The Quran in Context

873 Pages·2021·16.09 MB·English

The Qurʾān in Context

Texts and Studies
on the Qurʾān

Editorial Board

Gerhard Böwering

Yale University

Jane Dammen McAuliffe

Bryn Mawr College

VOLUME 6

The Qurʾān in Context

Historical and Literary Investigations into the
Qurʾānic Milieu

Edited by

Angelika Neuwirth
Nicolai Sinai
Michael Marx

LEIDEN • BOSTON
2010

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

This volume has emerged from the conference “Historische Sondierungen und methodische
Reflexionen zur Korangenese: Wege zur Rekonstruktion des vorkanonischen Koran,” January
2004, Berlin. The conference and the publication of its proceedings were assisted by a grant
from the Fritz Thyssen Foundation.

Brill has made all reasonable efforts to trace all rights holders to any copyrighted material used
in this work. In cases where these efforts have not been successful the publisher welcomes
communications from copyrights holders, so that the appropriate acknowledgements can be
made in future editions, and to settle other permission matters.

ISSN 1567-2808
ISBN 978 90 04 17688 1

Copyright 2010 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.
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contents
v

Contents

Introduction
Nicolai Sinai and Angelika Neuwirth
1

Part One: The Qurʾan’s Historical Context

The Martyrs of najrān and the end of the Ḥimyar: on the
Political History of south Arabia in the early sixth Century
Norbert Nebes
27

Arabia in Late Antiquity: An outline of the Cultural situation
in the Peninsula at the time of Muhammad
Barbara Finster
61

Mecca on the Caravan Routes in Pre-Islamic Antiquity
Mikhail D. Bukharin 115

early Islam in the Light of Christian and Jewish sources
Harald Suermann 135

The evolving Representation of the early Islamic empire
and its Religion on Coin Imagery
Stefan Heidemann 149

Arabo-Aramaic and ʿArabiyya: From Ancient Arabic to early
standard Arabic, 200 ce–600 ce
Ernst Axel Knauf 197

Literacy in Pre-Islamic Arabia: An Analysis of the epigraphic
evidence
Peter Stein 255

Arabs and Arabic in the Age of the Prophet
Jan Retsö 281

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vi

sources for the History of Pre-Islamic Religion
Tilman Seidensticker 293

The ʿIbād of al-Ḥīra: An Arab Christian Community in Late
Antique Iraq
Isabel Toral-Niehoff 323

An early Christian Arabic Account of the Creation of the
World
Kirill Dmitriev 349

The Qurʾan and the Prophet’s Poet: two Poems by Kaʿb
b Mālik
Agnes Imhof 389

Part Two: Contextualizing the Qurʾan

The Qurʾan as Process
Nicolai Sinai 407

Quantitative text Analysis and Its Application to the Qurʾan:
some Preliminary Considerations
Nora K. Schmid 441

Al-Ḥawāmīm: Intertextuality and Coherence in Meccan
surahs
Islam Dayeh 461

The House of Abraham and the House of Amram:
Genealogy, Patriarchal Authority, and exegetical
Professionalism
Angelika Neuwirth 499

Glimpses of a Mariology in the Qurʾan: From Hagiography to
Theology via Religious-Political Debate
Michael Marx 533

The “seal of the Prophets”: towards an Understanding of
Muhammad’s Prophethood
Hartmut Bobzin 565

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vii

Reading the Qurʾan as Homily: The Case of sarah’s Laughter
Gabriel Said Reynolds 585

The Qurʾanic Commandment of Writing Down Loan
Agreements (Q 2:282)—Perspectives of a Comparison with
Rabbinical Law
Reimund Leicht 593

Islam in its Arabian Context
François de Blois 615

Lost in Philology? The Virgins of Paradise and the
Luxenberg Hypothesis
Stefan Wild 625

The etymological Fallacy and Qurʾanic studies: Muhammad,
Paradise, and Late Antiquity
Walid A. Saleh 649

The Relevance of early Arabic Poetry for Qurʾanic studies
Including observations on Kull and on Q 22:27, 26:225, and
52:31
Thomas Bauer 699

Qurʾanic Readings of the Psalms
Angelika Neuwirth 733

The Codification of the Qurʾan: A Comment on the Hypotheses
of Burton and Wansbrough
Gregor Schoeler 779

The second Maṣāḥif Project: A step towards the
Canonization of the Qurʾanic text
Omar Hamdan 795

