Abstract
M.A.
This dissertation undertakes a socio-rhetoric analysis of Esack's ILT as conveyed in his book Quran, Liberation and Pluralism.
Having arrested the inevitable ironies and nuances of his venture, Esack describes the objective of his enterprise as the freedom to rethink the meaning of scripture to advance the liberation of all people. This noble desideratum was, as this dissertation will demonstrate, severely trammelled, if not undermined, by several subjective proclivities and idiosyncratic impulses. A socio-rhetoric analysis explores the mutually defining and modifying dynamics of the relationship between discourse and history.
Esack's ILT, because it purports to be based on the Quran, requires several strenuous manoeuvres and strategic devices. This entails 1] a hermeneutics, a legitimate way of reading the Quran, which is logically and theologically tenable, 2) keys, a codification of theory expected to streamline the dialogue between the Quran and political struggle, 3] a plausibility structure that helps to define or redefine legitimate authority, history, modes of struggle, historically and ethically feasible systemic alternatives, and, crucially for a located Esack, the bases for determining friends and foes.
Esack's apprehension of the socio-rhetoric landscape he had to negotiate inclined him to adopt a particular version of context-bound hermeneutics. He chooses to elaborate and substantiate this choice by, implicit and explicit, recourse to inchoate notions of relativism, constructivism, subjectivity, history, text and context. Esack's approach, however, is not conceptually and theoretically rigorous and as a consequence his hermeneutics has to rely on several tenuous and aporetic theoretical positions...