Quranic studies

Quranic studies is the academic application of a diverse set of disciplines to study the Quran (including its exegesis and historical reception), drawing on methods including but not limited to ancient history, philology, textual criticism, lexicography, codicology, literary criticism, comparative religion, and historical criticism (the historical-critical method).^[1][2][3][4]

Quranic studies can be divided into three primary domains. The first seeks to understanding its original meaning, sources, history of revelation, and the history of its recording and transmission. The second seeks to clarify the reception of the Quran in other texts and through centuries of exegesis. The third involves the study and appreciation of the Quran as literature independently of the other two domains. Until the twentieth century, the second and third domains were largely ignored by researchers.^[5]

History of the field

Predecessors

Silvestre de Sacy was one of the first to inaugurate the historical-critical approach to the Koran in Europe. Although he is best known for his philological research on the Arabic language, he also wrote a number of commentaries on the Koran with critical notes. For example, he questioned the authenticity of verse 3:144, speaking of the Prophet's death, which he claimed was a later addition by Abu Bakr pronounced after Muhammad's disappearance.

Modern Quranic studies

The modern discipline of studying the Quran may be considered to have begun in 1833, with the publication of the book Was hat Mohammed aus dem Judenthume aufgenommen? (‘What Did Muhammad Take Over from Judaism?’) by Abraham Geiger. The primary objective of this book was to demonstrate that the Quranic reception of biblical narratives did not occur directly via a reception of the books of the canonical Bible, but through parabiblical intermediaries such as midrash (traditional Jewish exegesis of biblical texts). Geiger, being a rabbinic scholar, focused on the Qurans correspondence with the Jewish literary tradition. This approach continued in the works of Hartwig Hirschfeld, Israel Schapiro, and others, before finally culminating in Heinrich Speyer's Die biblischen Erzählungen im Qoran, published in 1931. This mode of scholarship however came to an end with World War II, when a mass of Jewish academics were dispersed from Nazi Germany, and the primary contributors transitioned to working in adjacent areas of research. During this period, a different but smaller school of research emphasizing the influence of Christian texts (prominently including Tor Andrae); while research on pagan influences was not entirely absent from this time, it was comparatively severely understudied.^[6] In recent years, a trend that has been called the "New Biblicism" or "Syriac Turn" of Quranic studies has emerged, refocusing on the intertextuality of the Quran with a much greater attention paid to Christian intertexts. The current paradigm of research was initiated by Christoph Luxenberg; though his thesis was universally rejected among academics, it generated considerable new interest in studying the Quran in light of its historical context. The primary historians of this new wave of scholarship have included Gabriel Said Reynolds, Holger Zellentin, Emran El-Badawi, and Joseph Witztum.^[7]

In 1844, Gustav Weil published the first critical introduction to the Quran in Europe, with a second edition in 1878. The work was titled Einleitung in den Koran. This work succeeded an earlier book three-part book of his which treated the subjects of Muhammad, the Quran, and then Islam. In 1858, French Académie des Inscriptions announced a European-wide competition for a work on the history of the Quran. Three people jointly won: Theodor Noldeke, Aloys Sprenger, and Michele Amari. While Amari's work was never published, that of Sprenger and Amari would become foundational publications in the emerging field of Quranic studies.^[8]

In 1860, Noldeke published his thesis as a book titled Geschichte des Qorans (History of the Quran). Subsequent editions of the book were published by Friedrich Schwally, Gotthelf Bergsträsser, and Otto Pretzl between 1909 and 1938. This work had a major influence and, for a significant time, resulted in a consensus among Westerm scholars that the Quran reflected the preaching of Muhammad in Mecca and Medina, and that it should be chronologically periodized into four main types of surahs: Meccan surahs, which were divided into Early Meccan, Middle Meccan, and Late Meccan surahs, followed by Medinan surahs. Noldeke also accepted a canonization event during the reign of the third caliph, Uthman. (These views have been categorized by some as the "Noldekian paradigm". One of the first to question this paradigm was Hartwig Hirschfeld in his 1902 work New researches into the composition and exegesis of the Qoran.) As for Sprenger, his work was published in 1861–65 in three volumes under the title Das Leben und die Lehre des Mohammad, nach bisher größtenteils unbenutzten Quellen. Both Noldeke and Sprenger owed much to the Al-Itqan fi Ulum al-Qur'an of Al-Suyuti which had summarized hundreds of works of the medieval Islamic tradition.^[8] Other important publications from this early time included the Die Richtungen der Islamischen Koranauslegung of Ignaz Goldziher, which founded the critical study of the tafsir (commentary, exegesis) of the Quran and the Materials For The History Of The Text Of The Quran The Old Codices by Arthur Jeffrey in 1934.^[9]

