THE QUR’AN AND LATE ANTIQUITY

OXFORD STUDIES IN LATE ANTIQUITY

Series Editor
Ralph Mathisen

Late Antiquity has unified what in the past were disparate disciplinary,
chronological, and geographical areas of study. Welcoming a wide array of
methodological approaches, this book series provides a venue for the finest new
scholarship on the period, ranging from the later Roman Empire to the Byzantine,
Sasanid, early Islamic, and early Carolingian worlds.

Explaining the Cosmos
Creation and Cultural Interaction in Late-​Antique Gaza
Michael W. Champion

Contested Monarchy
Integrating the Roman Empire in the Fourth Century AD
Edited by Johannes Wienand

Universal Salvation in Late Antiquity

Porphyry of Tyre and the Pagan-​Christian Debate in Late Antiquity
Michael Bland Simmons

The Poetics of Late Antique Literature

Edited by Jás Elsner and Jesús Hernández-​Lobato

Rome’s Holy Mountain

The Capitoline Hill in Late Antiquity
Jason Moralee

Columbanus and the Peoples of Post-Roman Europe

Edited by Alexander O’Hara

Jonas of Bobbio and the Legacy of Columbanus

Sanctity and Community in the Seventh Century
Alexander O’Hara

Sacred Stimulus
Jerusalem in the Visual Christianization of Rome
Galit Noga-Banai

The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

A Shared Heritage
Angelika Neuwirth
The Qur’an and Late Antiquity
A Shared Heritage

Angelika Neuwirth
Translated by Samuel Wilder

1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data

Names: Neuwirth, Angelika, author. | Wilder, Samuel (Translator).
Title: The Qu’ran and late antiquity / Angelika Neuwirth ; translated
by Samuel Wilder.
Other titles: Koran als Text der Spätantike. English
Description: New York, NY : Oxford Univerity Press, [2019] | Series: Oxford
studies in late antiquity | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018015795 (print) | LCCN 2018016947 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780199928965 (updf) | ISBN 9780190921316 (oso) |
ISBN 9780190921309 (epub) | ISBN 9780199928958 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Qur?an—History. | Qur?an as literature. | Qur?an—Criticism,
Textual. | Qur?an—Evidences, authority, etc. | Qur?an—Manuscripts. |
Qur?an—Relation to the Bible.
Classification: LCC BP131 (ebook) | LCC BP131 .N48913 2019 (print) |
DDC 297.1/2209—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018015795

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
 Contents

Preface  ix
Postscript  xiii
Abbreviations  xv

Introduction  1
I.1. The Qur’an as the Document of the Emergence of a Religion  1
I.2. A “European Reading”  2
I.3. The Qur’an as Proclamation  4
I.4. Two Misreflections of the Qur’an: Teleology and the Syndrome
of Epigonality  12
I.5. The “Qur’anic Community”  17
I.6. Qur’an Research as Historical and Literary-​Critical Project  17
I.7. The Qur’an as Panorama—​Illuminated in Thirteen Chapters  25
1. How the Qur’an Has Been Read So Far: A Sketch of Research  33
1.1. Projects of Biblical Scholarship  33
1.2. A Great Research Tradition and Its Violent Interruption  37
1.3. Retreat to Islam-​Historical Positions  40
1.4. The Qur’an Without the Memory of the Community? New Voices
in the “Authenticity Debate”  47
1.5. The Arabic Side of the Qur’an: Mirror of the Arabian
Environment  55
1.6. The New Center: Not Book or Prophet, but Community  57
2. The Qur’an and Scripture  65
2.1. “Sending Down,” Tanzīl, and “Inspiration,” Waḥy  65
2.2. Al-​Qurʾān: Communication of Texts from the Heavenly
Scripture  73
2.3. Orality as Theologumenon  76
2.4. Late Meccan Reflections on Heavenly and Earthly Scriptures  80

v
vi Contents

2.5. Inlibration or Qur’anic Logos Theology?  89

2.6. Medialities of the Qur’an  95
3. The Qur’an and History  105
3.1. History of Communicated Speech  105
3.2. Two Manifestations of the Qur’an  109
3.3. The Conversation with the Older Traditions: Stations of
Community Formation  116
3.4. History Discourse  119
3.5. History in the Qur’an  131
3.6. Prophetic Succession, Counter-​History, and Chronological
History  135
4. Redaction and History of the Text  139
4.1. History of Transmission up to the Uthmanic Redaction  139
4.2. The “First Official Qur’an Edition of ʿUthmān”  144
4.3. The Imperial Project of ʿAbd al-​Malik  147
4.4. Text History  149
4.5. Instructions for Qur’an Reading and the Controls of
the Textual Form  155
4.6. Manuscripts  158
4.7. New Qur’an Editions and Translations  161
5. Sura Structures and Chronology  163
5.1. The Sura as Novelty  163
5.2. The Early Meccan Suras  166
5.3. The Linguistic Form of the Suras  187
5.4. Defining Criteria of Chronology  190
5.5. Middle and Late Meccan Suras  192
5.6. Medinan Suras  196
6. The Liturgical Qur’an: On the Development of Cult at the Time of the
Proclamation  201
6.1. The Ancient Arabian Preconditions  201
6.2. Cult and Canon in Islam  208
6.3. Emergence of a Liturgy  212
6.4. Cultic and Textual Development in the Middle Meccan
Period  217
6.5. Cultic and Textual Development in the Late Meccan Period  225
6.6. Cultic and Textual Development in Medina  229
6.7. From Qur’an to Islamic Cult  235
 Contents  vii

7. Stages of Communal Formation in the Early Meccan Period  239

7.1. Communal Engagements with Local Traditions: Successively
Pursued Discourses  239
7.2. Psalmic Piety  241
7.3. Excursus: Are the Early Meccan Suras Biographical of
the Prophet?  247
7.4. The Prophetic Office of Warning of the Judgment  254
7.5. Reflection on the Signs of Scripture and the Signs of Creation  264
8. Stages of Communal Formation in the Middle and Late Meccan
Periods  277
8.1. From Real World to Text World: The New People of God  279
8.2. From Mecca to Jerusalem: New Liturgical Forms  282
8.3. Mythical Narrative, Biblical History, and Qur’anic
“Corrective”: Mary and Jesus  290
8.4. Anti-​Pagan Polemic  300
8.5. New Homiletic Instruments: Morality Speeches
and Parables/​Likenesses  305
9. Stages of Communal Formation in Medina  313
9.1. The Turn of Exile  313
9.2. The Discovery of God’s Wrath  318
9.3. The Discovery of Ambiguity in the Divine Writing  324
9.4. From Jerusalem Back to Mecca  332
9.5. Qur’an and Martyrdom  337
10. Qur’an and Bible  347
10.1. Similarities, Dissimilarities  347
10.2. Looking for Allegory and Typology in the Qur’an  354
10.3. Allegories in the Qur’an?  359
10.4. “De-​allegorizations”  365
10.5. Considerations on Qur’anic Prophetic Speech  368
10.6. Considerations on Qur’anic Narration  373
11. Biblical-​Qur’anic Figures  379
11.1. Actors and Interaction Scenarios  379
11.2. Noah—​His Qur’anic Development  385
11.3. Abraham—​His Qur’anic Development  391
11.4. Moses—​His Qur’anic Development  405
12. The Qur’an and Poetry  419
12.1. Prophecy and Poetry  419
12.2. The Ambivalent Heritage of Poetdom and Seerdom  424
12.3. Poetical Topoi in the Qur’an  434
viii Contents

1 2.4. Poetical Operations in the Qur’an  441

12.5. Coping with Contingency in Poetry and Qur’an  444
12.6. Poets in the Qur’an  447
13. The Rhetorical Qur’an  453
13.1. The Qur’an—​Document of an “Age of Rhetoric”  453
13.2. “Incapacitating” Rhetoric  458
13.3. A Contest before Polemic: From Biblical Hymn to Qur’anic
Paraenesis  466
13.4. Rhetorical Bonding of Earthly Events to the Transcendent
Lord of the Worlds: Paraenetic Clausulas  472
13.5. Rhetorical Triumph over the Jewish and Christian Credos  477

Bibliography  483
Index of Persons  521
General Index  525
Citations of Scripture  529
 Preface

T his book could not have been written were it not for my long-​term
cohabitation with the three monotheistic religions in the place of their birth,
or at least of their spiritual origin. It is rooted ultimately in insights that reach
back far in time, to my time as a student in Jerusalem, living in the Old City,
in immediate proximity to the Haram al-​Sharif and the eastern churches and
synagogues. What elsewhere would have to be collected in the imagination—​the
sound of Qur’an recitation as a clearly audible voice in a concert of various litur-
gical chants and the presence of Qur’anic script, its calligraphy, as a strikingly
abstract-​geometrical representation amidst the omnipresent images exhibited
in the other religions—​belonged there to everyday experience. Accordingly, the
Qur’an could scarcely be perceived other than as part of an ensemble of related
holy scriptures, all of them sensually present side by side. It is this experience
above all that is reflected in the volume presented here.
At the same time, however, one cannot ignore that the Qur’an is the core tes-
timony of Arabic verbal creativity. I was fortunate to enjoy the unique possibility
to experience this language in its daily performance and as an object of zealous
scholarly discussions about its subtlest nuances, not only as an observer but as
a participant as well, during a six-​year guest professorship at the University of
Jordan, in Amman. The explanations that are set forth in the present volume
have been nourished hermeneutically by the numerous and diverse sugges-
tions offered to me by Arabic-​speaking students and colleagues in Jordan, with
whom I had the opportunity to read texts of classical Arabic literature over the
course of several years. These early experiences were re-​actualized often, above
all during periods of teaching in Egypt, during my work as the director of the
Orient Institute in Beirut and Istanbul and, not least, during my still ongoing an-
nual teaching activities at the Dormitio Abbey in Jerusalem.
But teaching experience in Germany has also played into this book. My
work at diverse German universities made me painfully aware that important

