Michel Cuypers, “And Yet It Moves: Reflection on an Essay by Nicolai Sinai” in Journal of Qur’anic Studies 22.2 (2020), 86‒104.
Tag Archives: Cuypers
A Qurʾānic apocalypse
Michel Cuypers, A Qurʾānic apocalypse: A reading of the thirty-three last Sūrahs of the Qurʾān, Atlanta: Lockwood Press, 2018, 384 pages (collection “International Qurʾānic Studies Association, Studies in the Qurʾān”, 1).
The present volume closes a trilogy devoted to the exegesis of the Qurʾān analyzed according to the principles of Semitic rhetoric, a method of textual analysis developed in the field of biblical studies. It studies the shortest sūrahs of the Qur’ān, which are traditionally dated to the beginnings of the preaching of Muḥammad in Mecca. The reference to the initial vision of Muḥammad in Sūrah 81, the point of departure for his career as Prophet, provides the starting point of the study of this group of sūrahs. The analysis shows that the redactors who assembled the textual fragments of the Qurʾān into a book were guided by precise intentions. In the end, it is these intentions that the rhetorical analysis of the text enables us to discover and better understand.
The composition of the Qur’an
Michel Cuypers, The composition of the Qur’an, Rhetorical analysis, Bloomsbury, London, New Delhi, New York, Sydney, 2015 (202 pages).
The text of the Qur’an appears to many to be desperately muddled and lacking any coherence. TheComposition of the Qur’an provides a systematic presentation of the writing processes (or rhetoric) and argues that there is indeed a coherence to the Qur’anic text. Michel Cuypers shows that the ancient Semitic texts, of which the Qur’an is a part, do not obey the Greek rhetoric and that their basic principle is therefore not progressive linearity, but symmetry which can take several forms, following precise rules. He argues that the knowledge of this rhetorical code allows for a radically new analysis of the structure and rhetoric of the Qur’an. Using copious amounts of examples from the text, The Composition of the Qur’an provides a new theoretical synthesis of Qur’anic rhetoric as well as a methodology for their application in further exegesis. A landmark publication in the field of Qur’anic Studies, this volume will be of interest to scholars and researchers in Islamic Studies, Religious Studies and Arabic Studies.
The banquet
Michel Cuypers, The banquet: A reading of the fifth Sura of the Qur’an, Convivium Press, Miami, 2009 (565 pages).
Cuyper’s work is a ground-breaking contribution to Islamic-Christian studies and is being warmly received by the Islamic academic community. He applies recent methods of rhetorical textual studies to the analysis of the Qur’an, the holy book of Islam, which previously has been seen by many as a fragmented text with little sense of order. He has achieved a systematic and organised reading of the Qur’an text that is in absolute accordance with the Islamic faith, a task that has never before been accomplished. Both Muslim and Christian theologians around the world recognise his achievement as one of the most important contributions to an understanding of Islam based on Christian scholarship.
Michel Cuypers, P.F.J.
Michel Cuypers is Belgian, born in 1941, a friar, and a member of the Fraternity of the Little Brothers of Jesus (Father Charles de Foucauld). He currently lives in Ḥagāza, a small city near Luxor, Egypt.
He lived twelve years in Iran, where he obtained a PhD in Persian literature at the University of Tehran (1982) and then worked at the University Press of Iran. He was the co-founder of Luqmān, a journal of iranology. Michel Cuypers left Iran in 1986 and, after studying Arabic, in 1991 he became a researcher at IDEO (Cairo). Since then, he focuses on the rhetoric analysis of the Qurʾān.
You can find on this website an example of rhetorical analysis applied to the Fātiḥa, an article entitled “A new vision of the composition of the Qurʾān” (in Arabic), including a brief history of the method, with the example of Sūrat al-Qāriʿa and an extract from Sūrat al-Māʾida, as well as an article comparing the rhetoric of the Qurʾān with that of a Pharaonic papyrus (in English).
In 2007, he published Le Festin. Une lecture de la sourate al-Māʾida (Paris: Lethielleux). In 2009, this book was granted the “World Prize for the Book of the Year”, awarded by the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance of the Republic of Iran as “one of the best new works in the field of Islamic studies”.
In 2012, he published La Composition du Coran (Pendé, France: Gabalda), a theoretical book in which he explains the method of Semitic rhetoric applied to the Qurʾān. English translation: The composition of the Qurʾān, Rhetorical Analysis (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Arabic translation: Fī nazm al-Qurʾān (Beirut: Dār al-Mašriq, 2018).
In 2014, he published Une apocalypse coranique. Une lecture des trente-trois dernières sourates du Coran (Pendé, France: Gabalda), in which he summarizes and develops his previous articles on the latest chapters of the Qurʾān. English translation: A Qurʾānic Apocalypse. A Reading of the Thirty-Three Last Surahs of the Qurʾān, (IQSA, Lockwood Press, 2018). Arabic translation expected in 2022.
- Send him an email: .
- Click here to download his bibliography.
- See his publication on this site.
- Click here to see his authority record and list of publications on AlKindi.
Related websites:
- The RBS site (International Society for Biblical and Semitic rhetoric).
- Mehdi Azaiez‘s site.
- The site of the International Qurʾānic Studies Association.
- The page of Michel Cuypers on Academia.
- The article Rhétorique sémitique on Wikipedia.