Language Use and Makkan and Madinan Revelations
A Comparative Study
Samia Locate
University of Leeds
Makkan and Madinan Revelations aims to provide an in-depth study of the Makkan and Madinan revelations of the Qur’an in terms of structure, themes, linguistic, stylistic and textual analysis of the suras. The main objective of these analyses is to make the contents of the Qur’an more accessible by the modern reader.
Firstly to represent the context in which the revelations took place, an account of the historical background of the two towns Makka and Madina at the time of the Prophet himself is given. The present discussion presents the Qur’an in terms of its composition and its status as a Holy Scripture compared to the previous other two Scriptures. Thus, an insight into the Makkan suras has been provided: Outlines of its structure, themes, peculiarities, and textual analysis in terms of tenets of faith of some selected Makkan suras have been dealt with. Similarly, an insight into the Madinan suras has also been provided along with structural, thematic and textual analysis of some selected Madinan suras. Other concepts such as the ‘coherence in the Qur’an’, ‘nazm in the Qur’an’ and ‘icjaz al-Qur’an’ which are looked at in terms of conceptual chaining between adjacent suras and ayas have been developed in this study.
The present study provides intriguing comparative and contrastive analyses of the Makkan and Madinan suras from Muslim and non-Muslim perspectives which led to 28 highly valuable observations about the study of the two phases of revelation. The author's approach has thus become different from classical classification of the suras. It is now based on suras structure, themes and text linguistics.
ISBN 9783895863929. LINCOM Textual Analyses 01. 269pp. 2009.
