ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the Qur’an project of Ḥamīd al-Dīn Farāhī (d. 1930). In comparison to Sayyid Aḥmad Khān and Ashraf ʿAlī Thānawī who were overwhelmed by contestations on “authentic” Islam, Farāhī was more interested in developing concrete methods to interpret the Qur’an. Although this need to develop reliable methods was in itself driven by the historical forces operating in British India, he remained in search of hermeneutically “authentic” approaches to understand the Muslim scripture. What came as most prominent in his search was a sophisticated program of interpreting the Qur’an in the light of his view of coherence and inter-connectedness present within the scripture. Academic discourse on modern Islam labels him a modernist. The investigation in this chapter challenges this characterization.