After WW2

After World War II, there was no primary locus for the study of the Quran. The major scholars from this time period, including Arthur Jeffrey, W. Montgomery Watt, William Graham, Rudi Paret, and others, thought it best to treat the Quran as Muslims do (as sacred) and so avoided discussion of its relationship with earlier Jewish and Christian literature. Many works from this time sought to foster good relations with Muslims; for example, Johann Fück wrote works about the originality of Muhammad. In addition, growing attention was paid to the tafsir (in which important progress was made) in part to avoid thorny critical issues surrounding the Quran and Muhammad. This continued well into the twentieth century, the latter period of which was best characterized by the works of Andrew Rippin, Jane McAullife, and Brannon Wheeler (as in his book Moses in the Quran and Islamic Exegesis).^[10] Books that critically appraised traditional sources concerning the origins of the Quran only began to appear in the 1970s, starting with the revisionist writings of Günter Lüling (1974), John Wansbrough (1977), and Patricia Crone and Michael Cook (1977). Though the theses advanced in these books were rejected, they resulted in a considerable diversity of new perspectives and analyses.^[11]

The present phase of Quranic studies began in the 1990s and, since then, the field has witnessed an explosion of interest and popularity.^[4] This has coincided with the formation of new journals such as the Journal of Qur'anic Studies, societies such as the International Qur'anic Studies Association (IQSA), and the publication of major resources like The Encyclopaedia of the Quran (2001–6). 2007 saw the initiation of the Corpus Coranicum project, led by Angelika Neuwirth, Nicolai Sinai, among others. In 2015, the publication of the Study Quran by HarperCollins included an English translation of the text, accompanied by a massive collection of traditional interpretations for each verse from a total of several dozen Islamic exegetes.^[12]

Despite the progress, there is still significant work to do in the field. For example, a critical edition of the Quran, which has been available for the Bible for decades, is still unavailable, despite an effort towards producing one in the first half of the twentieth century that was cut short by the second world war.^[13] Only one critical translation of the Quran has so far been published, by Arthur Droge in 2014.^[14][15]

Origins of the Quran

Provenance

Outside the Hejaz

During the 1970s and 1980s, several theses were put forwards suggesting that the Quran originated either outside of the Hejaz, or outside of the Arabian Peninsula entirely.^[16] The most common argument for this theory is that the Quran presupposes a context suffused with Christian tradition and some degree of Christological controversies that are a better fit for a text which emerged among Christian communities in Mesopotamia or the Levant. The first publication to this effect was John Wansbrough's Quranic Studies in 1977. Instead, the Quran was hypothesized to have come about in Mesopotamia.^[17] Wansbrough was soon followed by Gerald Hawting,^[18] although Fred Donner has commented that Hawting was unable to provide any new evidence for an extra-Arabian origins of the Quran.^[19] In the same year as Wansbrough, the book Hagarism also argued for an origins of the Quran outside of the Hejaz, although they placed it in northwestern Arabia as opposed to outside of Arabia entirely.^[20] More recently, Stephen J. Shoemaker has argued that while Muhammad's life and career can be placed in the Hejaz, and that Muhammad's oral teachings are the ultimate source of the Quran, the Quran itself was written down, redacted, and edited in the Levant before being canonized during the reign of Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan.^[21] Guillaume Dye believes that the Qurans origins cannot be tied down to any one locale; while sections of the Quran would have originated in the Hejaz, Dye believes that other parts of the Quran have different contexts and may emerge from different regions of Arabia before being redacted together by Muhammad.^[22]

