The Demise of Adam in the Qisas al-Anbiyā: The Symbolic Politics of Death and Re-Burial in the Islamic "Stories of the Prophets"

Abstract

Th is paper explores how death and burial narratives -particularly those associated with Adam, the paradigmatic fi rst human being, in the Islamic religious literature known as qiṣ aṣ al-anbiyāʾ ("stories of the [Biblical] prophets") -relate to the discursive processes through which religious communities articulate lines of inclusion and exclusion in the formation of their collective identities. In conversation with Katherine Verdery (Th e Political Lives of Dead Bodies), who examines reburials of political fi gures in Eastern Europe following the 1989 collapse of the Soviet Union, this paper argues that Islamic narratives regarding the death and burial of biblical fi gures like Adam serve to re-appropriate, re-situate, and re-defi ne boundaries of identity and diff erence both among Muslims (e.g. male/public vs. female/private; Sunni vs. Shiʿa; ʿālim (scholar) vs. populist preacher) and between Muslims and non-Muslim monotheists, Jews and Christians, principally. Grounding the discussion, empirically, are a series of close analyses of various renditions of the story of Adam's demise as found in a range of mostly Sunni qiṣ aṣ al-anbiyāʾ materials. From these analyses, the paper off ers an expanded understanding of how religious communities, specifi cally, develop multiple and competing claims in an eff ort to "monopolize the practices associated with death" (Verdery).

Pragmatic Study of Directive Speech Acts in Stories in Alquran

“…A special focus has been given to English as the target language which led to the emergence of the English Translated texts of the Qur'an (ETTQs hence forth) as a genre of its own. However, the large number of these English translated texts of the Qur'an -which currently exceeds one hundred different versions of translation (Khan, 1997) -creates a level of uncertainty that these translated texts of the Qur'an might show significant differences in the meaning among the different translation. Taking into account the literary value of the Qur'an, these versions of translation encompass errors arising from the "failure to capture stylistic, pragmatic and figurative aspects" (Muhammed, 2007).…”