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Notes on contributors
asma barlas is Professor of Politics at Ithaca College, New York, where she is the founding director of the Center for the Study of Culture, Race and Ethnicity. She has also been on the board of directors for the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy in Washington, DC. Her recent publications include ‘Believing women‘ in Islam: Unreading patriarchal interpretations of the Quran¯ (2002) and Islam, Muslims and the US: Essays in religion and politics (2004).
sheila blair shares the Norma Jean Calderwood University Professorship of Islamic and Asian Art at Boston College. Her publications include A compendium of chronicles: Rashid al-Din’s illustrated History of the world (1995) and Islamic inscriptions (1998), as well as numerous works co-authored with Jonathan Bloom, such as The art and architecture of Islam: 1250–1800 (1994) and Islamic arts (1997). Her tenth book, Islamic calligraphy, is due out in 2006.
jonathan bloom is joint Norma Jean Calderwood Professor of Islamic and Asian Art at Boston College. His publications include Minaret: Symbol of Islam (1989), Paper before print: The history and impact of paper in the Islamic world (2001) and Early Islamic art and architecture (2002), as well as many works on Islamic art and architecture, several co-authored with Sheila Blair, the most recent of which is Islam: A thousand years of faith and power (2000, repr. 2001 and 2002).
fred m. donner is Professor of Near Eastern History in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago and editor of al-Us.ur al-Wust ¯ .a, the Bulletin of Middle East Medievalists. His publications on the early period of Islamic history include The early Islamic conquests (1981), The conquest of Arabia (1993), a volume in the History of al-T. abar¯ı project, and his more recent Narratives of Islamic origins: The beginnings of Islamic historical writing (1998), as well as numerous articles.
claude gilliot is Professor in Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Aix-en-Provence, and is on the editorial board of Arabica: Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies/Revue d’´etudes arabes et islamiques. His publications include Ex´eg`ese, langue et th´eologie en islam: L’ex´eg`ese coranique de Tabari (1990) and numerous articles, especially on noteworthy figures from the classical exegetical tradition on the Quran.
william a. graham is Murray A. Albertson Professor of Middle Eastern Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and John Lord O’Brian Professor and Dean of the Faculty of Divinity at Harvard University. A specialist in the early religious history of Islam, he is author of Divine word and prophetic word in early Islam (1977) and his Beyond the written word: Oral aspects of scripture in the history of religion (1986) has won critical acclaim.
navid kermani is presently working as a freelance writer in Cologne, Germany. As a long-term fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin (Wissenschaftskolleg), he collaborated on numerous projects relating to the comparative study of religions. His interest in performative aesthetics is seen in his Gott ist sch¨on: Das asthetische Erleben des Koran ¨ (2000). His latest book, Der Schrecken Gottes: Attar, Hiob und die metaphysische Revolte (2005), deals with the Job-motif in the Middle East and Europe. For his literary and academic work, he has received several prizes, the latest being the ‘Europe-Prize’ 2004 of the Heinz Schwarzkopf-Foundation.
alexander knysh is Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He has published extensively (in English, Russian and Arabic) on local manifestations of Islam, from manuscript traditions to saint cults. Recent English publications include Ibn al-Arabi in the later Islamic tradition: The making of a polemical image in medieval Islam (1998) and Islamic mysticism: A short history (2000). fred leemhuis is Professor of Islamic Studies at the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. His ¨ interests encompass both textual-linguistic issues and modern socio-religious trends in the Arab world. Among his publications are The D and H stems in koranic Arabic: A comparative study of the function and meaning of the fa ala and af ala forms in koranic usage (1977), a Dutch translation of the Quran and field reports ¯ on his work on the Quran manuscripts found in recent excavations at the Dakhla ¯ Oasis in Egypt.
jane dammen mcauliffe is Professor in the Departments of Arabic and of History and Dean of Arts and Sciences at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. In addition to many articles and book chapters, she has published Quranic ¯ Christians: An analysis of classical and modern exegesis (1991), Abbasid authority ¯ affirmed (1995) and With reverence for the word: Medieval scriptural exegesis in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (2003). More recently, she has been the general editor of Brill’s five-volume Encyclopaedia of the Quran¯ . daniel a. madigan is Professor of Islamic Studies and Muslim–Christian Relations at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, where he is also Director of the Institute for the Study of Religions and Cultures. Specialising in the Abrahamic scriptural heritage, he has published a volume entitled The Quran’s ˆ self-image: Writing and authority in Islam’s scripture (2001).
harald motzki is Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands. His extensive publications on Islamic social, legal and religious history include Die Anfange der islamischen Jurisprudenz: Ihre Entwicklung in Mekka bis zur Mitte des 2./8. Jahrhunderts (1991; Eng. trans. The origins of Islamic jurisprudence: Meccan fiqh before the classical schools (2002)), The biography of Muhammad: The issue of the sources (2000) and H. ad¯ıth: Origins and developments (2004). angelika neuwirth holds the Chair of Arabic Studies at the Freie Universit¨at of Berlin, where she directs the Seminar fur Semitistik und Arabistik. She has ¨ published extensively on the text of the Quran, especially on its formal qualities ¯ and its source criticism, particularly as regards its liturgical uses. Her numerous publications on the Quran – among which are both German and English articles ¯ and book chapters, such as ‘Vom Rezitationstext uber die Liturgie zum Kanon: Zu ¨ Entstehung und Wiederauflosung der Surenkomposition im Verlauf der ¨ Entwicklung eines islamischen Kultus’ (1996) and ‘Mekkan texts – Medinan additions? Politics and the re-reading of liturgical communications’ (2004) – were initiated with her critically acclaimed Habilitation work, Studien zur Komposition der mekkanischen Suren (1981).
