Coherence in the Quran
Mustansir Mir
Paperback 125 Pages
American Trust Publications

A widely held view about the Quran is that, in its received form, it lacks coherence. Not surprisingly, most approaches to the Quran have remained atomistic in character. Also, some Western scholars have tried to rearrange the Quran in order to make it "more comprehensible."

The contemporary Pakistani scholar Amin Ahsan Islahi rejects the view that the Quran is disjointed. Developing the seminal ideas and insights of his teacher, Hamid ad-Din al-Farahi, he has argued in Tadabbur-i Quran,  his multi-volume Quran commentary (Urdu), that the Quran possesses a nazm or coherence that is not only aesthetically pleasing but carries profound hermeneutical significance.

According to Islahi, the Quran is marked by thematic and structural nazm on three levels, those of the individual surah (every surah is a unity), the surah pare (the surahs, as a rule, exist in pairs), and the surah group (the surahs are divisible into seven groups). Proceeding from this nazm premise, Islahi offers many valuable insights and fresh interpretations, and, more important, works out a methodology for studying the Quran that may well alter our perception of the kind of book the Quran is.

Coherence in the Quran is the first detailed study of Islahi's contribution to Quran exegesis. After putting a historical perspective on the ideal of nazm in the Quran, it makes a critical examination of the major aspects of Islahi's theory of Quranic nazm, and tries to assess the significance of this new approach to the Quran.

About the Author

Mustansir Mir is Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and the author of the forthcoming Verbal Idioms of the Quran (Center for Near Eastern and North African Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor).