Recently published in the UK and still to come in the US, The Composition of the Qur'an, by Michel Cuypers, is the first volume to argue that the Qur'an should be interpreted rhetorically, providing numerous examples and a methodology for future researchers to apply. We talked briefly with the author about his new book:
1. What particular areas of religious studies interest you and why?
I am especially interested in the exegesis of sacred writings and particularly in the Qur’an since I live in Cairo, in a Moslem country, and I wanted to understand Moslems better through the study of their sacred book.
2. How would you describe your book in one sentence?
My book helps to understand how an apparently composite text is, in reality, very skillfully constructed by using the techniques of Semitic rhetoric which is very different from the Greek rhetoric to which we are accustomed.
3. When did you start researching for this book?
In 1993, I became aware of the method of rhetorical analysis of the Bible and I began to apply this method to the text of the Qur’an. After having dedicated myself to this task in about a dozen articles on thirty suras (or chapters) of the Qur’an and a book on a long sura (The Banquet. A Reading of the Fifth Sura of the Qur’an, 2009) it seemed to me that it was necessary to write this more theoretical book explaining the method systematically, first in French (2012) and now in English.
4.What’s the meaning behind the title?
I explained the title in my reply to the second question. The sub-title requires additional explanation. Rhetorical analysis consists in discovering the different literary procedures the author or editor has used to give a specific structure to a text. These structures are always variants of parallelism (AB/A’B’), of mirror composition (AB//B’A’) or ring composition (AB/C/B’A’).
5. Which part of writing a book have you enjoyed most?
The chapter on ring composition was particularly fascinating because this structure is very frequent in the Qur’an and often difficult to detect. But it is very important to discover the center of a ring composition since, most of the time, it shows the way to the interpretation of the whole structure and, therefore, of the text.
6. Any tips for people reading the book?
This book is intended for all those, Moslems or not, who are interested in the Qur’an and who are often confused by the apparent disorder of the text. They will discover that, in reality, it is very exquisitely composed according to a complex ensemble of the procedures explained in this book, which is a sort of grammar of the text or of the discourse.
7. Where will your research go from here?
Since most of the Qur’an still has to be analyzed through this system, I still have plenty of work ahead for me. But I am also counting on dedicating myself more to forming students who will be able to continue my work. Leave room for the next generations!
8. If you could have dinner with one person, living or dead, who would it be?
That would be Fakhr-al-Dīn al-Rāzī, the greatest among the classical commentators of the Qur’an (12th century), because he was very attentive to all the subtleties of the text. I think he would be interested by my book. And I would ask him how it was that, in spite of his keen attention to the text, he did not discover the rhetorical system of the Qur’an!
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