Naṣr Ḥāmid Abū Zayd’s Use of Classical Theological and Philosophical Islamic Sources in His Qurʾānic Hermeneutics

Naṣr Ḥāmid Abū Zayd (1943 – 2010) is one of the most controversial contemporary Egyptian scholars in the Islamic intellectual context. One of his main concerns was to apply textual criticism to the interpretations of the Qurʾān. This is not an easy task considering the divine status of the prophetic message. Abū Zayd’s approach to the Arabic notion of interpretation (taʾwil) leads to an innovative and polemical approach to the Islamic prophetic message. Although Abū Zayd resorts to contemporary hermeneutics, I argue that he draws on three intellectual branches of classical Islam in which textual criticism was already being applied and, thus, made the bridge to hermeneutics and contemporary semiotic and semantic theories easier. These three branches are firstly, the Muʿtazila, a rationalist theological school; secondly, the philosophical Sufism of Ibn ʿArabī; and, finally, Shiite Qurʾānic exegesis.