Very disappointing - Rated 
Non-Muslim readers - and some Muslims also - may be put off by the simplistically written first two chapters dealing with the life of Muhammad, in which no distinction is made between facts which have been generally accepted and legends. But we learn from this and the following chapter on Aisha, the Prophet's favourite wife, how many verses of the Qur'an refer very specifically to personal dilemmas in which Muhammad found himself at various times of his life.
While the text of the Qur'an is immutable, it has to be interpreted. After the first four chapters, the book describes some of these interpretations, which are of course controversial. So the Shi'ite Ja'afar as-Sadiq (702 to 765) claimed that certain verses of the Qur'an allegorically referred to the Shi'ite imams and to the obligation to follow them - a claim hotly denied by Sunnis like Abu Ja'far at-Tabari (ca.839 to ca. 923), whose work is described in the following chapter. Lawrence often refers to the Qur'an as `the Book of Signs'. Both Sadiq and Tabari had distinguished between Clear and Ambiguous Signs in the Qur'an: Clear Signs are those `whose meaning the reader, with the proper background, can readily decipher'; Ambiguous Signs are those difficult passages of which `God alone knows the interpretation', and which invite imagination and intuition for their interpretation by those few who have access to the Qur'an's esoteric meanings. But whereas the Shi'ites had declared almost a quarter of the Qur'an to consist of Ambiguous Signs, giving them considerable flexibility in innovative interpretation, Tabari restricted the Ambiguous Signs to only a few passages, which did not include those which the Shi'ites had interpreted as referring to their Imams.
Then there is the mystical experience of the Qur'an such as that acquired by the Sufi masters like Muhyiddin ibn Arabi (1165 to 1240) and expressed in his magnum opus, `The Meccan Openings', or by Rumi (1207 to 1273) in his Mathnawi, 27,000 couplets of meditation on the Qur'an.
Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817 to 1898), living in the Raj, thought that Sadiq and Tabari had been preoccupied with what in the 19th century, when science seemed to challenge religion, struck him as secondary problems. Instead of distinguishing between Clear and Ambiguous Signs, Sayyid Khan distinguished between verses that were essential and those that were symbolic. As a believing Muslim, he regarded as essential the verses describing God as omnipotent and as Creator, and the revelation of the Qur'an to Muhammad. He took as symbolic those passages in the Qur'an (like, for example, the Night Journey) which in their literal sense conflicted with science, and he felt free to dismiss hadiths and earlier commentators on the Qur'an as historically but not divinely conditioned. As a modern man, he also laid stress on those verses in the Qur'an which had been ignored in practice by Muslims in the past, such as those condemning slavery and injustice to women (such as he saw also in polygamy, since he thought it impossible for a husband to treat all his wives equally as the Qur'an enjoined.)
There is a chapter on Osama bin Laden, whose interpretation of the Qur'an is well known: he focusses entirely on the most violent verses (`slay the idolators wherever you find them' - 9:5) to proclaim militant jihad as the obligation for Muslims second only to the commandment to believe in Allah; and, especially since Americans and Zionists have dominated Muslim lands, he sees jihad as essentially defensive.
In the last chapter Lawrence shows how the physical imbibing of Quranic verses dissolved in water is used by professional healers, with instructions how the use them available on a Sufi internet site from Indonesia.
I have found this book very disappointing and ultimately not very informative. Professor Lawrence is fervently in praise of the Qur'an, and apparently convinced that it was in fact revealed by God to Muhammad. Nothing wrong with that in itself, though a non-Muslim reader looking for a `biography' of the Qur'an would prefer a rather more detached account. In any case we have here an extremely limited `biography'. It deals only with what devout Muslims have seen in the Qur'an. And even in this narrow respect, where there have been the conflicting interpretations Lawrence does mention (as, for example, between Sadiq and Tabari) there is remarkably little detail in these admittedly very short chapters. There should surely have been very much more about Sunnis and Shi'ites. And although the book is about the Qur'an and not about the hadiths and the sira, the opening chapters in particular do not make this distinction. Then, one cannot imagine a `biography' of the Bible, for example, without taking Biblical Criticism into account. The equivalent of this does exist in Quranic studies, but there is no reference to it in this book. There is, for example, nothing on recent scholarship, even if controversial, on what the sources of the Qur'an may have been, or on the suggestion by John Wansborough that in its present form it was committed to writing not ca. 650 but about 150 years later; and he questioned whether it actually consists entirely of the revelations claimed by Muhammad. Also I would have expected from a `biography' to have learnt something more about the diffusion of the Qur'an, first in calligraphic and then later in printed form. That is obviously not the book Professor Lawrence wanted to write.
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