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Review of Qur’anic Research, vol. 7, no. 4 (2021)

Gabriel Said REYNOLDS

Allah: God in the Qur’an

New Haven: Press, 2020 Pp. x + 327

Hardcover $30. ISBN 978-0-300-24658-2

Gabriel Said Reynolds’ most recent book, Allah: God in the Qur’an, explores Allah’s characterization in the Qurʾān through His relationship with creation. Reynolds frames his discussion around the dichotomy of divine mercy and justice (or vengeance) in the Qurʾān; but the book is more than an analysis of the Qur’ān’s presentation of these characteristics. Rather, the book offers a wide-ranging introduction to theological debates framed by the Qurʾān, with a methodological intervention by Reynolds as to how to reconcile these dichotomous elements and the contentious debates they engender.

In the book’s introduction, Reynolds begins by presenting modern contexts for the debate surrounding the question of the predominance of Allah’s mercy or His justice. Reynolds frames the debate with discussions of what constitutes Allah’s primary quality—here, whether RQR | Review of Qur’anic Research Shari Lowin, Editor [email protected] www.iqsaweb.org mercy, justice, or even vengeance—and, by extension, the primary quality of Islam as a religion. Reynolds presents not only the scholarly discomfort with and debates around these contradictory characteristics of Allah in the Qurʾān, but also the implications of these characteristics for political players, activists, reformists, and “Islamists.” After detailing various methods through which scholars deal (or do not deal) with these apparent contradictions, Reynolds presents his intervention: “The goal of this book is to uncover the of the Qur’an, to explore the Qur’an’s presentation of a God who is both merciful and wrathful” (16). Reynolds does a thorough job presenting the stakes of the argument, and the ways in which various players have clashed when trying to reconcile their differing views of

Allah. Readers never lose track of the fact that the arguments of the book are not academic only but play out in larger socio-political circles.

Following the introduction, the book is split into four parts, further divided into chapters. Each chapter opens with a quote, followed by an anecdote that introduces the chapter’s topic. The rest of the chapter is divided into thematic subtopics that range from specific issues regarding Allah’s characteristics, His actions in the Qurʾān, and the attempts of scholars, both those working with the exegetical tradition and those whose primary focus is elsewhere, to interpret some of the thorny paradoxical issues therein. Reynolds combines his analysis of the qurʾānic descriptions of Allah with classical debates on these issues, their presence in modern scholarship, and (to some extent) how they are related in the public sphere. Reynolds’ basic arguments are as follows:

1. The Qurʾān assumes a continuity with the in terms of the narratives it uses and some of the tropes and positions it takes. However, it uses these narratives for different ends, primarily for exhortative and homiletic purposes; the Qurʾān encourages obedience to God in all cases, and it warns its audience against failing in this obedience.

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2. Allah is presented in the Qurʾān as demonstrating the qualities of mercy and justice/retribution (among others). These qualities are not mutually exclusive, nor are they paradoxical; rather, Allah promises mercy and justice in accordance with the character and actions of His creations, His servants.

3. In this way, the character of Allah in the Qurʾān is not detached from humanity; rather, He takes on human characteristics in relation to their actions. He can be angry at them, and He can “trick” (190) and mislead them.

The first part, “Allah and His Book,” presents readers with a general introduction to the subject of God’s presence in the Qurʾān, as well as the more general topic of qurʾānic revelation. Chapter 1, “The Qur’an and the Bible” compares the two scriptures in terms of address, style and format, and function. Chapter 2, “God and the Prophets,” focuses on the

“character” of Allah in the Qurʾān; that is, here Reynolds analyzes the language of the Qurʾān in regards to Allah, and the way Allah and His actions (in relation to the prophets and their communities) are presented. Chapter 3, “Heaven or Hell,” is primarily descriptive; Reynolds spends most of the chapter explaining the eschatologyl found in the Qurʾān—what happens to the body after death, resurrection, and on the Day of Judgement. This section of the book is the most wide-ranging, providing background on the Qur’ān’s format, cosmological content, and relationship with other Abrahamic faiths, on the assumption that most readers will be essentially unfamiliar with Qur’ānic Studies.