Inside the Hejaz

According to Tommaso Tesei, the majority of academics (himself included) favor an origins of the Quran within the Hejaz.^[23] This position has long been held by previous generations of scholars as well, including among Theodor Noldeke and his contemporaries in the 19th century, as well as mid-20th century writers like W. Montgomery Watt.^[24] Regarding the argument that Quranic familiarity Christian tradition favors a localization north of Arabia, Hejazi proponents origins argue that Christianity in pre-Islamic Arabia had sufficiently spread for long enough that its traditions would have also been present in the Hejaz.^[25] It is also commonly argued that, given Islamic tradition unanimously places the origins of itself and the Quran in the area of Mecca and Medina, there is no good explanation for why these regions would have been invented and backprojected as the locale of origins had Islam and the Quran originated elsewhere. Not only that, but it would be difficult to explain on this scenario how all dissenting or contravening traditions would have been suppressed without a trace.^[26] Some have gone further and argued that this scenario would require a conspiratorial level of forgery. Second, recent research has demonstrated a prominent role for local Arabian beliefs and traditions in the structuring of the content of the Quran.^[27] Third, Harry Munt has argued that all the toponyms mentioned in the Quran are Hejazi, and that the Constitution of Medina (whose authenticity is widely accepted among critical scholars) is also indicative of a Hejazi origins^[28]:

It has often been noted that the Qur’an ‘has little concern with the proper names of its own place and time’ (Reynolds 2010: 198; see also Robin 2015a: 27–8), which, I think, makes it all the more significant that it does mention a handful of Ḥijāzī toponyms, including Badr (Q. 3:123), Ḥunayn (Q. 9:25), Yathrib (Q. 33:13), and Mecca (Q. 48:24)—this last notably in close conjunction with al-masjid al-ḥarām, ‘the sacred place of worship’, which appears in the following verse—as well as the tribe of Quraysh (Q. 106:1). Furthermore, the so-called ‘Constitution of Medina’, which is widely accepted as a genuinely early (i.e. start of the first-/seventh-century) document preserved in two third-/ninth-century Arabic works, does place a ‘Prophet’ (nabī) and a ‘Messenger of God’ (rasūl Allāh) called Muḥammad in a place called Yathrib (Lecker 2004).

Finally, it has recently been demonstrated that the Quran was written in a local Hejazi dialect of Arabic from late pre-Islamic Arabia.^[29]

Authorship

There is little agreement on whether the Quran has one or more authors. Tommaso Tesei says that the hypotheses have not yet been critically adjudicated.^[30] The first study which directly scrutinized the issue was by Behnam Sadeghi, who argued using stylometric analysis for a single author.^[31] On the other hand, Gabriel Said Reynolds has argued in favor of a multi-authorship view, on the basis that the use of doublets in the Quran favors the hypothesis that it was the redactional product of two earlier texts (which fell along the lines of what are now classified as Meccan and Medinan surahs).^[32][33] Tesei also favors multiple authorship on the basis that there is at least one primary cluster of surahs which is stylistically significantly different from the rest of the Quran,^[30] corresponding nearly to but not exactly along the lines of the traditional Meccan surahs.^[34] Most recently, Michael Pregill has argued that the Quran can be divided into layers with three different roughly categorical levels of familiarity with biblical and parabiblical tradition; the Quranic text may in-turn have originated beforehand with Muhammad acting as the ultimate redactor of the stories and texts to weave them into what became the Quran.^[35]

Canonization

Behnam Sadeghi and Mohsen Goudarzi classify scholars of Quranic studies into four groups with respect to the question of the canonization of the Quran: traditionalists, revisionists, skeptics, and neo-traditionalists.^[36] Traditionalists accept the traditional account of the formation of the Quran, including the canonization it underwent during the reign of the caliph Uthman under a committee of Muhammad's companions, and that copies of the canonized Quran were sent to major cities to replace alternative versions. Revisionists reject this narrative, holding that it was someone other than Uthman who canonized the Quran or that the Quran continued to undergo significant revisions after the canonization. The skeptics, who Sadeghi and Goudarzi call "de facto revisionists", are agnostic with respect to whether the content of the traditional narrative is historical. Finally, neo-traditionalists affirm the primary elements of the traditional account but via critical historiographical analysis as opposed to merely trusting the traditional sources.^[37]

