Overview

The Qur'an's biblical foregrounds have long formed a controversial concern within Qur'anic Studies, with field-leading scholars debating the Muslim scripture's complex relationship and response to the Judeo-Christian canon. This contentious subject has largely overshadowed, however, a reciprocal, yet no less rich, question which motivates the present study. Rather than read the Muslim scripture in light of its biblical antecedents, The Qur'an & Kerygma adopts the inverse approach, situating the Qur'an as itself the formative foreground to Western literary innovation and biblical exegesis, stretching from late antiquity in the 9th century to postmodernity in the 20th. The book argues, in particular, that Qur'anic readings and renditions have provoked and paralleled key developments in the Christian canon and its critique, catalyzing pivotal acts of authorship and interpretation which have creatively contoured the language and legacy of biblical kerygma. Structured chronologically, the study's span of more than a millennium is sustained by its specific concentration on four case studies selected from representative areas and eras, exploring innovative translations and interpretations of the Qur'an authored by Christian literati from 9th-century Andalucia to 20th-century North America. Mirroring its subject matter, the book engages a literary critical approach, offering close-readings of targeted texts frequently neglected and never before synthesized in a single study, highlighting the stylistic, as well as spiritual, influence on Western authors exercised by Islamic writ.

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9781781794111

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Reviews

Einboden's The Qur'an and Kerygma opens the door for new opportunities in the study of Christian-Muslim relations. While recent scholarship on the Qur'an has focused on its 'context', 'biblical subtext', and biblical impressions in the Qur'an, Einboden's fresh study flips this relationship by investigating the impressions of the Qur'an on Arabic Christian commentaries and translations of the Bible. The Qur'an and Kerygma provides exciting new insights into the intertextuality of the Bible and the Qur'an. David D. Grafton, Professor of Islamic Studies and Christian-Muslim Relations, Hartford Seminary The Qur'an and Kerygma is wondrously creative and an intellectual delight of the very highest order. Jeffery Einboden has given us a truly exciting study of the Qur'an's influence in the so-called West. Eschewing humdrum and stale constraints, Einboden addresses notions of the Bible and the Qur'an , their identities, cross-fertilizations and, above all, their profound kerygmatic kinship. The result is utterly dazzling. The supremely diligent and perspicacious chapter on Northrop Frye is destined to impact both Biblical and Literature Studies. Words with power, one might say. Todd Lawson, Professor Emeritus of Islamic Thought, University of Toronto

His analysis of the texts he examines is thorough and insightful, and he has a fine eye for quranic allusions and echoes. In the process, he convincingly demonstrates that the authors he discusses have brought the Quran into their Bible-related work. . . . These six snapshots of various moments in the relationship between the Bible and the Quran provide an important corrective in that they remind us that, like all relationships, this one has been a two-way street. One direction of that road, the one that considers the Bible's possible influence on the Islamic text, has been well traveled. Einboden is to be commended and thanked for pointing us in the opposite direction so we can better appreciate the Qurans role in shaping how the biblical literature has been presented and understood. He is an able and informative tour guide on this fascinating journey. --Kaltner, John, Rhodes College, Memphis, TN, American Journal of Islam and Society

Author Information

Jeffrey Einboden is an Associate Professor at Northern Illinois University, and author of Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature in Middle Eastern Languages (Edinburgh University Press 2013); Islam and Romanticism: Muslim Currents from Goethe to Emerson (Oneworld 2014); and The Islamic Lineage of Literary America, forthcoming from Oxford University Press. His research into Islamic sources and the Western canon has appeared in journals including Milton Quarterly, Translation and Literature, Middle Eastern Literatures, and the Journal of Qur'anic Studies; in 2006, his The Genesis of Weltliteratur: Goethe's West-ostlicher Divan and Kerygmatic Pluralism (Literature and Theology; 2005) was named by OUP as one of the 100 seminal articles published by Oxford Journals in the past century.

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