God is Beautiful : The Aesthetic Experience of the Quran

The melodious recitation of the Quran is a fundamental aesthetic experience for Muslims, and the start of a compelling journey of ideas. In this important new book, the prominent German writer and Islamic scholar Navid Kermani considers the manner in which the Quran has been perceived, apprehended and experienced by its recipients from the time of the Prophet to the present day.

Drawing on a wide range of Muslim sources, from historians, theologians and philosophers to mystics and literary scholars, Kermani provides a close reading of the nature of this powerful text. He proceeds to analyze ancient and modern testimonies about the impact of Quranic language from a variety of angles. Although people have always reflected on the reception of texts, images and sounds that they find beautiful or moving, Kermani explains that Islam provides a particularly striking example of the close correlation, grounded in a common origin, between art and religion, revelation and poetry, and religious and aesthetic experience.

This major new book will enhance the dialogue between Islam and the West and will appeal to students and scholars of Islam and comparative religion, as well as to a wider readership interested in Islam and the Quran.

Author Notes

Navid Kermani is a writer and scholar who lives in Cologne, Germany. He has received numerous accolades for his literary and academic work, including the 2015 Peace Prize of the German Publishers' Association, Germany's most prestigious cultural award.

Reviews 1

Choice Review

In the last decade or so, much has been written about the aesthetic dimensions of the Qur'an. Kermani's God Is Beautiful is a valuable, if somewhat puzzling, addition to this literature. The puzzling aspect has to do with the original publication: the book was written in German and published in Germany in 1999, thus making it slightly anachronistic as an addition to the lively field of scholarship in 2015. Kermani's stated interest is in elaborating how Muslims since the seventh century have experienced the Qur'an through listening and recitation and how the Qur'an's structure, poetic prose, and reception point to the foundational Muslim belief in the Qur'an as a miracle--the only miracle associated with the Prophet Muhammad. Kermani interweaves premodern textual accounts with more recent scholarship (some of which he is very critical of) and sketches a compelling picture of the aesthetic significance of the sacred text of Islam. Kermani is a prolific writer, a well-respected author and scholar, and a well-known public figure in Germany. But despite the fact that Crawford's translation is impressively readable, at almost 400 dense pages, the book is as much a challenging as a rewarding read. Summing Up: Optional. Graduate students, researchers, faculty. --Juliane Hammer, UNC Chapel Hill

Preface	p. vii
1 The First Listeners	p. 1
Remembered History	p. 4
The Quran and the Traditions	p. 9
Conversions	p. 14
The Community of Quran Listeners	p. 24
The Adversaries' Impotence	p. 33
The Power of the Word	p. 45
About Verbal Magic	p. 52
Language and Poetry in Ancient Arabic Society	p. 59
2 The Text	p. 67
The Poeticity of the Quran	p. 70
Creating Horizons and Altering Horizons	p. 75
The Quran as an Open Text	p. 91
Idea and Structure	p. 114
Is the Quran Poetry?	p. 129
3 The Sound	p. 133
Oral Scripture	p. 136
The Text as a Musical Score	p. 155
Restriction and Reification	p. 162
God Speaks	p. 167
4 The Miracle	p. 185
Al-Jurjani's 'Science of Composition'	p. 202
The Direction of the Discourse	p. 227
I'jaz and the Quran's Reception History	p. 233
5 The Prophet among the Poets	p. 252
The Islamic Prophet and the Aesthetics of Genius	p. 255
Plato's Legacy	p. 269
Poetry and Prophecy	p. 274
Muhammad and the Poets	p. 277
The Language of the Angels	p. 286
6 The Sufi Listeners	p. 293
Sama' and Quran Recitation	p. 297
The Listeners Slain by the Quran	p. 303
The Terror of God	p. 311
The Pleasure of Listening	p. 320
Romanization of Arabic and Persian Words	p. 346
Glossary	p. 348
Notes	p. 350
References	p. 421
Index	p. 454

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Table of Contents