What garners assent in the realm of literary criticism? On what grounds do critical agreements or disagreements rest, and from what structures of evidence do they draw authority? What exactly constitutes the refutation of an interpretation? What are the first principles underpinning our literary critical assertions; and what is taking place between two interlocutors when they are engaging in critical “debate” or when they have arrived at an impasse? What is the nature of critical conviction in the realm of the aesthetic and what distinguishes it from moral, political, or religious conviction? What does it mean, in short, to make an argument about a work of art? Do arguments work, or does their success rely on other factors, such as our preexisting trust in the authority of the speaker?

Although literary studies is a discipline that has long viewed itself as adroitly dialogic, it is on the whole ill-equipped to answer such foundational questions about the epistemology of argument in the realm of the aesthetic, often leaving them to be settled, if at all and rarely satisfactorily, within the disciplines of analytic philosophy and rhetoric. Quran as Method argues that the absence of rigorous theorizations of dispute within literary criticism and theory—and, by extension, methodical practices of debate—is one of the long-term consequences of Renaissance humanism’s attempt to expunge the influence of the Arab-Islamic sciences, in particular classical Arabic philosophy and its adoption of Aristotelian logic. European and eventually American criticism and theory would thus emerge and flourish as observational rather than argumentative modes of utterance, based not in the deployment of impersonal methods of interlocution but in a fundamentally Protestant vision of unique personal expressivity unavailable for dispute.