The Wiley Blackwell Companions to Religion series presents a collection of the most recent scholarship and knowledge about world religions. Each volume draws together newly commissioned essays by distinguished authors in the field, and is presented in a style which is accessible to undergraduate students, as well as scholars and the interested general reader. These volumes approach the subject in a creative and forward‐thinking style, providing a forum in which leading scholars in the field can make their views and research available to a wider audience.

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The Wiley Blackwell Companion to the Anglican Communion
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John Hart

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to the Qurʾān
Edited by Andrew Rippin and Jawid Mojaddedi

Binyamin Abrahamov, Professor of Islamic Theology and Qurʾānic Studies, Bar‐Ilan University, Israel.

Carol Bakhos, Professor of Late Antique Judaism and Jewish Studies, University of California at Los Angeles, USA.

Herbert Berg, Professor, Department of Philosophy and Religion, University of North Carolina, Wilmington, USA.

Christopher Buck, Independent scholar and attorney in Pennsylvania, having taught at Michigan State University, Quincy University, Millikin University, and Carleton University, USA.

Michael Carter, Professor of Arabic, University of Oslo (until 2005), Honorary Professor at the Medieval and Early Modern Centre of Sydney University, Australia.

François Déroche, Professor, École pratique des hautes études, Paris, France.

Salwa El‐Awa, Lecturer in Arabic, Department of Languages, Translation, and Communication, Swansea University, UK.

Reuven Firestone, Regenstein Professor of Medieval Judaism and Islam at Hebrew Union College, Los Angeles, senior fellow at the University of Southern California’s Center for Religion and Civic Culture and co‐director of the Center for Muslim‐Jewish Engagement, USA.

Anna M. Gade, Professor, Department of Languages and Cultures of Asia and the Religious Studies Program, University of Wisconsin‐Madison, USA.

Alan Godlas, Associate Professor, Department of Religion, University of Georgia, USA.

Rosalind Ward Gwynne, Emerita Professor of Islamic Studies, Department of Religious Studies, University of Tennessee, USA.

Avraham Hakim, Arabic teacher and lecturer on Islam, The Lowy School for Overseas Students, Tel Aviv University, Israel.

Navid Kermani, writer, Cologne, Germany.

Leah Kinberg, Senior Lecturer, Department of Middle Eastern and African History, Tel Aviv University, Israel.

Marianna Klar, Research Associate, Centre of Islamic Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies, London, UK.

Jane Dammen McAuliffe, Director of John W. Kluge Center and Office of Scholarly Programs, Library of Congress, USA.

Mustansir Mir, University Professor of Islamic Studies, Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Youngstown State University, Ohio, USA.

Khaleel Mohammed, Professor of Religion, San Diego State University, California, USA.

Jawid Mojaddedi, Professor of Religion, Rutgers University, New Jersey, USA.

Angelika Neuwirth, Professor, Seminar für Semitistik und Arabistik, Freie Universität, Berlin, and director of the Project Corpus Coranicum at the Berlin‐Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Germany.

Gordon Nickel, Adjunct Professor, University of Calgary, Canada.

Johanna Pink, Professor, Orientalisches Seminar, Albert‐Ludwigs‐Universität Freiburg, Germany.

A. Kevin Reinhart, Associate Professor, Department of Religion, Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, USA.

Gabriel Said Reynolds, Professor of Islamic Studies and Theology, University of Notre Dame, USA.

Andrew Rippin, formerly Dean, Faculty of Humanities, Professor of History, University of Victoria, Canada.

Uri Rubin, Professor Emeritus, Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies, Tel Aviv University, Israel.

Abdullah Saeed, Sultan of Oman Professor of Arab and Islamic Studies, Director of the National Centre of Excellence for Islamic Studies, University of Melbourne, Australia.

Walid Saleh, Associate Professor, Department of Religion and Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations, University of Toronto, Canada.

Aliza Shnizer, Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies, Tel Aviv University, Israel.

Mun’im Sirry, Assistant Professor, Department of Theology, University of Notre Dame, USA.

Tamara Sonn, Hamad Bin Khalifa Al‐Thani Professor in the History of Islam at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, USA.

Diana Steigerwald, Assistant Professor, Department of Religion, California State University, Long Beach, USA.

Roberto Tottoli, Professor, Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale,” Italy.

