Table of Contents

Preface

I. The First Listeners

II. The Text

III. The Sound

IV. The Miracle

V. The Prophet among the Poets

VI. The Sufi Listeners

Bibliography

About the Author

Navid Kermani is a writer and Islamic scholar who lives in Cologne, Germany. He has been awarded numerous prizes for his literary and academic work, the most recent being the Buber-Rosenzweig Medal in 2011. This work was translated by Tony Crawford

Reviews

This outstanding work fills a major lacuna in both the study ofthe Qur'an as scripture and the study of Muslim faith,practice, and sprituality. It is an estimable scholarly andintellectual accomplishment that will be of significant interest toany student of Islam or the general history ofreligion. William Graham, Harvard University Navid Kermani, himself an highly accomplished and honored writer ofartistic prose, sets out to (and succeeds) in articulating theMuslim response to the Qur'an as a work of inimitable beauty, abeauty, moreover, that is only available to those capable ofreading it in Arabic. Reading Kermani has opened me up to an evengreater appreciation than ever of the Muslim tradition and awakenedin me an even greater desire to someday read the Qur'an in Arabic.The book is anything but a "fundamentalist" defense of the Qur'anon aesthetic terms but rather a beautiful evocation of the meaningof that beauty for Muslims in the past and today. Daniel Boyarin, University of California, Berkeley Navid Kermani has written one of the most insightful books onreligion to appear in decades. His approach is ground breaking, adazzling display of his profound knowledge of Islam, and hisextraordinary insight into the nature of religiousexperience. Susannah Heschel, Dartmouth College