Qur'ānic Studies Today

Angelika Neuwirth, Michael Sells, Angelika Neuwirth, Michael Sells, Angelika Neuwirth, Michael A Sells

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317295655
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Islamic Theology

Qur'?nic Studies Today brings together specialists in the field of Islamic studies to provide a range of essays that reflect the depth and breadth of scholarship on the Qur'?n.

Combining theoretical and methodological clarity with close readings of qur'?nic texts, these contributions provide close analysis of specific passages, themes, and issues within the Qur??n, even as they attend to the disciplinary challenges within the field of qur'?nic studies today. Chapters are arranged into three parts, treating specific figures appearing in the Qur??n, analysing particular suras, and finally reflecting on the Qur'?n and its "others." They explore the internal dimensions and interior chronology of the Qur'?n as text, its possible conversations with biblical and non-biblical traditions in Late Antiquity, and its role as scripture in modern exegesis and recitation. Together, they are indispensable for students and scholars who seek an understanding of the Qur'?n founded on the most recent scholarly achievements.

Offering both a reflection of and a reflection on the discipline of qur'?nic studies, the strong, scholarly examinations of the Qur'?n in this volume provide a valuable contribution to Islamic and qur'?nic studies.

Part 1

1 Wansbrough, Bultmann, and the Theory of Variant Traditions in the Qurʾān

Devin J. Stewart

John Wansbrough’s paired works Quranic Studies and The Sectarian Milieu have been recognized for their radical departure from mainstream scholarship on the Qurʾān and early Islamic history. Unfortunately, their difficulty has prevented many scholars in Islamic studies from constructive engagement with the theories proposed therein. In addition to dense style and technical terms in Greek, Latin, German, and Hebrew, unstated assumptions and unexplained methods made all the more obscure because of the absence of introductions and conclusions have presented a challenge to comprehension. It would aid investigators to understand the main intellectual background of these works, which Wansbrough merely hints at rather than sets forth methodically. They are based primarily on the methods of Formgeschichte (“Form-History”) developed by scholars of the New Testament who sought, by investigating the synoptic Gospels, to gain access to the earlier, folkloric texts from which they had been formed and thereby to understand the nature of the early Christian community in which those texts had been produced and circulated. The following remarks discuss Wansbrough’s indebtedness to Formgeschichte and critique the theory of variant traditions he proposes in Quranic Studies.

In the preface to Quranic Studies, Wansbrough criticizes the current state of qurʾānic scholarship: “To argue a case for the Qurʾān as scripture may seem gratuitous. As the record of Muslim revelation the book requires no introduction. As a document susceptible of analysis by the instruments and techniques of biblical criticism it is virtually unknown.”¹ Scholars of Islamic studies have often similarly lamented the fact that biblical criticism has not been applied to the Qurʾān, an observation that is justified in general though not true categorically. However, Wansbrough’s lament does not specify what is meant by biblical criticism, which encompasses a large number of distinct critical approaches that can be classed under the already broad rubrics of textual criticism, historical criticism, source criticism, form criticism, redaction criticism, canonical criticism, feminist criticism, and so forth. Wansbrough’s Quranic Studies: Sources and Methods of Scriptural Interpretation (1977) and The Sectarian Milieu: Content and Composition of Islamic Salvation History (1978) certainly respond to the dearth of critical study to which he refers and do employ biblical critical methods. However, awareness of the particular strand of biblical criticism on which he draws is a requirement necessary for an appreciation of his assumptions, methods, and theories that appear arbitrary or anomalous.

Many of Quranic Studies’ main arguments have been passed over in silence in part because it is a difficult book to read and comprehend. As reviewers have repeatedly noted, Wansbrough assumes the reader will readily understand quotations and technical terms in Hebrew, German, Latin, and Greek; to alleviate this problem, Andrew Rippin’s new edition of the work includes a glossary.² In addition, Wansbrough’s prose is dense. Stephen Humphreys remarks, “He affects a ferociously opaque style which bristles with unexplained technical terms in many languages, obscure allusions, and Teutonic grammar.”³ Despite being “laced with brilliance and insight,” William A. Graham reports that Quranic Studies is “an exceedingly cumbersome and gratuitously difficult work…. Here is Anglo-Saxon revenge for every dense and massive tome of Germanic erudition ever published. Compared to this, Reckendorf’s Arabische Syntax makes for light bedside reading.”⁴ Wansbrough disingenuously describes Quranic Studies as a collection of disparate essays. He omits an introduction and a conclusion to the work as a whole and also omits introductions and conclusions to the individual chapters. As Graham remarks, “The simple use of clear introductory statements, transitional explanations, and concluding summaries for the discrete arguments of the essays would have worked wonders for the comprehensibility of the whole.”⁵ The new edition might have done a useful service to the field had it provided an introduction that explained the work’s overall arguments and structure, clarifying its theoretical bases as well as the connections between its sections.⁶ In an effort to make Wansbrough’s ideas more accessible, several scholars have explained and commented on parts of his work, but they have not resolved the main difficulties it presents by tracing its intellectual genealogy, addressing it instead from the point of view of qurʾānic and Islamic studies.

