Historicising Revelation: Abdolkarim Soroush and the New Historicist Turn in Qur’anic Hermeneutics

Abstract

Abdolkarim Soroush’s deployment of new historicism, above all through the paired notions of the ‘historicity of text’ and the ‘textuality of history’, establishes a remarkably potent bridge between contemporary literary theory and the hermeneutics of the Holy Qur’an. New historicism, which has long discredited any naïve belief in history as a neutral, stable record, instructs us instead to see history as a contested field, continually shaped and reshaped by cultural, political, and social forces. Soroush presses this insight into the service of Qur’anic interpretation. Islam’s sacred text becomes, in his reading, not a timeless repository of meanings, but an utterance that emerges from its originating historical situation—an evolving product of that first context which demands a historicised interpretation if it is to be intelligible in contemporary society. On this account, the Qur’an is a dynamic text, profoundly conditioned by the socio-cultural milieu of the Prophet Muhammad, and inseparable from the human agencies that transmitted and construed revelation. By underscoring this human role in the ongoing life of the text, Soroush’s framework authorises a flexible and critical engagement with the Qur’an, one that contests rigid, acontextual readings and instead urges a multifaceted, historically alert apprehension of its significance.