Brannon Wheeler, Professor of History. Director of the Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies, United States Naval Academy, Annapolis, Maryland, USA.

A. H. Mathias Zahniser, Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies, Asbury Theological Seminary, Wilmore, Kentucky, USA, and Scholar in Residence at Greenville College, Illinois, USA.

Kate Zebiri, Senior Lecturer in Arabic and Islamic Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies, London, UK.

The publication of a volume devoted to the Qurʾān in the “companion” genre marks the emergence of the text of Muslim scripture within the canon of world literature in a manner particularly appropriate to the twenty‐first century. This companion is explicitly designed to guide the reader who may have little exposure to the Qurʾān beyond a curiosity evoked by the popular media. It aims to provide such a person with the starting point of a general orientation and take him or her to a well‐advanced state of understanding regarding the complexities of the text and its associated traditions. However, a “companion” volume such as this is also an opportunity for scholars to extend the boundaries of what might be deemed to be the “accepted” approaches to the text of the Qurʾān because such a volume provides, it is to be hoped, the material which will inspire future generations of scholars who first encounter the Qurʾān in the classroom and for whom new avenues of exploration provide the excitement of research and discovery.

Organization

This companion has been organized in order to facilitate its usefulness for the groups of readers who may wish to embark on a deeper understanding of the Qurʾān in its historical context and as an object of scholarly study. Part I functions as an introduction to the text but its three chapters are oriented in different, yet complementary ways. All readers, but especially those who are coming to the Qurʾān with little foreknowledge of the text and/or the scholarly study of it, will find these chapters the place to start. “Introducing” the Qurʾān (chapter 1) means orienting the reader to the basic facts, themselves coming from a variety of perspectives both internal and external to the text. “Discovering” the Qurʾān (chapter 2) speaks to the experience of a student and considers how one might integrate the Qurʾān within a framework of religious studies. “Contextualizing” the Qurʾān (chapter 3) orients the reader to a Muslim scholarly perspective, putting the emphasis on the historical context in which the facts about the Qurʾān are to be understood. Each chapter thus adds a level of complexity to the task of approaching the Qurʾān, although each chapter recognizes certain common elements which pose a challenge to the reader, especially the question of the choice of “lens” through which one should read the text.

Part II addresses the text of the Qurʾān on both the structural and the historical level, two dimensions which have always been seen in scholarly study as fully intertwined. Issues of origin and composition lie deeply embedded in all of these concerns because, it is argued, the structure of the text – which is what makes the book a challenge to read – must be accounted for through the process of history. However, the final aim of these attempts at explaining the Qurʾān is directed towards a single end, that of coming to an understanding of the text. The internal structure of the Qurʾān is the focus of chapter 4. These observations are complemented by an intricate series of observations about the nature of the text and its language, including the patterns of address used in the text (chapter 5), language – especially its use of literary figures – in chapter 6, the relationship between poetry and language as it affects the Qurʾān (chapter 7), and the range of the vocabulary of the text that is thought to come from non‐Arabic sources in chapter 8. All of these factors – structure, language, and vocabulary – combine and become manifested in the emergence of a text of the scripture within the context of a community of Muslims (chapter 9), creating the text which emerges as sacred through the complex passage of history (chapter 10), which is then transmitted through the generations of Muslims, the focus of chapter 11. All of this happens in a historical context of the early community which is shown to be foundational to the understanding of the text in both the person of Muḥammad and his life (chapter 12) and that of the early leader ʿUmar b. al‐Khaṭṭāb (chapter 13).

Such details provide an understanding of the text on a linguistic and historical level, but the overall nature of its message is fundamentally ignored in such considerations. Part III thus turns to consider some of the major topics which characterize that message. Muslims have, in fact, seen the Qurʾān as all‐encompassing in its treatment of human existence and an inventory of themes can really only provide examples of ways of analyzing and categorizing the contents of the scripture: there is little substitute for a rigorous study of the text itself if one wishes to gain a clear sense of what it is really about as a whole. However, certain aspects do provide key ideas and provide the opportunity to illustrate methods of approach. Dominating all of the message of the Qurʾān is, of course, the figure of Allāh, the all‐powerful, one God revealed in the Qurʾān just as He is in the biblical tradition (chapter 14), through a process of revelation brought by prophets (chapter 15), three important ones of whom in the Qurʾān are Moses (chapter 16), Abraham (chapter 17), and Jesus (chapter 18). The inclusion of such prophets in the Qurʾān highlights the importance of understanding the biblical background in the Qurʾān (chapter 19) and its references to other religions in general (chapter 20). The message those prophets (including Muḥammad in the Qurʾān) bring argues for belief in God (chapter 21) among reflective, thinking human beings (chapter 22). However, the prophets also bring a message of how life should be lived in both love (chapter 23) and war (chapter 24).