The second part of the book, titled “Mercy,” focuses on the definition of divine mercy and discusses to whom Allah’s mercy extends. Chapter 4 (“Divine Mercy”) categorizes the types of mercy extended, while Chapter 5 (“Allah and the Fate of Sinners”) and Chapter 6

(“Allah and the Fate of Unbelievers”) cover debates about those who are in an uncertain position regarding this mercy. Chapter 5 discusses Muslims who have sinned. Chapter 6 turns to the question of divine mercy for “infidels.” RQR | Review of Qur’anic Research Shari Lowin, Editor [email protected] www.iqsaweb.org

From here the discussion switches from those who might receive Allah’s mercy to those who definitely fall outside the realm of divine compassion and forgiveness. Part 3,

“Vengeance,” looks at the other possible response to human sinning—Allah’s judgement and vengeance. Chapter 7, “Divine Wrath,” concerns those upon whom Allah’s vengeance descends; it emphasizes that Allah expresses wrath—explicitly and in clear and unambiguous

Arabic—towards those who break their covenant with Him. Chapter 8, “Avenger,” discusses the ways in which Allah interferes in the lives of disbelievers and those who betray His covenant; it focuses not only on the different punishments given to them, but also on qurʾānic descriptions of these betrayers and Allah’s wrath towards them. Importantly, Reynolds recounts the numerous ways Allah seals the wrongdoers off from any type of redemption, including trickery and the hardening of hearts; Allah not only reserves His mercy for believers, but actively opposes and antagonizes disbelievers. These chapters function as a critique of those who wish to emphasize the mercy of Allah and ignore the presence of His vengeance.

The fourth section, “A Personal God,” emphasizes the continued duality of these dichotomous characteristics of Allah in order to interrogate the effect of His depiction in the

Qurʾān. The God of the Qurʾān is “personal” in that He both takes a personal interest in each of

His creations, and that He responds to human actions in a visceral, anthropomorphic way—and this is central to the Qurʾān’s arguments encouraging piety and worship. Chapter 9, “God of the Bible and the Qur’an,” explores the implications of comparing the God of the Qurʾān to the

God of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament,1 and focuses heavily on the duality of mercy and vengeance found in the Jewish and Christian traditions. Reynolds concludes that, while justice and vengeance are present in the Jewish and Christian depictions of God, the Qurʾān

1 There is also a short section on talmudic depictions of God. RQR | Review of Qur’anic Research Shari Lowin, Editor [email protected] www.iqsaweb.org makes these qualities more central in its depiction of the divinity. The reason for this, elucidated in Chapter 10, “Reading the Qur’an,” is that this binary encourages believers to godwariness/godconsciousness (taqwā). The central concern of the Qurʾān, Reynolds argues, is to exhort readers to submit to Allah, and the language of the Qurʾān, its rhetorical devices and use of this binary, encourage this reading.

Reynolds concludes his book with an epilogue, “The Qur’an on Peaceful Coexistence,” which discusses the topic of Allah’s mercy and vengeance in reaction to human behavior, and the Qurʾān’s expectations of believers. Just as Reynolds opens his study with the debates that the Qurʾān engenders among scholars and believers, he closes his book with the implications and ramifications of qurʾānic exegesis in the modern world, and how exegesis can be co-opted by ideological concerns and claims to religious authority. Reynolds relates the consequences that accusations of disbelief and blasphemy carry in the Muslim world, before arguing that judgement for transgressions of belief, according to the Qurʾān, is solely Allah’s purview—not that of humans. He ends the book by emphasizing Allah’s sovereignty, and a plea to, per Q al-

Baqarah 2:148, “Vie one with another in good works” (263).

Reynolds uses a close literary reading of the Qurʾān to establish his argument throughout the book. The Qurʾān is his base text, one that has a cast of characters, a range of purposes, and a variety of rhetorical features. Reynolds explicitly rejects a historically based argument, or one that tries to establish the development of the qurʾānic text or of theological systems in the early Islamic period. Using the current widely accepted text of the Qur’ān,2 he approaches the text as a cohesive whole, one that is in dialogue with pre-existing scriptures.

2 That is, the 1924 Cairo edition. Reynolds does not go into the debates over the variations found in early Qurʾān manuscripts. RQR | Review of Qur’anic Research Shari Lowin, Editor [email protected] www.iqsaweb.org

Reynolds employs verses from throughout the Qurʾān as his primary evidence. Secondary sources—that is, everything including ḥadīth reports, classical exegesis, modern scholarship, and biblical comparisons—are brought in to introduce or further develop areas of discussion.

While the stated focus of the book is Allah in the Qurʾān and specifically the paradoxical nature of His mercy and justice, the book covers a wide ground. It moves fluidly between arguments about the Qurʾān’s structure to arguments about Allah’s character and mercy.

Passages from the Qurʾān are compared with passages from the Bible, alongside discussions of

Biblical theology. The central arguments of numerous scholars and exegetes are presented and discussed. Various ḥadīths and anecdotes are included in order to provide context for the greater scholarly discussion of the issues at stake. Finally, modern scholars are presented in dialogue with both the Qurʾān and the exegetical tradition. The field is so broad and the cast of characters so wide, that it can be difficult for the reader to keep track of who is important for the points that Reynolds makes, and who is a throwaway character with little significance for the rest of the book.