andrew rippin is Professor of History and Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Victoria, Canada. His research into the formative period of Islamic civilisation in the Arab world, as well as the history of the Quran and its ¯ interpretation, has resulted in numerous publications, a selection of which are collected in his The Quran and its interpretative tradition ¯ (2001). He is also the author of Muslims, their religious beliefs and practices (two volumes, 1990 and 1993; 20012, 20053, as a single volume). abdulaziz sachedina is Francis Ball Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. A core member of various initiatives such as the Preventive Diplomacy project of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), his recent publications include The just ruler (al-sult.an al- ¯ adil) ¯ in Sh¯ı ite Islam: The comprehensive authority of the jurist in Imamite jurisprudence (1998) and Islamic roots of democratic pluralism (2001). stefan wild is emeritus Professor of Semitic Philology and Islamic Studies at the University of Bonn, Germany. In addition to the political aspects of Islamic history, his research interests include classical Arabic literature and lexicography, as well as modern Arabic literature. Editor of Die Welt des Islams, his recent publications include The Quran as text ¯ (1996) and Mensch, Prophet und Gott im Koran (2001).
Introduction
According to a thirteenth-century compilation of quranic knowledge – a ¯ medieval ‘companion to the Quran’ – the Arabic Qur ¯ an contains 323,015 ¯ letters, 77,439 words, more than 6,000 verses and 114 chapters or suras. ¯ 1 This makes it a rather modestly sized text when contrasted with the Upanishads, the Mahabharata and the Pali canon of Buddhist writings. But why would these titles come immediately to mind as the point of comparison? The quick answer to that question lies in their classification as ‘scripture’ or ‘sacred text’ or ‘holy writ’ or ‘divine word’ or even ‘classics’. These works, and many others that could be added, found their place in the late nineteenthcentury publishing project known as The sacred books of the East. 2 That project itself marked an important moment in the conceptual expansion of such categorisation. For centuries, the English term ‘scripture’, and its equivalents in European languages, had been virtually synonymous with the Bible. While it was recognised, particularly by Christian apologists and missionaries, that other texts were revered by their respective religious communities, that recognition was usually negative and antagonistic.
the peculiar category of scripture It is only rather recently that the term ‘scripture’ has itself become a contested category, a subject of scholarly interest and debate. An obvious, but not unique, reason is its etymology and derivation from the Latin word for ‘writing’, scriptura (pl. scripturae). Not all texts that have achieved a normative status within particular religious communities are written texts and, for others, writing is not the primary form of their dissemination. Scholars of comparative religion have discovered that this category, a category conceived within a Jewish and Christian framework, does not translate easily and accurately to other religious traditions. Neither content nor form suffices to define and delimit this concept. But ‘scripture’ does describe a connection between a particular community and a particular text. It names a relationship. Rather than designating a quality that inheres in a text, the term marks an affiliation between a text and those who accord it special status. People who do not acknowledge or share that affiliation will study and treat such texts differently from those who do. As commonly classified, the Quran falls into this category of ‘scripture’ and that categorisation shapes ¯ the way in which it has been read, by both Muslims and non-Muslims, and the way in which scholars have treated it.
the self-consciously scriptural scripture Within the past decade increasing attention has been paid to what I would call the ‘self-declarative’ quality of the Quran. In the words of one ¯ scholar, the Quran ‘describes itself by various generic terms, comments, ¯ explains, distinguishes, puts itself into perspective vis-`a-vis other revelations, denies hostile interpretations, and so on’.3 An earlier essay made an even more categorical declaration: ‘the Quran is the most meta-textual, most self-referential holy text known in the history of world religions’.4 Another astute reader of the Quran remarks that the ‘abiding enigma of the text ¯ is that, along with verses that are to be construed as timeless divine pronouncements, it also contains a large amount of commentary upon and analysis of the processes of its own revelation and the vicissitudes of its own reception in time’.5 The Quran’s ‘self-declarative’ or ‘self-referential’ ¯ nature expresses itself in various forms but one important expression is found in the quranic term ¯ kitab¯ , a common Arabic word that is frequently, but insufficiently, rendered as ‘book’. A careful collection and analysis of the 261 appearances of this word in the Quran – to say nothing of the ¯ many more occurrences of its cognates – reveal multiple significations that range from the divine inventory of all creation to the eschatological record of every human deed.
The Quran’s representation of itself as ¯ ‘kitab¯ ’ – its self-declaration or self-characterisation as such – is linked to these documentations of divine knowledge but in a fluid and open-ended fashion. This very ambiguity has exercised Western scholarship on the Quran¯ for well over a century. Successive scholars have asked whether the Prophet was consciously occupied with the production of a written corpus, a calque on such earlier codices as the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, and whether he saw this as a defining mark of his prophethood. While numerous, and competing, responses to this historical puzzle have been proposed, none has secured sustained consensus. Consequently, the Quran’s many ¯ self-declarations continue to tantalise: ‘That is the kitab¯ about which there is no doubt, guidance for those who fear God’ (Q 2:2); ‘indeed, we revealed it as an Arabic quran¯ so that you may understand’ (Q 12:2); ‘these are the verses of the kitab¯ and a quran¯ that makes clear’ (Q 15:1); ‘a kitab¯ that we have revealed to you, full of blessing so that you may reflect upon its verses’ (Q 37:29); ‘rather, it is a glorious quran¯ ’ (Q 85:21). I have used the Arabic words kitab¯ and quran¯ , rather than giving their English equivalents, in order to capture the polysemous quality of these terms.
