Reddit reply in r/AcademicQuran: why do so many analysts find the quran — January 18, 2025 · m7taitc | Ali Shukri Amin

It seems like you can't distinguish between making an argument for something and making an argument that a group of people believe something. You have conflated that I am arguing that the Qur'an holds various roles in the minds of a particular group of people with an argument that it sufficiently replaces certain analogs which were presented in an analogy to explain something.

>The Lawson quote is saying that Muslims believe the Qur'an is miraculous and it is theologically believed that Islamic civilization has an "umbilical relationship with the Qur'an" (of course, other factors played a much larger role; as we have seen, the cornerstone of Islamic law is not in the Qur'an but in hadith). But this conversation is not about what (some) Muslims *believe*.

"\[I\]t is theologically believed" I don't know what definition of theology you're operating on here. It is a historical fact that Muslims believe the Qur'an is miraculous and that Muslims believe the Qur'an is the foundational text of their civilization. You could even make a sociological argument to that effect totally separate of theology. The study of people's beliefs about something is not a statement about the truth or falsehood of those beliefs, again you're conflating the conversation.

The conversation since the very beginning in my top comments was about what Muslims believe about the Qur'an, not whether those beliefs are an objective fact, and how that effects approaches to the text. At some point you shifted it.

At this point you're just being pedantic for the sake of it. For Islamicate civilization, there is definitely one text which forms the basis for culture, ethics, morality, spirituality, etc. and it is the Qur'an. This is different than Western civilization which uses myriad sources, of which the Bible is arguably the most important but certainly not the major stakeholder.

>A better reason you could have cited for not having it in the running for being an epic poem is that it is not a poem — a rather crucial part of the definition of an epic poem

I don't even know how to respond to this but it seems like you just haven't engaged with these texts. What is Surah 12 in your opinion then? If the Qur'an is not a unique genre and this Surah is not written in a prose format, what is the genre of Surah 12?

>Muhammad denies being a poet and the Qur'an offers a challenge to make something "like" it. It does not contain the Islamic doctrine of inimitability fleshed out later (Richard Martin, "The Role of the Basrah Muʿtazilah in Formulating the Doctrine of the Apologetic Miracle", Sophia Vasalou, "The Miraculous Eloquence of the Qur'an").

The doctrine of inimitably is not the same as the Qur'anic assertion that it isn't in a human genre. The very obvious reason why the Qur'an doesn't deny that it is prose is because it is very obviously not prose to anyone that reads it. You don't need the Qur'an to deny that it is prose if... you had read the Qur'an. The reason why the Qur'an repudiates it being poetry is because that was an actual accusation and it has features of poetry or a poetic style for a large portion of the text.

Again, I did not make an argument that the Qur'an does indeed occupy it's own genre, but rather that this is how Muslims conceive of it.

>It's odd to see you very rapidly modifying the claims that I've actually objected to. I, of course, didn't say that secular governments from the 19th century onwards cite the Bible as a direct source of law. I am saying that it has had a major overall influence on the character of Western law. This is basically indisputable and I cited a book-length work backing that.

I didn't modify any claim. You seem to just be developing your own strawmen and then trying to deconstruct them, which is quite strange. You argued,

>The Bible has played a pretty significant role in terms of the inspiration of the legal canon of Christian civilizations. ... Given the dominance of hadith in Islamic law and how little of Islamic law is actually directly derived from the Qur'an, to say the least I think you need to put in the legwork of reading the relevant history and actually citing a source if you're going to offer sweeping assertions like this.

The idea that the Bible is currently or has ever had more of an impact on Western legal systems (with the exception of Judaic law in Jewish kingdoms) than the Qur'an has had on Islamicate legal systems is honestly just a mind-boggling claim. It reads like you've only read literature about the Qur'an and not read the Qur'an which does, indeed, at length discuss law. It is not as extensive as the hadith in that regard, definitely, but it is possible for the hadith to be more extensive while the Qur'an is still a primary legislative document - which it indisputably is.

>It is also true that there is no country that rules by Quranic law — it should go without saying that the Quran does not present a legal framework, but rather, a handful of legal prescriptions made in passing. The Constitution of Medina also assumes a number of tribal institutions that aren't used anymore anywhere today.

Are you aware of books of Ahkam al-Qur'an such as by ibn al-Arabi or legal-oriented exegesis such as tafsir Qurtubi? There has always been a strand of Islamic scholarship which has tried to derive as detailed as possible a legal framework directly from the Qur'an before considering any hadith. In fact, this was the exact methodology of the Mu'tazilah who were skeptical of the Sunnah cannon as a whole and who ruled the Abbasid empire. It's also the legal methodology of Hanafis whom historically have had more influence in shaping Islamic governance than any other madh'hab.

I'm still waiting to hear whether you're engaging with 1st-hand historical documents like the Qur'an directly or just reading academic accounts of it?