This text of the Qurʾān, as all of the preceding material has made clear, is a complex one that Muslims have always known needed interpretation. This might be said to be the nature of divine revelation, which poses the problem of how the infinity and absoluteness of God can be expressed in the limited and ambiguous format of human language. Such a situation calls for a hermeneutics that is elaborated within the framework of Islam (chapter 25) which can also draw its inspiration from a multitude of sources, always filtered through Islamic eyes and needs (chapter 26). Differing approaches to Islam developed in the Muslim world, variations which the Qurʾān facilitated through its conduciveness to interpretation: thus ṣūfīs (chapter 27), two of the most influential of whom were Rūmī (chapter 28) and Ibn al‐ʿArabī (chapter 29), Twelver Shīʿites (chapter 30), and Ismāʿīlīs (chapter 31) all sought strength and support for their ideas in the text of the Qurʾān and developed their own principles by which to understand the scripture. Modernity has posed its own distinct challenges that can be seen reflected in changes in the interpretation of the Qurʾān (chapter 32).

However, the Qurʾān has far more significance within Muslim life than as an object functioning as a ground for exegesis. The world of the Qurʾān extends much further, becoming the basis of scholastic consideration and development of learning within the context of exegetical elaboration (chapter 33), theology (chapter 34), and jurisprudence (chapter 35). It is a touchstone for every discussion of ethical issues in the modern world (chapter 36), just as it was the basis for literary development in the classical world (chapter 37). Underlying all of that, however, is the status of the Qurʾān not so much as a rational launching pad for further thought but as a text of devotion, as displayed in the attention to its orality and manifestation in recitation (chapter 38). The application of the Qurʾān thus extends through the many aspects of Muslim day‐to‐day life.

Technical Considerations

A work such as this depends upon a significant number of scholars interested in making their academic work accessible to a broad reading public and a new generation of students. As editors of the volume, we would like to express our appreciation to all of the contributors – a truly international gathering of scholars – for their efforts. There is a delicate balance in a work such as this between documenting and annotating every thought and being mindful of the variety of readers who are the potential audience; thus, the number of references and endnotes has been drastically reduced but not totally eliminated, for it is in such supporting apparatus that there lies one of the sources of research directions for future generations of scholars. As well, it is notable that there clearly continues to be a need to justify many points of discussion with reference to original and secondary sources; it is perhaps indicative of the still‐developing nature of Qurʾānic studies that it is not possible to assume an agreed‐upon core of basic data and interpretation that would simplify much of the documentation in a volume such as this.

In an attempt to eliminate some of the “clutter” that is often associated with academic work, the bibliographical references for each chapter have been consolidated into one overall bibliography at the end of the volume. The exercise of compiling this bibliography has been, for the editors, and for the publisher’s copy‐editor as well, a task made all the more complex because of the lack of standard editions of many works of constant reference in the field – an aspect aggravated by the loose control over the reprinting of works by different publishers in many parts of the Arab world who make no reference to the source of the original print and who oftentimes use slightly variant page numbering even in direct reprints of a text; thus, for some items in the bibliography, several prints will be listed because those are the ones available to individual writers, and only seldom has it been possible to consolidate different editions. The situation does not exist solely with reprints of Arabic texts in the Arab world, although it certainly afflicts that area far more extensively; the record of the European publishing project of the Encyclopaedia of Islam is equally complex, although the correlations between the multiple versions of that work are at least somewhat more straightforward. For ease of citation, all references to the Encyclopaedia of Islam New Edition (= second edition) in this book have been reduced to EI2 (2004), meaning the CD‐ROM version which is a direct reproduction of the printed work in English which appeared in twelve volumes (plus supplements) between 1954 and 2004 (and which is now also available in a Web version). The now emerging third edition appears to be planned under English head words, so no correlation with that edition will likely be possible.