Verses such as these represent but a small fraction of the Quran’s textual self-referencing; equally ¯ prominent are frequently found self-descriptives like ‘glorious’, ‘truthful’, ‘flawless’, ‘wise’. Among the most perplexing of these self-declarative verses is one that begins: ‘He is the one who revealed to you the kitab¯ in which there are clear verses – they are the ‘mother’ of the book – and others which are ambiguous.’ Q 3:7 continues with several more statements but for now I want to highlight the contrast drawn between the terms that I have translated as ‘clear’ and ‘ambiguous’. My rendering of these terms represents but one of several interpretive traditions on this verse but it suffices to invoke the decisive classification. By dividing its contents into two hermeneutical categories, the ‘clear’ or ‘defined’ and the ‘ambiguous’ or ‘undefined’, the Quran creates – ¯ to borrow a phrase from biblical studies – its own ‘canon within the canon’.
It adduces an additional form of self-description and self-characterisation, one oriented to the interpretative parameters of different kinds of verses. In its self-conscious scripturality, the Quran does not simply define ¯ and describe itself. It also situates itself in relation to other ‘books’, to other ‘scriptures’. It clearly expresses an awareness of divine revelation as a chronological sequence, a series of time-specific disclosures intended for particular peoples. Q 2:136 marks the milestones in that chronology: ‘Say, “We believe in God and what has been revealed to us and in what was revealed to Abraham and Ishmael, and Isaac, and Jacob, and the tribes, in what Moses and Jesus were given and in what the prophets were given from their lord.”’ Q 4:136 urges belief in the ‘kitab¯ that he [God] revealed before’ and promises perdition for those who do not believe in ‘God and his angels and his kutub [plural of kitab¯ ] and his messengers and the last day’. Being more explicit about these ‘kutub’, in yet other passages the Quran¯ designates ‘what Moses and Jesus were given’ as the Torah (Tawrat¯ ) and the Gospel (Inj¯ıl), recognising their respective positions in the continuity of revelation.
The notion that each successive scripture confirms its predecessor wins repeated affirmation in the Quran (Q 2:42, 3:3, 12:111 and 46:12, among ¯ many other instances) with the Gospel’s confirmation of the Torah (Q 5:46) used as the primary example. But recognition and confirmation do not equal perpetual validation. Among its strongest self-declaratives are the Quran’s assertions of its overriding pre-eminence, its utter finality. With ¯ this revelation, God has completed his salvific sequencing of prophets and messengers. The words spoken to Muh. ammad, the ‘seal of the prophets’, constitute God’s full and final guidance for humankind. Assertions of pre-eminence are but one of the ways in which another essential quality of the Quran manifests itself. The Qur ¯ an is an argumen- ¯ tative text. Even the most casual reader cannot help but be struck by the omnipresence of debate and disputation, of apologetic and polemic, of postulation and refutation.
As I have remarked in an earlier essay, ‘the operative voice in any given pericope, whether it be that of God, of Muh. ammad or of another protagonist, regularly addresses actual or implicit antagonists’.6 A recent study of this phenomenon finds in the quranic text ‘full arguments ¯ with premises and conclusions, antecedents and consequents, constructions a fortiori, commands supported by justification, conclusions produced by rule-based reasoning, comparisons, contrasts, and many other patterns’.7 Viewed from the perspective of historical analysis, the Quran quite clearly ¯ represents a Sitz im Leben of religious contestation. Continued claims to its own supremacy play out both retrospectively and prospectively. The quranic abrogation of previous scriptures argues that differences between ¯ the Quran and such earlier revelations as the Torah and the Gospel are a ¯ consequence of deliberate or inadvertent corruption in the transmission of these prior texts.
Looking forward in time, Q 2:23 challenges any would-be future prophet to ‘produce a sura like’ those of the Qur ¯ an and Q 17:88 ¯ declares that even the combined efforts of humans and jinn could create nothing equal to it. This human incapacity to meet the quranic challenge ¯ serves as the principal justification for the doctrine of the Quran’s inim- ¯ itability. These dual concepts – the corruption of earlier canonical texts and the human incapacity to match its excellence – buttress theological testimonies to the unique stature of this scripture.
readers and their discontents For the unprepared reader, however, affirmations of inimitability and avowals that the Quran is the ‘miracle’ that substantiates Muh ¯ . ammad’s claim to prophethood, can be hard to square with an initial exposure to the text. The Quran is not an easy read. If the comments of colleagues and ¯ friends over the years are any indication, I suspect that few who tackle the text cold, who simply pluck a paperback translation from a bookshop shelf, persevere to the concluding suras. Expectations of how a ‘scripture’ ¯ or a ‘classic’ should be structured – how it should ‘read’ – contribute to the frequently experienced frustrations. European and North American readers almost inevitably bring to the reading of the Quran biblically formed ¯ assumptions that ‘scripture’ will behave in a certain way, will have a narrative structure, will move forward in time, will assemble its genres into distinct sections. Even so sophisticated a student of Islamic literature as Theodor Noldeke (d. 1930), a renowned German scholar of the Qur ¨ an, fell ¯ prey to such presumptions: On the whole, while many parts of the Koran undoubtedly have considerable rhetorical power, even over an unbelieving reader, the book, aesthetically considered, is by no means a first-rate performance.
To begin with what we are most competent to criticise, let us look at some of the more extended narratives. It has already been noticed how vehement and abrupt they are where they ought to be characterized by epic repose. Indispensable links, both in expression and in the sequence of events, are often omitted, so that to understand these histories is sometimes far easier for us than for those who heard them first, because we know most of them from better sources. Along with this, there is a great deal of superfluous verbiage; and nowhere do we find a steady advance in the narration.8 Noldeke goes on to render a negative judgement on the Joseph account in ¨ the Quran (Q 12) as compared ‘with the story in Genesis, so admirably ¯ conceived and so admirably executed in spite of some slight discrepancies’. His criticism addresses not only the narrative elements of the Quran but ¯ the non-narrative, as well, where ‘the connection of ideas is extremely loose, and even the syntax betrays great awkwardness’.9 For most Western readers, the Bible operates as the literary template against which other sacred books are assessed.
