God’s Word, Spoken or Otherwise

Charles M. Ramsey, Ph.D. (2015), University of Birmingham, is Fellow, Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University (USA) where he teaches courses in Islamic Studies and the History of South Asia. He has published many writings on Islam in South Asia, including South Asian Sufis (Continuum, 2012) and The Gospel According to Sayyid Ahmad Khan (Brill, 2020).

Preface

Notes on Translation and Transliteration

Abbreviations



1 Introduction

 1 Approaching the Texts

 2 Approaching the Context

 3 Studies on Sayyid Ahmad Khan

 4 Outline of the Chapters



2 The Tabyīn in Context

 1 The Political Setting

 2 The Intellectual Environment

 3 Revelation Recorded

 4 The British Intellectual Environment

 5 Sayyid Ahmad’s Life and Works

 6 Conclusion



3 On the Bible

 1 What Is the Significance of the Title Tabyīn al-kalām?

 2 How Did Sayyid Ahmad Present His Commentaries on the Bible?

 3 Rationale for a Muslim Reading of the Bible

 4 Taḥrīf: The Greatest Obstacle to the Tabyīn Project

 5 Nāsikh wa-mansūkh

 6 Tabyīn Part 2

 7 To Reconcile Scripture and Science

 8 The Garden: What Did Transpire?

 9 Conclusion to Genesis

 10 Tabyīn Part 3

 11 The Person of Jesus Christ

 12 The Words and the Text

 13 The Counsels of Jesus

 14 Tafsīr al-Qurʾān

 15 Jesus’s Miraculous Birth

 16 Jesus Speaks in Infancy

 17 Jesus Raises the Dead

 18 Jesus’s Heavenly Ascension

 19 Conclusion



4 Prophecy: Rehearsed and Unrehearsed

 1 To Know What One Knows

 2 Experience as the Basis of Knowledge

 3 Experiment as the Way to Knowledge

 4 Knowledge for Salvation

 5 The Prophetic Experience

 6 Differentiating the Rehearsed and the Unrehearsed

 7 The Inimitable Qurʾan

 8 The Qurʾan as Text

 9 Revelation Defined

 10 Sources for the Adoption of the Taxonomy

 11 Construction Applied to the Bible

 12 Revelation Recorded

 13 Revelation in the Bible

 14 The New Testament Authors

 15 Writings Other Than Gospels in the New Testament

 16 Conclusion



5 The Coherence of Revelation

 1 Introduction

 2 Continuity and Originality

 3 Scripturalist falsafa

 4 Conclusion



6 Conclusion

 1 How Did Sayyid Ahmad Conceptualize Prophetic Revelation in the Bible?

 2 What Did Sayyid Ahmad Understand Himself to Be Doing in Tabyīn?

References

Index