Routledge Handbook on Early Islam

Herbert Berg, Herbert Berg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317589204
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Islamic Theology

The formative period of Islam remains highly contested. From the beginning of modern scholarship on this formative period, scholars have questioned traditional Muslim accounts on early Islam. The scholarly fixation is mirrored by sectarian groups and movements within Islam, most of which trace their origins to this period. Moreover, contemporary movements from Salafists to modernists continue to point to Islam's origins to justify their positions.

This Handbook provides a definitive overview of early Islam and how this period was understood and deployed by later Muslims. It is split into four main parts, the first of which explores the debates and positions on the critical texts and figures of early Islam. The second part turns to the communities that identified their origins with the Qur??n and Mu?ammad. In addition to the development of Muslim identities and polities, of particular focus is the relationship with groups outside or movements inside of the umma (the collective community of Muslims). The third part looks beyond what happened from the 7th to the 9th centuries CE and explores what that period, the events, figures, and texts have meant for Muslims in the past and what they mean for Muslims today. Not all Muslims or scholars are willing to merely reinterpret early Islam and its sources, though; some are willing to jettison parts, or even all, of the edifice that has been constructed over almost a millennium and a half. The Handbook therefore concludes with discussions of re-imaginations and revisions of early Islam and its sources.

Almost every major debate in the study of Islam and among Muslims looks to the formative period of Islam. The wide range of contributions from many of the leading academic experts on the subject therefore means that this book will be a valuable resource for all students and scholars of Islamic studies, as well as for anyone with an interest in early Islam.

Part I

The Qurʾān and Muḥammad

1

The Qurʾān¹

Nicolai Sinai

According to traditional Islamic belief, the Qurʾān (“recitation”) records the divine revelations that were communicated to the prophet Muḥammad in Mecca and Medina prior to his death in 632 CE. By virtue of being the foundational text of Islam, the Qurʾān must play a pivotal role in the present volume, since coming to terms with it will form a crucial condition of adequacy for any interpretation of early Islamic history. This chapter accordingly aims to provide a basic introduction to the form and content of the Qurʾānic corpus and to some of the scholarly debates surrounding it. The first two sections take stock of the text’s principal literary and structural characteristics, mostly without reliance on substantial historical commitments.² The third section then moves on to consider two issues that loom large in recent scholarship: the Qurʾān’s putative date of closure and the question of where we should locate its milieu of emergence.

I General literary characteristics

Surahs and verses

The Qurʾānic corpus is a collection of 114 textual units commonly understood to be composed in desinentially inflected Arabic.³ These units, the so-called surahs,⁴ are of extremely discrepant length. They are subdivided into a total of c. 6,200 verses (6,236 by the counting that is dominant today), traditionally called āyāt (sg. āya, “sign”).⁵ References to Qurʾānic passages are therefore made by surah and verse; the format that is most current in contemporary Western scholarship is “Q X:Y”, where X indicates the surah and Y the verse.

The Qurʾān’s verses are normally demarcated by rhyme. However, the rules of Qurʾānic rhyme are considerably more flexible than those governing classical Arabic poetry, insofar as phonetically similar consonants like l, m, and n are often used interchangeably. Likewise in contrast with classical poetry, Qurʾānic rhyme normally requires that verse-final words are given what is called a pausal pronunciation: the final short vowels of nouns and of verbs as well as the indeterminate nominal endings -un and -in must be omitted while the indeterminate accusative ending -an becomes -ā. Such a pausal pronunciation of verse endings also characterises the rhymed and rhythmic kind of prose (sajʿ) ascribed to pre-Islamic Arabian soothsayers (Stewart 1990: 109–110). The possibility of verse-internal rhyme and also what appears to be the occasional presence of rhymeless verses generates some uncertainty in subdividing the Qurʾān into verses. As a result, classical Islamic scholarship transmits different systems of verse divisions, but it must be underscored that the Qurʾānic verse grid, unlike e.g. the New Testament one, is not merely a secondary imposition for convenience of reference (Neuwirth 1981: 3, 117–118).

Like the surahs, Qurʾānic verses, too, exhibit great divergences in length, ranging from two or three words to entire paragraphs. Interestingly, verse length within one and the same surah is much more uniform than across the Qurʾān as a whole. It can also be shown that differences in the surahs’ mean verse length converge with a considerable number of further lexical, thematic, and literary traits. This is plausibly accounted for by the traditional assumption that the Qurʾānic proclamations, or at least clusters of them, form a linear evolutionary sequence in the course of which various formal and contentual characteristics evolved simultaneously, one such development being a gradual increase of mean verse length over time (Sadeghi 2011 and Sinai forthcoming c; for an opposing voice, see Reynolds 2011).