Even those who have had no direct exposure to the biblical text absorb this presumption because the Bible’s echoes and archetypes have informed so much of subsequent Western literature. In an interesting turn, the world of biblical scholarship itself has felt the force of these popular preconceptions. The atomistic focus of much historical-critical exegesis has been challenged by recent calls for more integrated readings. These challenges make the further claim that such holistic readings can minimise the distance between the ancient and contemporary interpreter, can recapture – albeit at a more sophisticated level – the perspective of pre-critical reading .
The biblical scholars who make these assertions must argue that current literary expectations of what constitutes a ‘book’ are no different than those of the biblical expositors. In other words, they must contend that both contemporary readers and scholars and ancient readers and scholars are equally concerned with matters of internal coherence and consistency and of narrative development and closure. Against such claims, however, must be placed the views of those who assert that preoccupations of this sort were frequently absent in the production process of many biblical books: ‘The compilers of the biblical books were not trying to produce “works” in the literary sense, with a clear theme or plot and a high degree of closure, but rather anthologies of material which could be dipped into at any point.’10 To shift such expectations and to ease the frustrations of unprepared readers it may help if we return to the limitations of the term ‘scripture’ with its etymological roots sunk in the soil of the written word. Notions of genre discrimination, narrative development and chronological coherence recede in importance when the focus shifts from reading to recitation. As experienced by Muslims over the past fourteen centuries, the majority of whom could neither speak nor read Arabic, the Quran is primar- ¯ ily sound, not script. The earliest instruction in the Quran, that given ¯ to small children in elementary recitation classes, ignores the sequence of the suras.
These students start with the shortest s ¯ uras, those at the ¯ end of the written text, and they learn to vocalise them by repeating the sounds that emerge from their teacher’s mouth. The children chant in Arabic but as most do not know that language, they have no idea what they are chanting and the meaning of their chant must be explained to them. Yet for these children and for their elders, the sounds themselves are powerful, whether immediately intelligible or not. Understood to be God’s own words divinely dictated to his final prophet, they are full of sacred blessing. For those who do speak Arabic, the aural and textual beauty of the Quran¯ has been avowed for centuries. The sheer majesty of the language, its rhetorical force and the vitality of its rhythmical cadences produce a powerful impact on people who can appreciate its linguistic and literary qualities. Classical treatises even collect the stories of those who have been ‘slain by the Quran’, mortally overwhelmed by its sublime sounds. ¯ 11 Whether apocryphal or not, accounts of fainting, falling unconscious or even expiring portray a form of textual reception that is utterly foreign to contemporary expectations of linear narrative function.
readers and their reasons Yet from the time of the Quran’s appearance on the global literary stage, ¯ many non-Muslim readers have persevered. They have come to the text by different paths, drawn to it for diverse reasons. For some, in both medieval and modern times, the purpose has been apologetics and polemics. The Quran is a window into the mind of the enemy and must be read to find ¯ arguments with which to refute that adversary. In its most virulent forms, such reading becomes an act of geopolitical aggression. A less antagonistic version would engage the text as a prelude to proselytisation, seeking an entree for religious or ideological conversion. Whether the conviction ´ sought be a conversion to evangelical Christianity or to democratic pluralism, the textual approach is the same. Both the belligerent and the benign versions of this approach manifest themselves in our electronic world of blogs and chat rooms. Other readers cultivate the Quran with an attitude of cultural curiosity. ¯ They are attracted by the literary status of the text, by its position in the pantheon of world literature.
Their interest may be formed and honed within a scholarly discipline like history or philology or comparative literature. If their textual investigations are to be rigorous and academically fruitful, such readers must be well versed in quranic Arabic and in the literature ¯ and culture of the classical Islamic world as well as its historical contexts. Finally, there are the readers who come to the Quran for religious rea- ¯ sons, seeking spiritual enlightenment and personal transformation. These, of course, share the motivations of devout Muslims and many eventually make the profession of faith that marks entrance into the community of believers. For such readers, the Quran takes on the fully relational quality ¯ of ‘scripture’ or ‘sacred book’, the ultimate source of guidance and insight. ‘It is a treasure-house, an ocean, a mine: the deeper religious readers dig, the more ardently they fish, the more single-mindedly they seek gold, the greater will be their reward.’12 Three fascinating figures can serve to exemplify these approaches. None was born Muslim or nurtured from infancy in the rhythms and tonalities of the recited text. Neither did any of these three anticipate the impact this sacred book would have on his life.
