And Yet It Moves: Reflection on an Essay by Nicolai Sinai

Michel Cuypers, “And Yet It Moves: Reflection on an Essay by Nicolai Sinai” in Journal of Qur’anic Studies 22.2 (2020), 86‒104.

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A Qurʾānic apocalypse

Michel Cuypers, A Qurʾānic apocalypse: A reading of the thirty-three last Sūrahs of the Qurʾān, Atlanta: Lockwood Press, 2018, 384 pages (collection “International Qurʾānic Studies Association, Studies in the Qurʾān”, 1). The present volume closes a trilogy devoted to the exegesis of the Qurʾān analyzed according to the principles of Semitic rhetoric, a method of textual analysis developed in the field of biblical studies. It studies the shortest sūrahs of the Qur’ān, which are traditionally dated to the beginnings of the preaching of Muḥammad in Mecca. The reference to the initial vision of Muḥammad in Sūrah 81, the point of departure for his career as Prophet, provides the starting point of the study of this group of sūrahs. The analysis shows that the redactors who assembled the textual fragments of the Qurʾān into a book were guided by precise intentions. In the end, it is these intentions that the rhetorical analysis of the text enables us to discover and better understand. Click here to buy the book online…

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Michel Cuypers

Send him an email: mcuyperspfj@gmail.com. Click here to download his bibliography. Click here to see his authority record and list of publications on Diamond. Michel Cuypers is Belgian, born in 1941, a friar, and a member of the Fraternity of the Little Brothers of Jesus (Father Charles de Foucauld). He currently lives in Ḥagāza, a small city near Luxor, Egypt. He lived twelve years in Iran, where he obtained a PhD in Persian literature at the University of Tehran (1982) and then worked at the University Press of Iran. He was the co-founder of Luqmān, a journal of iranology. Michel Cuypers left Iran in 1986 and, after studying Arabic, in 1991 he became a researcher at IDEO (Cairo). Since then, he focuses on the rhetoric analysis of the Qurʾān. You can find on this website an example of rhetorical analysis applied to the Fātiḥa, an article entitled “A new vision of the composition of the Qurʾān” (in Arabic), including a brief history of the method, with the example of Sūrat al-Qāriʿa and an extract from Sūrat al-Māʾida, as well as an article comparing the rhetoric of the Qurʾān with that of a Pharaonic papyrus (in English). In 2007, he published Le Festin. Une lecture de la sourate al-Māʾida (Paris: Lethielleux). In 2009, this book was granted the “World Prize for the Book of the Year”, awarded by the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance of the Republic of Iran as “one of the best new works in the field of Islamic studies”. English translation: The Banquet: A reading of the fifth Sura of the Qur’ān (Convivium Press, Miami, 2009). Arabic translation: سورة المائدة – نظم آي القرآن في ضوء منهج التحليل البلاغي في نظم (Dar el-Machreq, Beyrouth, 2016). In 2012, he published La Composition du Coran (Pendé, France: Gabalda), a theoretical book in which he explains the method of Semitic rhetoric applied to the Qurʾān. English translation: The composition of the Qurʾān, Rhetorical Analysis (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Arabic translation: Fī nazm al-Qurʾān (Beyrouth, Dar al-Mashreq, 2018). In 2014, he published Une apocalypse coranique. Une lecture des trente-trois dernières sourates du Coran (Pendé, France: Gabalda), in which he summarizes and develops his previous articles on the latest chapters of the Qurʾān. English translation: A Qurʾānic Apocalypse. A Reading of the Thirty-Three Last Surahs of the Qurʾān, (IQSA, Lockwood Press, 2018). Arabic translation: Fī naẓm al-Qurʾān li-l-dirāsāti l-Qur’ānīa (Tafsir Center for Qur’anic Studies, Riyadh, 2023). Related websites: The RBS site (International Society for Biblical and Semitic rhetoric). Mehdi Azaiez‘s site. The site of the International Qurʾānic Studies Association. The page of Michel Cuypers on Academia. The article Rhétorique sémitique on Wikipedia.

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