L’auteur

William Albert Graham est membre de la faculté des Arts et des Sciences de Harvard depuis 1973. Il est actuellement doyen de la Harvard Divinity School (2002 -). Ses axes de recherche principaux sont l’histoire religieuse de l’Islam, avec un accent particulier sur le Coran et les littératures du Hadith.

Presentation

William A Graham, a leading international scholar in the field of Islamic Studies, gathers together his selected writings under three sections: 1.History and Interpretation of Islamic Religion; 2.The Qur’an as Scripture, and 3. Scripture in the History of Religion. Each section opens with a new introduction by Graham, and a bibliography of his works is included.

Graham’s work in Islamic studies focuses largely on the analysis and interpretation of the religious dimensions of ritual action, scriptural piety, textual authority/revelation, tradition, and major concepts, such as grace and transcendence. His work in the comparative history of religion has focused in particular on the ’problem’ of scripture as a cross-cultural religious phenomenon that is more complex than simply ’sacred text’. This invaluable resource will be of primary interest to students of the Islamic tradition, especially as regards Qur’anic piety, Muslim ’ritual’ practice, and fundamental structures of Islamic thought, and to students of the comparative history of religion, especially as regards the phenomenon of ’scripture’ and its analogs.

Table des matières

Preface; Introduction;

Part I History and Interpretation of Islamic Religion: Introduction; Traditionalism in Islam: an essay in interpretation; Concepts of revelation in early Islam; The Divine Saying as problem; Transcendence in Islam; Islam in the mirror of ritual.

Part II The Qur’an as Scripture: Introduction; ’The winds to herald his mercy’: nature as token of God’s sovereignty and grace in the Qur’an; The earliest meaning of ’Qur’an’; Qur’an as spoken word: an Islamic contribution to the understanding of scripture; ’Those who study and teach the Qur’an’; Scripture and the Qur’an.

Part III Scripture in the History of Religion: Introduction; Scripture; Scripture as spoken word; The Indian paradigm for scriptural orality; God’s Word in the desert: Pachomian scriptural practice; Reflections on comparative study in religion: ’scripture’ as a case in point; Bibliography; Index.