ix
x Preface

preconditions for a synopsis of the widely divergent perceptions of the Qur’an

and of the Arabic language in the East and the West are still missing. Arabic-​
Islamic studies are pursued in the universities of Europe and the Islamic world in
almost complete isolation from one another. The two academic traditions remain
bound to their respective hermeneutic principles, so that the interpretation of
the foundational writings of Islam, especially the Qur’an, often leads to incom-
patible, even contrary results. These often idiosyncratic views on the Qur’an have
research fanned out in Western research into vastly differing models of reading
the Qur’an. To track one’s way through the thicket of these competing theses and
hypotheses, a comprehensive presentation of the results of research achieved up
to now is required. It is hoped that such an overview is accomplished here; a mere
retracing of the differences will not suffice.
Western research on the Qur’an is not only almost unmanageably subdivided
and ramified but is also highly controversial. Though more recently, in research
into the Qur’an’s “milieu” or tradition, linguistic and theological data from the
neighboring religions are being systematically taken into account, their reflec-
tion in the Qur’an is most often assessed in the framework of “reception history,”
as data testifying to the survival and vitality of Jewish and Christian traditions
beyond their narrow religious realms. To avoid such a “Eurocentric” reading, it
is therefore essential to re-​pose the question of the historical anchoring of the
Qur’an in time and place. A radical turning of perspective is required, away from
the focus on reception history and toward the history of the text’s emergence as a
scripture in its own right. This entails a new reflection on the Qur’an in relation
to Late Antiquity research, a field that has only in recent times been extended to
encompass the Arabian Peninsula.
Although the initial intention for this volume was to lay the ground for a con-
cise commentary on the Qur’an, to be published in several subsequent volumes,
it can also be read as a general introduction to the Qur’an, setting it systematically
for the first time into the context of its milieu of emergence, the Near Eastern
culture of Late Antiquity. This requires that the Qur’an no longer be treated
hagiographically, as part of the vita of the prophet, the Sīra, as has so frequently
been the case in introductions up to now, that is, as part of Islamic tradition,
but rather historically, as a document of “community formation” within a “sec-
tarian milieu,” a landscape of debate, of arguments fought out between diverse
groups, Christians, Jews, and pagans alike. This implies a 180-​degree turn of per-
spective, from the Islamic Qur’an to the Late Antique Qur’an, a turn that bears
culture-​critical implications that are highly relevant for the current moment. To
claim that the Qur’an emerged from Late Antique culture makes this scripture,
which has so far been treated only as an Islamic document—​to put it acutely—​
recognizable as a European legacy as well, a voice in the concert of traditions
of an age that is now being recognized as a formative epoch for later European
 Preface  xi

culture. The Qur’an thus becomes a text that should be significant for Europeans,
a text that binds together Muslims and non-​Muslims alike.
In order to reach scholarly oriented readers as well as those interested more
generally in religions, certain compromises have been necessary in the presenta-
tion of the text. Individual sub-​chapters of this volume, which have grown from
lectures on subjects already quite well known, may appear more easily acces-
sible than others that set forth new theses and seek to challenge the reader to
undertake a critical examination of the existing research literature. But wher-
ever it was deemed necessary, particular problems, in the interest of fostering
a broader comprehension, have been explained with reference to their wider
context. Occasional repetitions that were produced thereby have been allowed
to stand, in order to make the individual chapters comprehensible if read indi-
vidually. Through the explanation of technical terms and the systematic trans-
lation of all quotations, effort has been made to ease access to the text also for
nonspecialists. The use of scientific transliteration, even of long original Arabic
citations, may seem irritating at first view; it was unavoidable, however, as the
linguistic guise of Qur’anic discourse is an essential part of the message itself, and
textual discussions must therefore make reference to the exact linguistic form.
Citations cannot be replaced by mere references to the printed original text, since
the printed text merges Qur’anic verses into unstructured text blocks obscuring
their original poetic character. Readers who are not familiar with Arabic and
have no interest in the sound-​image of the Qur’an can easily skip over the trans-
literations, which are set into italic type.
 Postscript

T he original German text of this volume, Der Koran als Text der
Spätantike: Ein europäischer Zugang, which appeared in 2010, was the outcome
of long-​term scholarly exchange with colleagues, co-​workers, and students in
various parts of the world, who are gratefully remembered. Meanwhile, I  am
indebted to still another supporter of my cause, my patient and enduring trans-
lator, Sam Wilder, who has coped successfully with the often complicated issues
of my German style. I equally owe thanks to the Volkswagen-​Stiftung, whose
generous funding made the translation possible. Seven years have passed since
the publication of the original—​a time span in which our thesis that the Qur’an
is part and parcel of the Late Antique culture of the Eastern Mediterranean has
found approval in wide parts of the scholarly world. During these years, further
evidence could be provided in a number of new publications:  It is now pos-
sible to consult the historical literary “concise” commentary on nearly half of the
Meccan sura corpus (Angelika Neuwirth, Der Koran Band I: Frühmekkanische
Suren, Berlin, 2011, and Der Koran Band 2/​1:  Frühmittelmekkanische Suren,
Berlin, 2017). In addition, a collective volume of articles on both literary and
theological aspects of the Qur’an has been published (Scripture, Poetry, and
the Making of a Community:  Reading the Qur’an as a Literary Text, London,
2014), as well as more recently an extended essay on the development of the
Qur’anic proclamation viewed as a dialectical process of an enchantment and
a subsequent disenchantment of the world (Die koranische Verzauberung der
Welt und ihre Entzauberung in der Geschichte). Many of the ideas expounded
in the present programmatic volume have been developed further in these later
publications.
The translator wishes to thank Michael Ladner, Charly Wilder, and Harlene
Hipsh, for their help in the completion of this work.
Beirut, December 2017

xiii
 Abbreviations

AIEO Annales d l’Institut d’Études Orientales de l’Université d’Alger

BO Bibliotheca Orientalis
BSOAS Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies
EI2 Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., 11 vols., Leiden, 1975–​2002
EJ2 Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd ed., 22 vols., Jerusalem and
New York, 2007
EQ Encyclopedia of the Qurʾān, ed. Jane Dammen McAuliffe, 5 vols.,
Leiden, 2001–​2006
GdQ Theodor Nöldeke, Geschichte des Qorans, Göttingen, 1860
GdQ2 Friedrich Schwally, Geschichte des Qorans von Theodor Nöldeke.
Völlig umgearbeitet von F. S.; part 1: Über den Ursprung des
Qorans, Leipzig, 1909; part 2: Die Sammlung des Qorans, mit
einem literaturhistorischen Anhang über die muhammedanischen
Quellen und die neuere christliche Forschung, Leipzig 1919; Gotthelf
Bergsträsser, Geschichte des Qorans; part 3: Die Geschichte des
Qorantexts, Leipzig, 1938
JAOS Journal of the American Oriental Society
JQR Jewish Quarterly Review
JQS Journal of Qurʾanic Studies
JRAS Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society
JSAI Jerusalem Studies of Arabic and Islam
MIDEO Mélanges de l’Institut Dominicain d’Études Orinetales du Caire
OLZ Orientalistische Literaturzeitung
ThWAT Theologisches Wörterbuch zum AltenTestament
ZDMG Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft
ZRGG Zeitschrift für Religions-​und Geistesgeschichte
ZS Zeitschrift für Semitistik und verwandte Gebiete

xv
THE QUR’AN AND LATE ANTIQUITY
 Introduction

I.1  The Qur’an as the Document of the Emergence

of a Religion

The objective of this volume, to discern the emergence of a new religion through
the gradually unfolding textual form of its foundational document, may seem
overly ambitious. But in the case of Islam, there is no serious alternative. Later
historical evidence, such as the biographies of the Prophet, reflect the final vic-
tory of Islam as it was ultimately achieved, to which they in turn give literary
form. Only the Qur’an is the genuine testimony of the development of the culti-
cally marked movement from which the earliest community emerged, already
during the lifetime of the Prophet. Today, such a focus on the “emergent Qur’an
text” appears as unfamiliar as ever. Such a focus must not only compete her-
meneutically with the challenges of very divergent approaches and projects but
has to proceed from a conception of the Qur’an that is not identical with that
of research up to now. This is because it is not in the transmitted “anthological”
form of the text, with its 114 suras organized by text length, that the new religion
inscribed itself first, but rather in the pre-​form of this text: the oral proclamation
that preceded the text’s codification.
The distinction between these two manifestations of the Qur’an is no trivial
matter for textual history; rather, a focus on the oral “proclamation” implies a
significant hermeneutic revision, one that resets the Qur’an into an epoch to
which it has not yet been closely connected. In its pre-​canonic oral manifesta-
tion, the Qur’an text can no longer be considered as exclusively “Islamic,” but
instead forms an integral part of the debate culture of Late Antiquity, an epoch
that has only in recent times gained the attention it deserves in Near Eastern
studies.1 To uncover this oral proclamation, which remains, as it were, hidden
beneath the final canonized text of scripture and to retrieve the interaction be-
tween the speaker and his hearers engaged in the discussion of prior traditions
is a central aim of this book. Despite its experimental character, and despite the
numerous hypotheses that must be entertained in course, the radical alteration
of research perspective that is attempted here—​a turn from the final canonical
text to the communication process of Qur’anic proclamation that must first be

1.  See the discussion in Hoyland, Seeing Islam,  12–​17.

1
2  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

reconstructed—​appears to be the only viable route to the restoration of an im-

portant semantic dimension of the Qur’an that tradition has submerged. Only
when the text is read as a “transcript” that accompanied an oral proclamation can
the Qur’an be reconceptualized as a novel and rhetorically plausible response to
central questions of its time, a response that proved persuasive to its hearers and
united them into that new community that only a short time later would trans-
form the cultural map of the wider region.

I.2  A “European Reading”

The project that is developed here pursues several goals. On the one hand,
it is primarily an attempt to contribute to the inner-​European or “Western”
state of research. A  critical discussion of modern contributions to research
should bring some order to a body of Western scholarship that is hetero-
geneous in method and divided among a number of divergent schools, and
simultaneously draw attention to the political dimension of the knowledge
production involved in Qur’an research that is all too often neglected. This
should be a contribution to bridging the prevailing hermeneutic polarity be-
tween Muslim and Western research projects. At the current moment, when
Islam has long been a part of the European lifeworld, Western and Muslim
Qur’an researchers remain separated more than ever by hermeneutic barri-
ers. Western researchers accuse Muslims of being beholden to theological
dogmas, while Muslim researchers perceive their Western colleagues as po-
lemical and triumphalist, devoid of the most elementary empathy for Islam.
Although the period between the two world wars saw European researchers
of Islam being appointed to positions at Arab universities, and visiting pro-
fessorships by German scholars of the Qur’an were welcomed in Jordan and
Egypt as late as the 1970s and 1980s, such mutual curiosity and openness
have now become things of the past. Between then and now lie decisive polit-
ical events and developments, which have led to the ubiquitous present-​day
phenomenon of a ṣaḥwa islāmīya, an “Islamic awakening.” In the scholarly
arena, there have also been conflicts, “text wars,” which have led to a no-
table breakdown in the East-​West academic relationship, a breach of mutual
trust. In this situation, itself scandalous, where two great research traditions
stand opposite each other without entering into creative exchange, Qur’an
research as such must be newly rethought. The present book offers a con-
tribution toward the fulfillment of the desideratum of (self-​)critique within
Western research, in order to prepare the way for an open conversation en-
gaging inner-​Islamic research on the Qur’an.
But this project is not only European in that it problematizes various
Western discourses; more crucially, it is also European in its historical
perspective. This volume, and the commentary volumes that will appear
 Introduction  3

