Qur'?Nic Stories: God, Revelation and the Audience

The Qur'an employs storytelling and narrative devices to engage its audience and convey its messages. Leyla Ozgur Alhassen examines how these devices are used, including character portrayal, theme repetition, verbal echoes, and conceptual links, to establish a structure and strengthen beliefs. She argues that the act of reading the Qur'an is an interaction between God and the audience.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 184 pages
Publication date: 26 January 2023
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Explores the use of storytelling and narrative devices in the Qur an.
Draws on narratology, rhetoric and Qur anic studies to develop a new methodology.
Examines the interaction of the text, audience, characters and narrator.
Analyses Qur anic commentary: classical and modern; Sunni, Sufi and Shi i.
Studies stories that represent the variety of Qur anic narrative: Surat Y?suf; Surat?l Imr?n; Surat Maryam; Surat?aha; and Surat al-Qa?a?
Leyla Ozgur Alhassen approaches the Qur an as a literary, religious and oral text that affects its audience.
She looks at how Qur anic stories function as narrative: how characters and dialogues are portrayed; what themes are repeated; what verbal echoes and conceptual links are present; what structure is established; and what beliefs these narrative choices strengthen.
Ozgur Alhassen argues that, in the Qur an, some narrative features that are otherwise puzzling can be seen as instances in which God, as the narrator, centres himself while putting the audience in its place.
In essence, this makes the act of reading an interaction between God and the audience.

Dimension: 234 x 156 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781474483186