Hands Outstretched: Towards a Re-reading of Sūrat al-Mā’ida

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

Abstract

Most of the Western researchers believe that the long Medinan sūras contain diverse and dispersed material; the present article seeks to refute this consensus. The sūra that the writer has chosen for achieving his objective is Sūrat al-Mā’ida. First, the writer has divided the sūra into sections and then has tried, through maintaining a relationship among the consecutive sections, to prove their interrelationship. Although the writer’s principles for division is different from the Muslim exegetes, the new aspect of his work does not end up here and he presents, in the main part of his work, a general and comprehensive model for interrelationship of the sections of Sūrat al-Mā’ida that properly shows the structural coherence of this sūra. The method the writer has followed for his purpose is the employment of lexical evidence as well as some methods of literary criticism common in the West.