subsequently, aim to make the Qur’an recognizable again to Western read-

ers for what it was at the time of its emergence in the early community:  a
literarily extraordinary and intellectually engaging text. Because the Qur’an
emerged out of an engagement with Late Antique discourses and inscribed
itself in those already extant Christian and Jewish traditions commonly held
to be a European heritage, it too is itself a part of the historical legacy of Late
Antiquity to Europe. To read the Qur’an anew can and should open European
readers who are grounded in the Western-​Christian tradition to a new view
of their own theological and spiritual history and empower them to grasp the
Qur’an as a vital part of the reception history of their own familiar texts. It is
hoped that this book will make Western readers aware of the Qur’an’s close
connection to an epoch that has been reclaimed for European identity.
This does not entail, however, that this book has nothing to say to Muslim
readers. Certainly, the historical-​critical and literary method followed here is the
outcome of a long hermeneutic tradition honed on Western texts, and its sys-
tematic application to the Qur’an may therefore appear new and perhaps even
foreign—​despite the various projects aimed at historicization that took root
within the traditional inner-​Islamic literature, such as the scholarship on the
“circumstances of revelation,” asbāb al-​nuzūl,2 the “disputes over abrogation,” al-​
nāsikh wa-​l-​mansūkh, the discussions of Medinan additions,3 and the modern
“literary exegesis,” or tafsīr adabī.4 The ambivalent impression often imparted to
Muslim readers by historical Qur’an research, especially by older scholarly works
not always devoid of prejudice,5 has been reinforced in recent times by research
on early Islam that is heavily colored by polemic. It is for just this reason that
this book does not seek, despite its orientation toward the historical methods
of Europe, to remain in conversation only with readers acculturated within the
West, but rather seeks at the same time to offer a contribution to the long-​overdue
convergence of Western and inner-​Islamic research.
Indeed, this work starts from the recognition that the first step toward un-
derstanding must consist in placing the Qur’an on the same eye level in Western
perception as the scriptures of the two older religions, Judaism and Christianity.6
The disentanglement of the Qur’an from the context of something that is essen-
tially “other” and therefore admits of arbitrary interpretation is the necessary

2.  See also Rippin, “The Exegetical Genre ‘asbāb al-​nuzūl,’ ” and Rippin, “The Function of ‘Asbāb al-​nuzūl.’ ”
3.  See Nagel, Medinensische Einschübe.
4.  See Wielandt, Offenbarung und Geschichte, and Wieland, “Exegesis, modern”; cf. also “History of Research”
in chap. 1.
5.  See William Muir’s biography of Muhammad, The Life of Mohammad, and Khalidi, Image, 249–​251, on
earlier Western-​Eastern scholarship.
6.  This objective is in keeping with Mohamed Arkoun’s Lectures du Coran, which takes Western scholarship’s
historical-​critical approach to task for the contemporary malaise. Without a historical rehabilitation of the Koran,
the comparison Arkoun is trying to make between the Koran and other texts cannot be accomplished in a her-
meneutically adequate way. The present writer offers an Arabic summary of the earlier work on the Late Antique
Koran, “An yuʿallam al-​Qurʾān fī Urūba ka-​naṣṣ ʾurūbī,” (Teaching the Koran in Europe—​as a European text).
4  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

precondition for all further steps of reliable Qur’an research. Put into prac-
tice, this entails a methodological insistence on treating the Qur’an in the same
manner as the two other scriptures, as will be presented here through examples.
Our project therefore aims at an “inner-​European revision”: the critique of in-
dividual, historically problematic premises maintained in Western research, to
which an opposing model will be offered by the re-​embedding of the Qur’an in
an epoch shared by both Near Eastern and Western history.
With this goal in mind, our reading offers a “cultural translation,” rather than
an attempt at a comprehensive interpretation of the Qur’an text. Let there be no
illusion about this: a truly adequate interpretation of the Qur’an as the scripture
of the Muslims must include the great hermeneutic tradition of Islamic scholar-
ship, that is, the living Islamic tradition that embeds the Qur’an into the lifeworld
of Islam. This necessary second step, the integration of the Islamic tradition, can
only occur through intensive collaboration with Muslim scholars, a practice to-
ward which we hope this work will do something to prepare the way.
But what emerges positively from the investigations set forth here is that just as
the Qur’an belongs to the Islamic tradition, so too does it belong to the European
tradition; the proclamation recorded in the Qur’an is part of a discourse that
crosses the boundaries of religions. It is a new and consistently perceptible voice
in the concert of theological-​philosophical discussions of its time, which were
fundamental not only for the emergence of the Islamic religion but also, to put
the emphasis elsewhere, for the formation of Europe. The Qur’an is an integral
part of this process of development, which began in the close interaction be-
tween religious cultures. In that we read the Qur’an both as an innovative answer
to Christian and Jewish questions of Late Antiquity and as a challenge raised in
opposition to them, our reading is of significance not only for the historically
informed European reader. Rather, these very discussions into which the Qur’an
enters also gain new historical relevance for Muslim readers, who can reclaim the
entire debate culture of Late Antiquity, in which the Qur’an participates, as a part
of their own spiritual history.

I.3  The Qur’an as Proclamation

The Qur’an, although available since the death of the Prophet as a collection of
text units, or “suras” (Arabic sūra, pl. suwar), is nevertheless not a book com-
posed in writing. All too clearly, the form and content of the suras make evident
their function as oral proclamation. Accordingly, the text is not—​as one might
conclude from its frequent self-​designation al-​kitāb, “the writing”—​a “book”
conceived by an author that unfolds according to a preconceived plan; rather, as
is clear from its equally frequent self-​designation qurʾān, “lecture, reading,” it is a
proclamation. Given that this proclamation took place over a span of some two
decades, it is no wonder that differing styles of language supersede and follow
 Introduction  5

each other and that after a long period of poetic speech, a more prosaic and in-
structive discourse becomes the rule. But there is a rich set of characteristics
shared between these two differing discourse forms, which allows us to speak
of a formal and thematic continuity, evidence of one and the same language-​
forming genius. Even if we rarely find explicit personal references or specifica-
tions of time and place in the Qur’an, nevertheless the transmitted text of the
Qur’an can plausibly fit into the frame given by Islamic tradition. According to
this tradition, the Qur’anic texts were communicated by their proclaimer, who
entered history as the Prophet Muhammad, in the years between 610 and 632, to
a growing number of hearers and followers. Though we will proceed heuristically
from this rough framework in what follows (if not from all its traditional details
and specific interpretations of events), the legitimacy even of this framework can
only be proven through the results of a literary description of the Qur’an.
Because the proclaimer cannot be separated from the proclamation, at
least a summary reconstruction of the outer circumstances of the appear-
ance of Muhammad as a prophet cannot be dispensed with. This epitome can
only be partly brought out through the Qur’an itself but must also be derived
in part from the contemporary milieu of the Qur’an’s emergence—​here, the
results of critical research into the biographies of the Prophet (sīra) cannot be
excluded entirely.7 Perhaps the most important characteristic of his appear-
ance is the proclaimer’s increasingly forceful claim to communicate divine
inspirations, followed by his claim to play the role of a prophet in his society.8
This manifests itself in the Qur’an on the one hand in mantic discourse forms
in direct “you” address, maintained throughout the entire text, and on the
other in the strongly pronounced and continuous biblical intertextuality of
the Qur’an. If one follows the references in the Qur’an itself, during his min-
istry in Mecca (610–​622), the audience consisted, alongside pagan followers
of the local cult,9 mainly of monotheistically oriented though not confession-
ally bound hearers, whose religious knowledge would have been part of the
formation of the local elites. On the other hand, after their compelled migra-
tion (hijra) in the year 622 to the oasis settlement Medina, the proclaimer
and his community also encountered learned Christians and, above all, Jews
knowledgeable in tradition, with whom they entered into controversial dis-
putes and orally conducted discussions, as is shown by a great number of
negotiations of Jewish traditions in the Qur’an.

7.  See also Motzki, Biography of Muhammad, and Schoeler, Charakter und Authentie, and now also Goerke and
Schoeler, Korpus ʿUrwa b. az-​Zubair, and, in contrast, Berg, Development of Exegesis.
8. Andrae, Ursprung, Bobzin, Muhammad, and recently Schöller, Muhammad, offer an overview of the life and
works of the proclaimer. On the problems with the Prophet’s biography, see Rubin, Biography, and Chabbi, “Histoire
et tradition sacrée.”
9.  See Ammann, Geburt des Islam, and Krone, Al-​Lāt.
6  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

The turn that occurred at this time, when the proclaimer and his commu-
nity entered into an increasingly significant political role and a political en-
tity emerged,10 is set up by the Islamic calendar as the beginning of a new era.
Although the hijra itself is not mentioned explicitly in the Qur’an nor granted
any of its later aura as the primal scene of political self-​determination for the
Islamic religious community, or umma,11 the migration to Medina marks a new
factual beginning. In terms of textual development, this fissure can hardly be
overestimated, since political engagement in Medina brought about sustainable
religious-​political consequences that are reflected in the text. What had been
the freely available stock of monotheistic traditions that circulated in Mecca be-
came the object of controversy in Medina, so that biblical and post-​biblical tradi-
tions were now represented by concrete interpretive communities and reclaimed
as monopoly by learned Jews and Christians, so that the new community was
obliged to make claims against them—​an interaction that still needs to be recon-
structed critically in detail.12
Alongside and in parallel to the process of proclamation, we see already
in Mecca the formation of a belief community possessing a distinctive cult, a
process—​as can be gleaned from the Qur’an itself—​that is supported ideolog-
ically and documented textually by the proclamation. This occurs in a kind
of zigzag movement: after a time in which the cult was shared with the pagan
Meccans,13 we see a clear turning point toward monotheistic liturgical models al-
ready familiar to many pious people of the region, then later in Medina the local
ancient Arab cult forms and orientations are again granted an important rank.
Islamic cult practices, which at the end of the development consist of several
daily prayers, fasting, and pilgrimage, reflect these several changes in orientation.