In different historical periods and from different perspectives, Peter the Venerable, Ignaz Goldziher and Muhammad Asad turned their attention to the Quran. It is no overstatement to ¯ say that each in his own fashion changed the course of quranic studies. ¯ For our present purposes, however, I am more interested in introducing them as embodiments of particular forms of reading, of different ways of approaching the text of the Quran. ¯ Safely lodged in a Parisian library lie the results of a remarkable vision, a fateful journey and a successful scholarly collaboration. At the age of twenty-eight, Pierre Maurice de Montboissier was elected abbot of Cluny, centre of a monastic empire so vast that it encompassed hundreds of monasteries and thousands of monks.13 The son of a Burgundian nobleman, this monk, who was to become known as Peter the Venerable (d. 1156), entered the Cluniac order while still a teenager but within a few decades became one of the most prominent churchmen of his generation. High among the many accomplishments for which history remembers Peter was his role in the production of the first complete Latin translation of the Quran. Why ¯ would a French abbot have commissioned such a translation? Fortunately for us, Peter left a record of his reasons, one that can be culled from both his correspondence and his polemical writings.14 Peter’s motivations for supporting quranic scholarship were clear and straightforward. They can be ¯ succinctly captured in the phrase ‘know the enemy’. In the eyes of Peter and others of his era, Islam was a grievous heresy and a false religion, one which should be denounced and combated at every turn. Yet such a formidable adversary could only be adequately refuted if it were properly understood. Peter recognised that central to such understanding was a knowledge of the Quran, a knowledge in the service of refutation. ¯
In 1142, Peter set out for Spain, intent upon visitations to the Cluniac monasteries there and prompted by an invitation from Emperor Alfonso VII, whose grandfather had been a benefactor to Cluny.15 He spent a prolonged period in Spain but whether he conceived his plan of translating key Islamic texts at this point or earlier is unknown. What is known, however, is that during his sojourn he met and commissioned a group of translators and informants to produce Latin versions of the Quran, ¯ 16 as well as of other Arabic works dealing with h. ad¯ıth, the life of the Prophet and Islamic theology.17 The Quran’s translator was an English cleric and ¯ archdeacon of the church of Pamplona, Robert of Ketton.18 Peter’s translation project was no disinterested scholarly exercise. His substantial subventions – and his letters mention that the translators were well remunerated – underwrote the foundational work for a polemical attack. While there is evidence that Peter the Venerable tried to interest others in writing this polemic, his efforts were unsuccessful and he eventually decided to do it himself.
He was certainly no novice to such endeavours, having already written several works addressed to the correction of various Christian heresies. Nevertheless, his Liber contra sectam sive haeresim Saracenorum, along with a similar treatise directed at the Jews, have achieved particular importance because ‘they represent the first European books dealing with these faiths in which talmudic and koranic sources are cited verbatim within a carefully structured Christian argument’.19
More than seven centuries separate Peter from the Hungarian scholar Ignaz Goldziher (d. 1921) but an even greater gulf spans the distance between their reasons for attending to the Quran. Despite Goldziher having ¯ died more than seventy-five years ago, his work remains vital for the field of quranic studies. Scholars continue to mine his published corpus and to ¯ build their own arguments on the basis of, or in disagreement with, some of his fundamental insights. Goldziher was born in the Hungarian town of Szekesfeh ´ erv ´ ar and educated in both his native country and in Germany, ´ studying in Berlin and Leipzig – where he received his Ph.D. in 1869 – and then doing postdoctoral work in Leiden and Vienna.
His doctoral work prepared him in Hebrew, Arabic and Syriac and culminated in a thesis on a medieval Arabic commentary on the Bible.20 Quite a lot can be known about the intellectual development of this extraordinary scholar and the past few decades have seen the steady increase of books and articles on various aspects of Goldziher’s biography and bibliography. In a fashion that our email age may never be able to replicate, the study of his life and scholarly maturation is facilitated by a wealth of personal data. Goldziher kept a diary and was a prolific correspondent, leaving a rich written record from which much can be gleaned. He also kept an account of the profoundly formative trip of several months that he took to the Middle East at the age of twenty-three. Already a philological prodigy, he used this journey to learn Arabic dialects, to buy books and to become the ‘first European allowed to attend the Theological lectures of the Al-Azhar’.21
Goldziher is generally recognised as a key figure in the foundation of the modern field of Arabic and Islamic studies. He drew upon the work of such important predecessors as Theodor Noldeke and his own teacher H. L. Fleis- ¨ cher (d. 1888) and was deeply informed by currents of biblical studies that had emerged with the Haskala and its modernising and rationalising ideals. As a Hungarian Jew, he was attracted to the promise of religious reform, seeing it as both an important end in itself and as a means of achieving the full assimilation of Jews into the social fabric of their respective countries. It is clear from a review of Goldziher’s education that he, like most ‘Orientalists’ in the nineteenth century, was deeply influenced by the new insights and methodologies being explored by biblical scholars and, like many others of his generation, suffered the backlash that such scholarship generated. Both he and his contemporary Julius Wellhausen (d. 1918) were shaped by the perspective of Abraham Geiger (d. 1874) who insisted that all religious texts were human productions, decisively determined by the historical contexts that generated them.
Goldziher took this insight into Islamic studies: ‘The method he espoused, and which he was the first to apply systematically to the study of Islam on such a broad-ranging scale, viewed texts not as depositories of mere facts that research should ferret out and line up one after another, but as sources in which one could discern the stages of transformation through which a community based on a common religious vision had passed as it struggled to come to terms with a host of new situations and problems. By careful and critical analysis of these sources, one could extrapolate important new insights on such processes of development not only in religious thought, but in literature, social perceptions, and politics as well.’22 Goldziher’s publications command a topical breadth that few contemporary scholars could hope to equal. He wrote on Bedouin life, the culture of Muslim Spain, the development of h. ad¯ıth, the literary history and theory of early Arabic poetry, and many other matters. None of his works, however, has had more lasting value than his lectures on the history and varieties of quranic interpretation. ¯ 23 Contemporary work on this subject continues to cite this seminal study and it remains an active part of the scholarly conversation. For breadth and acuity it has yet to be superseded. Certainly there have been efforts to update Goldziher’s Richtungen and to draw upon the much larger number of Quran commentaries that have been edited and ¯ published in the past century. Nevertheless, Goldziher’s volume remains vital to the scholarly conversation about the Quran and its interpretation. ¯ He still stands as one of the most astute readers of this tradition. Goldziher read the Quran and its centuries of interpretive literature ¯ from the perspective of the academically informed outsider. Our final figure in this typological triptych shared that stance initially but eventually abandoned it for the full embrace of religious conversion. About fifty years ago, a journalist by the name of Muhammad Asad published a memoir that captured the attention of reviewers and the reading public alike.
