Application of Barthes' "Death of the Author" to qur'an: possible or impossible?

Abstract

Qur'an as the sacred book of Muslims has been subjected to different types of interpretations from the beginning of its revelations, approximately from 1400 years ago. All the Islamic theology scholars, even unmuslims, tried to make a contribution as the best of their abilities to its understanding. By the advent of new post-structuralist approaches of textual analysis techniques in West, the possibility of interpreting this holy book has obsessed the modern textual analysts all over the world. This article tried to investigate the possibility of Barthes’ “Death of the Author” as one of the most controversial theories of modern text analysis. Considering the fact that, the author of Qur'an has not been a human to compose the text based on the dominant social, cultural and economical context of that time, the application of Barthes’ “Death of the Author” to the Qur'anic interpretation seems to be logically impossible. Furthermore, as the Qur'anic verses are classified into two categories of “Mohkamaat” and “Motashabehaat” based on Quran itself, this theory of text analysis can be utmost be applied to the latter in order to offer a better comprehension of the “Mohkamaat” as there are various interpretations of these “ayahs” in Islamic literature.