I.3.1  Two Simultaneously Acquired Achievements: A Scripture

and a Community
The proclamation process thus at once generates a new scripture and a new
community—​a unique simultaneous “twin birth” of two historically crucial
achievements, which does not occur in the emergence of either the Hebrew Bible
or the New Testament.14 This double development is no longer recognizable in
the traditional reading of the Qur’an accompanied by commentary, as a text al-
ready fixed in writing. In that reading, historical developments that were only
later implemented are read teleologically back into the narrative of the emer-
gence of the Qur’an, thus ideas still being the object of negotiation in the Qur’an,

10.  Noth, “Früher Islam.”

11.  See the critical examination of the early Islamic concept of hijra in Crone, “Concept of Hijra.”
12.  For the topics debated here, see Busse’s account, Theologische Beziehungen,  8–​29.
13.  Our knowledge of this phase is largely due to Uri Rubin’s studies; above all see Rubin, “Morning and
Evening Prayers.”
14.  On the development of the Hebrew Bible from scribal culture, see Van der Toorn, Scribal Culture.
 Introduction  7

because they loom large in later Islam, are no longer palpable in the earlier ef-
fective power they wielded in the Qur’an. This double emergence of a text and
a community is also elided from the synchronic reading that is predominant
in current Western research, which takes the entire text into view as a fait ac-
compli. It only becomes evident from a chronologically oriented reading of the
text, which traces the process of development of the various fundamental ideas
treated by proclaimer and community and seeks to explain their sequence in
time plausibly. This progressive treatment has until now remained beyond the
horizon of Muslim researchers, even of such scholars as Fazlur Rahman15 and
the (post-​)modern Turkish exegetes,16 despite the fact that they postulate the ne-
cessity of a historical reading, that is, a reading oriented toward the transmitted
“circumstances of revelation,” the asbāb al-​nuzūl.
The form in which the proclamation was dressed is the sura. It is attested in
the manuscript tradition from the very beginning; thus its validity not only lit-
erally but also in terms of the history of the tradition must stand beyond ques-
tion. It is a textual unit unknown in liturgy up to that time, polythematic and
consisting of various elements such as address, prayer, hymn, and narrative. It
undergoes substantial alterations during the proclamation process. The Qur’an in
its final form, which appeared already in the seventh century, includes 114 such
suras, arranged into a text corpus by order of decreasing length. The first (incom-
plete) manuscript evidence dates to around forty to sixty years after the death of
the Prophet in 632;17 the oldest Qur’anic inscriptions are explicitly dated to the
year 691. Since manuscripts and inscriptions are extant from a time shortly after
the proclamation, if not from the time of the Prophet himself, the surviving state
of the text handed down to us can be referred back with high probability almost
to the time of its genesis. Although the existence of early manuscripts indicates
that the redaction of the Qur’an occurred already during the seventh century,
without, however, confirming the positive emergence of the text in precisely the
time presupposed by tradition, still no serious reason compels us to doubt the
genesis of the text from the proclamation of the Prophet at the point in time
asserted by tradition. The final redaction and authoritative publication of a textus
ne varietur, a text claimed to be binding and based on preceding written and
intensive oral tradition, is to be placed at the latest in the time of the Umayyad
caliph ʿAbd al-​Malik (ruled 65–​86 /​685–​705), it thus followed the emergence of
the text much more quickly than in the cases of the Old and New Testaments.
Alongside the Qur’an, Islamic tradition also developed a grand narrative of the
birth of Islam, clad in the form of the Life of the Prophet (sīra; in what follows

15. Rahman, Major Themes in the Qur’an.

16.  See Körner, Koranhermeutik in der Türkei.
17.  See now Déroche, La transmission écrite du Coran; Marcus Fraser (unpublished lecture) has drawn atten-
tion to even earlier manuscripts.
8  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

“Sira”) compiled by Ibn Isḥāq (d. 150/​768) and revised by Ibn Hishām (d. 214/​
829 or 219/​834),18 which, however, clearly reflects the perspective of a later stage
in the history of mentalities.
The presentation in this volume will build essentially not on this Prophet vita,
which is frequently relied on for Qur’anic history, but rather on the Qur’an it-
self and the evidence of its spatial and temporal environment, even if certain
basic data are adopted from the Prophet vita, such as the scenario “proclaimer
Muhammad—​Meccan and Medinan hearers” and the skeletal outline of the most
important political events.
The text of the Qur’an is available in numerous printed editions, among which
the textual tradition of Ḥafṣ (d. 180/​796) according to ʿĀṣim (d. 128/​745), the
Ḥafs ʿan ʿĀṣim text, has become particularly widespread due to the impact of
the first inner-​Islamic Qur’an printing prompted by the Azhar school (Cairo
1925).19 This edition, and all other printed editions in circulation today, is based
on the so-​called Uthmanic consonantal text, which Islamic tradition dates to
the 750s. European translations of the Qur’an are widely available. Among those
in German, that of Rudi Paret20 still enjoys the highest prominence in scholarly
usage. The Qur’an quotations in this volume are based on an original translation,
which attempts to display the character of the text as proclamation; it should be
read alongside the sequence of critical Qur’an commentaries that will follow this
volume.

I.3.2  Autonomy of the Qur’an as “Oral Scripture”

It is not accidental that from the beginning, the Qur’an declares itself to be an
oral text through its Arabic name al-​qurʾān, “recitation”—​this is a marked dif-
ference from the case of the Bible, whose name goes back to Latin biblia “the
book (as such)” or Greek ta biblia, “the (canonical) books.” The accent on orality
in the name al-​qurʾān touches upon an essential point in several respects:  the
Qur’an is not only a text composed orally but one that was also transmitted orally
throughout history and is today represented primarily in this way. Nevertheless,
as Western readers we have become accustomed to perceive it as a book like the
Bible, or even as something that is irritatingly close to it, a book that therefore
bears the onerous reputation of epigonality, precisely because of this closeness.
This is no light verdict, since the Bible not only possesses status as “the book
of books” from a religious perspective but also makes further universal claims

18.  Rotter offers a partial German translation of the Life of the Prophet in Das Leben des Propheten; a complete
English translation is available in Guillaume, Life of Mohammad.
19.  Al-​Qurʾān al-​karīm, Cairo, 1925. Other text traditions, some in print but primarily circulating in the form
of lithographs, do not offer an essentially different version of the text but, rather, deviations in spelling and orthog-
raphy; see chap. 4, 161–​163. On the principles of the Cairo edition, see Bergsträsser, “Koranlesung in Kairo.”
20. Paret, Koran. Newer German translations exist: Khoury, Koran, Zirker, Koran, und Karimi, Koran; a liter-
arily sophisticated translation by Bobzin was published in early 2010.
 Introduction  9

of a unique kind. It is not by accident that it has cleared away all other monu-
ments of ancient Near Eastern literature from the field,21 so that it is the only
continuously read and taught work from its various eras of emergence. Offering
prophetic discourse, narrative, wisdom, and poetry that claim to be worthy of
permanent memory, it has set standards in literature that are virtually unattain-
able, becoming the “canonical text” as such. Because the Qur’an for its commu-
nity of believers came to substitute for the Bible, the Qur’an’s status within Islam
seems to give substance to the Western accusation of epigonality, an accusation
that developed quite early: a book similar to the Bible but coming after the Bible
could only be a pale imitation. Perhaps it is this tense closeness to the Bible that
is chiefly responsible for the widespread denigrating judgments of the form and
contents of the Qur’an that have long been prominent in Western perception.22
In order to free the Qur’an from this verdict of epigonality, we have taken
a number of routes. There is a current trend in American research to read the
Qur’an simply as an updating of the Bible, one that makes the biblical memory
meaningful for its new recipients by bridging the ontological gap between the
biblical past and the Qur’anic present” through particular literary exegeses.23 The
problematic nature of the often cryptic Qur’anic narratives is solved through
interpreting them as attempts to decenter the linearity of the biblical textual
environment, to undermine Jewish and Christian scripture and thus eliminate
the idea of a clearly restorable message.24 The Qur’an is thus treated as a biblical
apocryphon, the outcome of a preconceived textual intention. Such an exegetical
concept would only be comprehensible for a text compiled by an author, which
is here assumed as a matter of course for the Qur’an. This presently prevalent
research trend, which reads the Qur’an purely synchronically and exclusively in
terms of text-​referentiality, steers clear of the problematic of the Qur’an’s emer-
gence, which is—​as has to be admitted—​loaded with hypotheses. By renounc-
ing the text’s temporal and spatial coordinates, this approach, however, takes
the question of historical emergence too lightly. Insofar as this reading does not
treat the relative chronology of each of the discussed texts, its reconstructions of
Qur’anic developments must fall apart as arbitrary and often untenable.25
In this introductory volume, as against that, the difficult attempt will be made
to place the Qur’anic proclamation into its historical sequence, because only in
this way does the processuality of its textual genesis and its communal forma-
tion become recognizable. It is here that the most significant analogy that binds
the emergence of the Qur’an to that of the two other monotheistic traditions
emerges, since the central texts of each of these traditions also reflect a communal

21.  Cf., for instance, Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts.

22.  See also Wild, “Schauerliche Öde.”
23.  Hughes, “The Stranger at the Sea.”
24.  See Brown, The Apocalypse of Islam, 87.
25.  See also, in general, Sinai, “Qur’an as Process.”
10  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

process of dealing with tradition. The Qur’an represents a religious genesis that
corresponds to these other two major processes of religious genesis; it is not a
post-​biblical text with no commitment whose conditions of emergence are of no
interest. Precisely because the Qur’an is a scripture that is so disputed between
East and West, to reckon with it seriously is to do much more than simply inter-
pret a text. What must be reconstructed is the development of the Qur’an as a
communal document, that is, as the genuine evidence of the emergence of a reli-
gion in Late Antiquity, analogous to the emergences of the two other traditions.
The opposite approach to the Qur’an as a written fait accompli either implicitly
denies or willfully ignores its worthiness of this rank. The exclusively synchronic
approach cannot be justified through the argument that it was only the later read-
ings of the community that first laid the foundations for the inner-​Islamic under-
standing of the Qur’an today, and these therefore must form the ideal basis for a
dialogue with Islam. The Qur’an can only be perceived appropriately in terms of
the history of knowledge, that is, in terms of its engagement with the two other
traditions, when it is considered as evidence of the “drama of argumentation”
that played out between the community and the contemporary representatives of
the contemporaneous traditions. The logic and hermeneutics of the Qur’an only
become clear when viewed as a recourse to the great questions of its time, an an-
tithesis to the premises current in its particular space, and not as the context-​free
discourse of an isolated speaker or, worse, an author. This requires an arsenal of
methods, including the philological approach offered here, which perhaps today
enjoys the weakest reputation. Although the Qur’an appears to many research-
ers as a textual challenge to be taken up primarily by literary scholarship, it is
of primary importance that Qur’an research first engages the tasks of philology
and the history of theology, in order to lay a solid foundation for literary-​critical
undertakings.