The Qurʾān’s divine voice and its addressees

Unlike the scriptural texts that are most familiar to a Western readership, such as the Book of Genesis or the New Testament gospels, the Qurʾān is not fundamentally a narrative document, although it does of course contain many narrative passages. Instead, its basic format is best described as a compilation of more or less extended units of divine speech treating a wide range of topics (eschatology, God’s workings in nature, episodes from past history, moral and quasi-legal norms of behaviour) and employing an eclectic mixture of discursive registers, including narratives, hymns, polemics, and quasi-legal prescriptions. While a detailed examination of these themes and registers is beyond the scope of the present chapter, the Qurʾān’s basic discursive constellation does deserve comment here: who is speaking to whom?

That the Qurʾānic proclamations generally style themselves as divine utterances is reasonably evident, given that they are interspersed with numerous occurrences of the first person singular or plural, the vast majority of which clearly represent a divine voice.⁶ It is because this divine voice is apparently intended to be the default speaker in the Qurʾān that the Islamic scripture contains no equivalent to the biblical messenger formula “Thus says YHWH” or “Thus says the Lord God”. What complicates matters is the fact that God appears not only in the first person, but is also talked about in the third person, sometimes in immediate proximity to a first-person reference (see Abdel Haleem 1992): “Or who has created the heavens and the earth and has sent down for you^p water from the sky, through which We have caused to grow gardens full of beauty?” (Q 27:60). A small number of short surahs are even devoid of any occurrence of the divine first person (e.g., Q 98–107 and 109–114). At least in some cases, the Qurʾān’s blending of first- and third-person references to God may be due to the combination of partially discordant literary conventions: while the Qurʾānic proclamations generally present themselves as God’s ipsissima verba, some of the literary subforms they use – forms that were already prominent in Jewish and Christian religious discourse – are originally associated with a human voice. This applies most obviously to hymnic patterns of expression, which are quite frequent in the Qurʾān. Thus, it is perhaps no coincidence that Q 55, a predominantly hymnic surah, contains only one occurrence of the divine first person, which appears in an ominous threat more than a third into the text (v. 31).

The divine voice constitutes one vertex in a triangular constellation that in some form or other underlies most of the Qurʾānic corpus.⁷ Its second vertex is formed by a human messenger, who is often addressed in the second person singular. It is true that some occurrences of the second person may be construed generically, similar to the way in which the second person is employed in biblical commandments such as “Thou shalt not kill!” (Rippin 2000). For example, such a construal is plausible for didactic questions such as “Have you^s not seen how your Lord dealt with ʿĀd?” (Q 89:6) or universal assertions like “To your^s Lord is your return” (Q 96:8). In many other cases, however, the second person singular clearly refers to a particular individual, who is frequently addressed with the vocative “O prophet” (e.g., Q 33:1) and whose personal and domestic circumstances are sometimes obliquely commented on (e.g., Q 33:37). Like the divine speaker, this messenger (rasūl) is also spoken of in the third person. This is the case, inter alia, in four verses that call him “Muḥammad” (Q 3:144, 33:40, 47:2, and 48:29).

The third vertex of the Qurʾān’s discursive constellation corresponds to the messenger’s audience, made up both of those who submit to his prophetic authority, thereby qualifying as “believers” (al-muʾminūn, alladhīna āmanū), and of various other collectives. The latter include a group accused of “associating” or “partnering” (ashraka) other beings with God and who are traditionally identified with Muḥammad’s pagan Meccan compatriots; Jews; Christians or “Nazoreans” (al-naṣārā); and a faction within the Qurʾānic community that is castigated as lukewarm and unreliable (al-munāfiqūn, customarily rendered “the hypocrites”).⁸ Like God and the messenger, the audience or specific subgroups within it can be referred to in the third person, a stance that may be coupled with second-person addresses to the messenger. Alternatively, when the messenger figures in the third person, this may occur in the vicinity of second-person addresses to the audience.

In general, then, Qurʾānic discourse takes the form of a divine speaker alternately addressing an individual messenger and a more or less clearly defined collective audience. Furthermore, in many passages the messenger and the audience are themselves given an opportunity to have their say. This is reconciled with the Qurʾān’s implied divine speaker by means of explicit formulae of citation. For instance, utterances by the audience are often introduced with “they say: …” or functionally equivalent verbs, while utterances imposed on the messenger are normally preceded by the singular command “say (qul): …”. Generalising somewhat, one might say that while in the Hebrew Bible it is divine speech that requires an introductory formula, in the Qurʾān it is human speech that does so. In some surahs, particularly those with medium-length or very long verses, such quotation formulae serve to link together statements by the divine speaker, by the audience, and by the messenger into extended polemical sequences (e.g., Q 6:4–73). Although such debates doubtlessly involve a considerable element of literary staging, it is difficult to avoid the impression that the Qurʾān addressed “a highly disputatious society” (Crone 2012: 466). Given...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I The Qurʾān and Muḥammad
• Part II Identities and communities in early Islam
• Part III Modern and contemporary reinterpretation of early Islam
• Part IV Revisioning early Islam
• Index