In Defense of the Bible ─ A Critical Edition and an Introduction to Al-biqai's Bible Treatise

Ibrahim ibn 'Umar Biqa'i (1406-80) was a famous Qur'an commentator who lived in the last days of Mamluk rule. He wrote al-Aqwal al-qawimah fi hukm al-naql min al-kutub al-qadimah (The Just Verdict on the Permissibility of Quoting from Old Scripture) to defend his use of the Hebrew Bible and the Gospels in interpreting the Qur'an. It is a jewel, says Saleh (Islamic studies, U. of Toronto) with facets that open onto Islamic relations with Judaism and Christianity, internal Islamic polemics, the status of the bible in Muslim imagination, and the history of Quranic exegesis. He presents an Arabic edition of it, along with a hermeneutical biography of al-Biqa'i and discussion of the controversy and the place of the treatise in it, and the manuscripts. The quality of the physical volume is as high as Brill readers have come to expect. Annotation c2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Walid A. Saleh, Ph.D. (2001) in Religious Studies, Yale University, is Associate Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Toronto. He has published on the history of tafsir, the Qur?an and Islamic apocalyptic literature. His book The Formation of the Classical Tafsir Tradition was published by Brill in 2004.