Recent analyses of Quranic manuscripts suggests both that the Quran experienced an early canonization event^[38] and that copies of the canonized text were sent to Syria, Medina, Basra, and Kufa.^[39] Similar analyses suggest the canonical (and presumably also the non-canonical) qira'at of the Quran are regional variations of a single, common oral ancestor that may date between roughly the time of Uthman's reign to the late seventh century.^[40]

Historical context

Contemporary interest of the Quran in its historical context was spurted by Christoph Luxenberg's publication of The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran in 2007, even though Luxenberg's thesis, that the Quran originated as a proto-scriptural Aramaic text in an Arabic-Aramaic bilingual environment,^[41] has been universally rejected by other academics.^[42][43][44] Today, some of the primary historians studying the Quran in its historical context include Gabriel Said Reynolds, Holger Zellentin, Emran El-Badawi, and Joseph Witztum.^[7]

Important contexts for the Quran and the emergence of Islam include the period of late antiquity (including the political and religious influences of the Byzantine Empire and the Sasanian Empire) and pre-Islamic Arabia.^[45]

Syriac

One of the primary interests of this group of new researchers is especially in the Syriac Christian context of the Quranic narrative, and many new findings have been made with this approach.^{[46][47][48][49][50]} Several of the authors writing in Syriac that have been focused on include Ephrem the Syrian, Jacob of Serugh, and Narsai. One of the most notable publications in the recent work in the study of the Quran in its historical context has been Witzum's dissertation, The Syriac Milieu of the Qurʾan: The Recasting of Biblical Narratives. This work demonstrated the crucial importance of Syriac literature in the construction of the Quranic narratives of the prophets.^[51]

Some believe Syriac intertextuality studies have overshadowed potential intertextualities, even if they are less common, in Greek sources.^[52]

Rabbinic

The Quran refers twenty times to Jews (yahūd/allādhīna hādū), and also often refers to Israel or Israelites (banū isrāʾīl) and the People of Scripture (ahl al-kitāb). In addition, similarities between Quranic stories and motifs have regularly been observed with earlier rabbinic literature, especially in the Mishnah and Talmud, going back first to the studies of Abraham Geiger in the first half of the 19th century. The first major work in this regard was Geiger's 1833 Was hat Mohammed aus dem Judenthume aufgenommen?. The closest and most well-known intertext is that between Quran 5:32, which refers to a dictum that comes from the children of Israel, and Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5 (in its form from the Palestinian Talmud).^[35] Another oft-cited parallel is the tradition of raising a mountain above the Earth, found in both Quran 2:63 and the Babylonian Talmud (Shabbat 88a).^[53] It has also been argued that the Quran responds in some instances to ideas found in rabbinic literature, such as the idea that an individual may only go to and remain in hell for a few days.^[54] Legal continuity been the Quran and rabbinic texts has also been argued for in several instances.^[55][56]

In understanding the conduit by which these stories may have appeared in the cultural milieu out of which the Quran emerged, many scholars have worked on understanding the spread of Judaism in pre-Islamic Arabia. A significant Jewish presence in South Arabia (Yemen) is known from the Himyarite Kingdom, as well as some evidence from the northern Hijaz, but inscriptional data from the central Hijaz (such as in Mecca and Medina) remains thin, although Islamic tradition and the Constitution of Medina both claim the presence of notable Jewish tribes in this region and time.^[35]

Arabian

Recent years have seen a growth in the emphasis on considering the Quran in its pre-Islamic Arabian context, especially in light of the growth of archaeological discoveries from the region in recent years. One emphasis has been on the finding from the archaeological record, contrary to prior belief, that Judaism and Christianity in pre-Islamic Arabia were significantly more widespread than had been thought before, and that monotheism in pre-Islamic Arabia had become the dominant form of religious belief in the fifth and sixth centuries.^[57][58] Asides from archaeology, similar observations have also been made regarding the representation of the "associationists" (mushrikūn) in the Quran, who though they provide intercessory prayer to intermediate beings, still believe in Allāh as the singular ominpotent Creator being^[59][60] as well as Islamic-era collections of pre-Islamic poetry where there is a noted rarity of polytheistic invocations.^[61]

