Modern Readings of the Qur'anic Text: Presentation and Criticism (The Readings of Hamid Abu Zayd, Arkoun, and Shahrour as a Model)

Al-Basyouni Siam., Fatima

doi:10.21608/bfsgm.2025.443014

Modern Readings of the Qur'anic Text: Presentation and Criticism (The Readings of Hamid Abu Zayd, Arkoun, and Shahrour as a Model)

Author

Fatima Al-Basyouni Siam.

Al-Azhar University

10.21608/bfsgm.2025.443014

Abstract

Recent decades have witnessed calls for renewal aiming to re-read the Qur’anic text in particular and the Islamic mind - and its intellectual legacy - in general, according to the methods of dialectical materialist philosophy and critical literary analysis, under the name of renewal and modernity, which led to multiple readings of a single text, these readings were based on the principles that every understanding is influenced by the backgrounds of its interpreter, it also places the continuous and renewed change of the process of understanding and producing meaning - as it appears to the horizon of the reader and his own interpretation - as its first steps, taking into consideration the historicity of the text and its limitation to the reasons for its revelation outside the data of the text and far from the intention of its speaker, they are, in their entirety, critical interpretive readings based on the benefit of Western sciences and its critical skeptical methods - despite their differences in starting point and purpose with the nature of the Qur’anic text - to the arena of interpreting the Qur’anic text in terms of understanding and approach. The research here aims to study the foundations that the advocates of modernist reading relied upon, through looking into the linguistic paths that they relied upon when reading the Qur’anic text, and in order to achieve this goal, the research followed the procedural tools of the descriptive method. One of the most prominent results that the research reached was that modernist reading means diverting the word from its legislative direction and taking it out of the givens of the text and what it produces of current semantic and linguistic contents, and subjecting it to the reins of the reader and his whims saturated with the givens of his culture,the modern readings produced by secular thought are absurd, deviant, semantic readings that shun the Qur’anic system and have taken interpretation out of its rhetorical value into a means used to remove sanctity from it, and to demolish the foundations of faith by emptying the Qur’anic meanings of their faith-based content and applying them to modern terms that are alien to them; therefore, the research recommends not to be carried away by these wasteful calls that attempt to bring Western reality with its critical methods to the Arab-Islamic reality, and to search instead for a creative modern reading connected to the heritage that relies on the spirit of modernity and takes the text from a position of wasting the meaning of the lexical and contextual Qur’anic word to a position of activating it, and establishing a disciplined, modern reading that aligns with the objectives of legislation without compromising the intent of the Lawgiver. This reading relies on the spirit of modernity and is governed by a traditional linguistic reference stemming from the principles of the Arabic language.

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