Images of the Qur’an in Western scholarship: a socio-narrative approach

Abstract

Despite the huge body of research that has developed around the Qur’an in the West, there is still a dearth of research on how this scholarship represents the Qur’an and could contribute to feeding dominant narratives about Islam and Muslims in the West. To fill this gap, and drawing on socio-narrative theory, the present article analyzes the textual choices made in two works published in the well-established journal Arabica: Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies, namely Christiansen’s ‘The Dark Koran: A Semantic Analysis of the Koranic Darknesses (ẓulumāt) and their Metaphorical Usage’, and Boisliveau’s ‘Polemics in the Koran: The Koran’s Negative Argumentation over its Own Origin’. Analysis reveals that the different discursive choices made by the authors draw on the anti-Islamic polemical tradition and activate a century-old narrative with much currency in the West. The article concludes that while Western scholarship on the Quran has provided valuable insight into this text, its historical context, and relationship to other religious texts, it produces contingent and situated knowledge that can still bear the traces of orientalist representations and misconceptions.

Keywords

• Orientalism
• socio-narrative theory
• Qur’anic studies
• framing
• conceptual narratives
• representation of Islam