RENAISSANCE OCTOBER 2021

40 Monthly Renaissance October 2021 Qur’ ā n The Qur’ ā n: A Dialogic Text Ameen Fayaz The meaning of the word Qur’ ā n in Arabic is to read and to keep the things in a proper order (that is to make something cohesive and coherent like the pearls of a necklace). The Qur’ ā n is the name of the holy book that Allah, the Almighty, revealed upon the last prophet of Islam, Mu ḥ ammad (sws). In the holy Qur’ ā n itself, Allah has used many other names for this book, for example, Furq ā n (a book that differentiates between truth and falsehood), Dhikr ā (a book that serves as reminder for the mankind), N ū r (a book that is full of divine light for the mankind) and so on and so forth. While reading this book of guidance, a serious reader realizes it very easily that the Qur’ ā n is actually a book that engages a man in a serious conversation with God. A further serious engagement with the book reveals to the eyes of a reader that at every step in Book there is actually unfolding a serious dialogue between Allah and the Prophet, between Allah and His servants, between Allah and the mankind as a whole, between Allah and the believers and non-believers from amongst mankind, between Allah and nature and between Allah and the angels and jinn; in other words, one can say that the discourse of the Qur’ ā n is polyphonic having different addressers and multiple addressees all of whom are subservient to the central voice and command of Allah who wants to uplift mankind from mere menfolk to the status of His vicegerents under the son. This dialogic nature of the Qur’ ā nic text has been theorized and explained by one of the most important twentieth century Islamic scholars of India, Ḥ am ī d al-D ī n Far ā h ī in his Ni ẓā m al-Qur’ ā n , Ras ā ’il , Mufrad ā t al-Qur’ ā n , Aqs ā m al-Qur’ ā n and other books on the subject. His student, Am ī n A ḥ san I ṣ l āḥī has further explicated the theory of Ḥ am ī d al-D ī n Far ā h ī in his monumental exegesis of the Qur’ ā n titled Tadabbur-i Qur’ ā n. In this write up, I would try to build on the same theory and present some glimpses