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Quranic studies

(Redirected from Qur'anic 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]

A page from the Sanaa manuscript — the oldest Islamic archaeological document to date.

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]

Historical criticism

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Main article: Historical criticism

Quranic studies employs the historical-critical method (HCM) as its primary methodological apparatus, which is the approach that emphasizes a process that "delays any assessment of scripture’s truth and relevance until after the act of interpretation has been carried out".[1] To read a text critically

means to suspend inherited presuppositions about its origin, transmission, and meaning, and to assess their adequacy in the light of a close reading of that text itself as well as other relevant sources ... This is not to say that scripture should conversely be assumed to be false and mortal, but it does open up the very real possibility that an interpreter may find scripture to contain statements that are, by his own standards, false, inconsistent, or trivial. Hence, a fully critical approach to the Bible, or to the Qur’an for that matter, is equivalent to the demand, frequently reiterated by Biblical scholars from the eighteenth century onwards, that the Bible is to be interpreted in the same manner as any other text.[1]

By contrast, to read a text historically would mean to

require the meanings ascribed to it to have been humanly ‘thinkable’ or ‘sayable’ within the text’s original historical environment, as far as the latter can be retrospectively reconstructed. At least for the mainstream of historical-critical scholarship, the notion of possibility underlying the words ‘thinkable’ and ‘sayable’ is informed by the principle of historical analogy – the assumption that past periods of history were constrained by the same natural laws as the present age, that the moral and intellectual abilities of human agents in the past were not radically different from ours, and that the behaviour of past agents, like that of contemporary ones, is at least partly explicable by recourse to certain social and economic factors.[1]

Textual criticism

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See also: Textual criticism

Today, the textual criticism of the Quran is in its infancy. The most significant development in recent years has been the digitization of Quran manuscripts. The study of manuscripts has picked up as well in the same timeline.[6]

Companion codices

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Soon after the death of Muhammad, many of his Companions produced codices of the Quran, with the most important one being the Uthmanic codex. However, codices have also been attribute dto Abdullah ibn Masud, Ubayy ibn Ka'b, and Abu Musa al-Ash'ari.[7] Al-Ash'ari's codex is not understood, but those of the former two were widely transmitted and survived up until the eleventh century. The nature of these manuscripts was described by several authorities with access to them, although manuscripts have not survived to the present day. Importantly, the codex of Ibn Mas'ud did not include Surah al-Fatihah, or the Al-Mu'awwidhatayn (the last two surahs of the Uthmanic codex). By contrast, the codex of Ubayy has all the surahs known from the Uthmanic codex, in addition to two more.[8] The historicity of companion codices is widely accepted[9] especially with the recent discovery of the Sanaa manuscript, the first known and extant companion codex that was produced independently of the Uthmanic tradition.[10]

Canonization

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See also: Canonization of Islamic scripture

Tradition holds that the Quran was canonized by the caliph Uthman around 650 AD, which immediately became the standard Quran. In recent decades, a new controversy has emerged over when the Quran was canonized. Behnam Sadeghi and Mohsen Goudarzi classify members of the field into four camps on this issue: traditionalists, revisionists, skeptics, and neo-traditionalists.[11] Traditionalists accept the traditional account of the formation of the Quran (canonized under Uthman, by a committee headed by Muhammad's companions, with codices being produced and sent out to regional centers to replace any alternatives). Revisionists hold that canonization either happened later, or that it did not prevent substantial additional revisions afterwards. The skeptics ("de facto revisionists") are simply agnostic about the historicity of the traditional accounts. Neo-traditionalists accept the main details of the traditional account, but do so on the basis of critical historiography and not a trust of traditional sources.[12]

Recent radiocarbon, orthographic, and stemmatic analyses Quranic manuscripts converge in agreement on an early canonization event for the Quran (during the reign of Uthman, as opposed to Abd al-Malik, the most commonly cited alternative)[13][14] and that copies of the canonized text were sent to Syria, Medina, Basra, and Kufa.[15]

In the decades after the canonization, a "rasm literature" emerged whereby authors sought to catalogue all variants that existed in copies or manuscripts of the Quran that descended from the Uthmanic standard. Among the most important of these include the Kitab al-Masahif by Abī Dāwūd (d. 929) the al-Muqni' fi Rasm al-Masahif by al-Dānī (d. 1052–1053). Such works, though, due to their lateness, do not reflect a number of the consistent variants in the earliest manuscripts.[16]

Readings (qirāʾāt)

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Main article: Qira'at

Because the Uthmanic Quran did not standardize the dotting of the skeletal Arabic text (the rasm), variant ways to do this emerged in different cities. These different styles of dotting (and correspondingly, recitation) are called qirāʾāt ("readings"). Prominent reciters developed their own readings starting as early as the first half of the early 8th century. Ultimately, while many of these were created, only seven were canonized by Ibn Mujahid (d. 936) in the 10th century, these being known as the seven readers. Three readings were chosen from Kufa, and one each from Mecca, Medina, Basra, and Damascus. The reading of each teacher was independently attested through two transmissions, called a riwāyah (pl. riwāyāt), these typically being direct students. A century later, Al-Dani canonized two specific transmitters for each of the eponymous readers. In the 15th century, Ibn al-Jazari (d. 1429) canonized three more readers, giving us the modern ten recitations. Although variation between these is largely in the dotting, a few differences occur also with the rasm of Uthman, especially in Abu Amr's reading. Most variants only affect the form of the word, but a minority also impact the meaning. Common variants are dialectical, or concern noun formation, the singular versus plural, different verb stems, etc. Today, the reading of Hafs through Asim is the most popular in the Muslim world, having been canonized in the 1924 Cairo edition.[17][18]

