This axis gathers 2 instances of the use of this verse in the books of Muhammad Shahrur, linking it to the concepts and arguments that appear around it.
Text of the Verse as Cited
And she said to his sister, “Follow him,” so she observed him from a distance…
Reader’s Answer
Question
How does Muhammad Shahrur employ God’s saying, “And she said to his sister, ‘Follow him,’” in his reading of kinship within Qur’anic narratives?
Shahrur employs the verse to establish that Moses had a sister in the Qur’anic story. He introduces it within an account that mentions Moses’s mother and his brother Aaron, while noting that the text does not mention his father. As for linking this to an interpretation of Mary’s description as “the sister of Aaron” through a narrative or behavioral similarity, the accompanying evidence itself does not establish this, since it does not address Mary or explain the significance of that description.
The verse mentions a sister of Moses, and Shahrur explicitly cites it to establish this point. He places this citation in the context of enumerating the kinship relations mentioned for Moses: his mother, his brother Aaron, and his sister, while stating that the father is not mentioned in this account.
Evidence and Location
Islam and Faith — p. 213.
Limits of the Reading
- The evidence establishes Shahrur’s citation of the verse to demonstrate that Moses had a sister; it does not establish an independent claim about the meaning of kinship throughout all Qur’anic narratives.
- The repetition of the same text on pages 213 and 214 does not provide a second independent piece of evidence; therefore, the evidence from p. 213 is sufficient.
- No connection should be made between “Moses’s sister” and “Aaron’s sister” merely because they share the word “sister”; this connection requires a passage in which Shahrur explicitly interprets the phrase or builds an argument upon it.
Continue From Here
Brief Reading
He invokes it to establish the presence of a sister in Moses’s story, making it a key to reading certain kinship expressions in other narratives.
Axes
- Narrative and historical
- Linguistic and semantic
Related Concepts
- Sister: 3
Its Place in the Concept Network
It serves to link the Qur’anic narrative with the construction of familial meaning.
Role of the Verse in the Argument
- Context: 1
- Support: 1
Instances of Use
- Islam and Faith, p. 213: He cites it to confirm the existence of a sister for Moses in the story, and thus that the description of Mary as the sister of Aaron can be understood through narrative and behavioral similarity.
- Concept: Sister
- Function of the verse here: Context
- Textual evidence: “{And she said to his sister, ‘Follow him,’ so she observed him from a distance…} (Al-Qasas 11).”
- Islam and Faith, p. 214: He uses it to establish that the Revelation mentions Moses’s mother and sister but does not mention his father, as a prelude to his reading of lineage through the mother.
- Concept: Sister
- Function of the verse here: Support
- Textual evidence: “It also mentions that he had a sister, in God’s saying: {And she said to his sister, ‘Follow him,’ so she observed him from a distance…} (Al-Qasas 11).”
Related Books
This page is presented within the general atlas construction methodology.