Assignment #4 for the Departments of English & Media Studies by Prof Dr Sohail Ansari

Barthes understands textuality to be be a moveable, woven tapestry and intertextuality weaves the tapestries of individual texts together. Extend the judgment of this fluid concept of writings to the arguments of Quranists and hold different strands of the tapestry together to discern the meaning shifts with the perspective of yours. Produce subjectively the meanings of the claims of Quranists via the interaction between you and textuality.

For a construction (interpretation or perspective) and that is where/when the meanings emerges, you are ought to see the claims of Quranists as orphaned, not owned by their intents, thus free from their authority. 

This assignment does not introduce you to Interdisciplinarity or Interdisciplinary studies as it does not involve the combining of two academic disciplines into one research activity nor to a multidisciplinary approach as it does not require you to seek to integrate the skills and methodology of multiple disciplines into a collaborative effort or to understand how diverse areas of expertise can come together to solve complex problems. Hence, no integration which focuses primarily on the different disciplines and the diverse perspectives they bring to illustrate a topic, theme or issue.

This assignment is not cross disciplinary as it does not aim to cross boundaries between disciplines. It does not require you to study the arguments of the Quranists from the viewpoint of more than one discipline.

Hence, no approach to integration that generates an understanding of themes and ideas that cut across disciplines and of the connections between different disciplines and their relationship to the project. Hence, no requirement for emphasis of process and meaning by combining contents, theories, methodologies and perspectives from two or more disciplines.

 

This assignment does not require you to learn the integration which dissolves the boundaries between the conventional disciplines and organizes learning around the construction of meaning in the context of new and different themes.

 

This assignment does not require you to incorporate content from other subject areas into your analysis as it does not aim at blurring disciplinary boundaries; therefore not closely associated with the point that theory or experience of one discipline and problems of other one ought to inform one another.

Roland Barthes changed the face of criticism with his theory that works should be considered alone, in a vacuum, for their own merits, rather than as extensions of their authors. This assignment does not intend to explore the consequences, in literature and in art, of Roland Barthes's affirmation of "the death of the author"?  

This assignment teaches the probing of the art of finding possibility of extendibility of a theory to different domain in order to analyze reasoning of Ahle-Qur’an or Quranists as the extensions of undercuts. 

Help: Lines below help you a great deal to analyze the reasoning of Quranists from a Muslim perspective, further they inform you of the applicability and non-applicability of deconstruction as a critique

When US Supreme Court Judge Antonin Scalia, refers to the textual analysis of America’s Constitution he is referring to having regard to the original intentions of the drafters of the Constitution, something completely at odds with the ideas of polysemy and ‘the death of the author’.

Quranist trumpet the death of an interpreter and has long denounced the mandarin irrelevancy of prophet discourse which as they assert increasingly interposes itself between interpreters of the Quran and the Quran.

Ecclesiastes famously warns us that "Of making many books there is no end". True, as seeing things necessary to be known and done lie in a compass of Prophet (P.B.U.H) therefore, the commentaries approaching the Quran independent of Hadith are the endless and needless work. 

The responsibility for a divine narrative can never be assumed by people claiming to be the mediators, shamans.  Divine   text releases a single ‘theological’ meaning not a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of meanings can blend and clash.

Once the prophet is removed, the claim to decipher a divine text becomes quite futile. Text’s unity lies in its origin and the text is explained when the Author is found beneath it.

The birth of interpreters is at the cost of the death of the meanings intended by the Author-God.

Prophet (P.B.U.H) was charged with the mission to get sleaze off from every facet of life and revolutionize thoughts and feeling underpinning social, cultural and economic relations so that a society could make strides in consonance with Divine Wish and pass across the new threshold, hence it was imperative for prophet (P.B.U.H) to be equipped with skill to interpret infallibly the divine intentions of The Drafter of the Quran.