Entitled The road to Mecca, it spun a tale of travel and religious reflection, a spiritual pilgrimage that took one man from his roots in eastern European Jewry through a conversion to Islam to a significant contribution to Muslim scholarship on the Quran. Leopold Weiss (d. 1992), Asad’s birth name, was born ¯ in the first year of the twentieth century and lived until its last decade.24 His family insisted on an intensive education in Hebrew and the major Jewish texts. Weiss did not continue such studies at the University of Vienna, however, and after completing his degree pursued a career in film writing and journalism. A trip to Jerusalem in the earlier 1920s offered Weiss his first exposure to the Muslim world. More prolonged periods followed and included contact with some of the Egyptian intellectuals who were leading a Muslim modernist movement.25 Asad himself, after his conversion, was to write extensively in support of such modernist ideals.26 The turning point in Weiss’ spiritual journey occurred in his midtwenties. As he recounts the moment of his conversion to Islam, the echo of that much earlier conversion narrative to be found in the Confessions of Saint Augustine is unmistakable. For Augustine it was an unseen child’s voice from across a garden wall that prompted him to pick up the Bible and read the first passage (Romans 13:13) upon which his eyes fell.
For Asad it was a moment of spiritual insight during a Berlin subway ride that turned him towards a deeper engagement with the Quran. He speaks of ¯ the moments after he returned to his house and spotted his Quran lying ¯ open on his study desk: ‘Mechanically, I picked up the book to put it away, but just as I was about to close it, my eye fell on the open page before me, and I read.’27 Q 102 jumped out at him as a direct response to the sense of human despair that had overwhelmed him on his ride home and convinced him that the Quran ‘was a God-inspired book’. ¯ 28 His profession of faith (shahada ¯ ) before the leader of a Muslim community followed shortly, and within the year, Leopold Weiss – now Muhammad Asad – left on his first pilgrimage to Mecca. Years in Saudi Arabia followed and were succeeded by those in India where his stature as a Muslim intellectual continued to increase. In 1936, he was offered the editorship of Islamic Culture, a journal published in Hyderabad whose previous editor had been the British convert and Quran¯ translator, Marmaduke Pickthall (d. 1936).29
Asad was interned during World War II but in its aftermath he assumed increasingly important political and diplomatic posts in the newly created state of Pakistan. In 1952, he moved to New York as, for a brief period, Pakistan’s representative to the United Nations. Asad’s most extended immersion in quranic studies did not begin until ¯ he was almost sixty years old. After moving to first Geneva and then Tangiers, he began to work on a new English translation of the Quran. He ¯ was prompted to this by dissatisfaction with existing translations and by a desire to enshrine an avowedly modernist hermeneutic. The reasons for his dissatisfaction are interesting. Largely linguistic, they apply to both Muslim and non-Muslim efforts to render the Quran into a western language. Asad ¯ contends that no non-Arab, whether a Muslim or not, can capture the true ‘spirit’ of the language through academic study, even when supplemented by conversation with contemporary, urban Arabs. Only someone who has spent time with the desert Bedouin of the Arabian peninsula – as Asad himself did – can ‘achieve an intimate understanding of the diction of the Quran’. ¯ 30 He also takes full account of precisely that stylistic element of the Quran that N ¯ oldeke found so troubling.
Classical rhetorical analysis of ¨ the Quran uses the technical term ¯ ¯ıjaz¯ to designate instances of concision or brevity in the text. In Asad’s assessment this is lauded as ‘that inimitable ellipticism which often deliberately omits intermediate thought-clauses in order to express the final stage of an idea as pithily and concisely as is possible within the limitations of human language. This method of ¯ıjaz¯ is, as I have explained, a peculiar, integral aspect of the Arabic language, and has reached its utmost perfection in the Quran. In order to render its ¯ meaning into a language which does not function in a similarly elliptical manner, the thought-links which are missing – that is, deliberately omitted – in the original must be supplied by the translator.’31 While the reception of Asad’s rendering, like that of many others, has not been uncontroversial, there are ‘many English-speaking Muslims who will attest to the appeal of this translation, and who rely upon it daily’.32 Peter the Venerable, Ignaz Goldziher and Muhammad Asad represent three different reasons for reading the Quran. While the polemicist, the ¯ scholar and the convert need not be separate and independent entities – overlap is obviously possible – they often are. For our purposes, they can operate as heuristic devices, ways to identify the diverse perspectives from which the Quran is approached, studied and analysed.
for the readers of this book The present volume seeks to assist readers of the second sort, those who bring to their reading of the Quran a preliminary perception of its lit- ¯ erary, historical and anthropological potential. Some of these readers may undertake its intellectual examination with a religiously informed appreciation of the text but with little or no understanding of the scholarship that surrounds the Quran. Other readers may have never even opened the ¯ Quran but are curious about a book that has guided the lives of millions both ¯ present and past. Yet others may have an informed perception of another significant scripture, such as the Bible, and will likely pose a set of questions to the Quran that are based on that perspective. ¯ The story of the Quran as told through these chapters moves from ¯ context to text and from text to textual history and impact. Part I provides the basic historical background and then raises the most contested issue in contemporary scholarship on the Quran, the question of its very ¯ origins. Part II turns to the text itself with a thematic, literary and experiential analysis.
