some reflection on post-enlightenment qur'anic hermeneutics

1442 Michigan State Law Review [Vol. 2006:1403firmities these days. The most crucial infirmities are caused by the absenceof discourse between linguistic communities seeking to interpret the Qur’anand by the increasing irrelevance of the canonical tafsir, even when it isexpressed in a language that the believers can understand. This Article suggeststhat Post-Enlightenment hermeneutics has <strong>some</strong> potential to breakthrough the barriers presented by these difficulties. One of the best ways todo that is for the scholarship to take on the question of equality, a centralissue of contemporary life in the Islamic world.We live in an egalitarian age. The Qur’an and the project that theProphet Muhammad embarked upon included strong egalitarian principlesbut those principles were lost or obscured as the history of Islam and theMuslim peoples evolved. The history of the interpretation of the Qur’anlargely confirms that the egalitarian impulse, a core tenet in Islamic jurisprudenceand ethics, is not well understood by Muslims. The Enlightenment,perhaps not by design, restored interest in egalitarian ideas and actuallyprovided the impetus for many modern approaches to problems ofequality. The Qur’an and Islamic jurisprudence’s emphasis on equality predatedthe Enlightenment by one thousand years. The approach of Islamtoward equality may not be the same as the universalist secular approachsuggested by Enlightenment initiatives, such as the abolition of slavery, butthere is no reason why contemporary interpreters of the Qur’an should notincorporate this Post-Enlightenment history into their understanding of thetext. It is part of the contemporary context that Muslims live in. A soundmethodology for interpretation of the text should address the context andhistory of the text. The Enlightenment and its history is therefore just asrelevant to Qur’anic interpretation as are the details of the behavior of theQuraishi Arabs in Mecca in seventh century Arabia. The abolition of slaveryand its relevance to contemporary interpretations of the Qur’an verseson slavery prove this contention. Perhaps there are other aspects of the textthat could benefit from a fresh hermeneutic using a similar approach.