Table Of ContentThe 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.
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ISSN 1567-2808
ISBN 978 90 04 17688 1
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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
vi contents
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
contents 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
viii contents
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)
