RENAISSANCE OCTOBER 2021

Qur’ ā n 41 Monthly Renaissance October 2021 of the dialogic nature of the Qur’ ā nic discourse. First and the foremost that I would like to state about the subject is that Allah is the addresser of the Qur’ ā n and His address throughout the Qur’ ā n is directed to either the Prophet or to the believers or to the non-believers or to the hypocrites or to the mankind as a whole or to the nations and people who were no more at the time of the revelation of this Book. Then Allah either makes these addressees to speak in various contexts or quotes them in different contexts or assumes them to talk to Him or respond to Him in different contexts. This aspect of the Qur’ ā nic discourse makes it not only dialogic but polyphonic as well. It further points to an important fact about the Qur’ ā n that through this continuous and sustained dialogue it actually is all the time subservient to the Chief addresser, Allah, to the three key central themes of the Qur’ ā n, taw ḥī d , ris ā lah and life after death. There are hundreds of sub-themes in the Qur’ ā n that one would always find subservient to these three central and key themes of the Qur’ ā n; therefore, the dialogue among different speakers in the Qur’ ā nic text revolves around these main themes with reference to and through the hundreds of sub-themes that are involved in the making of the Qur’ ā nic text. Secondly, what is very beautiful about this dialogue and polyphony in the Qur’ ā n is the proper turn taking and shift from one voice to another voice. Those who are not familiar with the concept of coherence and cohesion in the Qur’ ā n would say that the Qur’ ā n is not an organized discourse and would also claim that it is an assemblage of verses that are disjointed and unorganized as has been the claim of many Orientalists and Muslim scholars as well latently or manifestly; however, those who are well versed in the science of coherence and cohesion and have a good understanding of the Qur’ ā nic language would find such claims baseless the moment they realize how from the beginning to the end the Qur’ ā n is not only a continuous and constant flow but in this constant and continuous flow of conversation there is also a proper turn taking and shift from one voice to another voice also which makes it a dialogue proper and a highly organized and well- connected discourse also. From the S ū rah al-F ā ti ḥ ah to S ū rah al- N ā s, the small and big chapters of the Qur’ ā n testify to this singularity with multiplicity of voices and then within every chapter of the Qur’ ā n all the ā y ā t do also testify to the same fact.