ashland, Ore.: WHITE CLOUD PRESS, 2014. Pp. xvii + 163. S17.95 (paper).

The important and fascinating problem (along with the attendant problem of why it should be a problem at all) of the coherence of the Quran has been circulating through the general field of Islamic studies for a long time. Quran scholars have taken it up relatively recently. This book is not a summary of that scholarship but rather something of a popularization of many of its conclusions pressed into the service of a study of coherence as exemplified in the Quran through symmetry, chiasmus, and pairing/organization of suras into unified sections or systems of textual and narrative coherence. The second chapter of the book (pp. 9-21) was published a few years ago in The Muslim World as a study of the coherence of surat al-Baqara. This article has been revised and joined with some interesting supplementary explorations of coherence from different angles. Many of these theories and approaches have been the subject of recent scholarship. A cognate, though quite different, book was published a few years ago by Carl Ernst entitled How to Read the Quran (for which, see Travis Zadeh, "Quranic Studies and the Literary Turn," JAOS 135.2). The driving idea is traced ultimately to Nils Lunds work on the New Testament (1940) and its resurrection and expansion in the recent work of the late social anthropologist Mary Douglas with her explication of the so-called ring structure and chiasmus in oral composition. In her last book, Thinking in Circles (2007), she saw this mode of narrativity and composition as a universal human phenomenon--sometimes referred to as "Semitic logic" in older scholarship--and exemplified in a vast range of literature from the Iliad to Harry Potter.

Farrin and some of his predecessors argue that ignorance of the structure and method of chiasmus and its centrality in Islams holy book has caused the uninitiated (which apparently includes a large segment of the entire tafsir tradition) to miss the compelling and perfectly coherent narratological profile of the Quran. The volume under review is divided into two major parts: (1) the body of the text (pp. 1-74) with six chapters, and (2) a series of three substantial appendices (pp. 75-121) designed to illustrate and substantiate some of the authors more technical and intricate insights. The general...