Since Aristotle's Poetics, literature has always given rise to its exegesis, and so has the Quran. In literary exegesis the answer to question are divined by the patient thoughts; but all the commentaries of the Holy Quran must be the scholarly reflections in the light of the Hadith.

A literary exegesis is a critical look at a text but the commentaries of the Quran have always been the Hadith-Based Exegesis because Hadith with regard to the exposition of the Quran is reliable in a non-qualified sense.

Prophet (P.B.U.H) was infused with divine power to determine meaning from  multiple meanings that is, semes  or sememes and thus restricting meanings to one instead of multiple senses usually related by contiguity of meaning within a semantic field.

Prophet (P.B.U.H) was infused with divine power to protect the Quranic Arabic phrases in its original sense; fathom out  the elliptical style of the Quran and  its drastic shifts between a highly poetic diction and metaphors and a self- understood sequence of the message.

Prophet (P.B.U.H) was infused with divine power to provide missing links to the  deliberate omission of  intermediate thoughts and words in order to clarify its import, and discover its significance with the perfect knowledge that there is no accidental similarity between words or a mere linguistic coincidence in the Quran.

 

The Quran without Hadith is reduced to a communication that repeatedly emphasizes a certain act but never explains.  Minus authoritative, definitive and incontrovertible interpretation by Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) each divine injunction contains multiple layers and meanings.  

 ‘‘Barthes notes that the traditional critical approach to literature raises a thorny problem: how can we detect precisely what the writer intended? His answer is that we cannot. He introduces this notion of intention in the epigraph to the essay, taken from Honoré de Balzac's story Sarrasine in which a male protagonist mistakes a castrato for a woman and falls in love with him. When, in the passage, the character dotes over his perceived womanliness, Barthes challenges his own readers to determine who is speaking, and about what. "Is it Balzac the author professing 'literary' ideas on femininity? Is it universal wisdom? Romantic psychology? … We can never know." Writing, "the destruction of every voice," defies adherence to a single interpretation or perspective.

The approach of Al Quran raises a thorny problem: how can we detect precisely what God intends? The answer is that we cannot. Interpreters mistakes injunctions for a certain meaning and fall in love with it. Every interpreter dotes over his understanding; but we can never know what God is speaking and about what because of the defiance to the adherence to a single interpretation

A text's unity of the Quran lies in its origins, or in its Creator. The crisis of legitimacy is the inevitable corollary of the non- acknowledgment of the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon) as the ultimate arbiter of what constitutes an accurate analysis of the layers of meanings or what are the isolated exceptions or the rule.

 Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) is not to be seen in the traditional continuity of power between the terms "author" and "authority’’ as  The Author is not a human being and His interpreter is not an ordinary human being as latter has the divine sanction to explain acts and injunctions of the Quran. The scriptor is God and an interpreter does not exist to produce but to explain the Quran and is not born simultaneously with the text, but is equipped with a being preceding and succeeding but never exceeding the Quranic text.

Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) is the subject with the Quran as predicate; therefore, every succeeding interpretation without the Hadith is eternally written here and now, with each re-reading, because the "origin" of meaning lies exclusively in "language itself" and its impressions on the interpreters. The criteria of the interpretation of Quran enjoy the fluidity necessary to obtain the intended meanings rather than the rigor demanded by respect for the meanings determined by the Hadith.

The argument of Barthes & of ahle-Qur'an or Quranists

An essay ‘‘The Death of the Author argues against ‘traditional literary criticism's practice of incorporating the intentions and biographical context of an author in an interpretation of a text, and instead argues that writing and creator are unrelated.  Barthes argues against the method of reading and criticism that relies on aspects of the author's identity—their political views, historical context, religion, ethnicity, psychology, or other biographical or personal attributes—to distill meaning from the author's work. In this type of criticism, the experiences and biases of the author serve as a definitive "explanation" of the text. For Barthes, this method of reading may be apparently tidy and convenient but is actually sloppy and flawed: "To give a text an author" and assign a single, corresponding interpretation to it "is to impose a limit on that text". Readers must thus separate a literary work from its creator in order to liberate the text from interpretive tyranny or a narrative tyranny as Erich Auerbach discussed about Biblical parables’

ahle-Qur'an or Quranists holds that the job of the Prophet, Salla-Allahu alayhi wa sallam, was only to deliver the Qur'an. They are to follow only the Qur'an and nothing else. Hadith is not needed to understand the Qur'an, which is sufficient for providing guidance. Thus, Writing (The Quran) and its interpreter (Holy Prophet P.B.U.H) are unrelated.

