Revolutionary hermeneutics: translating the Qur’an as a manifesto for revolution

Abstract

Abstract This essay examines the Urdu Qur’an commentary of an important but less studied Indian Muslim scholar ‘Ubaydullah Sindhī (d.1944) titled The Qur’an’s Conscience of Revolution (Qur’ānī Shu’ūr-i Inqilāb) published between1939 and 1944. An anti-colonial activist turned revolutionary, in this commentary Sindhī sought to present and translate the Qur’an as a manifesto for a revolution that promised socio-economic emancipation for the underprivileged. In this essay I explore the discursive mechanisms through which Sindhī undertook such a task of epistemic translation, with a view to highlight ways in which the conditions of modernity and specifically, the global revolutionary currents of the early twentieth century generated novel approaches to Islam and the study of the Qur’an.