List of Contributors 837

contents
viii

contents
1

IntRoDUCtIon

nicolai sinai and Angelika neuwirth

The academic discipline of Qurʾanic studies today is most strikingly
characterized, not by any impressive scholarly achievements of the
field itself, which has been appropriately diagnosed by Fred Donner
as being “in a state of disarray,”1 but by the large-scale interest of the
media that the Qurʾan’s origin and interpretation have solicited dur-
ing the last decade or so 2 Indeed, the lacunae of the field—impossible
to overlook when confronted with the impressive list of what has
been achieved in biblical or classical studies—have developed into a
veritable litany: There is no critical edition of the text, no free access
to all of the relevant manuscript evidence, no clear conception of the
cultural and linguistic profile of the milieu within which it has
emerged, no consensus on basic issues of methodology, a significant
amount of mutual distrust among scholars, and—what is perhaps the
single most important obstacle to scholarly progress—no adequate
training of future students of the Qurʾan in the non-Arabic languages
and literatures and cultural traditions that have undoubtedly shaped
its historical context
Yet the general public’s interest in Qurʾanic studies, oddly opposed
as it may seem to the sorry state of the discipline itself, may not be
an altogether negative thing; it holds out a vague promise of exciting
discoveries that may attract younger scholars and inspire more senior

1 Donner, “Recent scholarship,” 29
2 The take-off point for this rather unprecedented rise in the attention given to the
Qurʾan in Western media can be dated to January 1999, when toby Lester published
his article “What is the Koran?” (The Atlantic Monthly 283: 43–56) Media attention
to the Qurʾan was subsequently stoked by the near-coincidence between the publica-
tion of Christoph Luxenberg’s Die syro-aramäische Lesart des Koran in 2000 and the
new public interest in all things Islamic that followed the attack on the World trade
Center in 2001; a perfect illustration of the extent to which public awareness of Lux-
enberg’s book has been shaped by the specter of Islamic terrorism is provided, for
example, by Ibn Warraq’s piece “Virgins? What Virgins?” published in The Guardian,
January 12, 2002 Most recently, the Qurʾan has made it onto the front page of the
Wall Street Journal with Andrew Higgin’s article “The Lost Archive” (January 12,
2008)

introduction
2

researchers Indeed, what the field of Qurʾanic studies has lacked for
too long is precisely the injection of such a healthy dose of excitement
Publications from before the 1970’s, when existing narratives about
the Qurʾan’s origin were for the first time subjected to radical doubt,
all too often convey a sense that there is, firstly, not much left to be
known about the Qurʾan, and, secondly, that the object of all this
supposedly stable mass of knowledge, the Qurʾan itself, is not all that
interesting—in fact, that it is an epigonal text not worthy of the same
kind of methodological sophistication that biblical and classical lit-
erature have generally been accorded 3 In 1961, two years before the
publication of the first installments of his highly respected German
translation of the Qurʾan, Rudi Paret could state “that the picture of
Muhammad that has so far been worked out by european orientalists
is well-founded and can be modified and rounded out merely in mat-
ters of detail A new and systematic interpretation of the Qurʾan hardly
leads to new and exciting discoveries ”4 In Qurʾanic studies, it seemed,
the gate of ijtihād had been closed, and the discipline could from now
on devote itself to administrating the accumulated knowledge of ear-
lier pioneers or, to put it more bluntly, Qurʾanic studies had become
a subject that was bound to bore itself to death
excitement was to come to Qurʾanic studies in the guise of skepti-
cism There appears to be a general sense among many scholars that
the publication in 1977 of John Wansbrough’s Qurʾanic Studies and
of Hagarism by Michael Cook and Patricia Crone marks a decisive
break in the history of the discipline, which hitherto had largely
accepted the general historical framework within which Islamic tradi-
tion locates the promulgation of the Qurʾan Frequently the earlier
work of Günter Lüling (Über den Ur-Qurʾān: Ansätze zur Rekonstruktion
vorislamischer christlicher Strophenlieder im Qurʾān, 1974) and
Christoph Luxenberg’s recent Die syro-aramäische Lesart des Koran
(2000) are grouped together with the above-mentioned scholars under
the loose term “revisionism,” although those familiar with these books
are usually quick to point out the very different methods and assump-
tions on which they are based 5 The full import of the heterogeneity
of “revisionism,” however, will perhaps not be fully internalized until
the history of modern Qurʾanic studies ceases to be told according