God is the author of Quran; and His words are transmitted to Prophet (P.B.U.H) through Divine inspiration, and hence, Hadiths are to serve as definitive explanations; therefore, Ahle-Qur'an or Quranists are compelled to acknowledge an interpreter to Quranic text: Prophet (P.B.U.H).

As Quranists cannot afford to bracket Prophet (P.B.U.H) with the authors of common characteristics; therefore, they cannot separate the Quran from its interpreter in order ‘to liberate the text from interpretive tyranny or a narrative tyranny of its interpreter’.

 ahle-Qur'an or Quranists instead pursue expedient of rejecting Hadith on the basis of reliability but this  sleight-of-hand subterfuge defies reason as accepting the Quran and rejecting Hadith cannot be possible unless we received the Qur'an directly from Allah. But we have received both Qur'an and Hadith through the same channels. Same people transmitted this as the Word of Allah, that as the word of the Prophet, Salla-Allahu alayhi was sallam. Even the verse claiming that Qur'an will be protected came to us through the same people. Through what logic can anyone declare that the channels are reliable for Qur'an and unreliable for Hadith? On the contrary the Quranic promise of protection must apply to Hadith as well for there is no point in protecting the words but not the meanings of the Qur'an.

Non Applicability of the argument of Barthes to the arguments of ahle-Qur'an or Quranists

We argue for traditional literary criticism's practice of incorporating the intentions and biographical context of ahle-Qur'an or Quranists  for the textual analysis of their claims in order to learn the original intentions of the drafters of the claims as we argue that claims and creators (of claims) are related because:

‘For the past fourteen centuries Qur'an and Sunnah have been the twin undisputed sources of Guidance for Muslims. In every generation, the Muslims devoted the best of their minds and talents to their study. They learned both the words and meanings of the Qur'an through the Prophet, Salla-Allahu alayhi wa sallam, and made an unprecedented effort in preserving them for the next generation. The result: The development of the marvelous -- and unparalleled -- science of hadith, one of the brightest aspects of Muslim history.

What does it mean to believe in a Prophet except to pledge to follow him? And so the teachings of the Prophet, Salla-Allahu alayhi wa sallam, have always guided this Ummah. No body, in his right mind, could or did question this practice. Then something happened. During the colonial period, when most of the Muslim world came under the subjugation of the West, some "scholars" arose in places like Egypt (Taha Hussein), India (Abdullah Chakralawi and Ghulam Ahmed Pervaiz), and Turkey (Zia Gogelup), who began questioning the authenticity and relevance of hadith. It was not that some genius had found flaws in the hadith study that had eluded the entire ummah for thirteen centuries. It was simply that the pressures from the dominant Western civilization to conform were too strong for them to withstand. They buckled. Prophetic teachings and life example -- Hadith -- was the obstacle in this process and so it became the target.’

 Non Applicability of the argument of Barthes to ahle-Qur'an or Quranists

Writings of pervaz cannot be separated from pervaz because the hubristic belief in one’s own self-proclaimed genius led to self-supremacy and the marginalization of others, which in turn led to pontification: writings then became an exercise to flatter one’s personal omnipotence, grandeur and an arrogance that bordered on megalomania.

