This is a lexicographical entry that brings together the technical meaning of this term in Shahrur’s various books and links between its multiple uses.
This entry belongs to Shahrur’s lexicon. For reading by theme, one may refer to Shahrur’s major themes and shared concepts.
The Meaning in Shahrur
The Qur’anic narratives are what the Qur’an presents as a story with a guiding purpose: it awakens moral insight, invites reflection, and reveals historical patterns in the movement of messages and events. For Shahrur, it is not a text for direct legislation, nor material for predicting the future, but rather a record that reads history in its relation to human reality and its transformations.
Distinctions
- It is not treated like legislative rulings; its purpose is moral insight and the extraction of patterns, not the direct derivation of legal rulings
- It is not reduced to reports of occasions of revelation or transmitted narratives; for his understanding of it is broader than linking it to a single cause or a single final interpretation.
Places in His Books
- The Qur’anic Narratives, vol. 2: Shahrur makes it a material for moral insight, reflection, and the extraction of historical patterns, not material for legislation or for predicting the future. He also insists that it is a record of the development of history and the messengers, and reads it as connected to historical reality, not detached from it
What It Is Adjacent To and Differs From
- history
- occasions of revelation are not an all-encompassing key
- occasions of revelation and transmitted narratives are not a valid absolute basis for understanding
- myth combines truth and imagination
- the default in things is permissibility
- the default in things is lawfulness, and prohibition applies to acts
- livestock are domesticated animals with multiple benefits
- the human being participates in making history
- “sons” may mean building
- interpretation is a gradual process of understanding
- interpretation is a gradual reading of the text and the narratives
- human history is not subject to determinism