Recent archaeological work has also resulted in many grammatical insights about the Quran, including demonstrations of how the spelling of some of the names of Quranic figures (like Jesus) are attested in Safaitic inscriptions^[62] and how the Arabic of the Quran is in continuity with the late phase of pre-Islamic Arabic (known as Paleo-Arabic) in its Hijazi dialect.^[29] Research has also investigated the continuity between Quranic ritual and ritual from pre-Islamic Arabia. For example, Arabic words for pilgrimage (ḥajj), prayer (ṣalāh), and charity (zakāh) are known from pre-Islamic Safaitic Arabic inscriptions.^[63] In particular, both ḥajj and ʿumra have been argued to share many precise continuities with pre-Islamic Arabian ritual.^[64] Pan-Arabian pilgrimage to the South Arabian Temple of Awwam has also been described.^[64] Furthermore, it has been widely described that black stones believed to be of heavenly or meteorite origins were popularly used in Arabian cults.^[65][66]

Greek

Hellenization of pre-Islamic Arabia

There is evidence of Hellenization in pre-Islamic Arabia, including in parts of the Hejaz. Roman rule had long been imposed on Arabic-speaking populations in Syria, the Transjordan, Palestine, and the northern Hejaz (the Roman province of Arabia Petraea, established in 106 AD by the conquest of the Nabataean Kingdom).^[67] Roman military encampments have been found at Hegra as well as in Ruwafa, reflected by a set of second-century Greek-Arabic bilingual inscriptions from northwestern Arabia known as the Ruwafa inscriptions.^[68] More recent Latin inscriptions have revealed a Roman military presence as far south as the Farasan Islands, in southereastern Saudi Arabia.^[69] At Qaryat al-Faw, capital of the ancient Kingdom of Kinda, statues of Greek deities such as Artemis, Heracles, and Harpocrates have been discovered. The Roman emperor is also mentioned repeatedly in Safaitic inscriptions. Arabic-speaking tribes were gradually converting to Christianity or becoming foederati of the emperor, resulting in increasing integration into the Roman world over time. In the mid-sixth century, for example, Justinian I was closely allied with the Ghassanids, a Hellenized Christian Arab kingdom.^[67] The Letter of the Archimandrites dating to 569/570, composed in Greek but preserved in Syriac, demonstrates the presence and distribution of episcopal sees from its 137 Archimandrite signatories from the province of Roman Arabia.^[70]

Hellenism and the Quran

Trends in Hellenization have been related to the Quran in various ways. In 2014, Omar Sankharé published what is still the only book-length investigation of the subject, in his volume Le Coran et la culture grecque. He studied the Quran vis-a-vis Greek literary descriptions of the flood, the legend of Korah, the triad of female intercessory beings mentioned in Quran 53:19–23, the story of Alexander the Great so-named as Dhu al-Qarnayn, the Surah of the Cave and Plato's Republic, and more.^[71] Individual studies have also focused on the following elements:

• Cole has demonstrated a notable overlap between Quranic law, like Surah Al-Ma'idah (5), and late Roman law, like the Corpus Juris Civilis codified during the reign of Justinian I.^[67][72]
• Expressions such as being "dyed by the dye of God" (Quran 2:138) also echoes a widespread phrase, found from the Republic to late antiquity.^[73]
• The story of Mary's birth in relation to the palm tree has also been related to a tradition witnessed in the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, ultimately going back further still to a reworking of traditions surrounding Leto's labor.^[74][75]
• The figure of Luqman in Quran 31 has been related by some to the Greek philosopher Alcmaeon of Croton.^[73]
• Quran 52:24 has been related by Walid Saleh to Ganymede.^[76]

