Qur’anic Orality and Textual Epistemologies of the Humanities

This article argues that the Qur’an presents an epistemology that can recenter the categories underlying modern understandings of religion and knowledge. This is done through an examination of the role of orality, textuality, writing, and listening in relation to the Qur’an. The article consists of two parts: first, a synthesis and intervention of the research on the construction of the modern category of religion is brought together with a discussion of modern ways of knowing and sensing. Second, I argue that further attention to orality, sound, and listening in relation to the Qur’an further confounds the assumed neutrality of the categories of knowledge and subjectivity associated with the modern category of religion. The argument reveals the implied assumptions of the categories of orality and textuality that undergird the modern category of religion, to which the Qur’an presents an epistemology wherein orality and textuality are intertwined and overlapping categories and ways of knowing and experiencing, not separable categories as is often assumed.