Recent studies indicate that there is a common oral ancestor to all the canonical (and likely also non-canonical) readings that dates to the seventh century, after the reign of Uthman.[19]

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The Cairo edition, published in Egypt in 1924, is the dominant print edition of the Quran today. It follows the Hafs reading. Earlier but lesser-known print editions also once existed, including the Hinckelmann edition, Marracci edition, both from the late 17th century, and notably the Flugel edition, established in 1834 and remaining in use until the Cairo. Most physical copies of the Quran are high resolution prints of an originally handwritten Quran by a calligrapher, but this too is derived from the Cairo edition.[20] The orthography of the Cairo edition is largely faithful to what is found in seventh-century manuscripts, although not entirely:[21]

This is especially the case for the use of letter ʾalif, which is used to write the ā significantly more often in modern print editions than is typical for early manuscripts. But there are also several other innovative orthographic practices compared to early manuscripts. For example, the nominative pronoun ḏū is consistently spelled و ذ in modern print editions, while in early manuscripts it is consistently followed by an ʾalif, ا و ذ .

So far, no critical edition of the Quran exists. The creation of one is the major goal of the Corpus Coranicum project has, though so far, it has focused on publishing text editions of early manuscripts.[22]

Origins of the Quran

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Geography

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Outside the Hejaz

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During the 1970s and 80s, several historians argued that the Quran originated beyond the Hejaz, if not the Arabian Peninsula.[23] The strongest justification that was seen for this was the view, by these authors (including John Wansbrough), that the Hejaz (if not Arabia) lacked the level of familiarity with Christian tradition that is displayed by the Quran. Instead, a more plausible provenance would be Mesopotamia or the Levant.[24] Wansbrough was followed by Gerald Hawting in his book The Idea of Idolatry and the Emergence of Islam,[25] although Fred Donner commented that Hawting did not provide any new evidence for this view.[26] Another work in this framework was Hagarism by Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, who kept the Quran in Arabia, but in its northwestern region instead of the Hejaz.[27] The most recent support has been from Stephen J. Shoemaker. Shoemaker places the life of Muhammad in the Hejaz, but positions the compilation of his oral teachings, including the redaction and editing of the Quran, in the Levant during the reign of the caliph Abd al-Malik.[28] Another proponent, Guillaume Dye, believes that the Quran represents a redaction of texts that would have emerged in different parts of Arabia, including but not limited to the Hejaz.[29]

Inside the Hejaz

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The majority of historians accept a Hejazi origins of the Quran,[30] following a long standing consensus going back to Theodor Noldeke and his contemporaries through to W. Montgomery Watt before the rise of the revisionist school.[31] According to Angelika Neuwirth, the Hejazi position is supported by the latest manuscript, philological, and historical studies.[32]

Hejazi proponents argue that pre-Islamic Arabian Christianity was widespread enough to account for the Qurans familiarity with Christian tradition.[33] Hejazi proponents also question why a non-Hejazi origins of the Quran or Islam would be unanimously retrojected back into Mecca and Medina without trace of a competing or suppressed alternative or original view.[34] Taken further, this argument asserts that a non-Hejazi origins would require a conspiratorial level of forgery to maintain. Recent research has also established a major role played by Arabian tradition in the formation of the content of the Quran, such as the presence of Arabian words, Arabian prophets, etc.[35] Proponents also argue that all toponyms in the Quran are Hejazi, and that the Constitution of Medina (widely accepted as authentic) is also indicative of a Hejazi origins:[36]

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).

Recent study of pre-Islamic Arabian inscriptions shows that the Arabic dialect of the Quran was a late-antique Hejazi.[37] It has also been shown that the spelling of the word Allah in the Quran is also specific to the dialect in the Hejazi.[38]

Authorship

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There is no consensus on whether the Quran has one or more authors, with some scholars stressing the need for more research in the area.[39] The first study to evaluate this directly was by Behnam Sadeghi, who used stylometric analysis to argue for a single author.[40] Gabriel Said Reynolds argued for multiple authorship on the basis in his study on Quranic doublets, which he argued allows for the conclusion that two originally separate works, correlating to Meccan and Medinan surahs, were combined to form the Quran.[41][42] Tesei favors multiple authorship on the basis that there are two primary stylistic clusters of Quranic surahs,[39] corresponding mostly, but not exactly, to the division between Meccan and Medinan surahs.[43] Most recently, Michael Pregill has argued for three redactional layers of the Quran largely distinguished by their degree of familiarity with biblical and parabiblical tradition. For Pregill, Muhammad redacted/weaved these texts together to create the Quran.[44]

