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Readings of the Qur՚ān in London and Najaf: John Wansbrough and Muḥammad Bāqir al-Ṣadr1
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2009
Extract
Muḥammad Bāqir al-Ṣadr read the lectures which were published after his death under the title al-Madrasa al-Qur՚āniyya a few months before his arrest and execution, without trial, by the authorities in Baghdad. John Wansbrough, it is said, received threats following the publication of Quranic studies and The sectarian milieu. These two episodes of the late 1970s, in places as far apart as London and Najaf, show how fraught discussion of the Qur՚ān might be by the late twentieth century. That discussion of the literature of the sacred has always been a delicate exercise may be a truism, but at least there is solace in placing the writings of authors such as ?adr and Wansbrough in the long perspective of such threats to creativity. It provokes the soothing thought that even in this domain, the creative contribution will, sooner rather than later, establish itself against the hostility of ‘ la bêtise au front de taureau’. Such comfort may be drawn from the famous precedent of a cause célèbre in which creative novelty found itself on trial:
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- Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies , Volume 57 , Issue 1 , February 1994 , pp. 159 - 173
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- Copyright © School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 1994
References
2 Joyce, James, Ulysses (New York, Modern Library edition, 1949), pp. ix, xi.Google Scholar
3 For Wansbrough's, John two major works, Quranic studies (Oxford, 1977)Google Scholar, and The sectarian milieu (Oxford, 1978), I have used the abbreviations QC and SM throughout the references in this article. A significant literature has followed, notably in book reviews (most notably for QS): Boullata, I., Muslim World, 47, 1977, 306–7Google Scholar; Serjeant, R., Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 76–8;Google ScholarParet, R., Der Islam, 55, 1978, 354–6;Google ScholarEss, J. Van, Bibliotheca Orientalis, 35, 1978, 349–53;Google ScholarUllendorff, E., BSOAS, XL, 3, 1977, 609–12;CrossRefGoogle Scholar for SM: Madelung, W., Der Islam, 57, 1980, 354–5;CrossRefGoogle ScholarEss, J. Van, BSOAS, XLIII, 1, 1980, 137–9;Google ScholarRippin, A., Journal of Semitic Studies, 26, 1980, 121–3;Google ScholarCook, M., Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1980, 180–2Google Scholar and articles, including Rippin, A., ‘ Literary analysis of Qur՚ān, Tafsīr, and Sīra: the methodologies of John Wansbrough’Google Scholar, in Martin, R. (ed.), Approaches to Islam in religious studies (Tucson, 1985), 151–63Google Scholar, and Koren, J. and Nevo, Y. D., ‘Methodological approaches to Islamic studies’, Der Islam, 68, 1991, 87–107.Google Scholar
al-Ṣadr's, Muḥammad Bāqiral-Madrasa al-Qur՚āniyya consists of a series of 14 lectures which were recorded in Najaf shortly before his death. In the original edition, which is used in the present article, the text appears as a verbatim transcription of a recording, with some marginal editorial work produced by the publishers. The lectures were read between 17 jumādā 1, 1399 (25 April 1979)Google Scholar and 5 rajab 1399 (1 June 1979). The connexion between Ṣadr's arrest and his lectures on the Qur՚ān is difficult to document, but it certainly existed for his followers, who recall the lectures as the last occasion for public teaching by their leader. The lectures can be seen as the ultimate manifestation of the re-interpretation of Islam by Ṣadr, which together with the rise of the Islamic revolution in Iran, should be contrasted with the ‘ re-discovery’ of Islam by the Iraqi Ba'th at the same period.
Ṣadr was confined to house arrest on 13 June. He remained unable to lecture until his execution in April 1980. The lectures, which were promptly published by Dār al-Ma'āref, were edited, and not necessarily in a felicitous manner, in Ṣadr's Collected Works (al Majmū'a al-kāmila li-Mu'allafāt as-Sayyed Muḥammad Bāqir al-Ṣadr, 15 vols., Beirut, 1980–, in vol. 13, 22–175). In the present article reference is to al-Madrasa al-Qur՚āniyya as MQ, followed by the page, from the original 1979 Dār al-Ma'āref edition.Google Scholar
4 See Burton, John, The collection of the Qur՚ān (Cambridge, 1977)Google Scholar, and the review by Wansbrough, J., BSOAS, LXI, 2, 1978, 370–1.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
5 The concept of overdetermination, as employed by Freud and Althusser, corresponds to that of the palimpsest constituted by the Qur՚ān and the sīra/maghāzī and ḥadīth literature.
