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The melodious recitation of the Quran is a fundamental aesthetic experience for Muslims, and the start of a compelling journey of ideas. In this important new book, the prominent German writer and Islamic scholar Navid Kermani considers the manner in which the Quran has been perceived, apprehended and experienced by its recipients from the time of the Prophet to the present day.
Drawing on a wide range of Muslim sources, from historians, theologians and philosophers to mystics and literary scholars, Kermani provides a close reading of the nature of this powerful text. He proceeds to analyze ancient and modern testimonies about the impact of Quranic language from a variety of angles. Although people have always reflected on the reception of texts, images and sounds that they find beautiful or moving, Kermani explains that Islam provides a particularly striking example of the close correlation, grounded in a common origin, between art and religion, revelation and poetry, and religious and aesthetic experience.
This major new book will enhance the dialogue between Islam and the West and will appeal to students and scholars of Islam and comparative religion, as well as to a wider readership interested in Islam and the Quran.
- Sales Rank: #752600 in Books
- Published on: 2015-02-16
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.30" h x 1.60" w x 6.30" l, 1.84 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 400 pages
Review
This outstanding work fills a major lacuna in both the study of the Qur'ân as scripture and the study of Muslim faith, practice, and sprituality. It is an estimable scholarly and intellectual accomplishment that will be of significant interest to any student of Islam or the general history of religion.’
William Graham, Harvard University
Navid Kermani, himself an highly accomplished and honored writer of artistic prose, sets out to (and succeeds) in articulating the Muslim response to the Qur'an as a work of inimitable beauty, a beauty, moreover, that is only available to those capable of reading it in Arabic. Reading Kermani has opened me up to an even greater appreciation than ever of the Muslim tradition and awakened in me an even greater desire to someday read the Qur'an in Arabic. The book is anything but a "fundamentalist" defense of the Qur'an on aesthetic terms but rather a beautiful evocation of the meaning of that beauty for Muslims in the past and today.
Daniel Boyarin, University of California, Berkeley
Navid Kermani has written one of the most insightful books on religion to appear in decades. His approach is ground breaking, a dazzling display of his profound knowledge of Islam, and his extraordinary insight into the nature of religious experience.
Susannah Heschel, Dartmouth College
About the Author
Navid Kermani is a writer and Islamic scholar who lives in Cologne, Germany. He has been awarded numerous prizes for his literary and academic work, the most recent being the Buber-Rosenzweig Medal in 2011.
This work was translated by Tony Crawford
Most helpful customer reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Important and Captivating Insight into the Aesthetic Experience of God in Islam.
By mirasreviews
If "God Is Beautiful" sometimes reads like a text written by an academic for consumption by academics, it's because it was Navid Kermani's doctoral dissertation. Kermani is a German-Iranian novelist, Islam scholar, and sometime political commentator. This work is not new; it was originally published in 1999. But it is important. Kermani's intention is to convince the reader that "an exploration of Islam as a religion of art could be at least as fruitful as the studies that have customarily examined it as a religion of Iaw." The basis for this reasoning is Islam's doctrine of I'jaz and its implications. I'jaz asserts that the Quran is formally and aesthetically too accomplished to have been composed by a human and is inimitable, always having maintained its superiority on those counts when faced with human challengers. This is not just theoretical, as the miracle of Quranic language is Islam's only and defining miracle, and the aesthetic dimension of the text "is of central importance to the Muslim self-image" and to the faithful's experience of God.
Kermani draws on an impressive mastery of modern and classical European philosophy and Islamic literature, theology, and philology to make his point. He also incorporates a wide array of ideas from the fields of theology, linguistics, literary theory, aesthetics, philology, Islamic historiography, and relevant commentary from writers whom he admires, such as Kafka, Umberto Eco, and Octavio Paz. Sometimes the references seem a bit much, perhaps intended to impress academics, but my experience of German works of literary and cultural theory and history is that they tend to incorporate ideas from many sources in the text, even if it is meant for publication rather than a doctoral committee. I don't think many readers will recognize all the references to theorists from diverse cultures across a millennium of time, but that is not an impediment to understanding. Kermani is a great fan of the philologist of Arabic literature Angelika Neuwirth, with whose work I was unfamiliar before reading "God Is Beautiful" and now feel compelled to read.