The claims of ahle-Qur'an or Quranists emanate from a misguided sense of intellectual superiority that led to the creation of one’s own ‘dogmatic constitution’ arbitrary definitions and terms and the establishment of own discourse by snubbing competing discourses as everyone else appeared to them walking around in a metaphorical drug-induced stupor.

In short, writings of Quranists are the paranoid ramblings of bloated ‘scholars’ of unwarranted exaggerated self-importance who by twisting contexts feel that they can "compete" in a back and forth verbal argument with readers who do not see eye to eye.

Instructions for Analysis:

Getting at the Meaning: How to Help

Students Unpack Difficult Te

Apply ‘Questioning the Author approach’ for getting at the meaning by unpacking the intentions of authors or Unpacking a Text insulated against interposing authors.   Building understanding is not a new idea, but the way understanding is built distinguishes ‘Questioning the Author’ from other approaches. Ideas in a text are cumulative, so in order to build meaning along the way, text is dealt with “on-line,” as ideas are initially encountered, rather than waiting until after reading has been completed.  

‘Questioning the Author approach’ is different from the read-question-evaluation pattern that is an “after-the-fact” procedure. You will not be lost in a text nor will you construct misconceptions thinking you have understood, finally when you have right answers you will always understand what makes them right.

Reading objectives Strategies: 

Identify Author’s Purpose and Viewpoint.

 Draw Conclusions.

 Analyze Text Structure and Styles of Writing.

Distinguish Fact From Opinion

Analyze Flip-flop by analyzing a sudden reversal: how does the present viewpoint different to what the author said earlier?

Procedures and Strategies:

Explore questions about the author’s viewpoint, purpose, and style.

Identify text structures authors use to organize information: chronological, cause/effect, compare/contrast, and description.

Focus on how words and phrases are used to convey facts and opinions.

Think who could be intended audience.

What devices writers have used to hook readers’ attention?

How the information is organized to be reader-friendly?

Summarize your ideas by completing the sentence, “If I Were the Author I would...” however,

 ‘If I Were the Author’ approach is not ready-made for our task; therefore, we add “If I Were the Author born in radically different times and differently affected by the context so I would not be either inclined or compelled like Quranists and apologists to appropriate the western discourse for masking the real intent of Islamist ideologues as a way of gaining sympathy in the West

 Applicability of the argument of Barthes to analyzes claims without authors.

Assume Quranists have stepped away from their claims and hence have ceased to speak. By not giving claims an author, you do not impose a limit on them, thus can analyze separated claims or the liberated text for the reasons Quranists garner to marshal support for the assertion that Hadith is the unwelcome intervention to the interpretation of the Quran.

Dissect each claim to express the central meaning of the segment before subjecting it to rebutting.  

 Encounter claims for unpacking by the application of the “Questioning the Author" approach to comprehension for the construction of meaning by going back and forth between the text and discussion of ideas.  .

“Questioning the Author" approach provides the active engagement with a text and helps critique the author's writing however, it is not tailor-made for our purpose to get to the meaning; it is, therefore, to be modified to “Questioning the Text"; hence, not The QtA strategy to question the author but Qtt is to be applied to ask questions of the text

How to use ‘question the text’ to spur thoughts to solidify the understanding of a text

Reading objectives Strategies: 

What is the text’s message? Does the text explain this clearly?

Does the text engage its readers?

Procedures and Strategies:

Decide appropriate stopping points where you think you need to obtain a greater understanding.

Create queries or questions for each stopping point to learn what  the text is trying to say?

Why do you think the text use the a certain term, phrase or idiom or  a word or group of words to describe a particular situation or  particular people? And how different the sense it makes for you and for the intended audience?

 Create a yardstick by which to see

Qurnists make arguments, thus propose a thesis and offer some reasoning, using evidence that suggests why the thesis is true. Analyze the thesis of theirs. And then analyze other counter- arguments against the thesis of theirs or some aspect of their reasoning.

In short, in other words develop viable and valid yardstick to serve as a gauge for evaluating the arguments of Quranist and the counter arguments.