Despite this wide range, or perhaps because of it, the book is a succinct and thorough introduction to Qurʾānic Studies. Unfortunately, the number of similar books aimed at an introductory readership is quite small, and most introductory works take an encyclopedic approach, rather than a historic, literary, or thematic approach.3 Reynolds fills this gap by providing a new vantagepoint for readers unfamiliar with the larger world of Qurʾānic Studies.

3 Among the few works aimed at a more general readership is Michael Cook’s A Short Introduction to the Koran (: , 2006). As for the works that are explicitly aimed at students new to Qurʾānic Studies, most are encyclopedic in nature. For example, there is Abdullah Saeed’s The Qur’an: An Introduction (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008), which is a general introduction to the Qurʾān as text. In terms of literary, historical, or thematic approaches, there is the work of Carl Ernst, How to Read the Qurʾān: A New Guide, with Select Translations (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011) Ernst centers his work around a “development, structure, intertextuality, and historical context” (11) and presents a chronological approach to the Qurʾān, not giving any kind of voice to the larger theological questions that are the focus of Reynolds’ work. RQR | Review of Qur’anic Research Shari Lowin, Editor [email protected] www.iqsaweb.org

He writes lucidly and clearly, without assuming a familiarity with the field on the part of his readers. Especially in the first part of the book, he provides not just a background on the

Qurʾān, its history, and its structure, but also its traditional exegesis and reception in the West.

Furthermore, he uses the topic “Allah in the Qur’an” as a framing device to introduce wider questions and debates about the relationship between theology and society. Reynolds presents readers with a substantial introduction to Islamic theology alongside a literary reading of the

Qurʾān. This is an outstanding book for an introductory course on Islam or the Qurʾān, one which would provide students new to the field with a comprehensive yet clear source that they can use to develop their own interests, and which would introduce them to areas currently being explored in Qurʾānic Studies.

As to developments in Qurʾānic Studies, the book delicately navigates areas of tension in current approaches. It provides a glimpse into the current state of the field and into developments in method and lines of inquiry. Some relevant recent works that provide the context for Reynolds’ book include studies like Karen Bauer’s 2016 JIQSA article “The Current

State of Qurʾānic Studies,” and an article co-written by Reynolds and Devin Stewart, titled

“Afterword: The Academic Study of the Qurʾān—Achievements, Challenges, and Prospects,” from the same issue. Bauer views the growing interdisciplinary nature of Qurʾānic Studies as clashing with the tendency to see different camps of Qurʾānic Studies as largely part of a series of binaries: traditionalist/revisionist, historical-critical/normative, confessional/non- confessional. She gestures towards the hope that Qurʾānic Studies will not move in the direction of hyper-specialized fields. Similarly, Reynolds and Stewart begin with a history of the field through the sort of dichotomous perspective that was discussed in Bauer’s article, contrasting the work of traditional exegetes with the development of the Western study of the RQR | Review of Qur’anic Research Shari Lowin, Editor [email protected] www.iqsaweb.org

Qurʾān out of Biblical Studies. They then move into the recent history of the field. Of the areas relevant for this review, they speak of the Qurʾān in dialogue with Christian and Jewish scripture and texts (and, more broadly, in discussion with the world of Late Antiquity), and the study of qurʾānic rhetoric, particularly its self-referentiality. Little is mentioned about the study of theologians and exegetes, except as a traditional (as well as limited and outdated) model of scholarly engagement with the Qurʾān. When one looks at recently published works in Qurʾānic Studies, one can also trace the development of these subfields and ideas. There have been numerous works on the Qurʾān in the context of other religious texts and traditions;4 a significant number of texts with a thematic approach to the Qurʾān, or chapters of the Qurʾān;5 and some works on Muslim exegesis, from classical to contemporary. 6 Most of these works examine very specific topics and are written primarily for specialist audiences.

Reynolds’ work sits at the crossroads of these different trends, and it is very clear that he is attempting, in some ways, to blaze a via media between these tensions. Reynolds is curious about the connective tissue between different faith traditions in the context of revelation and exegesis. His A Muslim Theologian in a Sectarian Milieu: ʻAbd al-Jabbār and the Critique of Christian

Origins (2004) is explicitly centered around a Muslim theologian, but also deals extensively with

