New Perspectives on the Qur'an

The Qur'an in its Historical Context 2

Gabriel Reynolds, Gabriel Said Reynolds

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136700774
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Islamic Theology

This book continues the work of The Qur'?n in its Historical Context, in which an international group of scholars address an expanded range of topics on the Qur'?n and its origins, looking beyond medieval Islamic traditions to present the Qur'?n's own conversation with the religions and literatures of its day.

Particular attention is paid to recent debates and controversies in the field, and to uncovering the Qur'?n's relationship with Judaism and Christianity. After a foreword by Abdolkarim Soroush, chapters by renowned experts cover:

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• method in Qur'?nic Studies

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• analysis of material evidence, including inscriptions and ancient manuscripts, for what they show of the Qur'?n's origins

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• the language of the Qur'?n and proposed ways to emend our reading of the Qur'?n

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• how our knowledge of the religious groups at the time of the Qur'?n's emergence might contribute to a better understanding of the text

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• the Qur'?n's conversation with Biblical literature and traditions that challenge the standard understanding of the holy book.

This debate of recent controversial proposals for new interpretations of the Qur'?n will shed new light on the Qur'anic passages that have been shrouded in mystery and debate. As such, it will be a valuable reference for scholars of Islam, the Qur'an, Christian-Muslim relations and the Middle East.

Introduction

The golden age of Qurʾānic studies?¹

Gabriel Said Reynolds

On the afternoon of Monday July 5, 2010, as I was working on a draft of the present introduction, I received the terrible news that Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd had died earlier that day in Cairo. Professor Abu Zayd, the keynote speaker of the 2009 Notre Dame Qurʾān conference on which this book is based, was a revered teacher of Muslims and non-Muslims alike. His Arabic works on Islamic thought were translated into Turkish, Persian, Indonesian, and many European languages. His “humanistic hermeneutic” (see his contribution to the present volume), a method of Qurʾān interpretation developed during his work in exile towards the end of his life, garnered significant interest in the West and in the Islamic world.² Accordingly Prof. Abu Zayd was often asked to give major speeches, and to him the keynote speech at our conference could hardly have been an extraordinary event. Yet to the community of students and scholars of the Qurʾān who gathered at Notre Dame it certainly was. And so the present book is dedicated to his memory, in gratitude for his presence among us in April 2009, and in gratitude for the wisdom he has shared with many throughout the years.

The April 2009 Notre Dame Qurʾān conference was preceded by a conference in 2005, the papers of which were published under the title The Qurʾān in Its Historical Context (Routledge, 2008). In that book’s introduction, subtitled “Qurʾānic Studies and Its Controversies,” I describe the mysteries surrounding the supposed destruction of the Qurʾān manuscript films collected by Gotthelf Bergsträsser (d. 1933) and Otto Pretzl (d. 1941) and the early Qurʾān manuscripts discovered in 1972 in the Great Mosque of Ṣanʿāʾ, Yemen. I focus, however, on the works of those authors who have challenged traditional ideas about the Qurʾān in recent decades. The works of these authors, I argue, have fomented methodological confusion in Qurʾānic studies: “Their theories, besides their basic precept, actually have very little in common. This sub-culture, therefore, has not developed a methodology, much less a school, that poses an organized challenge to the current paradigm.”³

In the introduction to the present book I will focus not on particular controversies, but rather on the remarkable increase of work in Qurʾānic studies generally. Indeed if such things were to be evaluated by the level of activity alone, then it would seem that the golden age of Qurʾānic studies has arrived. In order to illustrate this scholarly activity I will present the state of Qurʾānic studies today in the light of earlier assessments of the field. Thereafter I will ask whether this activity is indeed the sign of a golden age.

