Academic literature on the topic 'Qur'anic Allusions'

This chapter talks about the Sufi-minded Ottoman historians that reconstructed Islamic history in which both the Ottomans and the Safavids were identified as the parties of the same perennial conflict since the creation of Adam. The Ottomans and the Safavids—both ethnically Turkic dynasties—were identified as the Romans and the Persians in allusion to the well-known Qur'anic prophecy that the former would defeat the latter. Perception of the Safavids as the perfect other for Islam was not mere war propaganda. The conquest of Constantinople, reportedly prophesized by Prophet Muhammed, and the approach of the end of the first millennium of the Islamic calendar had already sparked apocalyptic anxieties. Through the endeavors of high-profile jurists and mainstream Sufis, this esoteric epistemology was fully reconciled with the formal teachings of Islam and became an important component of political imagery and imperial ideology.

This chapter re-evaluates major aspects of the Golden Calf story in the Qur’an, proposing a reading of the narrative that breaks with those of both traditional Muslim and Western scholarship and seeks to restore it to its proper historical, religious, and literary context in Late Antiquity. The qur’anic references to the image worshipped by the Israelites provided Muslim exegetes with a pretext for depicting the Calf as alive or at least possessing some semblance of life. However, the qur’anic Calf is better understood not as ? lowing image of a calf but rather an image of a lowing calf, a distinction of enormous significance for the exegesis of the story. In the absence of a conception of the Golden Calf as actually or seemingly animate, the Qur’an’s allusions to the creation of this entity must be reinterpreted as well. This chapter thus proposes alternative explanations of the major elements of the traditional portrayal of the narrative, especially the depiction of the “Samaritan” as an outside interloper who created and animated the Calf through supernatural means, with Moses subsequently imposing a sentence of exile on both him and his descendants, the Samaritan community, for all time. Instead, the major elements of the key passage in the Qur’an can be interpreted as allusions to various biblical subtexts; the qur’anic story originally posited, like its Jewish and Christian precursors, that it was Aaron—called by the unique epithet al-sāmirī here—who had made the Calf and led the Israelites into sin.

This chapter examines the main narrative of the Golden Calf found in Exodus 32, as well as other allusions to this episode from Israel’s history from what became the canonical Hebrew Bible. The account of the Calf in Exodus appears to have been shaped by polemical imperatives in the earliest stages of its development, and reflects complex questions surrounding sanctioned forms of divine worship, the status of different priestly groups, and the relationship of those groups to the Israelite monarchies and the cult forms they sponsored. The conception of the Calf in Exodus appears to reflect ancient ideas about the sanctioned means of worshipping the God of Israel, with an older form of Israelite cult practice—the use of bulls or calves to suggest the invisible divine presence—being critiqued here. However, rather than corroborating the Exodus narrative’s presentation of the affair, the version of the episode preserved in Deuteronomy reflects the profoundly different imperatives of a later age. While the Exodus narrative ultimately hearkens back to a time in Israel’s history in which the making of the Calf was perceived primarily as a lamentable cultic infraction, the reframing of the narrative in Deuteronomy embeds it in a larger discourse in which the making of the Calf appears as the pre-eminent example of idolatry, a distinctive ideological construction of the exilic and post-exilic periods that marked all forms of religious practice not sanctioned as “orthodox” as betrayals of the covenant and regression to the worship of false gods.