In Part III, the history of the Quran’s transmission deals ¯ with such diverse modes of textual replication as the human voice, the production of manuscripts and printed copies, and calligraphic inscription on buildings and other objects. Part IV examines another form of textual history, the ways in which the Quran has generated an enormous litera- ¯ ture of interpretation, has influenced every area of Muslim intellectual life and has evoked extensive scholarly investigation in European and American academic circles. The final section, Part V, looks more closely at issues within the interpretive tradition that are of particular interest to today’s readers. The colleagues whom I invited to write these chapters responded quickly and positively to my request.
Each holds a university appointment and each recognised the need for a volume that could offer to a new generation of students both essential information about the Quran and a sum- ¯ mation of current scholarship in the field of quranic studies. As will be ¯ clear from the chapter notes and bibliographies, these colleagues have made important contributions to the scholarly investigation of the topics on which they have written. With this volume, however, they have agreed to write for a broader audience than that of specialists in Islamic studies. While such specialists will undoubtedly find much of interest in these pages, my hope is that they will prove equally engaging to those who have had little or no exposure to the Quran as a subject of scholarly attention. A few words ¯ about each of the following fourteen chapters should help readers orient themselves to this book’s overall sequence but also permit them to pick and choose those chapters that are of immediate interest. In Chapter 1, Fred Donner presents a sketch of Muh. ammad’s life and of the Quran’s revelation, as based on the standard biographical accounts of ¯ the Prophet, and raises issues about the historiography of those accounts. The quranic text itself takes centre stage in Chapter 2 as ¯ Claude Gilliot, drawing upon traditional narratives but also questioning their reliability, describes how the oral revelations became the written and codified text. This part of the story continues in Chapter 3 with Harold Motzki’s exposition of forms of contemporary scholarship that pose a challenge to the classical accounts of these collection and redaction stories. Textual content takes the foreground with Daniel Madigan’s presentation in Chapter 4 of quranic theology and its principal postulations. Chapter 5 switches the lens ¯ from theological to literary examination as Angelika Neuwirth describes the text and offers a succinct structural analysis. In Chapter 6, co-authors William Graham and Navid Kermani explain the oral conveyance of the Quran in both its technical developments and its functional reception. ¯
Fred Leemhuis presents information in Chapter 7 on the Quran’s multiple forms ¯ of transmission, both ancient and modern. With the second co-authored chapter in this volume, Sheila Blair and Jonathan Bloom turn our attention in Chapter 8 to the visual and to the omnipresence of quranic inscrip- ¯ tion in the material culture of the Muslim world. In Chapter 9, I introduce the interpretation of the Quran by offering a concise case study and ¯ presenting some of the principal foci and major figures in the history of quranic commentary. ¯ Alexander Knysh’s discussion in Chapter 10 of significant areas of intellectual endeavour in the classical Muslim world concentrates upon philology, jurisprudence and ethics, theology and philosophy, as well as literature and rhetoric. In Chapter 11, Andrew Rippin charts the emergence of a ‘scholarly’ or academic approach to the Quran, especially as ¯ this develops in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. With Chapter 12, Asma Barlas raises the first of three contemporary readings of the Quran by ¯ attending to recent exegesis by Muslim women.
Chapter 13 continues this concentration on contemporary readings with Stefan Wild’s presentation of modern political interpretation and of the politics of interpretation itself. Finally, in Chapter 14, Abdulaziz Sachedina brings forward the question of interreligious relations as these can be comprehended from a quranic ¯ perspective. While the organisation and arrangement of these chapters should make a continuous reading beneficial, I have also asked each author to treat his or her particular topic in a manner that would allow the resultant chapter to be read independently of the others. For this reason, several chapters deal – in diverse ways – with the crucial question of the origin of the quranic ¯ text. In the past three decades, no single issue in the field of quranic studies ¯ has generated more controversy than this one.33 Entire bodies of scholarship hinge on the question of whether the traditional narratives of the Quran’s collection, codification and written dissemination can be consid- ¯ ered historically reliable or not. The process of textual formation and inscription in the aftermath of the Prophet’s death has been the subject of intense scrutiny. Coupled with this concentration on textual stabilisation stands an equally close examination of what can be called the ‘pre-history’ of the text. Scholars of both Arabic and cognate languages have sought to identify themes and narratives found in earlier near eastern literature, perhaps filtered through intermediate recapitulations such as liturgies and lectionaries, and ‘recaptured’ in Muh. ammad’s public message as this found expression in the codified text of the Quran.
Consequently, several authors in this collection have alluded to, or expanded upon, these contentious topics as an inextricable part of their larger project. The resulting multiplicity of scholarly perspectives offers readers of this volume a good glimpse of a lively and current scholarly exchange. The authors who have collaborated in the creation of this volume have successfully balanced the twin demands of accuracy and accessibility. They have made an effort to keep the technical apparatus of scholarship, such as endnotes and extensive bibliographies, to a minimum but without sacrificing the needs of those readers who will want to use this book as a launching pad for more detailed investigations of specific subtopics. The transliteration of Arabic and other terms follows the now standard American format used, with small variations, by the Library of Congress, leading academic journals and the Encyclopaedia of the Quran¯ . 34 The word ‘Quran’, which ¯ more closely represents the Arabic original, is preferred to the now-outdated rendering of ‘Koran’. In analogous fashion, its adjectival form is given as ‘quranic’ and is lower-cased to follow the English-language conventions of ¯ ‘Bible’ and ‘biblical’, respectively. For the earlier periods of Islamic history, the death dates of prominent figures are provided in both Muslim and western versions (i.e., hijr¯ı and m¯ılad¯ ¯ı). To enhance the reader’s visual enjoyment and to introduce some of the diversity and beauty of quranic manuscripts, I have included fourteen ¯ photographs, placing one at the beginning of each chapter. While, with one exception, there is no direct relation between the textual calligraphy and the contents of the chapter that it precedes, taken together this set of manuscript pages exemplifies one form of the dissemination of the Quran to ¯ which several chapters refer. The single exception is Chapter 2 which makes illustrative reference to a few of the photographs. These examples have also been selected to offer readers a sense of the geography and chronology of that dissemination. Assuming that most readers will use this Companion in conjunction with an English translation of the Quran, I should say a word about some ¯ of these translations.