I should emphasize that Kermani's focus is not on the Quran, itself, but on its reception by an audience, i.e. it is received aesthetically, and what that has meant, and continues to mean, for Muslims. Kermani makes no claim that the early stories of the Quran's reception that resulted in instant conversions and sometimes even instant death are literally true. But they are part of the cultural memory of Muslims and therefore affect their historical self-image and understanding of God. Kermani begins by introducing us to the linguistic context into which the Quran entered in the 7th century and analyzing a long list of stories in which individuals were so struck by the power of Quranic language that it altered their lives and values. This seems repetitive, but it is essential to have a basis in how the Quran was received, whether myth or true, when reading the subsequent chapters. The Quran has always been a work that defied genre conventions, so Kermani explores its strong poeticity, even though its structure is not literally poetry.
If there is one thing that Kermani insists that readers understand about the Quran, it is that the Quran is an oral text, designed to be spoken and heard. Its linguistic structure reflects that it was intended to be recited. The Quran was spoken by mostly illiterate reciters to a mostly illiterate audience, before it was written down. "People are more strongly moved by the melody than by the meaning of the Quran." Kermani takes us through the development of rules for articulation, pronunciation, and prosody in Quran recitation, some history of recitation and of reception. He compares the reception of the Quran to the sacraments in Christianity as "mimetic acts in which the believer re-creates the situation of the revelation." The chapter about the miracle of the Quranic language is, surprisingly, the most tedious, as Kermani summarizes and analyzes the works of Al-Jurjani, an 11th century Persian orthodox theologian, and Al-Baqillani, a slightly older critic from Baghdad, who are among the most renowned literary critics of the Quran and defenders of I'jaz.
Kermani asks the question: Is Muhammed, who composed the Quran in its original form or received it from God, a genius, in the sense of the Enlightenment ideal of an artistic genius? Prophets and poets were one in the same in ancient cultures, and the European concept of artistic genius has much in common with Islamic concept of the Prophet. The book's final chapter discusses Sufi accounts of the reception of the Quran. Sufis take their reverence for the Beautiful and "sensitivity for everything acoustic" to an advanced level in stories of hearing the Quran. It is an existential experience, literally. The listeners tend to drop dead. Kermani is opinionated, and "God Is Beautiful" is not always easy to read. I was so captivated, though, that I never found myself distracted while reading. Kermani's aesthetic approach to the Quran is eye-opening. Westerners have difficulty understanding Islam, as it is a religion that has not yet undergone a Reformation. But if Westerners could understand Islam aesthetically, this would allow insight into the Muslim self-image and relationship to God.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Not for the layman, but a lifetime's work of scholarship
By Nathan Webster
This is a difficult book to review because I am not clear what I can even say about it beyond that it is a towering work of academic scholarship. If you want to use this book to inform your knowledge of the Quran, it will not take one reading, or 10 or likely 100 - this would be a resource I anticipate readers returning to dozens of times.
This is essentially a life's work of research, presented here in translation.
The best summary I could give it would be that to understand the Quran, one must first understand how it sounds, and in how it sounds is the first level of meaning to Islam's adherents. That is a vast simplification, but it's a start.
I came to this hoping for more of a layman's explanation, and this is NOT that - so it's best left to those who already have a decent level of understanding and can now delve even more deeply into Quranic study. Anything, in these days, that helps any audience understand Islam and the Quran is a good thing.
7 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
BRILLIANT, IMPRESSIVE AND A NEEDED READ IN TODAY'S CLIMATE OF ENTRENCHED FEAR AND IGNORANCE ON THE SUBJECT OF THE QURAN
By gracies mom
It is impossible to use this kind of criteria for such a book on such a subject.
This volume is so rich so heady with substance whether discussing the poetry or the causation of poetry in the Quran that it is staggering.
For those who are ignorant of the faith of Islam this book though a difficult and challenging read is well worth the time.
It is a multi disciplined look at the core of the title as seen in and through Islam. God is beautiful and speaking with a rhythm and in Arabic
can open one to the direct experience of God.
A comparison to the effects of prayer from all the main and in extant Father God religions is presented with a knowing and prehensile grasp of the fundamental cores of those faiths.
I have to say that I am left speechless by the amount of scholarship this book entails and the beautiful way in which the disciplines of history memory, science, poetry and more are interwoven into a gigantic book that throws a much needed light on the depth and beauty of the Quran not only for non Muslims but for Muslims themselves.
I will be re-reading this book and using it as a reference for many years to come and I will be grateful for it has saved the image of God before both Muslim and Non Muslim alike, in this world now polarized by the fictions of those who use God and faith for war and hatred.
This is a brilliant intellectual overview of the mystery of faith and the only thing missing is the direct experience itself but for those who ponder such issues this is one of the finest and most approachable books on the God as experienced in and through the Quaran
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