Contributions Of Non-Religious Disciplines To Understanding The Qur'an

 

Contributions of Non-Religious Disciplines To Understanding The Qur’an

M. Bakri Musa

July 19, 2026

Excerpted and adapted from Qur’an, Hadith And Hikayat: Exercises In Critical Thinking (2021)

 

The late Syrian scholar Muhammad Shahrour once paid a glowing tribute to his colleagues at the University of Damascus’s Linguistics Department. He freely credited them with using modern theories of language, structuralism, and grammar to help untangle his own understanding of the Qur’an. Likewise, modern Muslims should eagerly emulate Shahrour. We must aggressively leverage every contemporary analytical tool available—whether forged in the East or the West—to better comprehend our Holy Book, rather than treating it as a stagnant crystalized artifact frozen in seventh-century Arabia.

Our historical luminaries during the Islamic Golden Era did precisely that. They did not suffer from the intellectual insecurities that plague today’s ulama. Those early scholars eagerly devoured philosophy from the ancient Greeks and weaponized that alien logic to analyze and articulate the truths of the Qur’an. They were not at all perturbed about learning from those godless, pagan Greeks. They rightly recognized that Aristotle and Plato had a thing or two to teach us believers.

Those early Muslims possessed a robust, supreme confidence in their faith. They believed to their very marrow that all knowledge ultimately originates from the Creator. If He, in His infinite and inscrutable wisdom, chose to impart profound rational insights to those ancient, toga-wearing, non-believing Greeks, it was not for us to question His divine distribution system. Our job was simply to learn, absorb, and benefit. By marrying Greek deductive reasoning with empirical observation, science blossomed in the Islamic world while Europe was still trapped in the dark mud of the Middle Ages. That is the crucial diagnostic lesson for today’s stagnant Muslim ummah: we must re-learn how to learn.

Today, there is wide academic acceptance of the two distinct textual and thematic halves of the Qur’an: the early, universally spiritual Meccan verses versus the later, highly contextual and political Medinan ones. Decades before Shahrour popularized this, the tragic Sudanese reformer Mahmoud Mohamed Taha—coincidentally also an engineer by training—argued this exact thesis in his seminal, fatal work, The Second Message of Islam. Another towering reformer of the last century was India's Asghar Ali Engineer. Yes, “Engineer” was literally his surname, and he practiced the profession for twenty years before turning his analytical mind toward dismantling the crust of orthodox Islamic jurisprudence.

There is a fascinating, if dark, irony here. While those 20th-century Muslim luminaries used their engineering mindsets for benign reformation, their counterparts a century later used the exact same technical training towards far more malignant ends. As Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog documented in their 2017 Engineers of Jihad, there is a bizarrely disproportionate number of engineers embedded within violent radical Islamic movements. Osama bin Laden is the obvious poster boy, but Malaysia too contributed her own lethal share to this statistic. Consider Azahari Husin, the brilliant mastermind behind the horrific Bali bombings—he wasn’t a product of some backwater madrasah (religious school), but a man holding an engineering PhD from the University of Reading. When an engineering mind lacks the humanizing guardrails of the liberal arts, it treats theology like a rigid plumbing blueprint, with catastrophic results.

This is precisely why we must apply the nuanced insights of modern literary analyses when reading the Qur’an. Take Louise Rosenblatt’s Reader-Response Theory. She argued that readers must fully engage their own unique cognitive capacity, cultural milieu, and personal biography when interacting with a text. A rigid teacher should never impose preconceived dogmas on how one ought to react to a work.

Consider Charles Dickens. His vivid narratives evoke the exact same visceral, tear-jerking emotional responses whether the reader is a wealthy aristocrat in Victorian London, a commuter on the London Underground today, or a barefoot Malay boy sitting in a rustic kampung (village) stilt house. Readers bring their own unique luggage of human experience to bear on the plots, scenery, and characters.

While the Qur’an is obviously not a mere piece of human literature, nonetheless when we open its pages we must still utilize our highest literary and cognitive faculties to truly digest it. We must look past the static historical characters—like the wise Luqman I cited earlier—and trace the sweeping narrative arcs, the psychological tensions, and the dramatic twists and turns inherent in Prophet Muhammad’s grueling twenty-three-year prophetic journey. Only then will the text come alive, transforming from a chanted ritual into a dynamic manual for the modern intellect.

Next:  Hudaybiyyah:  The Prophet’s Most Pivotal Early Battle