Most large bookstores will stock copies of the ones that I will mention and they are readily available from online booksellers. I should also note, however, that while the authors of this book’s chapters may have drawn upon one or more of these English translations, I made no attempt to impose a single version as mandatory. Many scholars of the Quran, such as those who have contributed to the present volume, prefer ¯ to make their own verse renderings directly from the quranic text. ¯ For the past generation, the most widely recommended translation of the Quran for academic purposes has been that of A. J. Arberry. Arberry attempted ‘to produce something which might be accepted as echoing however faintly the sublime rhetoric of the Arabic Koran’.35 In the eyes – and ears – of most readers he did so successfully. Consequently, his version has often been reprinted in various paperback editions. Another frequently found translation, and one that has long been popular with Muslim readers, is that of the British convert to Islam Mohammed Marmaduke Pickthall.36 Pickthall’s intent was to provide a close and faithful rendering of the Arabic text and to do so in a language that would sound like ‘scripture’ to Englishspeaking ears.
To this end, he used a form of archaic expression reminiscent of the King James Bible, with liberal use of ‘thee’, ‘thy’ and ‘thou’ as well as of verbal forms such as ‘giveth’ and ‘thinketh’. While Pickthall reliably conveys the meaning of the Arabic, its antique form of expression strikes most contemporary readers as odd and outdated. Probably the most popular version of the Quran among Muslims in the English-speaking world is that ¯ of Abdullah Yusuf Ali which was originally issued in Lahore as consecutive fascicles. Yusuf Ali sought ‘to make English an Islamic language’.37 He embellished his work with a free-verse, running commentary and extensive textual notation. A more recent publication, and one to which I have already referred, is Muhammad Asad’s The message of the Quran¯ . 38 While Asad’s translation reflects a decidedly modernist agenda, it also manifests a skilful use of language and is enriched with excellent annotations. For ‘an American version in contemporary English’, readers can turn to The Quran:
The noble reading by T. B. Irving, also a Muslim convert.39 Even newer are the translations by two prominent scholars, M. Fakhry and M. A. S. Abdel Haleem, that have appeared in the past decade and have garnered good reviews.40 Two older, but still widely available translations are those of J. M. Rodwell,41 which was first published in 1861, and of N. J. Dawood,42 initially issued in 1956, a year after Arberry’s version appeared. Less frequently found, at least in contemporary bookstores, is Edward Henry Palmer’s translation which was published as volumes six and nine of Max Muller’s ¨ Sacred books of the East. 43 An important translation project, but one of interest primarily to scholars, is Richard Bell’s effort to refine the chronological analysis of quranic material and to represent the extensive redaction that he was con- ¯ vinced the text had undergone.44 For those interested in the history of the English translation of the Quran, the work of George Sale is indispensable – and still available, at ¯ least from second-hand dealers. Sale’s version first appeared in 1734 with the lengthy title: Koran: Commonly called the Alkoran of Mohammed. Translated into English immediately from the original Arabic; with explanatory notes, taken from the most approved commentators. To which is prefixed a preliminary discourse. 45 The ‘preliminary discourse’ itself is 145 pages and marks an important point in the dissemination of information about Islam to the English-speaking world.46 Note should also be made of some partial translations that provide selected excerpts from the quranic text, often in particularly fine renditions. ¯ Two of special value are K. Cragg, Readings in the Quran¯ and M. Sells, Approaching the Quran¯ . 47 Readers may also wish to consult the Englishlanguage concordance for the Quran that has been built on the basis of ¯ Arberry’s translation.48
Finally, I would like to draw attention to the ever-increasing proliferation of Quran translations on the Internet. I do so, however, with the ¯ now-common caveat that the integrity of Internet texts cannot always be trusted. Some of these translations are searchable text files while others can be downloaded or purchased as compact disks. Since URLs change frequently (or disappear altogether) the best way to find these websites is by experimenting with keyword combinations. Sites and compact disks that feature the Arabic text of the Quran often include recitation as an additional ¯ feature, providing instant access to the aesthetic experience described in Chapter 6. Even for those with no knowledge of Arabic, hearing the Quran¯ recited by world-renowned masters offers an invaluable entree into the ´ Muslim experience of the holy book. In selecting an English edition of the Quran, I always counsel students ¯ and colleagues to choose at least two versions, if possible. Combining a paperback copy with an online reproduction makes this easy to do. Reading two translations simultaneously quickly reminds us that every translation is an act of interpretation.
The divergent renderings of many words and phrases will also alert readers to those areas of the text that have been the subject of particular scrutiny by both commentators and scholars alike. I close this introduction with an expression of gratitude to all those who have contributed to the completion of this volume. My editor at Cambridge University Press, Marigold Acland, has offered excellent and timely guidance. My research assistant, Clare Wilde, has laboured long hours to produce consistency in the final manuscript. Most especially, I thank my collaborating colleagues: Fred Donner, Claude Gilliot, Harald Motzki, Daniel Madigan, Angelika Neuwirth, William Graham, Navid Kermani, Fred Leemhuis, Jonathan Bloom, Sheila Blair, Alexander Knysh, Andrew Rippin, Asma Barlas, Stefan Wild and Abdulaziz Sachedina. They have honoured me with their enthusiasm for this project, their prompt submission of promised chapters and their unfailing interest and support.
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