Scholarship addressing Quranic Studies has focused on a limited number of issues and especially on the claim of a late redaction of the Qurʾān. Gregor Schoeler critiques Wansbrough on this account, arguing that the compilation and redaction of the Qurʾān under ʿUthmān (r. 644–656) is, if not proven, at least extremely probable because it is unanimously supported by tradition. The dispute over the writing down of hadith presupposes an already complete and published Qurʾān by the beginning of the second Islamic century. Moreover, now fragments of a Qurʾān manuscript have been found in Ṣanʿāʾ that date to as early as the second half of the seventh century.⁷ Andrew Rippin, Herbert Berg, and others have written commentaries and explanations of Wansbrough’s theories in general, pointing out, for example, that the mere existence of the Qurʾān as scripture at a certain date does not prove that it had been canonized by that time.⁸ Gerald Hawting has written a significant defense of Wansbrough’s claim that the Qurʾān cannot have been written in the Arabian peninsula, addressing what is perhaps the strongest piece of contrary evidence, the material in the Qurʾān that is related to pre-Islamic pagan traditions, and arguing that the references to pagan beliefs do not derive from pre-Islamic Arabian pagan beliefs but are rather part of a strategy often seen on the part of monotheists, of accusing opponents of pagan beliefs.⁹ Wansbrough’s specific claims about the text of the Qurʾān and the process by which it came into being and was canonized have received little attention.¹⁰ It is worth noting that even if Wansbrough’s dates are wrong, his suggestions about the process of the text’s formation may still be correct.

Even less constructive, in my view, has been the attack on Wansbrough’s use of traditional Jewish terms such as masoretic, haggadic, and halakhic to describe various types of exegesis in Islamic tradition. Only scholarly parochialism can lead one to reject them out of hand; the important issue is whether they serve as useful shorthand conveying actual differences in the commentaries’ conventions and approaches. Adequate Arabic terms drawn from Islamic literature might have been substituted in this case, but there is nothing inherently wrong with the application of terms derived from Jewish tradition to describe commentaries on the Qurʾān, particularly in light of the obvious connections between the traditions, and no more than there is in using terms derived from ancient Greek in modern biology or physics.

Supporters of Wansbrough have lamented the fact that his theories have not garnered the attention that they deserve. Critics have often dismissed his theories and method out of hand, without serious rebuttal, and in some cases without evidence that they have read or understood his work. Many have ignored or overlooked the fact that Wansbrough presented his findings as tentative and provisional, and others have criticized the work simply because it does not take for granted the traditional account of the Qurʾān’s compilation during the reign of ʿUthmān and the doctrinal edifice upon which Islamic salvation history has been built. Wansbrough’s defenders overstate the case, however, when they present him as a lone iconoclast who was willing to question time-honored doctrinal and ideological assumptions, laboring against naive, positivist historians who obstinately refuse to give them up. Neither Wansbrough’s critics nor his supporters have adequately explained his method, characterizing it as modeled on biblical criticism in general and most often describing it in vague terms as a “literary” as opposed to a “historical” approach. They rarely refer to specific biblical studies in assessing his methods, stressing instead how they differ from methods used in other works on the Qurʾān, the prophet, and the early history of Islam. Berg gives some specifics when he writes, “His literary approach to Islamic texts will not be unfamiliar to biblical scholars who employ the tools of form, redaction, and literary criticisms.”¹¹ It is only Charles Adams who points squarely to the main source of Wansbrough’s method, German form criticism, the aim of which is not merely to use knowledge of genres and generic conventions to analyze biblical texts but rather to reconstruct the stages of development through which those texts passed before becoming fixed in the scripture and, through consideration of those stages, to derive an understanding of the shape of the community under the auspices of which the texts were redacted. As Adams puts it, “The primary aim is a history of the formation of the document itself, but secondarily such studies provide a kind of intellectual history of the community whose documents are under consideration.”¹² Here, he reveals the main methods and goals of Quranic Studies and The Sectarian Milieu.

Wansbrough’s approach fits most squarely in the tradition of German Protestant form criticism of the New Testament, which was developed in the first half of the twentieth century by Martin Dibelius (1883–1947) and Rudolf Karl Bultmann (1884–1976), both students of Hermann Gunkel (1862–1932), the founding father of biblical form criticism. Like their teacher, these students were concerned with the identification of literary forms in the biblical text and understanding their original social setting (Sitz im Leben). However, while they saw that an understanding of the conventions of various genres could help the critic interpret biblical passages, they felt that this was a limited or immature pursuit, which they labeled “literary” or “aesthetic,” as opposed to “social,” “sociological,” or “historical.” This shift in focus from genre study as an end to genre study as a means to get at the history of transmission and community formation is mirrored in a shift in terminology. While Gunkel labeled his approach Gattungsforschung “investigation of genres,” Dibelius, Bultmann, and their successors adopted the term Formgeschichte “form history,” which Dibelius coined in his work Die Formgeschichte des Evangeliums (The Form-History of the Gospel, 1919), and which Bultmann adopted in Die Geschichte der synoptischen Tradition (The Hi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Transliteration
• Introduction
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Bibliography, Qurʾānic Studies Today
• Index of Qurʾānic References
• Index