Quran as a Speech, rather than a Text; a Critique of Abu Zayd's Latest View about Revelation and Quran

In the last years of his life, Abu Zayd developed a new view concerning revelation and Quran. He no longer viewed Quran as God's speech; he identified it as a fallible speech of the Prophet that counts as an appropriate response to the questions of people then. For Abu Zayd, Quran is a result of the Prophet's dialogue with Arabs, and indeed, a narration which reconstructed and interpreted by the narrator. Quran does not count as a single coherent text; it rather counts as a set of speeches. According to this theory, Quran is a result of the Prophet's dialectical relation with social events and Arab's questions from the Prophet-all this contributing to the process of producing Quran. Since in this speech theory different conditions of expressing things are in view, it should be accepted that the Prophet changed and modified some of his views over time. Quran as a speech counts as a fragmentary text whose differences and contradictions can be justified, since each speech has been made in appropriate circumstances and for a certain audience. On this theory, Quran is never considered as a legislative text that is meant to express a series of eternal judgments. In this paper, I explicate, evaluate and criticize Abu Zayd's view and seek to show the shortcoming of his theory as well as the reasons why such a theory is developed.