ABSTRACT
As I was planning the April 2005 University of Notre Dame conference, “Towards a New Reading of the Qur’an?” on which this book is based, a number of my colleagues told me that they were suspicious of the very idea of a “new reading” of the Qur’an. The reading of the Qur’an, that is the accuracy and meaning of the words (and not the interpretation thereof), seems sufficiently clear. No current edition of the Qur’an, for example, contains an apparatus criticus, a list of words that are different, missing or added in certain manuscripts. Meanwhile, the various editions of the Qur’an printed today (with only extraordinary exceptions) are identical, word for word, letter for letter. The Arabic text of the Qur’an, then, seems to be uniform and problem-free.
