The Qur'an in Context: Historical and Literary Investigations into the Qur'anic Milieu (review)

In the 1970s, works such as John Wansbrough's Quranic Studies: Sources and Methods of Scriptural Interpretation (Oxford, 1977) and Patricia Crone & Michael Cook's Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World (Cambridge, 1977) and, later, Christoph Luxenberg's Die syro-aramäishe Lesart des Koran: Ein Beitrag zur Entschlüsselung der Koransprache (Berlin, 2000) — among others — mistrusted or completely rejected Arabic sources about early Islamic history and developed new hypotheses to explain what "really happened." In these circumstances, Western scholarship on the Qur'an and its origins was said to be "in a state of disarray" and a conference was held in Berlin in January 2004 to study the situation, and this hefty volume emerged as a result of it.

The book is divided into two parts: Part One deals with the Qur'an's historical context and consists of 12 articles while Part Two deals with contextualizing the Qur'an and has 15 articles. Each of the articles has its own extensive bibliography.

The volume may be considered a major account of the field of Qur'anic studies in current Western scholarship, showing the main scholarly concerns of those working in it today. The emphasis in the book is on seeing the Qur'an as a text reflecting the environment of Late Antiquity, and on employing methods of microstructural literary analysis to its content that have been usually used in biblical studies. Viewed in a diachronic perspective, the Qur'an is seen as a continuing discourse with its contemporaneous community and its historical and cultural conditions, and as a parallel text to other texts of Late Antiquity and especially as part of those of the biblical tradition. Yet the Qur'an's integrity and distinct uniqueness are made manifest in its milieu of the Arabian Peninsula.

This milieu is shown in Part One to have been in contact with surrounding nations and civilizations, with not an insignificant amount of exchange of ideas. Although this fact was known by historians, there has been little attention to detailed literary analysis of the Qur'an itself in relation to those ideas or the wording that expresses them.

In Part One, Mikhail D. Bukharin shows how Meccan trade connected South Arabia, Syria, and Mesopotamia; Norbert Nebes demonstrates the inroads made by Zoroastrian Iran and Christian Ethiopia into the Arabian Peninsula; Harald Suermann examines non-Arab sources on the rise of Islam and shows the apocalyptic perceptions of Christians and Jews regarding the Arab invaders; and Kirill Dmitriev studies 'Adi ibn Zayd (d. circa 600 C.E.), a pre-Islamic Christian Arab poet from al-Hira in Mesopotamia, and offers a close reading of his poem about the biblical story of the creation of the world and the fall of man. These are only some of the themes dealt with in the articles comprising Part One.

In his article, Dmitriev compares parts of 'Adi's poem with relevant texts in the Qur'an showing amazing parallel features, and also the Qur'an's selectivity by being "less concerned with the narration of history than with presenting its ethically relevant message." The Qur'an is shown as drawing on something already known in order to impart moral teaching, and thus the poem provides an insight into the pre-Islamic religious background of the Arabs and their acquaintance with the biblical tradition. No Qur'anic dependence is implied here but rather a reference to an insistent and strong religious message that uses all available means to eloquently communicate new teaching to people.

In Part Two, there is more detailed microstructural literary analysis of the Qur'an. This begins with the issue of chronology, where Nicolai Sinai defends the dating criteria of Theodor Nöldeke in his pioneering book Geschichte des Qorâns (Göttingen 1860), in which he chronologically divided the Qur'anic corpus into (a) early, (b) middle, and (c...