AnyBook4Less.com	Find the Best Price on the Web Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Home  |  Store List  |  FAQ  |  Contact Us  |
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money Keyword AuthorISBN

Title: Fables of the Ancients?: Folklore in the Qur'an by Alan Dundes ISBN: 0-7425-2672-0 Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield (Non NBN) Pub. Date: August, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $19.95

Your Country USA Canada United Kingdom Australia Austria Belgium France Germany Italy Netherlands Switzerland Currency AutoUSD CAD GBP EUR AUD CHF Delivery Only cheapest delivery All delivery options Include Used Books Are you a club member of: Barnes and Noble Books A Million Chapters.Indigo.ca

Average Customer Rating: 3.5 (2 reviews)

Rating: 5
Summary: It is a glorious day!
Comment: Indeed, it is a glorious day when the Quran, like any sacred text of antiquity, is subject to crtitical study through the means of modern textual criticism without any fear of bloodshed as they did with Salman Rushdie. As an Arab Muslim, I believe there is a desperate need for this kind of books that seek to deal with the text of the Quran objectively, putting aside the halo of the taboo and seeing it just as plain old, classic text. It reminds me of the great German scholar Luling and Christoph Luxemborg. More and more books of this genre are direly needed for more profound appreciation of the legacy of Islam.
Ibrahim Arafat "Timothy Abraham"

Rating: 2
Summary: Poorly Researched w/ Typical Western Assumptions
Comment: I have always been interested in the phenomena of folklore in the Qur'an. As a Muslim it fascinates me how most of my co-religionists fail to realize that the stories in the Qur'an operate on a much higher level than narrations of some historical event as it is thought of today. None the less, I came to the conclusion long ago that the Qur'anic discourse uses folklore to illustrate spiritual truths and to convey to an audience of what we would probably refer today as an necessarily simple people (not that we are, with out technological feats any more refined or civilized) a message concerning man God and the nature of the dynamic in which the two engage each other. I have kept my eyes open for a title which explores this phenomena, so when this title emerged I picked it up. I wasn't impressed, nor satisfied with the treatment Alan Dundes gave our tradition. He does state that "Islamisists" would have a difficult time with his book, but he says this in the typical manner as to show how "backwards" those "Islamisists" are in the sense that they cannot tolerate a critical approach to their scriptures. This is only partly true, because if Alan Dundes did a bit more research he would discover that Muslims themselves explored these concepts long ago in the "classic" period of Islamic scholarship. In other words, Alan Dundes has really touched on nothing new. He opens the book with an preface which states:
"After the publication of Holy Writ as Oral Lit: The Bible as Folklore in 1999, in which I sought to demonstrate how traces of original oral transmission could be clearly discerned in both Old and New Testaments, I began to wonder about other sacred texts that had a possible debt to oral tradition. One of those texts that aroused my curiosity was the Qur'an. As I began my research I was almost immediately overwhelmed by the amount of scholarship devoted to the subject." (page x of the preface)
It is clear that Alan Dundes is interested in deconstructing sacred texts, and I have no problem with this, if it is done skillfully and with respect for the text. in other words, if the author, in this case a secular educated Western academic, bullies the text and forces its semantic to reflect modern understandings of the words, then I have a problem. It is clear from the preface that Alan was oblivious of the Qur'an before he began his research in 1999, and that this book was published in 2003. That means that Alan probably spent less that two years, three at best, researching this topic after having come from being oblivious to it. As anyone worth their weight in this field knows, the Qur'an is not a light book and three years of reading mostly secular studies of Islam and the Qur'an does not equip them with enough knowledge to appraise this text with any amount of diligence. On top of that Alan's work is sloppy and disoriented. I found myself skipping over many pages which simply lists topics in the Qur'an like a concordance. The book is small enough as it is without exhausting a third of it with annoying concordances. His bibliography indicated that he has no knowledge of the Arabic language which automatically disqualifies him from the project because it is the semantics, the subtleties and the nuances of the Arabic language which carry it's message, not the English interpretation/translation employed by Dundes. His bibliography is littered with books written by top notch orientalists and a few Islamisists from the early modern period. In his preface he pretends to avoid orientalists approaches by fails miserably in the first chapter where he immediately begins informing the reader of how "sloppy" the collection of the Qur'an was, citing obscure reports from the debated and contested hadith literature about the nature of the compiling of the Qur'an. His bibliography also includes the paid-to-bash Islamaphobe Ibn Warraq, an author who is far bellow the intellectual surface, rooting about in the pits of pro-Christian polemics. Why this theatrical showboat is included in the bibliography is beyond me. Now I am aware that bibliographies usually include references which the author may not find convincing himself, and that he is using the source to illustrate a point. However, throughput the book Alan Dundes concludes on the same trite and common points as does hie orientalists and essentialist counterparts. To put it simply, the author treats the text with the arrogance common amongst most Western academics, and his relationship with his topic is abusive. There are many Western academics who are able to deal with the Qur'an and hadith in a critical and respectful way, and their results have been helpful in destroying the accumulation of dogma both in this country and in the Muslim world. This is certainly not one of them. I will continue to keep my eyes peeled for a more mature and sober study of how the Qur'anic discourse uses folklore to convey the message of Islam. I gave this title two stars because the author did hit on a few points which I found relevant. One is that he categorizes the rhetorical arguments in the Qur'an and explains their purport. The second is that he indicates how the formulaic structure of the Qur'an is part of it's "folkloric" character. Meaning that, if you take the Qur'an as an ahistorical text, that the Qur'an is not really concerned with history but with conveying a message, then the character of the Qur'an is folkloric in that sense. I hope I wasn't too harsh, but I feel that our tradition demands more qualification and sophistication than what is employed in this book.