3 For the rather pejorative views of orientalists on the Qurʾan’s literary value, see
Wild, “schauerliche Öde ”
4 Paret, “Der Koran als Geschichtsquelle,” 140 (translation by n sinai)
5 For a survey, cf Reynolds, “Introduction,” 8–19

introduction
3

to the criterion of how much of the traditional Islamic foundation
narrative a certain scholar accepts or rejects, that is, along the tradi-
tionalist-revisionist divide For example, to reduce John Wansbrough’s
complex and multi-facetted work on early Islam to his (tentative)
claim that the Qurʾan did not see the light of history until the Abbasids
would be to caricature it 6 Rather more appropriately, the unique
contribution of Qurʾanic Studies, only about a sixth of which is devoted
to the analysis of Qurʾanic data, may be discerned in Wansbrough’s
attempt to conceive of traditional tafsīr and sīra works—which so far
had been viewed primarily as “sources” to be cannibalized for tidbits
of historical information—as literature, and to apply to them the
appropriate methods of form-critical analysis Classifying a given
scholar’s work according to his rejection (or acceptance) of the tra-
ditional explanatory framework for the emergence of the Qurʾan is
thus patently reductive

Another prominent feature of Qurʾanic Studies is of course its sus-
tained emphasis (an emphasis shared, albeit with more youthful exu-
berance, by Hagarism) on the Qurʾan’s Late Antique environment,
apparent not only in the numerous Hebrew characters that dot the
book’s pages but also in the occasional use of German terminology
drawn from biblical studies The Qurʾan’s Late Antique context, how-
ever, did not have to await the revisionist turn of 1977 to be discov-
ered Already Abraham Geiger’s groundbreaking Was hat Mohammed
aus dem Judenthume aufgenommen? (published in 1833) constitutes
an ambitious attempt at identifying the biblical and rabbinic tradi-
tions with which the Qurʾan can be seen as being in conversation
Geiger’s study arguably represents the starting point of modern his-
torical research on the Qurʾan in general,7 to be followed by the works
of Gustav Weil (Mohammed der Prophet, sein Leben und seine Lehre,
1843; Historisch-kritische Einleitung in den Koran, 1844), Aloys
sprenger (Das Leben und die Lehre des Mohammed, 1861) and, most
importantly, Theodor nöldeke (Geschichte des Qorâns, 1860) Yet
Geiger can also be viewed more particularly as the initiator of a strand
of Qurʾanic research connected with the “Wissenschaft des Judentums”
(the “science of Judaism”) which, through a profound awareness of

6 This point is eloquently made by Rippin, “Foreword,” xiv
7 on Geiger and Qurʾanic studies cf Hartwig et al (eds ), “Im vollen Licht der
Geschichte,” and especially the contributions by Friedrich niewöhner and nicolai
sinai and the introduction by Angelika neuwirth

introduction
4

the Qurʾan’s links with biblical and post-biblical traditions, extended
the text’s frame of reference beyond the narrow confines of an exclu-
sively pagan “age of ignorance” (jāhiliyya) Important representatives
of this line of research are Hartwig Hirschfeld (Beiträge zur Erklärung
des Qorân, 1886; New Researches into the Composition and Exegesis
of the Qoran, 1902), Josef Horovitz (Koranische Untersuchungen,
1926),8 and Heinrich speyer, author of a comprehensive conspectus
of the elements of rabbinic lore familiar to the Qurʾan (Die biblischen
Erzählungen im Qoran, 1931)
to a contemporary audience, research of the kind undertaken by

speyer easily appears as obsessed with the notion that to understand
a text is equivalent to unearthing its “sources ” While such an approach
is already frowned upon when applied, for example, to the Bible or
to ancient Greek and Latin literature, with regard to the Qurʾan it is
often suspected of serving an underlying political agenda as well,
namely, of aiming to demonstrate that the Qurʾan is nothing but a
rehash of earlier traditions in order to discredit the Islamic faith and
assert Western cultural superiority 9 And it is true that the title of
Geiger’s study—“What did Muhammad borrow from Judaism?”—
does seem to bear out such misgivings: Muhammad, it is implied,
“borrowed” existing religious concepts and motives—or, worse, he
borrowed and misunderstood them—and passed them on to his fol-
lowers An obvious suspicion about the line of research initiated by
Geiger would thus be that in his eagerness to demonstrate the Jewish
origin of many Qurʾanic conceptions, he is prone to overlook the
substantial modifications these have undergone on the way, or to
dismiss such modifications as mere “misunderstandings” rather than
functionally meaningful transformations

It is precisely this line of thought that is expressed in Johann Fück’s
1936 lecture “Die originalität des arabischen Propheten” (“on the
originality of the Arabian Prophet”) Fück attacks the kind of research
initiated by Geiger—who is explicitly singled out as an ancestral

