In The Qur'an and Modern Arabic Literary Criticism, Mohammad Salama navigates the labyrinthine semantics that underlie this sacred text and inform contemporary scholarship. The book presents reflections on Quranic exegesis by explaining - and distinguishing between - interpretation and explication. While the book focuses on Quranic and literary scholarship in twentieth-century Egypt from Taha Husayn to Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, it also engages with an immense tradition of scholarship from the classical period to the present, including authors such as Abu 'Ubayda, Ibn 'Abbas, al-Razi, and al-Tabari. Salama argues that, over the centuries, the Arabic language experienced semantic and phonological shifts, creating a lacuna in understanding the Qur'an and bringing contemporary readers under the spell of hermeneutical and parochial interpretations. He demonstrates that while this lacuna explains much of the intellectual poverty of traditionalist approaches to Quranic exegesis, the work of the modern Egyptian school of academics marks a sharp departure from the programmed conservatism of Islamist and Salafi exegetics. Through analyses of the writings of these intellectuals, the author shows that a fresh look at the sources and a revolutionary attempt to approach the Qur'an could render tradition itself an impetus for an alternative aesthetics-contextual, open, and unfolding.

Is anything ever not an interpretation? Does interpretation go all the way down? Is there such a thing as a pure fact that is interpretation-free? If not, how are we supposed to know what to think and do? These tantalizing questions are tackled by renowned American thinker John D Caputo in this wide-reaching exploration of what the traditional term 'hermeneutics' can mean in a postmodern, twenty-first century world. As a contemporary of Derrida's and longstanding champion of rethinking the disciplines of theology and philosophy, for decades Caputo has been forming alliances across disciplines and drawing in readers with his compelling approach to what he calls "radical hermeneutics." In this new introduction, drawing upon a range of thinkers from Heidegger to the Parisian "1968ers" and beyond, he raises a series of probing questions about the challenges of life in the postmodern and maybe soon to be 'post-human' world.'

Throughout the last several decades professional biblical scholars have adapted concepts and theories from the social sciences - particularly social and cultural anthropology - in order to cast new light on ancient biblical writings, early Jewish and Christian texts that circulated with the Scriptures, and the various contexts in which these literatures were produced and first received. The present volume of essays draws much of its inspiration from that same development in the history of biblical research, while also offering insights from other, newer approaches to interpretation. The contributors to this volume explore a wide range of broadly social-scientific disciplines and discourses - cultural anthropology, sociology, archaeology, political science, the New Historicism, forced migration studies, gender studies - and provide multiple examples of the ways in which these diverse methods and theories can shed new and often fascinating light on the ancient texts. The fruit of scholarly work that is both international in flavour and truly collaborative, this volume provides fresh perspectives not only on familiar portions of Jewish and Christian Scripture but also on select passages from the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Nag Hammadi library and previously untranslated French texts.