Three assessments of Qurʾānic studies

In the “Present Status of Qurʾānic Studies,” published in 1957, Arthur Jeffery emphasizes the failure of scholars to produce critical work on the text of the Qurʾān.⁴ While noting numerous studies (including his own) on non-canonical (muṣḥaf)⁵ and canonical (qirāʾāt) variants to the Qurʾān,⁶ Jeffery laments the failure of the project that he had begun with Bergsträsser and Pretzl to produce a critical edition of the Qurʾān.⁷ He notes that the 1342/1924 edition of Cairo had increasingly become something approaching the textus receptus of the Qurʾān, even among western scholars. Yet this edition, he adds, is an imperfect reproduction of the Ḥafṣ (d. 180/796) ʿan ʿĀṣim (d. 127/745) tradition and hardly a critical text.⁸ As for the ever increasing number of translations of the Qurʾān in his day, Jeffery finds them largely redundant: “Translations, however, in both European and Oriental languages, continue to appear, but with few exceptions, they make no real contribution to Qurʾānic studies.”⁹

Regarding “higher (or literary)” studies of the Qurʾān, Jeffery is hardly more enthusiastic. He notes with appreciation the appearance of Régis Blachère’s Introduction au Coran,¹⁰ and the posthumous publication of Richard Bell’s Introduction to the Qurʾān,¹¹ but he concludes that neither surpasses Nöldeke (et al.)’s Geschichte des Qorāns. To this Jeffery adds: “There has been no recent systematic investigation” of the grammar and syntax of the Qurʾān, and “we still have no comprehensive work on the theology of the Qurʾān.”¹² He similarly laments the absence of a comprehensive work on the literary and religious sources of the Qurʾān (commenting, “we are still using the rather antiquated works of Geiger … and St. Clair Tisdall”¹³). He does, however, acknowledge the appearance of a considerable number of studies focused on either Jewish or Christian antecedents to the Qurʾān. To this end Jeffery recognizes in particular the exceptional value of Heinrich Speyer’s Die biblischen Erzählungen im Koran.¹⁴

Angelika Neuwirth opens her 1983 analysis of Qurʾānic studies with the remark, “Die westliche Koranforschung … steckt – gemessen an vergleichbaren Forschungsgebieten – noch immer in den Kinderschuhen.”¹⁵ Like Jeffery twenty-six years earlier, Neuwirth finds that the field of Qurʾānic studies still lacked the sort of resources that are taken for granted in other fields, such as a dictionary of Qurʾānic Arabic, a comprehensive evaluation of Qurʾānic grammar, and a commentary arranged by subject.¹⁶ Neuwirth describes most recent works in the field as studies of minor, isolated matters, achieved “ohne besonderes Methodenbewußtsein.”¹⁷ Otherwise Neuwirth objects to the manner in which certain scholars (namely Bell, Blachère, and Wansbrough) had argued against the conventional notion that the Sūra was the original organizing unit of the Qurʾān.¹⁸ In a similar tone she notes how John Burton and John Wansbrough both challenged the notion of the ʿUthmānic codex, although in quite different (and indeed contradictory) ways.¹⁹ Neuwith dedicates most of her survey to a refutation of their works.²⁰

Fred Donner's 2008 assessment of Qurʾānic studies in The Qurʾān in Its Historical Context is notably different.²¹ Donner is not concerned by a lack of scholarly work on the Qurʾān, but rather by conflicts among scholars working on the Qurʾān. Donner opens his article with the remark. “Qurʾānic studies, as a field of academic research, appears today to be in a state of disarray.”²² Thereafter he identifies five questions regarding the Qurʾān on which no scholarly consensus exists:

1 The existence of an “Ur-Qurʾān.”

2 The character of the “Ur-Qurʾān” (among those who accept its existence).

3 The original language and script of the Qurʾān.

4 The transmission of the “Ur-Qurʾān”.

5 The codification and canonization of the Qurʾān.

Donner illustrates how recent critical studies of the Qurʾān have addressed these matters, but in such different ways that no clear picture of the Qurʾān’s origins has emerged. Lüling, for example, argues that behind the Qurʾān lies the hymnal of an Arabic Christian community, while Wansbrough proposes that the Qurʾān is the product of scattered “prophetical logia.” In a more recent publication Christoph Luxenberg contends that the original language of the Qurʾān was heavily influenced by the vocabulary and syntax of Syriac (a language that the Muslim scholars who later established the scriptio plena of the Qurʾān did not understand).²³ On the question of the transmission of the Qurʾān, Donner notes the conventional view that an ancient oral tradition accompanied the transmission of the scriptio defectiva text, and recent research that seems to contradict this view. On the problem of the codification of the Qurʾān, he comments: “The available evidence on the Qurʾān’s codification, similarly, seems to provide support for both the early-codification and the late-codification hypotheses.”²⁴