I.3.3  “Multi-​mediality”
With respect to its media of representation, the Qur’an holds a very special status
in religious history. In a much more vital way than in the case of the other scrip-
tures, the Qur’an was and is still present audibly in daily life, where it is recited in
various forms of cantilene. Its unique Sitz im Leben has always been liturgy: each
of the five daily prayers of Islam includes several Qur’an recitations, chosen in-
dependently by the worshipper and recited by heart in melodic recitation. The
Qur’an is thus tied inextricably with performance intended for aesthetic affect,
whose emotional potential becomes unrecognizable in the mute reading of the
text that so often forms the basis of critical research.26 This additional acoustic-​
aesthetic dimension, which for the scriptures of the other religions is confined

26.  An approach to this aesthetic dimension is introduced by Kermani, Gott its schön.

 Introduction  11

to the social context of collective worship, is the ubiquitous form of presence of

the Qur’an, which maintains its affective power outside of collective worship as
well.27 Since claims for aesthetic quality were already involved in its emergence
and earliest diffusion, it is no surprise that the Qur’an soon took on a further
aesthetic manifestation beyond the acoustic as it was set into writing in Arabic
letters: the Qur’an is also omnipresent visually, in calligraphic reproductions of
individual suras and verses that are present in public and private space. As the
reference text par excellence for calligraphic art, it has exercised an effect on
Islamic aesthetics throughout history that cannot be overstated.28
That this formal plurality of appearances, this “multi-​mediality,” is a unique
quality of the Qur’an, and that a special attraction adheres to its visual and au-
ditory manifestation, has often been noted in research, but serious conclusions
have rarely been drawn from this. The Qur’an’s three forms of appearance have
never been studied together in Western research, the visual appearance of the
Qur’an being the subject of art history, while the acoustic one remains a spe-
cial area of ethnomusicology. On the other hand, the textual appearance of the
Qur’an, as a post-​biblical prophetic writing, is excluded from the only discipline
that might be entitled to comprehend it, theology. Instead, the Qur’an has been
considered exclusively through the lens of Arabic philology, which, concerned
with the study of the entire stock of Islamic writing, took the Qur’an to be one
among the various bodies of evidence of Arabic literature, ignoring its special
status as the founding document of a world religion. Accordingly, the Qur’an has
been submitted mainly to grammatical and stylistic analyses. Though many of
these foundational works—​produced by outstanding scholars—​are still of great
value, they have rarely been able to bring the Qur’an closer to the Western reader
aesthetically or hermeneutically—​a failure that is due not least to the application
of inappropriate standards. The criteria for judgments about the linguistic cor-
rectness, level of style, and literary rank of the Qur’an have been derived from the
same sources by which one measured Arabic literature as a whole, being derived
from the grammatical and lexicological writings on the “classical” Arabic lan-
guage, the ʿarabīya,29 which were all composed some centuries after the Qur’an.
Although this body of rules and regulations is invaluable for any approach to the
development of secular post-​Qur’anic classical Arabic, its strict application to
the Qur’an is an anachronism, since the Qur’an emerged well before the fixing of
“classical” grammar. Taking into account the further important aspect that the
Qur’an cannot be isolated stylistically from biblical tradition, it becomes clear
that the paradigms developed in later Arabic literature that are applied to the
Qur’an in Western research offer only arbitrary standards. It is no surprise, then,

27. Nelson, Art of Reciting.

28. Blair, Calligraphy.
29.  Spitaler, “Arabisch.”
12  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

that philological analyses have sometimes amounted to “catalogues of vices”

rather than elaborations of a poetics of the Qur’an.30 Indeed, it would be no exag-
geration to claim that until the end of the last century,31 with the single exception
of the German poet and “imitative stylist” of Near Eastern literature Friedrich
Rückert (1788–​1866),32 no researcher in the German-​speaking world has taken
a noteworthy interest in the Qur’anic speech style—​a judgment that probably
can be extended to the rest of the European research tradition, where it was
only translators, including George Sale (1697–​1736)33 and his later countryman
Arthur Arberry (1905–​1969),34 who alone showed any evidence of a sensibility
for Qur’anic literary form.35 In the German-​speaking world, we can, however,
expect a feedback of the Qur’an into German literature in the near future; two
literary translations, by Hartmut Bobzin and Stefan Weidner, are presently in
preparation, or have already appeared.36

I.4  Two Misreflections of the Qur’an: Teleology and

the Syndrome of Epigonality

The list of false perceptions of the Qur’an can be continued. Above all, two con-
tinuously encountered research perspectives stand in the way of an objective and
open-​ended textual investigation: teleology and, often in conjunction with it, the
assumption of epigonality. We constantly encounter an unquestioned concep-
tion of the Qur’an as a “finished book,” whether in the sense of a great authorial
venture by the Prophet that still during his lifetime would alter world history
or in the sense of a successful later compilation that grounded this success ret-
roactively in salvation history. This reduction of the genesis of the Qur’an to a
“parthenogenesis,” to the production of a consummate book intended as such,
is accompanied by a second reductive conception, which claims that the text is
a mere surrogate of the Bible, or at most an epigonal attempt to recreate it in
Arabic. With few exceptions, modern Qur’an researchers shy away from granting
the Qur’an its own creative process of emergence and avoid granting the final
sacral-​coded text any dimension of meaning that exceeds its verbal pronounce-
ments; above all, they avoid recognizing it as a document of communal history.
Qur’an research, and research in early Islam in general, is thus beholden to
the teleological conception of the appearance of the Qur’an as a “primal scene”—​
this is so regardless of whether the Qur’an is seen as Muhammad’s “book” in

30.  Nöldecke, “Zur Sprache des Koran” (“register of sins”).

31.  That is, up to the publication of Kermani, Gott its schön, in 1999.
32. Rückert, Koran (completed 1844, first edition 1888).
33. Sale, Koran, London, 1734.
34. Arberry, Koran, Oxford, 1964.
35.  Some short suras were analyzed for their tonality in the exceptional study of Michael Sells, “Sound, Spirit,
and Gender”; this is an approach he adopts also in his synoptic work Approaching the Qur’an.
36. Bobzin, Der Koran.
 Introduction  13

its traditional temporal and spatial coordinates, as in traditional research, or

whether it is construed by skeptical researchers as a “book” produced by anon-
ymous redactors. The “book” is conceived as an authorial text or, put briefly, a
finished theological design, a fait accompli that marks a new historical beginning
or, in the eyes of the skeptics assuming a later, politically conditioned compi-
lation, asserts in retrospect a new beginning for an already established Islamic
society. In the cases of the individual phases of development of the Qur’an’s gen-
esis, however, such as the migration of the Prophet from Mecca to Medina in the
year 622, the construction of a primal scene has recently been sharply critiqued
and debunked as untenable. Thus a recent study shows that the event of the hijra,
which occurs during the Qur’an genesis itself, was not initially a foundational act
that set the standards for a new epoch in Islamic history, but only became such
retrospectively, through a hindsight that underlays it with teleological necessity.37
The most crucial such event, the emergence of a “book,” the gradual “hypostasiz-
ing” of the proclamation into the word of God manifest in codex form, should
be subject to just such an interpretive archaeology. It is evident that the “closure
of the text,” which is a necessary precondition for this hypostasizing, did not
occur during the period of the Qur’an’s genesis. Within the Qur’an itself, one can
detect traces of an adaptation of a Late Antique logos theology, which raised the
audibly recited Qur’an, al-​qurʾān in statu nascendi, to the rank of a “hypostasis,”
a manifestation of the word of God perceivable to the senses. The Qur’an’s ele-
vation to a transcendent status as a materialized “book” is a later phenomenon,
one that is often carried forward in modern apologetics. Islamic reform thinkers
such as Muhammad Shahrur begin their critique here;38 likewise, structuralist
researchers such as Mohammed Arkoun have long called for the deconstruction
of the sacralized “book,” or what Arkoun called the “livre-​livre”; but this critique
has not been pursued in connection to historical analysis.39 Even in “skeptical”
research, the task of historically criticizing the construction of Islamic primal
scenes and their mythical ramifications has only barely been perceived, and often
short-​circuited through the “transportation” of the Qur’an text out of its “pri-
mary milieu,” the Hijaz of the seventh century, into a later, “demythologized his-
torical period” or a more “historically transparent” geographical region such as
Syria. It is on this crucial point of Qur’an research that the volume here presented
adopts a fundamentally new position: the Qur’an should be perceived as a text
that grew historically, prior to its later achievement of a unique religious aura.
It must be loosed from both the historically later discourse of Islamic tradition
and the speculative horizon of Western projections and placed back into the Late
Antique milieu of its emergence—​as a unique and new voice in the theological

37.  Crone, “Concept of Hijra.”

38.  Eickelman, “Muslim Politics.”
39. Arkoun, Lectures du Coran; Arkoun, Rethinking Islam.
14  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

debates of its time. In this project, it will not always be possible to proceed be-
yond hypotheses.
This project of freeing the Qur’an from its teleological cocoon has a culture-​
critical dimension that goes beyond academic concerns and that touches upon
not only the very position of Western research but also the position of research
in the Near East, which does not appear much better off than that of Western
research. According to the dominant Islamic view, relevant Arab history begins
with the Qur’anic revelation, and “only a chaotic image remains from the pre-
vious time, condensed in the concept of jāhilīya, which is understood as the
‘Time of Ignorance.’ ”40 As the Lebanese historian Samir Kassir emphasizes, this
origin myth, which refers everything back to the “role of Muhammad,” reduces
prehistory to an epoch characterized almost exclusively by nomadic forms of life.
The jāhilīya, construed as pre-​Islamic “barbarism” and “ignorance,” thus serves
as a pure binary contrast to the new civilization brought about by Islam. But
jāhilīya understood in this sense,

of which Arabic historiography preserves only poetic evidence and gene-

alogical myth, would in the best case cover the immediate hundred years
preceding the Prophet only. The chaotic image cannot be maintained if
one reviews the results of research into Hellenistic and Roman history
documented by archaeology, epigraphy, and numismatics. Indeed, the
Arab cities in the northern Hijāz were fully Romanized, even to the point
that they gave rise to Roman emperors. Warlike nomadism, a notion nour-
ished in the later Arabic conceptual world, should then be thoroughly
relativized, so that one can imagine what sort of Copernican revolution
would be initiated by the recognition of a golden age that preceded the
actual golden ages.41

Kassir pleads for the freeing of the Arabic-​Islamic vision from the teleolog-
ical compulsion of the assumption of religious predetermination, the assump-
tion that all Arab history stems originally from the revelation proclaimed by
Muhammad—​a mythologizing of history that, mutatis mutandis, also underlies
the alternative nationalistic vision that attributes a “golden age” to the Arabic ex-
pansion movement under the first caliphs. Kassir’s plea is valuable for its recon-
textualization of Arabic-​Islamic history alongside Jewish-​Christian, syncretistic,
and pagan Late Antiquity, and for its opening of Islamic history to a pre-​Islamic
pluricultural past that releases the Qur’an and early Islam from their respective
isolation.
The burning question of the evaluation of the jāhilīya current in Islamic dis-
cussions has its counterpart in discussions around the European construction of

40. Kassir, Das arabische Unglück, 38ff., cf. below 22ff.

41.  Ibid., 39.
 Introduction  15

Late Antiquity. Jāhilīya and Late Antiquity are two sides of the same coin. But they
are difficult to bring together, as each in turn is based on a principle of exclusion.
Though the Islamic jāhilīya construction, with its ostracizing of the pre-​Islamic
mentality, is geared above all to the pagan way of life, it consigns however—​with
the denigration of an entire epoch as an obsolete “pre-​time”—​those processes
and actors not in conformity with later Islam to historical oblivion. Late Antique
Arabia has become an “empty Hijaz,”42 as James E. Montgomery has pointedly
expressed it, a region emptied of its cultural setting. The traditional concep-
tion of a “culturally remote” Hijaz has not only caused skeptical researchers to
search for the milieu of the Qur’an’s emergence in another region; it also seems
co-​responsible for the exclusivist Western construction of Late Antiquity, which
has long excluded Islam. Islam was received as signaling a cultural break, induc-
ing the “decline” of the plural older cultures of the Near East that had survived
into Late Antiquity—​a construction that has only begun in recent times to be
weakened by a more inclusive view.43 But the Qur’an itself has not yet been given
a place in the world of Late Antiquity.

