Description:
<jats:p>This essay presents a broad overview of certain key works and intellectual trends
that mark traditional scholarship on the Qur’an in South Asia, from the late
medieval to the modern periods, roughly the fourteenth to the mid-twentieth
centuries. Far from an exhaustive survey of any sort, what I have attempted
instead is a preliminary and necessarily partial outline of the intellectual
trajectory of Qur’an commentaries and translations in the South Asian context—in
Arabic, Persian, and Urdu—with a view to exploring how shifting historical and
political conditions informed new ways of engaging the Qur’an. My central
argument is this: in South Asia, the early modern and modern periods saw an
important shift from largely elite scholarship on the Qur’an, invariably
conducted by scholars intimately bound to the imperial order of their time, to
more selfconsciously popular works of translation and exegesis designed to
access and attract a wider non-elite public. In this shift, I argue, translation
itself emerged as an important and powerful medium of hermeneutical populism
pregnant with the promise of broadening the boundaries of the Qur’an's
readership and understanding. In other words, as the pendulum of political
sovereignty gradually shifted from pre-colonial Islamicate imperial orders to
British colonialism, new ways of imagining the role, function, and accessibility
of the Qur’an also came into central view. A major emphasis of this essay is on
the thought and contributions of the hugely influential eighteenth-century
scholar Shah Wali Ullah (d. 1762) and his family on the intellectual topography
of South Asian Qur’an commentaries and translations.</jats:p>