References to the Qurʾān are cited generally in the format “Q sūra number:āya number,” numbered according to what is commonly called the Cairo text. Dates are generally cited in the format “Hijrī/Gregorian” unless otherwise indicated.

Jawid Mojaddedi

On July 22, 2015, the academic study of the Qurʾān made international headlines due to the announcement of the results of the radiocarbon dating of a manuscript held at the University of Birmingham. The resulting dates (568–645 CE) covered a range that encompasses earlier dates than previously achieved by such methods, including before the traditional date of birth of the Prophet Muḥammad of 570 CE. While the average viewer of this news item might have believed the original manuscript of the Qurʾān had been discovered, or “the one belonging to the first caliph, Abū Bakr” (http://www.bbc.com/news/business‐35151643), informed inquirers found that this radiocarbon dating raised more questions than it answered.

The immediate cause of doubts over the results of this radiocarbon dating, which are always very broad and have been known to fail with documents of verifiable dates of origin, was the graphical evidence, which has been interpreted as pointing to a much later date; it is after all the date of the text that is most important, not the specific date of the parchment, though possibilities of storage or reuse of such material would open further areas of exploration. And, of course, the Birmingham manuscript is not a complete Qurʾān, but just two folios of an estimated 200 in its source. In spite of all these concerns, this discovery nonetheless managed to raise public awareness of the complexities of dating the Qurʾān and also of the many question marks that remain about the history of the Islamic holy text.

If this discovery had been made forty years ago, the opinions of academicians about its historical value may not have diverged so much, neither among themselves nor from the opinions of the widely quoted local Muslim leaders in Birmingham. However, the academic study of the history of the text of the Qurʾān has transformed considerably in the past four decades, not only with regard to paleography and codicology, but also, in combination with this, through the seriousness with which scholars have attempted to situate the Qurʾān in the wider history of the Near and Middle East. The adoption of the same principles of historical study as used in other fields has enabled a much larger number of scholars than ever before to communicate and collaborate in constructive ways, rather than exceptionalize and thereby isolate the study of the history of Islam.

In view of scholarly preoccupations in recent decades, a whole section, Part II, is devoted to the analysis of the textual structure of the Qurʾān and its history. Among the chapters of Part II there can be found, in addition to the chapters on the Qurʾānic text itself, a chapter on Muḥammad by Herbert Berg. This is because the biography of the prophet of Islam and its relationship to Islamic scriptures is at the center of diverging theories about the history of the Qurʾānic text. It provides the narrative framework for the revelation of the Islamic holy book in traditional understanding, and, through the correspondence of its content with much of the content of the Qurʾān, makes a compelling case for this role. It is therefore not altogether surprising that for most of the history of the academic study of the Qurʾān and the biography of Muḥammad, there was a near consensus about their inseparable historical relationship.

The reason for doubting the traditional understanding of the relationship between the Qurʾān and the biography of Muḥammad is that, while it satisfies theological needs perfectly adequately, the same cannot be said for historical questions. The work of John Wansbrough in the 1970s represents the most important turning point for newer, “revisionist” approaches to this relationship in the quest for more convincing historical answers. For Wansbrough, “prophetic logia” (the Qurʾān) were much later exegetically historicized by “the Muḥammadan evangelium” (the biography of Muḥammad), and there is no reason for academicians to assume that the two were originally related. Based on the dating of available textual material and through Wansbrough’s influence, the Qurʾān has increasingly come to be seen in the academy as independent in origin from the much later written biography of Muḥammad, while in traditional scholarship they have continued to be treated as inseparable. The Wiley Blackwell Companion to the Qurʾān includes chapters that take a range of differing approaches to this issue, reflecting the diversity of opinion among academicians today.

Pulling away the entire framework that has propped up a structure always has a devastating effect. This case of a framework that has endured for more than a millennium through different intellectual traditions by embedding the Qurʾān within a contemporary life‐story is no exception. However, as Wansbrough has put it, “the seventh century Hijaz owes its historiographical existence almost entirely to the creative endeavor of Muslim and Orientalist scholarship” (Wansbrough 1987: 9); the knowledge that remains without this is sparse. As a result, while the study of the Qurʾān adopted rules of the game that correspond to those of historians of other aspects of the Near and Middle East in the same time period, the heavy price to pay for this has been the loss of confidence in accumulated knowledge of generations of scholarship on the history of early Islam that had taken on the assumptions of the faith traditions being studied.

