Intended Meaning
Muhammad Shahrur states that the Qur’an is Muhammad’s eternal miracle and locates its miraculous nature in the fixity of its text together with the transformability of its content’s understanding according to the cognitive ground of each age for that reason, the Qur’an is not understood in a single rigid way; rather, its comprehension is renewed as knowledge changes
The Atom’s Structure in the Atlas
- Type of argument: value-based
- Movement of the argument: making the Qur’an’s miracle lie in the fixity of its text and the renewal of its understanding.
- Key terms: the Qur’an, miracle, fixity of the text, renewal of understanding.
- Degree of centrality: original.
It links the value of miracle to the continuity of textual presence with the changing horizon of understanding, thus granting the text the quality of cognitive immortality rather than limiting it to the original historical event.
Links that help with reading
- Muhammad Shahrur’s Book and the Qur’an
- The Book, the Qur’an, and the Mother of the Book
- the Qur’an
- Qur’anic understanding distinguishes between objective law and human choice
Basis
- Supporting text: «He holds that the Qur’an is Muhammad’s eternal miracle, and that its miraculous nature rests on being a fixed text with a changing content that is understood relatively according to the cognitive ground of each age».
Place of the basis in the book
- Book: The Book and the Qur’an.
- Location: at the beginning of the book, within the introduction
- Type of basis: near witness.
- Verification marker: the eternal miracle
- Reading note: the passage describes the Qur’an as Muhammad’s eternal miracle and affirms its validity for every time and place, which clearly supports the atom.
Degree of documentation
- Level: directly documented
- Meaning of the level: the atom rests on an explicit witness close to the formulation of the claim.
- Limits of reading: the wording above is an analytic summary and should not be treated as a verbatim quotation unless the witness is explicitly verbatim.
Its function in the book
Its function here is declarative; it establishes a result on which what follows in the argument depends.
Related to
Editorial note
This atom is important for understanding the author’s position on renewed interpretation.