Beyond Sectarianism Ambiguity, Hermeneutics, and the Formations of Religious Identity in Islam

"At this study's core is al-Sharif al-Radi's (d. 1015 CE) only surviving volume of his literary Qur'anic exegesis Haqa'iq al-Ta'wil fi Mutashabih al-Tanzil in which he tackled thirty-seven ambiguous verses in the Qur'an. Tehseen Thaver persuasively demonstrates that when read with a keen scholarly eye and against the backdrop of the 'general episteme that dominated the social and intellectual currents' of Buyid Baghdad in the tenth and eleventh centuries CE, al-Radi's work presents numerous and surprisingly compelling fruit...[G]roundbreaking...Clear and highly accessible, Thaver's prose excels in elucidating complicated theological and linguistic debates of a bygone era even to a lay reader." (Islamic Studies) "One of the best works to appear in Islamic studies recently. Tehseen Thaver offers a profound, theoretically engaging study of medieval Islamic identity and hermeneutics. This is a must for any reader of Islamic intellectual history." (Walid Saleh, University of Toronto) "Tehseen Thaver provides a timely corrective to our understanding of classical scholarship produced by Shi'i thinkers. Not only does her study of the hermeneutics of Radi speak broadly to debates in the study of the humanities, she also indicates important ways in which we cannot reduce a thinker to their theological affiliation nor can we set aside their personality. A critical intervention in the study of Islam." (Sajjad Rizvi, University of Exeter)