By the end of Donner’s article readers might expect a gloomy assessment of Qurʾānic studies. Instead, Donner finds the field to be markedly improved: “I do not want to imply, however, that this current disarray is necessarily a bad thing. Quite the contrary, it is far preferable to the earlier stage of ‘false consensus,’ which really concealed a failure or refusal to address some burning questions in a critical way (perhaps for fear of antagonizing believers).”²⁵

Current developments in Qurʾānic studies

But the rise of interest in the critical questions of Islamic origins is not the only positive development in Qurʾānic studies. Research on the Qurʾān generally has continued to increase, and today many of the desiderata named by Jeffery and Neuwirth have been achieved. The following brief survey of recent critical work in Qurʾānic studies might illustrate this trend, although it hardly represents a comprehensive catalog of such work.

Perhaps the most significant development in Qurʾānic studies is the appearance of new scholarly reference works. Two Arabic–English dictionaries of the Qurʾān have recently been published: A Concise Dictionary of Koranic Arabic (2004) by Arne A. Ambros and Stephan Procházka (supplemented in 2006 by The Nouns of Koranic Arabic Arranged by Topics: A Companion Volume to the Concise Dictionary of Koranic Arabic),²⁶ and The Arabic–English Dictionary of Qurʾānic Usage by Elsaid Badawi and Muhammad Abdel Haleem (2008).²⁷ Moreover, another lexical resource can now be found in Martin Zammit’s A Comparative Lexical Study of Qurʾānic Arabic (2002),²⁸ a work that provides cognate terms in a number of Semitic languages (although not, unfortunately, Christian Palestinian Aramaic) for Qurʾānic vocabulary.

The most significant new publication in terms of breadth is the Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān (2001–6), which covers a wide range of topics, including many of those which Jeffery felt were in need of scholarly treatment, such as the grammar, syntax, and theology of the Qurʾān. The 2007 publication of the Dictionnaire du Coran (not a lexicon but a one-volume reference work), a dense volume with contributions from a wide range of francophone scholars, is likewise a noteworthy development in Qurʾānic studies.²⁹

Whereas Jeffery noted the absence of a critical edition of the Qurʾān, this task has now been taken up by a research team of the Freie Universität in Berlin.³⁰ The significance of this task, however, is still unclear. The defective script of the early Qurʾān manuscripts renders the very definition of a critical edition problematic. If the goal of such an edition is to represent the earliest pronunciation of the Qurʾān, the ancient manuscripts themselves will hardly be sufficient, since they represent only a shorthand of the consonantal text. Scholars might then turn to the reports found in later Islamic literature on the readings (qirāʾāt) of the Qurʾān to infer the shape of the complete text. But in that case the task achieved would not be fundamentally different from the work of the committee, led by Muḥammad b. ʿAlīal-Ḥusaynī al-Ḥaddād, that established the Cairo version of the Qurʾān on the basis of literary reports of the Ḥafṣ (d. 180/796) ʿan ʿĀṣim (d. 127/745) reading.³¹

Of course, a critical edition could provide a wider range of qirāʾāt in some sort of apparatus – or perhaps with a digitalized hypertext – and scholars could attempt methodically to decide in each case which reading is more ancient. But then individual scholars can already use a work such as Muʿjam al-qirāʾāt al-qurʾāniyya (1983) to make their own decisions on these matters.³² In any case scholars might remember that Otto Pretzl himself apparently gave up the task of a critical edition of the Qurʾān towards the end of his life, having grown convinced that the Islamic tradition of qirāʾāt was essentially exegetical.³³ With similar logic Donner himself argues that, in light of our current state of knowledge, any project to establis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• Foreword by Abdolkarim Soroush
• List of abbreviations
• Map: locations cited in the present volume
• Introduction: The golden age of Qurʾānic studies?1
• PART I. Method in Qurʾānic studies
• PART II. The Qurʾān and material evidence
• PART III. Qurʾānic vocabulary
• PART IV. The Qurʾān and its religious context
• PART V. The Qurʾān and Biblical literature
• Bibliography
• Index of Qurʾānic citations and references
• Index of people, places and subjects