The Impact of the Islamic Theories of Revelation on Humanist Qurʾanic Hermeneutics

In the present article, I illustrate the impact that the Islamic theories of revelation have on the construction of different types of Qurʾanic hermeneutics, with a special focus on what I define “humanist hermeneutics”. The article is divided in three parts. In the first part I expose the two main theoretical frameworks exploited here in order to analyze different classical and modern theories of revelation and their corresponding hermeneutics, namely Shahab Ahmed’s understanding of Revelation and my own definition of humanist hermeneutics and its main characteristics. In the second part of the article, I succinctly present some pre-modern theories of revelation, emphasizing a few examples from the large variety of philosophical Peripatetic Muslim and Ṣūfī conceptualizations that are relevant from a humanist hermeneutics perspective. Contemporary, contextualist approaches of revelation will end the article. My general focus is on the acknowledgement of the agency of the prophet Muhammad in the construction of the Qurʾanic text and its expression, and on the interaction between the formulation of the Qurʾanic text and its social context.