This axis gathers 1 instance 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
The People of the Book ask you to bring down to them a book from heaven …
The Reader’s Answer
The Question
How does Muhammad Shahrur employ Qur’an 4:153 in reading the People of the Book’s request that a book be sent down from heaven?
Shahrur reads the verse as a reminder to the Prophet Muhammad of an earlier request by Moses’ people: the request to see God openly. He holds that the verse compares the two requests in order to establish that, in his reading, the Jews of Medina have no excuse for asking that a book be sent down from heaven, because humanity had reached, in the Muhammadan era, a higher level of “abstraction” than what he calls the level of personifying thought among Moses’ people.
Shahrur identifies the addressee in the verse as the Prophet Muhammad, takes the requested “book” to be the Torah, and understands its “people” to be its Jewish adherents. Shahrur employs the verse to compare the request of the Jews of Medina for a book to be sent down from heaven with Moses’ people’s request to see God openly, describing the latter request as more serious. From this comparison, Shahrur concludes that Moses’ people may be excused, “in one way or another,” because of the level of their personifying thought, whereas the Jews of Medina are not excused because humanity had risen, in his view, to the rank of abstraction.
Citation and Location
The Book and the Qur’an — p. 410.
Limits of the Reading
- The citation establishes the attribution of this use to Shahrur, but it alone is insufficient to establish that this is the determinate meaning of the verse, or that the historical progression from personification to abstraction is explicitly indicated by it.
- The excerpt does not present independent evidence for the definition of “personifying thought” or the “rank of abstraction,” nor for the criterion by which the Jews of Medina are judged to be “far worse” than Moses’ people; these judgments form part of Shahrur’s interpretive construction.
- The comparison on which Shahrur relies is between what the verse attributes to the People of the Book and what it recounts about Moses’ people; it should not be extended to other claims not stated in the citation.
Continue from Here
Brief Reading
He interprets it as a historical comparison showing the transition of understanding to a more abstract level in the Muhammadan era.
Axes
- Narrative and historical
- Methodological
Related Concepts
- Lessons from stories: 2
Its Place in the Conceptual Network
It serves to link the story to its lesson within the trajectory of the development of Qur’anic discourse.
The Verse’s Role in the Argument
- Support: 1
Instances of Use
- The Book and the Qur’an, p. 410: He interprets it as a comparison between the request of the Jews of Medina and an earlier request by Moses’ people, in order to show the maturity of abstraction in the Muhammadan era.
- Concept: Lessons from stories
- Function of the verse here: Support
- Textual citation: “{The People of the Book ask you to bring down to them a book from heaven …} (An-Nisa 153).”
Related Books
This page is presented within the general atlas-building methodology.