Reconsidering Qur'anic Genre

The Qur'an's employment of diverse modes of discourse is, perhaps, the text's defining literary feature. These discourses, ranging from apocalyptic, to narrative, to legal, have long been observed by Western scholars. Genre studies of the Qur'an, however, have largely stagnated, and little progress has been made beyond cursory classifications. This stagnation is particularly stunting to the study of the textual history of the Qur'an, as vital questions concerning the development of individual genres and the relationship between Qur'anic genre and the unit of the sura remain unanswered. This article marks a first attempt at formulating a literary framework for approaching Qur'anic genre. It will synthesise existing conceptions of Qur'anic genre into a common interpretative framework: individual Qur'anic genres exist as thematically and syntactically demarcated literary units. The article will then propose a novel, literary approach that utilises a comparative thematic and syntactic structural analysis of the Qur'an text to uncover the original, communicated pieces of Qur'anic revelation from the Prophet to an audience in time, or 'Qur'anic utterances'. This literary analysis is applied to Surat Al (c)Imran and will demonstrate that it is constructed of 34 individual utterances and nine distinct literary genres.