Jewish Christian

It has long been argued that Jewish Christianity played an important role in the formation of Quranic conceptions of Christians in Muhammad's Arabia.^[77][78] The first major argument put forwards that Jewish Christianity played an important role in the formation of Quranic tradition was Aloys Sprenger in his 1861 book Das Leben und die Lehre des Moḥammad. Since then, numerous other authors have followed this argument, including Adolf von Harnack, Hans-Joachim Schoeps, M. P. Roncaglia, and others.^[79] The most recent notable defenders of this thesis have been Francois de Blois^[80] and Holger Zellentin, the latter in the context of his research into the historical context of the legal discourses present in the Quran especially as it resembles the Syriac recension of the Didascalia Apostolorum and the Clementine literature.^[81] In turn, several critics of this thesis have appeared, most notably Sidney Griffith.^[82][83] De Blois provides three arguments for the importance of Jewish Christianity: the use of the term naṣārā in the Quran (usually taken as a reference to Christians, as in Griffith's work) which resembles the Syriac term used for Nazoreans, the resemblance between the description of Mary as part of the Trinity with traditions attributed to the Gospel of the Hebrews, and dietary restrictions associated with the Christian community. In turn, Shaddel argued that naṣārā merely may have etymologically originated as such because Nazoreans were the first to interact with the Arabic community in which this term came into use. Alternative sources as well as hyperbole may explain the reference to Mary in the Trinity. However, Shaddel does admit the ritual laws as evidence for the relevance of Jewish Christians.^[84] In the last few years, the thesis for the specific role played by Jewish Christians has been resisted by Gabriel Said Reynolds,^[85][86] Stephen Shoemaker,^[87] and Guillaume Dye.^[88]

Significant works

• The Foreign Vocabulary of the Qur'an, 1938
• A Concordance of the Qurʾān, 1983.
• Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān, Vols 1–5, 2001–2006
• A Concise Dictionary of Koranic Arabic, 2004
• The Integrated Encyclopedia of the Qurʾān (IEQ) by the Center for Islamic Sciences^[89]
• The Qur'an: An Encyclopedia, 2006
• The Cambridge Companion to the Qur'an, 2006
• Dictionnaire du Coran, 2007
• The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to the Qur’an, 2017
• The Qur’an: A Historical-Critical Introduction, 2018
• The Oxford Handbook of Qur'anic Studies, 2020
• The Routledge Companion to the Qur'an, 2021
• Key Terms of the Qur'an, 2023

Commentaries

English

• Azaiez, Mehdi et al. The Qur'an Seminar Commentary / Le Qur'an Seminar, De Gruyter 2016.
• Bell, Richard. A Commentary on the Quran, Vols 1–2, 1991.
• Nasr, Seyyed et al. The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary, HarperCollins 2015.
• Neuwirth, Angelika. The Qur'an: Text and Commentary. Volume 1, Early Meccan Surahs: Poetic Prophecy, Oxford University Press 2022.
• Reynolds, Gabriel Said. The Qur'an and the Bible: Text and Commentary, Yale University Press 2018.
• Sirry, Mun'im. The Quran with Cross-References, De Gruyter 2022.

German

• Khoury, Adel Theodor. Der Koran. Arabisch-Deutsch. Übersetzung und wissenschaftlicher Kommentar, 2001.
• Neuwirth, Angelika:
  • Bd. 1: Frühmekkanische Suren, 2011.
  • Bd. 2/1: Frühmittelmekkanische Suren, 2017.
  • Bd. 2/2: Spätmittelmekkanische Suren, 2021.
• Paret, Rudi. Der Koran, Kommentar und Konkordanz, 1963.

French

• Azaiez, Mehdi et al. The Qur'an Seminar Commentary / Le Qur'an Seminar, De Gruyter 2016.
• Dye, Guillaume & Mohammad Ali Amir-Moezzi. Le Coran des historiens, Vols 1–3, Éditions du Cerf 2019.

Journals

The following journals publish often or exclusively in Quranic studies.

• Al-Bayan: Journal of Qur'an and Hadith Studies^[90]
• Arabica, published by Brill^[91]
• Der Islam
• Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam^[92]
• Journal of Qur'anic Studies, published by Edinburgh University Press
• Journal of the International Qur’anic Studies Association (JIQSA)^[93]
• QURANICA – International Journal of Quranic Research^[94]
• Review of Quranic Research^[95]

See also

• Early Quranic manuscripts
• Historicity of Muhammad
• Historiography of early Islam
• History of the Quran
• Islamic studies
• Revisionist school of Islamic studies

References

Citations

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