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Review Essay: Going Round in Circles by Nicolai Sinai Professor of Islamic Studies; Fellow of Pembroke College
.......The two publications under consideration here are impelled by this holistic turn while endeavoring to push it much further. Michel Cuypers’ The Composition of the Qur’an seeks to demonstrate, at a stimulating level of detail, that Qur’anic surahs are structured in accordance with a small number of general compositional principles that govern Semitic literary production more widely. Cuypers’ objective is to establish that the method of rhetorical analysis codified by the Biblical scholar Roland Meynet ,which is also claimed to be valid for other ancient Near Eastern literature as well as for material from the ḥadīth corpus (pp. 6–7), is likewise applicable to the Qur’an. .................
Rhetorical analysis : an introduction to Biblical rhetoric by Roland Meynet.
The Composition of the Qur'an: Rhetorical Analysis by Michel Cuypers September 22, 2016
Michel Cuypers is from Belgium and lives in Cairo. Born on 1941, he is a member of the Fraternity of the Little Brothers of Jesus (Father de Foucauld).
He lived twleve years in Iran, where he obtained a PhD in Persian literature at the University of Tehran and then worked at the University Press of Iran. He was one of the co-founders of Luqmân, a journal of iranology. Michel Cuypers left Iran in 1986 and, after studying Arabic, he became a researcher at IDEO (Cairo), where he focuses on the rhetoric analysis of the Qur’an.
You can find on this website an example of rhetoric analysis applied to the Fātiḥa, as well as sūrat al-Māʾida (in Arabic). You can also find an article on the comparaison between the Semitic rhetoric in the Qur’an and a Pharaonic papyrus.
In 2007, he published Le Festin. Une lecture de la sourate al-Mâ’ida (Collection «Rhétorique sémitique» n°3), Paris, Lethielleux, 2007, 453 pages. (English translation: The banquet: A reading of the fifth Sura of the Qur’an, Convivium Press, Miami, 2009, 565 pages). 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”.
In March 2012, he published La Composition du Coran. نظم القرآن, Rhétorique sémitique, ed. Gabalda, Paris, 200 pages, a theoretical book in which he explains the application of Semitic rhetoric to the Qur’an. English translation: The composition of the Qur’an, Rhetorical analysis, Bloomsbury, London, New Delhi, New York, Sydney, 2015, 202 pages.
In January 2014, he published Une apocalypse coranique. Une lecture des trente-trois dernières sourates du Coran, éd. Gabalda, Pendé (France), 364 pages, in which he summarizes and develops his previous articles on the latest chapters of the Qur’an.
How to Read the Qur'an: A New Guide, with Select Translations by Carl W. Ernst 2011
Topic: Qur'anic studies today