6 Ṣadr's most important works include Falsafunā, first published at Najaf in 1959, and Iqtiṣādunā, first published in two volumes at Najaf (1959–61). The current edition by Dār al-Taՙāruf is in one volume. Al-Bank al-lā ribawī fi I-Islām was first published in Kuwait in 1969. For a full bibliography, see my The renewal of Islamic law (Cambridge, 1993).
7 Wansbrough, John, ‘Res ipsa loquitur, history and mimesis’, Albert Einstein Memorial Lecture (Jerusalem, 1987)Google Scholar. I attended the other lecture, which was presented at SOAS at the Conference on the Qurՙān (21–22 March 1990). Although most of the texts presented at that Conference appeared in Hawting, G. R. and Shereef, A.-K. A. (ed.), Approaches to the Qurՙān (London, 1993), Wansbrough's lecture was not published.Google Scholar
8 See pp. 5–13 above.
9 See Mallat, Renewal of Islamic law, chs. iv and v for Iqtiṣādunā and al-Bank al-lā Ribawī. The theory on Qur՚ān 5, Mā'ida: 44 was developed by Ṣadr in a study entitled Khilāfat ul-insān wa shahādat al-anbiyā՚ (Beirut, 1979).
10 Obscure. In the Aristotelian theory of causality as applied in the Islamic tradition of al-Ghazālī to actions, we would normally expect ‘efficient’ to cover both their immediate causes and their consequences: cf. e.g. O. Leaman, An introduction to medieval Islamic philosophy (Cambridge, 1985), 82 ff. But the elliptical (?) reference here may be to the fundamental potential for change which is inherent in matter (humanity?) as a cause, and underlies the permutations engendered by ‘efficiency’: cf. e.g. G. Quadri, La philosophie arabe dans I'Europe médiévale (Paris, 1960), 221 ff., with reference to Averroes.
11 cf. his criticism of Crone, P. and Cook's, M.Hagarism, BSOAS, XLI, 1, 1978, at p. 156Google Scholar: ‘My reservations… turn upon what I take to be the authors’ methodological assumptions, of which the principal must be that a vocabulary of motives can be freely extrapolated from a discrete collection of literary stereotypes composed by alien and mostly hostile observers, and thereupon employed to describe, even interpret, not merely the overt behaviour but also the intellectual and spiritual developments of the helpless and mostly innocent actors.’
12 Ṣadr, , Iqtiṣādunā (Beirut, 1977), 260, 261.Google Scholar
13 Wansbrough, ‘Res ipsa loquitur’, 7.
14 Goethe, , Faust, Part one, I, v, 1224, 1236–7 (ed. Zurich, , 1950).Google Scholar
15 ‘Risāla taḍa’ ḥaddan H-istighlāl al-insān li՚l-insān, a message that ends exploitation of man by man’, Ṣadr, Lamḥa fiqhiyya tamhīdiyya ՙan mashrūՙ duslūr al-jumhūriyya al-islāmiyya fi Irān (Beirut, 1979), 15.
16 For instance in Fakad in history, Ṣadr's earliest book (Najaf, 1955).
17 Rippin, ‘Literary analysis’, 155, quoting T. Thompson.
18 See especially Ṣadr's Dawr al-a'imma fī՚ l-ḥayāt al-lslāmiyya, Tehran, 1980 (original 1966); Ahl al-bayt (Beirut, 1982 (original 1968)); Baḥth hawl al-Wilāya (Beirut, 1977), and my ‘Religious militancy in contemporary Iraq: Muḥammad Baqer as-Ṣadr and the Sunni-Shia paradigm’, Third World Quarterly, 10, 1988, 699–729.
19 Rippin, 154.