Epistemic Authority of the Quran According to Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd; a Cultural-Literary Approach

Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, the contentious Egyptian thinker, has proposed different ideas about the revelation and the Quran and encountered with different reactions. He made endeavor to provide some natural and non metaphysical explanations for the Islamic phenomena. In this regard he went through the miraculous feature of the Quran differently and reduced it to a cultural-literary phenomenon that everyone who knows Arabic takes it as a fundamental cultural text. Analyzing the literature and the linguistic mechanism of the Quran from the viewpoint of the current literary criticism will show its role in the creation of history and culture. This view is radically different from the viewpoint of faithful people because it reduces the religious attitude to a cultural atmosphere in which the Quran is like the other masterpieces which may be literary criticized. The content of the Quran, in this kind of criticism, is ignored while in the currentliterary criticism the content is heeded too.