The ACRPS has published Quranic Discourse and the Secrets of Reception by Abdessalem Mseddi (376 pp.). The book attempts to answer the question: how does a person receive the Quran when reciting it? If ʿilm al-tafsīr is based on interrogating the Quranic text through explanation and exegesis, this book seeks to “re-examine the greatest Arabic text” as received by its reader instinctually, without knowledge of the Quranic sciences. The text is hence addressed based on what goes through the reader’s mind as they receive it, bearing in mind that the moment of reception differs for a given reader from one era to another, not to mention from one reader to the next. This leads Mseddi to devise a methodological concept in the study of the sacred text called “Quranic memory”, based on the fact that a reader’s first representations continue to accompany them even if they subsequently specialize in Quranic sciences. Hence, the author explores the Quranic meanings a person stores beginning from the conditions surrounding the moments of reception.
When we emphasize that the Quran has various manifestations according to individual experience, we are approaching the intimate psychological relationship that develops over time between the individual and the Quranic text, which in no way detracts from the sacredness of the singular essence that makes the Quran what it is: a divine text, in the full, complex meaning of the phrase which is nearly obscured by how often it is repeated, especially when used to allude to the idea that the Quran is not the only such text.
Conventionally, we approach the Quran in the form we envision to be definitive, reading, memorizing, quoting from, and reciting it as the fullest holy text and the highest in our consciousness. Hence, there is no dispute about what is established in our minds. Rather, the issue at hand, which is of the greatest subtlety and obscurity, is that associating with the Quranic text and continually recognizing its sublime holiness conceal the central question of how this entrenchment in the psyche took place, and what the stages are that we passed through for this exalted form to take shape – almost as if the gradual ascent of our perceptions is beyond our control.
To ignore the inner content of our souls about each verse or chapter is a form of denying reality. How, then, can we communicate the meaning of the Quran and interpret its objectives when addressing those receiving it, youths and adults alike, without attending to their perceptions at each point?
One of the major issues through the history of Islamic “philosophy” which needs no introduction is the characteristics of God [ṣifāt allāh], where the question may be asked: is it permissible to separate the description from the described and to say, “because God is all-powerful [qādir], then power [qudra] is one of His immutable characteristics”? This morphological principle opens a debate that could not have been imagined during the first era of Islam; such a statement would have been tantamount to attributing partners to God [shirk].
There is significant intellectual distance between paying attention to “scientific facts” mentioned in the Quran and establishing an entire field within Islamic science called “scientific interpretation” [al-tafsīr al-ʿilmī]. Though the reader – with their intellectual objection, spiritual inspiration, or both intertwined – may be at ease, the difficulty remains whenever we encounter references in the Quran with a purely scientific basis and are unable to reconcile them with the latest discoveries of worldly science. Do we stop interpreting, then? Do we cast blame on the methodology? Or do we throw up our hands and announce that the fault is ours, not of science or the method?
We ought to remember that every signifier is supposed to have a single signified, and vice versa. But with language, a signifier coincides with a particular signified at first, then its range of meaning expands to include numerous senses. For this reason, the ancients upheld the precedence of meaning over words, as in the adage “words are undisputed” [lā mushāḥḥata fī-l-ʾalfāẓ].
We should also remember that through the history of all human cultures, people gather in space and time and communicate through a given language that becomes public property; no individual can claim priority or ownership. Their language becomes a living being that grows and develops according to the needs of society, and eventually the need arises to deduce the internal rules that govern it, known as syntax.
