The talismanic potential of literature is dependent on its openness to being interpreted. As it has been deployed in current debates, it is taken to stand in contrast to the “closed” sacred text of Islam. Asad revisits his comparative history of these ideas in his book Formations of the Secular to suggest that although interpretation of the Quran has always been open and shifting, there has been no equivalent of that nineteenth-century European tradition of “higher” criticism that drew so strongly on Enlightenment and German idealism to treat the Bible as a literary text open to being read in mythological and symbolic as well as literalist ways.

DEFINE: Clarifies Asad's distinction between open Quranic interpretation and the nineteenth-century European 'higher criticism' tradition that approached the Bible as a literary text.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 87