4 For some examples, see Mark Durie, The Qur’an and Its Biblical Reflexes: Investigations into the Genesis of a Religion (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018); Mouhanad Khorchide and Klaus von Stosch, The Other Prophet: Jesus in the Qur’an, trans. Simon Pare (Chicago: The Gingko Library, 2019); Angelika Neuwirth, The Qur’an and Late Antiquity: A Shared Heritage, trans. Samuel Wilder (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019); Michael E. Pregill, The Golden Calf between Bible and Qur’an: Scripture, Polemic, and Exegesis from Late Antiquity to Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020); and, Danny Crowther and Ida Glaser (eds.), Reading the Bible in Islamic Context: Qurʼanic Conversations (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018). 5 See in particular,; Michel Cuypers, A Qur’anic Apocalypse: A Reading of the Thirty-Three Last Surahs of the Qur’an, trans. Jerry Ryan (Atlanta: Lockwood Press, 2018); Robert Gleave and István Kristó-Nagy (eds.), Violence in Islamic Thought from the Qur’ān to the Mongols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020); and, Ramon Harvey, The Qur’an and the Just Society (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018). 6 Alessandro Cancian (ed.), Approaches to the Qur’an in Contemporary Iran (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019); Majid Daneshgar, Studying the Qur’an in the Muslim Academy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020); and, Kifayat Ullah, Al-Kashshāf: Al-Zamaksharī’s Mu’tazilite Exegesis of the Qur’an (: De Gruyter, 2017). RQR | Review of Qur’anic Research Shari Lowin, Editor [email protected] www.iqsaweb.org the larger Judeo-Christian context of ʿAbd al-Jabbār’s critique. Reynolds’ later book, The Qurʾān and its Biblical Subtext (2012), emphasizes the importance of the Qur’ān’s Judeo-Christian connections even further: “Accordingly, the general argument in the present work is that the connection made by medieval Muslim exegetes between the biography of Muḥammad and the

Qurʾān should not form the basis of critical scholarship. Instead, the Qurʾān should be appreciated in light of its conversation with earlier literature, in particular Biblical literature.”7 His most recent book prior to the book under review is The Qurʾān and the Bible:

Text and Commentary (2018), where he provides Ali Quli Qarai’s translation of the Qurʾān alongside commentary on possible biblical/scriptural references in the text. Throughout these earlier works, Reynolds places the Qurʾān in the larger context of Abrahamic scripture. Allah:

God in the Qur’an begins the same way. While Reynolds acknowledges in his introduction that he intends to examine how Muslims used the Qurʾān to establish their views on and of God, he immediately states that he is “principally interested in what the Qurʾān itself says about God, and not in later theological debates” (10). He goes on to emphasize the importance of putting the Qurʾān in the context of doctrinal debates with Late Antique religion—primarily

Christianity.

Alongside his declarations about the centrality of late antique religion in his understanding of the Qur’ān, Reynolds incorporates the later theological debates necessary to understanding the topic of qurʾānic theology more generally. True, Reynolds regularly describes the Qurʾān vis-à-vis the Bible—not just in terms of theology, but in terms of the structure and (narrative) content. Yes, his conclusions are very much based on his own reading of the Qurʾān. However, Reynolds refers regularly to classical theologians and modern

7 Gabriel Said Reynolds, The Qurʾān and Its Biblical Subtext (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), 2. RQR | Review of Qur’anic Research Shari Lowin, Editor [email protected] www.iqsaweb.org scholars, making their discussions of Allah in the Qurʾān central to the development of his argument. Reynolds focuses his analysis on the Qurʾān’s text, but this analysis is introduced and mediated through the broader theological debates that rage among classical and contemporary Muslims and scholars. He focuses in large part on classical theological debates that emerge from the Qur’ān, such as the Muʿtazilī-Ashʿarī debate, which is especially prominent in Chapters 5 and Chapter 8. He spends a significant portion of Chapter 6 on al-

Ghazālī’s, Ibn Taymiyyah’s, and Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyah’s theories of salvation and Islamic eschatology. Chapter 10 describes the work of Muḥammad Aḥmad Khalaf Allāh, an Egyptian modernist thinker. All of these discussions are central to developing the arguments in his book and giving them weight as normative readings of the Qurʾān. It is a great strength of the book that Reynolds regularly places his reading of the Qurʾān in the context of those who engage with it both as scholars and as believers. Reynolds does not generate controversy from a single, individual reading of the Qurʾān; rather, he gives readers a glimpse into discussions of theology, literature, and communal boundaries that have spanned a millennium and are still in conversation today. His arguments as to the nature of Allah’s character in the Qurʾān are of value in that they constitute part of a larger discourse on these selfsame topics.

Allah: God in the Qur’an is, for readers unfamiliar with Qur’anic Studies, a remarkable introduction to exegesis and theology in Islam. By focusing on Allah’s character, mercy, and vengeance in the Qurʾān, Reynolds explores larger questions of how qurʾānic exegesis takes place, how the Qurʾān itself can be read for literary critique, and how issues that are debated in the Muslim world today are part of a larger dialogue. Those who read this book will be introduced to a wide field and a wide array of methods, signaling some of the directions that

Qurʾānic Studies is taking today. RQR | Review of Qur’anic Research Shari Lowin, Editor [email protected] www.iqsaweb.org

Ameena Yovan University of Chicago