The experience of comparing scholarship on early Islam before the 1970s with that which emerged afterwards among revisionists can be like comparing work on a previously busy and crammed canvas with that on a fresh canvas, where the justification for every brush stroke is more rigorously scrutinized. This is one of the more challenging aspects of more recent scholarship on the history of the Qurʾān, as well as the more startling, for those familiar with traditional scholarship on the subject. In consequence, although the academic study of the Qurʾān is hardly in its infancy, new ways of understanding it have proliferated in recent decades, including ground‐breaking works by contributors to this volume.

There is still much research that needs to be carried out, as highlighted by the fact that even a critical edition of the Qurʾān is yet to be prepared. But this is a most exciting field at the present time, and the developments in academic research into the Qurʾān may have an impact eventually on traditional understanding as well, especially since this is a fertile period for new twenty‐first‐century interpretations of the religion by Muslim reformers. More broadly, the fruits of this research so far, such as through highlighting the consonance and continuities between the Qurʾān and late antique Syriac sources for Christianity, have already been drawn upon increasingly to counter the exceptionalization of Islam by both islamophobic circles and supremacist Muslim factions. As a result, Islam is increasingly seen, both theologically and historically, as another product of the same milieu of Semitic monotheism in the Near and Middle East that also eventually produced the forms of Judeo‐Christian traditions that dominate the English‐speaking world today.

The fact that it is the Qurʾān that is being studied in this new light means that other fields in Islamic studies are also inevitably being impacted by these developments, since it is of fundamental importance to all representations of Islam. The most obvious example is the study of minority religious traditions that had long been dismissed by mainstream theologians for their belief in the continuation to some degree of divine revelation and prophethood after Muḥammad, with the effect that academicians had also taken on the same prejudices. Seemingly afoul of the basic dogmas of Islam, traditions such as Ṣūfism and Ismāʿīlism had even developed defensive public justifications that ended up being regarded in traditional scholarship as the normative expressions of their traditions rather than apologetics. A more nuanced understanding of the sacralization of the Qurʾān and the development of related dogmas as being the results of a slower process can reveal a much more diverse and historically dynamic range of competing interpretations about revelation and prophethood, especially during the early centuries of Islam. These matters are explored further in the chapters in this volume in Part IV on interpretations of the Qurʾān in minority traditions, and by influential representatives such as Rūmī and Ibn al‐ʿArabī.

Whatever interpretation one has of the history of the text of the Qurʾān and its sacralization, there is no doubt about its status in the eyes of Muslims for the documented history of the community. It is also precisely because of its supreme status for them that the changing experiences of the Muslim community over the centuries have necessitated new readings of the Qurʾān. Since the encounter of modernity has had the most emphatic impact of this kind, the chapters on modern interpretations of the Qurʾān and its usage in the Internet age in this volume are particularly illuminating in this regard.

The increasingly multimedia experience of texts in recent decades has also had the effect of highlighting the aesthetic qualities of the Qurʾān, especially in aural, oral, and visual experience. This arguably redresses the imbalance in much academic study focused on the written text. The chapters in this volume about such qualities are strong reminders of the significance of the primary encounter of the Qurʾān for Muslims in these different dimensions and the aesthetic beauty that has inspired convictions about the Qurʾān’s inimitability.

Aesthetic aspects are increasingly highlighted through studies using the latest critical theory and can be experienced more easily than ever through the latest technology, ensuring that they do not become overshadowed by research developments in the study of the Qurʾānic text’s early history. They ensure that it will never be difficult to see why the Qurʾān is so revered and treasured by more than a billion people in the world today. The inclusion of these chapters makes the Wiley Blackwell Companion to the Qurʾān not only a resource for accessible introductions based on the latest academic scholarship, but also a very well‐rounded volume in its coverage of topics.

The principal editor of this volume, Andrew Rippin, became too ill in Spring 2015 to continue with its preparation, at which point I became involved in its editing. Andrew died on November 29th, 2016. On behalf of all contributors, I would like to dedicate this volume to his memory.