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      South Asian Qur’an Commentaries and Translations: A Preliminary Intellectual History

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      ReOrient
      Pluto Journals
      South Asia, exegesis, translation, power, Mughal empire, colonial modernity
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            Abstract

            This essay presents a broad overview of certain key works and intellectual trends that mark traditional scholarship on the Qur’an in South Asia, from the late medieval to the modern periods, roughly the fourteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Far from an exhaustive survey of any sort, what I have attempted instead is a preliminary and necessarily partial outline of the intellectual trajectory of Qur’an commentaries and translations in the South Asian context—in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu—with a view to exploring how shifting historical and political conditions informed new ways of engaging the Qur’an. My central argument is this: in South Asia, the early modern and modern periods saw an important shift from largely elite scholarship on the Qur’an, invariably conducted by scholars intimately bound to the imperial order of their time, to more selfconsciously popular works of translation and exegesis designed to access and attract a wider non-elite public. In this shift, I argue, translation itself emerged as an important and powerful medium of hermeneutical populism pregnant with the promise of broadening the boundaries of the Qur’an's readership and understanding. In other words, as the pendulum of political sovereignty gradually shifted from pre-colonial Islamicate imperial orders to British colonialism, new ways of imagining the role, function, and accessibility of the Qur’an also came into central view. A major emphasis of this essay is on the thought and contributions of the hugely influential eighteenth-century scholar Shah Wali Ullah (d. 1762) and his family on the intellectual topography of South Asian Qur’an commentaries and translations.

            Content

            Author and article information

            Journal
            10.2307/j50009694
            reorient
            ReOrient
            Pluto Journals
            2055-5601
            2055-561X
            1 April 2020
            : 5
            : 2 ( doiID: 10.13169/reorient.5.issue-2 )
            : 233-256
            Affiliations
            Franklin and Marshall College, USA
            Article
            reorient.5.2.0233
            10.13169/reorient.5.2.0233
            8c531ee0-2ced-40bb-9f7e-48bebc5f78ba
            © 2020 Pluto Journals

            All content is freely available without charge to users or their institutions. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles in this journal without asking prior permission of the publisher or the author. Articles published in the journal are distributed under a http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

            History
            Custom metadata
            eng

            Literary studies,Religious studies & Theology,Social & Behavioral Sciences,History,Philosophy
            colonial modernity,power,Mughal empire,exegesis,translation,South Asia

            References

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