IQSA Studies in the Qurʾan

This volume is a study in the history of the reception of the Qurʾān in the early Islamic centuries. It aims at taking scholarship beyond attempts at situating early qurʾānic exegesis within the confines of magisterial classical Tafsīr, and offers a systematic investigation of the early interpretations of select qurʾānic passages against the backdrop of the interreligious milieu of the growing Islamic Empire.

By incorporating writings on the Qurʾān across different genres, not only by Muslim authors, but also by Arabophone Christian writers, this study maps the exegetical trajectories of key qurʾānic passages in the early Islamic period, thereby providing historical context for classical Tafsīr works. Far from an imagined splendid isolation marred by occasional interreligious polemics, the picture we get is an exegetical feedback loop, with Christians relying on, as well as reacting to, Muslim data, and vice versa.

This study further argues that incorporating Arabic Christian readings of the Qurʾān inevitably enriches our understanding of the reception of the sacred text, and indeed helps us better capture the dynamism characteristic of the interreligious context of Qurʾān interpretation in the early Islamic centuries.

The triliteral Arabic root ẓ-l-m occurs on almost every single page of the printed Qurʾān. Despite this central and consistent usage, it has not yet been studied within the field of Western Qurʾānic Studies. In its most basic sense, ẓ-l-m means ‘putting something in the wrong place’ but is often translated as ‘to do wrong’, ‘to act unjustly’, ‘injustice’, ‘evildoing’, or finally, ‘oppression’. As such, a study of ẓ-l-m elucidates significant ethico-religious dynamics and power relations that obtain within the qurʾānic text. While the present book does not contain a grand thesis on the origin or canonization of the Qurʾān nor claim to answer questions pertaining to the ultimate origins and formation of this multifaceted religious and historical text, it will contribute a systematic philological and semantic study of one root and its relations to other roots in the Qurʾān through a synthesis of three methodologies: Synchronic/diachronic analysis, semantic field analysis, and formulaic analysis.

How the Qur’ān reflects on and responds to the regional cultural, religious and political currents swirling in Western Arabia and neighboring areas during the great war, 603-630, between the Roman and Sasanian empires? The book approaches the Qur’ān through six case studies. The first two consider the era 200-800 CE, which classicist Peter Brown dubbed late antiquity. The second two contextualize quranic stories and tropes in the era of Herakleios and Khosrow II. The final pair consider issues in how the Qur’ān was constituted, both physically and stylistically, and also sets these processes in their late antique context. The book treats the constitution of the quranic text, first physically and then rhetorically. The use in the Qur’ān of the technique of narrative apostrophe is for the first time subjected to a concerted analysis. These themes are all united by a concern to understand better issues in why the Qur’ān makes certain narrative choices, how the narrative changes over time, and how it articulates with other texts and perspectives.

Over the last twenty years, the rise of Qur'anic studies has been one of the most remarkable developments within the wider framework of Islamic scholarship. This evolution can be viewed from three angles: exponential growth in the accessibility of relevant primary; the use of contemporary methods for developing new analytical agendas; a renewed appreciation of diverse hermeneutical orientations. A veritable gold-rush of publications, theses, colloquia and study projects devoted to the Qur'an in the past two decades illustrates these developments. This scholarly community subsists primarily in European countries and the United States, but its effects are not limited there. The reception and dissemination of this work in Muslim-majority countries is constant and bodes as a promising opportunity to establish a real dialogue between scholars and lived community. The present book contains expert contributions emerging from this nexus, with scholars from North African, Middle Eastern and Western backgrounds who share a common ambition: to advance academic study of the Qurʾan by promoting cooperation across global boundaries.

This work aims to distill the findings of a wide variety of scholarly disciplines into a coherent narrative of the Qur’ān’s history, from the first oral recitation to the four published Variants in active circulation today. In the process of unraveling the complicated relationships between the oral Qur’ān and the written Qur’ān, it becomes clear that there are, in fact, two histories of the Qur’ān and that the overall history of the Qur’ān cannot be appreciated without understanding the interactions between these two occasionally intertwined but often independent component histories. Discrepancies between the four qur’ānic Variants that are in active use today are indexed and analyzed. While most scholarship views the Qur’ān either in relation to its past and its possible origins, or in relation to its contemporary status as a static, fixed text, this work adopts an organic, developmental approach recognizing that the Qur’ān is a living text that continues to evolve.