I.4.1 Epigonality
The second distorting mirror, the projection of the Qur’an as an epigonal re-
prise of the Bible, has effects that are no less disfiguring. If nearly all available
introductory presentations show traces of a pejorative assessment of Qur’anic
religious discourse44 and draw a strikingly dismissive picture of the development
of the Qur’an’s textual form, this is largely due to a conception of the Qur’an as
a weaker replica of the Bible, with nothing essentially new to offer. These reser-
vations about the text have even deeper roots: if we read the Qur’an as a mere
replica of the Bible, the text seems to put forth trains of thought and images in
a way that has long become obsolete in the secular West. Qur’anic practices and
positions, such as ritualized piety and the awareness of standing within primor-
dially concluded covenantal bonds, would thus appear too outdated and obsolete
to deserve a systematic review of their gradual development as results of a long
and constant religious conversation.45
The Qur’an, as a post-​biblical scripture, is also caught between the meshes
of a new secularized reading of the “Bible as literature.”46 As a paraenetic text,
a communication with admonishing-​instructing intentions, the Qur’an does
not meet the classical standards of biblical narrative, where strict narrative
logic and artistic composition of theological elements take precedent. It is even

42.  Montgomery, “The Empty Ḥijāz”; see also his rehabilitation of the ʾayyām al-​ʿArab literature, which had up
that point been completely ignored in literature on the Koran: Montgomery, Vagaries,  10–​51.
43. Bowersock, Hellenism; Hoyland, Arabia; Brown, “Late Antiquity and Islam.”
44.  Wild’s compilation, “Schauerliche Öde,” could easily be expanded to new cases.
45.  See also Wild’s observations in “Why Self-​Referentiality?,” 1–​14.
46.  See Schmidt and Weidner, Bibel als Literatur.
16  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

further from fulfilling the expectation imposed on the text today, that it should
be “rooted in reality” and “animate.” The Bible itself has only recently been
widely rediscovered as “literature,” a discovery whose representatives boldly
discredit previous exegetical readings oriented to allegory and typology as hin-
drances to the recognition of the full “humanistic dimension” of biblical dis-
course. Here too a judgment emerges that is drawn exclusively from Western
secular ideals. This verdict hits the Qur’an all the harder, since this scripture as
such already reflects an exegetical reading of biblical narratives, and thus is not
highly amenable to readings rooted in reality or concentrating only on narra-
tive techniques.
The teleological conception of the Qur’an as a pregiven book and the re-
fusal to include a reading of its sacral coding (the “religious ballast” long
disregarded in the Western tradition) have operated as distorting mirrors
and ultimately eliminated the Qur’an’s epistemic dimension, the process of
dealing with diverse older traditions. That which is revolutionarily new, what
the reading of the Qur’an makes most attractive intellectually, thus remains
unrecognized. In this volume, special significance and constant attention will
be given to the contextualizing of the Qur’an not only with the Bible but also
with rabbinic, patristic, and liturgical literature. Of course, “parallels” and
“models” for Qur’anic texts have long been recognized, but they have gener-
ally been treated as mere evidence for comparative studies. Here, by contrast,
their re-​functioning in the context of communal formation will become the
central point of focus.
We will also oppose the widespread notion that the Qur’an can be under-
stood in isolation from ancient Arabic poetry. It is not enough to concede that
the Qur’an inverted the heroic ethos of murūʾa, “heroism,” or integrated it where
possible into new Islamic categories. The confrontation of the Qur’anic com-
munity with this local “great tradition” brought forth a complex new discourse,
which, no less dramatically than the biblical-​Qur’anic discourse, radically over-
turned central conventions of thought. Perhaps the most significant rewriting is
to be seen in the rigorous new formation of the ancient Arabic construction of
space, which is given form in the nasīb, the opening section of the qasida (qaṣīda)
that includes the convention of the poet’s lamenting at the abandoned camp-
site. The space of the ruins, emptied of sense, in which the ancient Arab speaker
locates himself, is not only reversed in its qualities but raised in its reformula-
tion to the rank of a linchpin for the new eschatologically marked worldview: it
returns in the form of a garden full of sensory fulfillment, which awaits the pious
in the hereafter.47

47.  Neuwirth, “Zeit und Ewigkeit in den Psalmen und im Koran.”

 Introduction  17

I.5  The “Qur’anic Community”

A third new aspect of our approach lies in the focus on the Qur’anic commu-
nity. We do not assume an “author” behind the Qur’an, but rather—​apart from
the very first suras, which reflect an individual conversation between God and
man—​a protracted communal discussion that lasts over the whole period of the
Prophet’s ministry. The expectation of the hearers that is fulfilled in the Qur’an
is conditioned by their previous knowledge: successful communication is condi-
tioned on a body of knowledge that existed already in ongoing discussions. This is
not to discard the assumption, firmly held also in our hypotheses, that it was the
proclaimer himself who ultimately gave the text its verbal and literary form. But
in terms of content, the pronouncements also belong simultaneously to the early
community, which is constantly present in the text. In what follows, particular at-
tention will be given to the hearers—​here termed the “Qur’anic community”—​as
co-​formers of the discourse and intended hearers of the text, though the central
actor in the interaction scenario remains, just as before, the proclaimer himself.
While older works speak in general of “Muhammad” and newer ones of “the
Qur’an,” here we speak generally of the “proclaimer,” with respect to the com-
munication process that overrides all of this; this term can be understood as the
common denominator of his frequent self-​designations as “warner,” nadhīr; later
“apostle,” rasūl; and then yet later “prophet,” nabī. The name Muhammad appears
first in Medinan texts, perhaps as an honorific, at a time when the proclaimer
already occupies a ruling and ceremonial function evoking theocratic models.
Account should be given to the Qur’anic language usage as it developed through
a number of stages; to avoid anachronisms, referring to the “proclaimer” there-
fore appears to be most rewarding.48

I.6  Qur’an Research as Historical and Literary-​

Critical Project

It is hard to deny that the Qur’an remains a text that is difficult to approach for the
Western reader. In its transmitted form, it does not invite a continuous reading.
But its unapproachability is not based primarily on its historical age, on the fact
that it is a Late Antique text dating to the seventh century and thus stands at a
distance from the modern thought world; nor is it based on the fact that it is an
Arabic text, the particular cultural references of which are not familiar to the
European reader. Rather, the text’s unique obstacle lies in its particular formal
traits, as a document of proclamation in a mantic discourse form that has not
yet been analyzed through literary-​critical methods. In common perception, the
Qur’an stands as an erratic block within its own literary landscape, disconnected

48.  On scholarly uncertainty, see Crone, “What Do We Actually Know about Mohammed?”
18  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

from the Arabic literature that preceded it and isolated in its textual position from
the neighboring, more familiar Jewish and Christian literatures. “Uprooted” in
this way from its semantic and aesthetic context, the text appears full of forced
metaphors, occasionally labored mysteriousness, and trains of thought that are
ambiguous to the untrained eye; above all, it is the order of suras, which evinces
no chronological or narrative logic, that makes the Qur’an appear to be a text that
undercuts any continuous reading. Added to this is the centuries-​old perception
of the text’s foreignness in the Western world, of simultaneous nearness to and
distance from the Bible, a trait that has been willfully overplayed again in recent
scholarly literature. The contemporary call for a re-​reading of classical Greek po-
etry that would concentrate on aesthetics and not overemphasize cultural spec-
ificity and foreignness is relevant also, mutatis mutandis, for the Qur’an—​even
if, in our case, the historical reconstruction of the milieu of emergence is still far
from achieved. An additional hindrance to this project is the teleological ballast
of a traditional Western reading, which is based on the preconceived notion that
the Qur’an is a kind of “reduced form” of the Bible and thus a literary fossil. This
ballast must be discarded, if one wants to make comprehensible the actual and
irrefutable aesthetic affective power of the Qur’an, which has been so powerful
throughout the centuries and remains so.
Indeed, we find that all of the text-​specific obstacles to understanding listed
above can be explained and dispelled historically. Each must be worked through,
if the new reading is not to remain speculative. And the conditions for this are
more amenable than ever: not only has our knowledge of the environment of the
Qur’an and its historical, religious-​historical, and social-​political conditions of
emergence progressed significantly in recent times, so that one speaks now of
regionally different “Late Antiquities” in the broader region in which the Qur’an
emerges;49 additionally, promising new methodological approaches are being de-
veloped for the study of the formal particularities of the Qur’an. It is therefore
not too ambitious to suggest a new reading, through the laying out of the con-
ditions of emergence as well as the functions and forms of Qur’anic discourse,
and through a detailed commentary: a new reading will invite the reader of the
Qur’an to discover the historical complexity of the text and to recognize its com-
plex rhetorical structure as an integral part of the religious message itself.
This optimism may be surprising given the current state of Qur’an research,
where the most diverse projects and methodologies are employed side by side
but hardly ever checked against each other. Certainly, the project of an introduc-
tion to the Qur’an that brings together all relevant aspects will remain illusory, in
view of the diverse innovative individual research projects that now stand only in
their beginning phases. Yet just such an introduction is long overdue, if only as a

49.  On this, see Neuwirth, Sinai, and Marx, Qur’ān in Context. Robin has presented important new insights on
the historical context of Late Antiquity in Southern Arabia; see especially his “Himyar et Israël.”
 Introduction  19

practical attempt to break through the hermeneutical barriers erected in Qur’an

research between the different methodologies. This confidence is based in the
conviction that through the linking of literary-​critical and historical approaches,
a firm basis for new Qur’an research can be laid. This means that we must develop
a linking model that also allows the knowledge attained within disciplines that
have until now been kept distinct from philological or historical studies, such
as cultural anthropology50 or art theory,51 to be bundled and made fruitful for
a more complex understanding of the Qur’an. The present volume, which situ-
ates itself in the tradition of philological-​literary studies, assumes that serious
academic Qur’an research cannot proceed without an interest in the historical
dimensions of the Qur’an, and that even an inexperienced, less ambitious reader
applying an ahistorical reading would make it only halfway through the Qur’an.
At least heuristically, the text must be placed within a cultural milieu.

