I recently read a famous quote taken out of context. “The isnād is from the religion; were it not for the isnād anyone could say anything they wanted“. The trouble with this is that most people will not only not challenge this claim, they are not aware of its context.

I was asked to expand a bit on how I “read” the Quran now. I was initially motivated by a linguistic analysis of the Quran: a method I am trained to use not limited to just syntax and morphology, but also pragmatics, semantics, historical linguistics, and even psycholinguistics.

This brought me to semiotics, the study of how signs work. When talking about signs, it’s hard to say we “read” them without muddying the waters of what we mean. So instead of “reading” in the linguistic sense of extracting sentential meaning (semantics) from the sign , I prefer to “respond” to signs. Revelation as a system of signs communicating meaningful signals or messages to its intended recipient: ultimately me. I can relay or reflect it, accept it or reject it, but from my own subjective vantage point, my “I” is the end of the line and my observations while relaying that signal are all I can know. I cannot see beyond my vantage point.
My approach is to respond to the Quran as God’s revealed speech directly without the mediation of historical theorization as we find in most commentaries, legal doctrines, sufic traditions, creedal polemics, and other lenses. Lensing is an unavoidable activity in reading. If I’m unaware of the biasing effect of my lenses, then I am likely to never know its limitations; never to know what is the subject, the object of inquiry, or the artifacts of the lens. The goal is to read the Revealed Speech intentionally and thoughtfully as an authentic communiqué, not as a history book (naqlism), or a user’s manual (neo-salafism):