Historical context

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The historical context of the Quran refers to the culture and societal milieu out of which the Quran emerged and may have been shaped by. The study of this context was a major area of research in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but experienced a half-century pause in engagement until the beginning of the 21st century.[45] Around this time, Christoph Luxenberg published his book The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran, which asserted that the Quran originated as an Aramaic book in an Arabic-Aramaic bilingual environment.[46] His thesis was universally rejected.[47][48][49] Despite that, Luxenberg's resparked interest in the historical context of the Quran. Some of the leading scholars in this area now include Gabriel Said Reynolds, Holger Zellentin, Emran El-Badawi, and Joseph Witztum.[50] In terms of era, the Quran has been situated into the period of late antiquity (politically dominated by the Byzantine and Sasanian empires), and geographically, it has been situated as arising out of pre-Islamic Arabia.[51]

The context of the Quran has been independently studied, additionally, through the prism of a variety of linguistic and religious traditions.

Syriac

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The Syriac Christian context has recently been one of the dominant paradigms of historical-context research.[52][53][54][55][56] Notable pre-Islamic Syriac authors analyzed in this context include Ephrem the Syrian, Jacob of Serugh, and Narsai. Joseph Witzum's dissertation, The Syriac Milieu of the Qurʾan: The Recasting of Biblical Narratives, is usually seen as the first major, serious publication in this area. Witzum's work is thought to have demonstrated that Syriac literature is crucial in reconstructing the context for Quranic narratives of the prophets.[57]

Rabbinic

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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).[44] 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).[58] 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.[59] Legal continuity been the Quran and rabbinic texts has also been argued for in several instances.[60][61]

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.[44]

Arabian

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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.[62][63] 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 omnipotent Creator being[64][65] as well as Islamic-era collections of pre-Islamic poetry where there is a noted rarity of polytheistic invocations.[66]

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[67] 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.[37] 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.[68] In particular, both ḥajj and ʿumra have been argued to share many precise continuities with pre-Islamic Arabian ritual.[69] Pan-Arabian pilgrimage to the South Arabian Temple of Awwam has also been described.[69] Furthermore, it has been widely described that black stones believed to be of heavenly or meteorite origins were popularly used in Arabian cults.[70][71]

Greek

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Hellenization of pre-Islamic Arabia

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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).[72] 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.[73] More recent Latin inscriptions have revealed a Roman military presence as far south as the Farasan Islands, in southwestern Saudi Arabia.[74] 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.[72] 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.[75]

Hellenism and the Quran

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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.[76] Others have related Quranic to Hellenistic notions of time.[77] 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.[72][78]
  • 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.[79]
  • The story of Jesus' 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.[80][81]
  • The figure of Luqman in Quran 31 has been related by some to the Greek philosopher Alcmaeon of Croton.[79]
  • Quran 52:24 has been related by Walid Saleh to Ganymede.[82]

Jewish Christian

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It has long been argued that Jewish Christianity played an important role in the formation of Quranic conceptions of Christians in Muhammad's Arabia.[83][84] 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.[85] The most recent notable defenders of this thesis have been Francois de Blois[86] 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.[87] In turn, several critics of this thesis have appeared, most notably Sidney Griffith.[88][89] 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.[90] In the last few years, the thesis for the specific role played by Jewish Christians has been resisted by Gabriel Said Reynolds,[91][92] Stephen Shoemaker,[93] and Guillaume Dye.[94]

History of the field

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Predecessors

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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

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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.[95] 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 Michael Zellentin, Emran El-Badawi, and Joseph Witztum.[50]

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.[96]

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 Western 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.[96] 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.[97]

After WW2

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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. In light of this, decrials of research that focused on the origins of the Quran, efforts towards promoting Christian-Muslim dialogue, the move to read the Quran in light of traditional exegesis instead of earlier tradition, the disbandment of the primary locus of Quranic research in Germany after the war, and other reasons, the study of the historical context of the Quran would descend into obscurity for the remainder of the twentieth century, until being revived by the turn of the twenty-first century.[45]

During this period, 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).[98] 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.[99]

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.[100]

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.[101] Only one critical translation of the Quran has so far been published, by Arthur Droge in 2014.[102][103]

Significant works

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  • 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[104]
  • 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

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English

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  • 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

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  • 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

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Journals

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The following journals publish often or exclusively in Quranic studies.

See also

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References

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Citations

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  1. ^ a b c d Sinai 2017, p. 2–5.
  2. ^ Sinai 2015.
  3. ^ Sinai 2020.
  4. ^ a b Zadeh 2015.
  5. ^ Stewart 2017, p. 7.
  6. ^ Van Putten 2024, p. 152.
  7. ^ Deroche 2022, p. 121–129.
  8. ^ Deroche 2022, p. 136.
  9. ^ Anthony 2019.
  10. ^ Van Putten 2024, p. 162.
  11. ^ Sadeghi & Goudarzi 2012, pp. 1–4.
  12. ^ Sadeghi & Goudarzi 2012, p. 4.
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