I.6.1  The Indispensability of Chronology

A crucial precondition of this project is the reconstruction of the chronology that
is no longer immediately evident in the transmitted textual form, despite the fact
that such a reconstruction has often been discredited in modern studies as an
obsolete research goal.52 It is chronology that constitutes the scaffolding for the
understanding of the pre-​redactional text, that is, the successive proclamation of
the Qur’anic message that should be the centerpiece of historical comprehension
of the Qur’an, whereas chronology for the understanding of the post-​redactional
text interpreted by the exegetes is not as urgently required.
Still, questions surrounding the chronology of individual texts have played no
insignificant role in the Islamic tradition from the beginning. They were the ob-
ject of theology and legal science, where the interpretation of Qur’anic citations
often requires one to confront the question of when and under what circum-
stances the texts under scrutiny were proclaimed. Assigning a historic sequence
to the individual Qur’an texts, the traditional Islamic sciences distinguish be-
tween Meccan and Medinan suras.53 This differentiation does not, however, af-
fect the interpretation in general, but rather remains limited to verses already
problematized theologically or in terms of legal specifics. Initiatives toward a
chronological ordering of texts have also been developed in the discipline of the
determination of the “circumstances of the revelation,” asbāb al-​nuzūl; but since
this discipline involves the Sira and therefore merges with hagiographic litera-
ture, its results cannot be evaluated as historical in strict sense.

50.  See, e.g., Toelle, Coran revisité; Chabbi, Seigneur; and Martin, Cultural Perspective; Toelle, Local Contexts.
51.  See, e.g., Fowden, Hellenism, Christianity and the Umayyads.
52.  This seems to be characteristic of British and American work on the Koran; cf. for example the works of
Hawting, Rippin, and Martin.
53.  A compilation of statements within the traditional literature is offered by Nagel, Medinensische Einschübe.
20  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

On the other hand, specialized European research—​above all Gustav Weil (1808–​
1889),54 followed significantly by Theodor Nöldeke (1836–​1930), whose Geschichte
des Qorans (The History of the Qurʾan) appeared in 1860—​refined the division into
two periods of emergence established in Islamic tradition. Primarily on the basis of
formal observations, Nöldeke distinguished between three Meccan periods and one
Medinan period. For several generations, European research relied on this chro-
nology as the backbone of its understanding of the Qur’an, taking interest above all
in a reconstruction of the development of the proclaimer and his message. Though
Nöldeke’s work remained beholden to several prejudices, and although he treated
the Qur’an as above all an authorial work rather than the reflection of an interaction
between speaker and community, nonetheless his The History of the Qurʾān laid the
basis for all later work on the formation and development of the Qur’anic message.
In the time since, it has been possible to refine the chronology he laid out in essen-
tial ways.55 For the development of the pre-​redactional text, that is, the proclamation
itself, chronology, though it remains ultimately hypothetical, must serve as an indis-
pensable guideline if the succession of discourses and theological positions is to be
comprehended.

I.6.2  The Problem of Historicity

The Qur’an is not only a difficult text but also a contested one in the contemporary
moment, one whose historical location is controversial in Islamic and Western
research. Certainly, in view of the disproportionately short time that Islamic tra-
dition assigns to Muhammad’s lifework, it is to be expected that doubts may arise
about the unprecedentedly grand career of a man from a remote corner of the
contemporary oecumene. If we follow the historical reports, he was born around
570, first appeared publicly in Mecca in 610, and was forced into exile to Medina
in 622, where, after the successful spread of his teaching across a wide range of
the Arabian Peninsula, he died ten years later in 632.56 Much of this presentation
seems to differ from what is familiar from religious history: the Qur’an, a mes-
sage to the pagans of the Arabian Peninsula, led within only twenty-​two years to
the founding of a new religion? A holy scripture becomes fixed and canonized
a short time after the death of the founder, and then transmitted authentically
down to the present? It is thus hardly surprising that hypotheses drawing on
the course of developments in Judaism and Christianity have been continually
formulated, not only in recent times, seeking to rewrite early Islamic history and
place the emergence of the Qur’an in another region, another time,57 occasionally

54. Weil, Historisch-​kritische Einleitung.

55.  See Sinai, “Qur’an as Process.”
56.  An overview of the proclaimer’s life and work is offered by Bobzin, Muhammad, and recently by Schöller,
Mohammed.
57. Wansbrough, Quranic Studies; Wansbrough, Sectarian Milieu; Crone and Cook, Hagarism.
 Introduction  21

even without the participation of Muhammad.58 But these new reconstructions

cannot be brought into agreement, nor do they yield a plausible new picture of
events, raising instead innumerable new questions. It has not been possible so far
to construct an alternative history of the emergence of Islam. The risk assumed
by the skeptical elimination of the inner-​Islamic historical tradition has so far
yielded no historically viable result.
But the inner-​Islamic positioning of the Qur’an in history is also not without
its problems, as the critique of the historian Samir Kassir has already made clear.59
There is a tendency here to construct a pure historical origin in the Qur’an and to
denigrate the preceding times as an “age of ignorance.” The fact that Samir Kassir,
in his call for the reconnection of Arabian history to Late Antique culture, has
in mind primarily the social and ideological links with non-​Arabian actors60 and
does not problematize inner-​Arab verbal and literary relationships is not due to
his personal specialization as a historian alone. Arabic research looks back to a
long tradition of linguistic and literary work on the Qur’an and ancient Arabic
poetry stretching back over many centuries, so that the urgency of venturing new
readings in this realm may not be immediately felt. But critical Qur’an research
must take up, as a second axis of the undertaking, so to speak, a new cultural-​
critical and literary study of the evidence of poetry and epic of the sixth and
seventh centuries.
Indeed, ancient Arabic poetry, whose reincorporation into Late Antiquity
is now being advocated by ever more voices,61 has not been adequately studied
with a view to its rich intertextuality reaching across languages and cultures. This
poetry has long been explained in conformity with indigenous Arabic language
scholarship, as originating entirely from a nomadic, or in exceptional cases pro-
vincial and courtly, culture; it has thus appeared as essentially particular and
wholly limited to Arab culture. But, as James E. Montgomery has shown, what
we are dealing with here is rather a consciously Bedouinizing elitist poetry, that
fits into the Hellenistically imprinted culture of its wider environment. Particular
characteristics, such as the wistful call to that which has passed on, the ubi sunt
qui ante nos in mundo fuere62 motif that is so characteristic of the Hellenistic pe-
riod and which is repeated in ancient Arabic poetry, come immediately to mind.
As these ideas also undergo a new interpretation in the Qur’an, this poetry is
to be considered one of the formative foundations for the Qur’an community,
comparable in rank to the monotheistic religions. That the Qur’an employs and

58. Luxenberg, Syro-​aramäische Lesart.

59. Kassir, Das arabische Unglück. Chabbi argues similarly in Le Coran décrypté. Chabbi, however, is primarily
interested in eliminating mythical excesses from the history of Islam.
60.  See, e.g., Ali, Al-​Mufassal, Ajina, Mausūʿat, and al-​Saʿfī, al-​Qurbān. Crucial advances have been made in
the study of epigraphy and papyrus; for more recent Arabic scholarship, see Hussein, Nashʾat al-​Dawla.
61. Montgomery, “Dichotomy”; Zwettler, Oral Tradition; cf. also Bauer, “The Relevance of Early Arabic
Poetry”; Dmitriev, Das poetische Werk; Toral-​Niehoff, Stammesfürsten.
62.  Becker, “Ubi sunt qui ante nos in mundo fuere.”
22  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

further develops the poetic language has long been recognized. But this research
path has rarely been pursued in any detail since the work of Alfred Bloch.63 It
is obvious that a treatment of the Qur’an that neglects its literary form and its
reference to poetry—​a deficit that is reflected still in the Western Qur’an com-
mentaries presently in use64—​cannot adequately capture the dimensions of the
text’s significance.

I.6.3  Plurality of Methods

Only thirty years ago, one could make the claim, with an apologetic but also opti-
mistic tone, that “Qur’an research still stands in children’s shoes.” In the time since,
it has grown up into a complex discipline, in which a diversity of methodological
projects are being tested anew. Yet these complex approaches to the Qur’an do not
tend to build on each other, but rather give rise to a kind of chaos, in which the
actual object of research, the Qur’an itself, no longer comes into focus. However
welcome this diversity of research methods may be, it remains ineffectual so long
as the individual projects and their results are not brought together and the re-
spective underlying hypothetical premises are not explicitly expounded.
At present, the Qur’an’s textual history and exegesis are more controversial
than ever.65 Above all, we are further away than ever from the important goal of
setting the third monotheistic scripture on the same level with the two others, of
setting the Qur’an into relief as a reference text equal to the Bible, a text to which
no less promising historical, literary, and theological questions can be set than to
the biblical writings themselves. This justifies the urgency of a serious analysis
of the structures of the text that is to be informed by biblical studies, a treat-
ment that handles it not in an “essentialist” way, as an exotic text, but rather with
an “egalitarian” method, that is, with the same methodical apparatus and corre-
sponding strategies as employed for the biblical writings. According to the guid-
ing principle of biblical studies, which calls for the primacy of “lower criticism,”
the Qur’an must first be submitted heuristically, in its current state of transmis-
sion, to a microstructural reading, which will test the coherence of its unities, the
suras, before it can be made the object of such textual experiments as have be-
come frequent in recent studies, seeking to prove hypothetical pre-​Islamic prec-
edents or the contrary, a text produced later within Islam.
It is thus no longer possible to base oneself on a single, particular method.
The present study is principally dedicated to the historical-​critical approach, an
approach that is being questioned, however, from various perspectives in recent
times.66 Alongside the numerous alternative synchronic Bible readings, which

