as i said, i haven't made any progress with the book, but i have a vague sense that he's talking about a deconstructionist approach to the Qur'aan. aside from the fact that the subject material is quite esoteric (to me, anyway), he often uses awkward constructions, which isn't surprising, i suppose, given that English is probably his fourth language after Tamazigh (Berber), Arabic, and French--not that it doesn't manage to sound erudite. but on occasion i come across a sentence that doesn't seem to have any meaning at all. add to this the abundance of little spelling errors (the proofreader did an awful job), and the fact that all of the most cryptic terms are in bold (e.g., People of the Book-book) without explanation, as though it were a frigging textbook...and perhaps you can see why reading this book nearly drove me nuts. i hate the font, and he doesn't have a complete list of works cited, just a "Select Bibliography" whose purpose i can't figure out despite (or perhaps because of) his explanatory paragraph. and then there are the diagrams...oh, those diagrams. sometimes i feel as though i'm reading Finnegan's Wake.

i'm going to go back to it, though, because i don't have a good understanding of deconstructionism yet, and i have a vague sense that beneath all the jargon (who the fuck are the People of the Book-book?!) something precious may be lurking.

what do you think of deconstructing scripture, though?

[ July 07, 2002: Message edited by: Mohamad Khan ]

quote:

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I favour a historical analysis of all human productions

I do not think it is ever sensible to repress our ability to think critically, whether for Stalin, Jahweh, or anyone else.

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how sensible is it, then, to repress one's ability to think critically for the sake of one's faith in a logocentric and linear history?

As for your question... There's an intriguing Donna Haraway article called (brace yourself) "Ecce Homo, Ain't (Ar'n't) I a Woman and Inappropriate/d Others: The Human in a Post-Humanist Landscape" in which she rereads Jesus and Sojourner Truth as two trickster figures who show how humanity is always an open-ended affair, a work in progress, and reminds what troubles the halts in interpretation -- of the 'human', of 'history', of religious texts, let's say -- usually bring. The article was published in Feminists Theorize the Political ed. by Judith Butler and Joan Scott, and I couldn't find on the web anything other than this essay that in its second half talks about Haraway's Ecce Homo. It's a dense piece mostly on philosophy of historical interpretation, but it can be useful.

I remember reading ages ago about a Pakistani female defence lawyer Asma (whose last name escapes me) who is a feminist and who manages to base all of her defence work on Qur'an. That's all I can remember, tho'.

[ July 07, 2002: Message edited by: Trespasser ]