Footnote: What is really the Masoretic exegesis?

Submitted by dhimmi no more (United States), Jul 26, 2015 at 11:33

This is just a footnote: Wansbrough defined the Quranic masoretic exegesis as follows:

1, Lexical explanation

2. Grammatical analysis

3. Agreed apparatus of variant readings

Masoretic exegesis requires

1. Textual analogy

2. Periphrasis as well as the the introduction of evidence from a large and conveniently flexible corpus of Arabic poetry

3. Mawatin al-nuzul (place of revelation)

This form of tafseer can be dated to the late 2nd and 3rd century of Islam and in the words of Herbert Berg

the qur'an could not have been canonized much before the emergence of masoretic exegesis is further supported by the characterisically masoretic practice of explicating the qur'an in its proper order

What does all of this mean? It means that these fragments do not mean that we had a copy not unlike the 1923-1924 Cairo Qur'an ready when Othman collected the Qur'an it also means that the Qur'an was still a written text that was not memorized as we are told after all how could you memorize a text that you could not be read and it had a long way ahead of it before being canonized in the late 2nd and early 3rd century

PS: Any reader interested in reading about Alba Fedeli and the Alphonse Magnana's Quranic fragments please check "Early Evidences of variant readings in Quranic manuscripts" and also check about Surat Taha

http://www.islamicmanuscripts.info/reference/articles/MO-15-2009/Fedeli-2009-MO-15-1-200906.pdf

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