8 on Horovitz, see Jäger, “Josef Horovitz ”
9 Cf Manzoor, “Method against truth,” 33: “The orientalist enterprise of Qurʾanic
studies, whatever its other merits and services, was a project born of spite, bred in
frustration and nourished by vengeance: the spite of the powerful for the powerless,
the frustration of the ‘rational’ towards the ‘superstitious’ and the vengeance of the
‘orthodox’ against the ‘non-conformist ’ At the greatest hour of his worldly-triumph,
the Western man, coordinating the powers of the state, Church and Academia,
launched his most determined assault on the citadel of Muslim faith ”

introduction
5

figure—by stating that “the more an inquiry into questions of depen-
dence came to the fore, the more this kind of research lacked any
kind of grand vision and finally contented itself with ever new attempts
to locate some kind of source for everything in the Qurʾan, whether
it be a religious idea, a saying, a principle of law, a narrative, a motive,
or even a single word—as if it were possible to dismantle the character
of the Prophet into a thousand details ”10 Although Fück’s interven-
tion may at first sight appear to be eminently sensible, it did have the
fatal effect of discouraging interdisciplinary research of the kind prac-
ticed by scholars like Geiger and Horovitz, and of narrowing down
the wide array of literature with which they worked to traditional
Arabic sources Hence, against Fück’s weariness of all that source
mongering, it is important to emphasize the achievements of the
Geiger project Perhaps for the first time, the Qurʾanic texts are rein-
tegrated into their original cultural context and seen for what they
were before they were canonized into the foundational document of
a new religion—namely, answers to pressing contemporary questions
and problems, answers that engaged, modified, adapted, and re-inter-
preted narratives and motives with which their audience must already
to some degree have been familiar For Geiger, Horovitz, and speyer,
the Qurʾan presented itself not merely as the starting point of Islamic
history but rather as a transitional text that needed to be relocated
within a complex, religiously and linguistically pluralistic milieu of
origin
Ultimately, however, the approach laid out in Fück’s lecture was
to prove more successful and to exert a stifling influence on the whole
discipline This was in part due to external political factors When
the national socialists consolidated their control over Germany after
having won parliamentary elections in 1932, they soon proceeded to
exclude all Jews from German public life, an ominous sign of still
worse things to come Research in the vein of Geiger, Horovitz, and
speyer was thus severely disrupted, with the result that the study of
the Qurʾan became more narrowly a domain of scholars whose train-
ing had been primarily in Arabic literature, and not, for example, in
Rabbinics to be sure, intertextual readings of the Qurʾan in the light
of the religious traditions circulating in its historical environment
had not been the exclusive prerogative of Jewish scholars; important

10 Fück, “originalität,” 168 (translation n sinai)

introduction
6

contributions were made by tor Andrae,11 Karl Ahrens,12 and, indi-
rectly, by Julius Wellhausen’s comparative study of ancient Arabian
religion 13 Yet the second World War did mark a noticeable change
in approach The person of Muhammad now became the primary
focal point of interest, a development clearly reflected in the works
of Rudi Paret14 and W Montgomery Watt,15 and the Qurʾan appeared
above all as a mirror image of the psychological development of the
individual Muhammad This change in outlook entailed a much more
extensive, and sometimes gullible, reliance on Islamic sīra traditions
than can be observed, for example, in Horovitz and Geiger; Qurʾanic
scholarship, to put it in a mildly provocative form, turned into “life
of Muhammad” scholarship The ensuing loss of interest in the Qurʾan
as an object of study in and of itself is evident, for example, in the
fact that Paret’s commentary on the Qurʾan, regarded as authoritative
almost from the moment of its publication, pays scant attention to
issues of chronology, which had so captivated earlier scholars like
nöldeke, Hirschfeld, and Bell The cross-references to parallel Qurʾanic
passages provided by Paret never signal whether the text referred to
may be significantly earlier or later than the verse at hand; issues of
genuinely textual, rather than biographical, development thus recede
into the background This is particularly problematic since it blurs
the considerable evidence that the genesis of the Qurʾanic text was in
fact intertwined with the emergence of a Qurʾanic community defined
by its allegiance towards, and liturgical use of, the open-ended series
of divine communications promulgated by Muhammad 16 If the
Qurʾanic corpus is treated in a basically synchronic fashion, without
due consideration to the thematic and formal evolution of the original
textual units of which it is composed, then our most important wit-
ness for sounding out the gradual crystallization of the pre-conquest
Islamic Urgemeinde is left unexplored

It is of course true that studying the Qurʾan as a source for the life
and thought of Muhammad had been deeply ingrained into Western
Qurʾan scholarship since the time of Geiger—in fact, when traditional

11 Andrae, Ursprung des Islams
12 Ahrens, Muhammad als Religionsstifter
13 Wellhausen, Reste arabischen Heidentums
14 Paret, Mohammed und der Koran
15 Watt, Muhammad at Mecca, and id , Muhammad at Medina
16 For a survey of the textual evidence indicating a liturgical, and thus communal,
function of Qurʾanic surahs, see neuwirth, “Vom Rezitationstext über die Liturgie
zum Kanon ”