Der Islam | 2019
Nevin Reda, The al-Baqara Crescendo: Understanding the Qurʾan’s Style, Narrative Structure, and Running Themes, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017, xi + 264 p., ISBN 9780773548862 (paperback).
Abstract
Nevin Reda’s The al-Baqara Crescendo is a new contribution to structuralist approaches to the study of the Qurʾān, aiming to add new dimensions to holistic readings of Islamic scripture. Reda uses some of the concepts and methods borrowed from the fields of literary theory and Biblical studies to unfold the structure of Qurʾānic sūras. By emphasizing the Qurʾān’s oral quality, she searches for those literary figures and rhetorical devices (both verbatim and thematic) that supposedly promoted its aesthetic and semantic quality in the oral culture of pre-Islamic Arabia in which the text came into being. The work makes Sūrat al-Baqara (Q 2) as her key focus of study, a choice that is driven by the paramount position that the sūra holds for both religious and secular scholarship of the Qurʾān.1 It provides in its capacity enough evidence for an arguable composi-