63. Bloch, Vers und Sprache; see as well Spitaler’s review.

64.  This also applies to Paret, Koran: Kommentar; Bell, Commentary; and Khoury, Koran.
65.  Motzki, “Alternative Accounts of the Qur’an’s Formation.”
66.  See also Barton, Cambridge Companion to Biblical Interpretation.
 Introduction  23

are not applicable to the pre-​canonic Qur’an, an approach oriented toward recep-
tion history,67 poses new challenges to Qur’an research. Thus, certain Jewish68 and
Christian69 exegetes plead that the Bible should no longer be understood from
outside the context of its beginnings, but should rather be re-​embedded into its
living liturgical and theological tradition, which has been maintained down to
today. In this, they point to the decisive break with tradition that began with the
secularization of biblical studies in the eighteenth/​nineteenth century, when the
traditional hermeneutic rules were displaced through the rigorous application of
historical-​critical methods, and, to put this briefly, the study of the prehistory of
the Bible came to replace the study of the Bible itself.
But Qur’an research, unlike this new direction of biblical studies, is not faced
with the task of reconnecting the Qur’an to its traditional exegetical context.
In contrast to the Bible (at least in its mainstream interpretations), the Qur’an
stands within a virtually unbroken tradition of dogmatically bound exegesis. But
Qur’an research, even as it adopts principles from the historical-​critical method,
should learn from these new reflections in biblical studies. What is still required
for the Qur’an is focus on it as a text that already reflects the traditional Jewish
and Christian traditions of exegesis that are now being rediscovered in biblical
studies. What is called for now is not, as in new Jewish and Christian Bible re-
search, the reconstruction of the Qur’an’s own traditional exegesis; rather, be-
cause the Qur’an itself is a part of the history of post-​biblical exegesis and presents
reworkings of allegorical and typological interpretations of earlier writings; what
is demanded is the laying open of these particular post-​biblical intertextualities
in the Qur’an itself. From this perspective, the inclusion of post-​biblical exeget-
ical traditions newly reclaimed in biblical studies and historical-​critical analysis
can be meaningfully brought together. Apart from this, the fact that a reading of
the Qur’an embedded in its exegetical tradition still presents a challenging field
of research in itself is shown fully by exemplary new studies on the commentary
literature.70
What must be brought up to speed in Qur’an research, however, are attempts
to anchor the text historically in Late Antiquity, a task wherein the historical-​
critical method must be combined with newer approaches:  the investigation
presented here will in no way end in literary-​critical “deconstruction,” since the
primary object of study on which it seeks to shed light consists of the individual
suras in their complete and final form. The single suras are not to be treated in
isolation, however, but rather should be regarded as parts of the sequence of suras
that must be reconstructed, that is, as phases of the proclamation. In this, the

67. Reiser, Bibelkritik und Auslegung.

68.  Kugel, “Early Interpretation”; Kugel, The Bible as It Was.
69.  Wilken, “In Defense of Allegory.”
70.  Most recently see Saleh, Qur’an Commentary of al-​Tha’labi; Saleh, In Defense of the Bible; Lane, Kashshaf of
Jar Allah al-​Zamakhshari; and Sinai, Studien zur frühen Koraninterpretation.
24  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

posing of questions about the history of redaction connects to the interests of the
so-​called canonical reading (canonical approach), which has been propagated
since the 1970s in American biblical studies.71 The canonical approach under-
stands the genesis of a canon as a process of growth. Canon in this context no
longer means simply the binding, codified final form of a scripture but rather “a
consciousness deeply rooted in this very writing of obligation, which is estab-
lished through processes of updating and intertextuality that are reflected in the
text.”72—​“Even if this genesis, conceived as a canonic process, comes to an end
with the end of the growth of the text, the final form of the writing offers neither
a form without tension nor one that levels out the traces of the gradually grown
text. With the final form, the site of interpretation is displaced. Up to that point it
has occurred in the text as productive updating or redaction, and from that point
on it occurs through commentary and interpretation alongside, or on, the text.”73
Differently than in, for example, the case of the Psalms, with the Qur’an we
are not attempting to stitch together a meaningfully ordered total corpus of
proclamations—​for in the case of the Qur’an, these proclamations never consti-
tuted a meaningfully ordered written ensemble, but rather consisted at most of
a virtual corpus made up of the suras assigned to their historical sequence. The
most important goal of the reconstruction of a Qur’an chronology is, rather, an
understanding of the suras themselves that meets the demands of literary crit-
ical scholarship. That the suras are rich in intertextual references has already
been highlighted by John Wansbrough;74 but Qur’anic intertextuality does not
make reference exclusively to extra-​Qur’anic texts that arise out of the biblical
tradition. Rather, the Qur’an—​as has been highlighted by Navid Kermani,75 who
most recently has made the case for the poeticity of the Qur’an—​predisposes its
addressees “through announcements, open and hidden signals, familiar charac-
teristics or implicit references, to a very particular kind of reception. . . . In the
case of the Qur’an it must be added that the Qur’an is to a high degree a self-​
referential text, a text which reflects on itself in many places, which comments on
itself, which makes a theme of its own linguistic awareness, more than any other
scripture in the history of world religions.”76
Literary research into the Qur’an thus stands before a double task: it must on
the one hand take into its horizon the insights of the hermeneutics developed
within Islam, that is, integrate classical Arabic linguistic stylistics and modern
literary exegesis, tafsīr adabī. This important task is yet to be attempted. Its other

71.  See especially Childs, Biblical Theology; Childs, Old Testament as Scripture; Childs, New Testament as
Canon; and Childs, Theologie der einen Bibel.
72.  Dohmen and Oeming, Biblischer Kanon, 25.
73. Ibid.
74. Wansbrough, Quranic Studies.
75. Kermani, Gott ist schön.
76.  Ibid., 97.
 Introduction  25

task is a “poetological analysis” in the Western tradition, and here important

precedents already exist in Psalm research; “the approaches of structural literary
studies, aesthetic stylistics and rhetoric, speech-​act theory, but also research in
motifs and symbols, allow one to treat the differing images and communication
structures, and especially the ornamental and structural form . . . , in the most
precise way possible. This endeavor is combined with the program of close reading
of the so-​called final-​text exegesis, which, in contrast to the frequent privileging
of the “first form” of a text, demands that the ‘end form’ of a text be taken seri-
ously.”77 In the Psalms as well as the Qur’an, the dialogue between individual texts
plays a decisive role. In the first instance, the recognition of the inner-​Qur’anic
intertexts, as they emerge on the basis of chronological analysis, allows a full
understanding of an individual sura. The reconstruction of a chronology is thus
above all a desideratum for further literary studies, even while it itself is carried
out in turn through the initial investigatory steps of literary studies.
That all of these projected steps in our limited frame cannot be dealt with in
more than a programmatic way at best, is self-​evident. The knowledge required
for this, belonging as it does to various disciplines, does not converge in the minds
of individual researchers, but can only be generated through the cooperation
of research teams. The project Corpus Coranicum, which has been underway
since 2007 in the Berlin-​Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, has envisaged this
new kind of work on the Qur’an text reaching across disciplinary boundaries,
bringing together literary scholars, historians, Arabists, Semiticists, scholars of
Judaism, and researchers on the Christian Orient.78 The present is meant to lay
the basis for a concise commentary on the Qur’an that will appear in successive
volumes, and which in turn is conceived as a kind of pilot project for the publi-
cation of a major commentary work, to be made available online, edited by the
Berlin-​Brandenburg Academy of Sciences.

I.7  The Qur’an as Panorama—​I lluminated

in Thirteen Chapters

The present volume consists of three parts. The first part consists of three intro-
ductory chapters (chaps. 1–​3), the first of which is an overview of research. This
overview consciously does not limit itself to a recital of the approaches and results
of earlier research,79 but attempts to summarize them critically, to draw attention
to the problematics and occasional prejudices of Western research. But the cur-
rent self-​imposed isolation of research into the Qur’an and early Islam, high-
lighted by Samir Kassir, is only partially due to the indigenous Islamic tradition

77. Hossfeld, Die Psalmen, 1:20.

78.  Marx, “Programmatik des Akademienvorhabens Corpus Coranicum.”
79.  This is the aim of the article by Motzki, “Alternative Accounts.”
26  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

itself. It is also a reaction to Western approaches, in particular those of the so-​

called skeptics, whose research has until now not been successfully explained to
Muslim readers “constructively,” as products of a given critique-​provoking re-
search tradition, nor has the Western approach of connecting the Qur’an to its
biblical intertexts.
It immediately stands out that alongside the “traditional” Western research
interests in the Qur’an, as a text read through the lens of the Prophet’s biography
and thus already “Muslim,” there was and still is a parallel interest in generating
an “archaeology” of the Qur’an, following the tradition of historical-​critical Bible
exegesis. This search to find the foundational “source texts” of the Qur’an rarely
contented itself with illuminating the Qur’an historically, but rather corroborated
the image of the Qur’an’s substantial dependence on biblical and post-​biblical
traditions, its epigonality.
The results of this “source research” are apt to bring to light the biblical or
Late Antique intertexts that served as premises for Qur’anic argumentation. Such
intertexts should be considered part of the image store of Late Antiquity, a col-
lective stock of knowledge familiar to the proclaimer and his first hearers from
oral tradition, that needed to be negotiated and tested for their compatibility with
the new worldview taking shape. The historical overview presented here follows
discussions of the Qur’an back into the nineteenth century (chap. 1, “Sketch of
Research”).
In research up to now, the already canonized text has almost without ex-
ception consistently occupied the foreground. While individual verses have
been recognized as results of the appropriation of older traditions, this did
not result in the perception of the Qur’anic communication process as a con-
tinuous negotiation of traditions. These two projects—​the assessment of the
already completed Qur’an and the appraisal of the preceding processes of its
communication addressing a not yet Islamic, pluricultural listenership—​have
not been presented adequately in their dialectical tension in the research up
to now, but have regularly been simply conflated. In place of the “Islamic
revelation” or the Qur’an already fixed literarily, the “Qur’anic proclamation”
must therefore be brought to the fore, and the dialectic tension between both
manifestations of the Qur’an should be described. A glance on Qur’anic self-​
referentiality is helpful here, since it shows how the Qur’an itself reflects on
the process of the mediation of its message, and thus reflects on its own emer-
gence. What is at stake is the gradual taking shape of the Qur’anic end form
and its sacral coding, which has triggered irritation in Western discussions,
even giving rise to the formulation of a “theory of inlibration” in analogy
to the incarnation of the divine word in Christianity (chap.  2, “Qur’an and
Scripture”).
The relationship between the Qur’an and history is an area of particular con-
troversy. The question of the status of history in the Qur’anic worldview has up
 Introduction  27

to now been addressed only cursorily,80 and has been answered generally in an
entirely negative way. The Qur’anic conception of history itself is considered to
be cyclical, a judgment that disregards the complex ideological developments in
the course of the Qur’an’s genesis, being derived almost entirely from the early
suras. This view cannot be maintained if one takes into account all the evidence
concerning history in the Qur’an. Above all, it has gone unnoticed up to now
that the Qur’an takes serious positions on contemporary “history discourses”: on
the one hand it offers a new view of the biblical valuation of history as a his-
tory of providence, and on the other it takes up historically specific questions
current in ancient Arabia and employs them as groundwork for new concep-
tions. Moreover, the later texts of the Qur’an exhibit a successive expansion of
the inherited salvation history, finally involving the development of the Qur’anic
community itself. Viewed within the project of understanding the Qur’an as a
text of Late Antiquity, the Qur’an’s view of history seems in a sense to “run back-
wards,” taking into account disputes with Late Antique hearers and their expec-
tations. In that this project connects Qur’anic content and form with the debates
of Late Antiquity, it necessarily builds on foundations that are both historical and
literary (chap. 3, “Qur’an and History”).
This general introductory section is followed in the second part (chaps. 4–​9)
by sketches of individual domains of scholarship within Qur’an research, begin-
ning with the history of the text and its redaction. The prehistory of the later
fixed codex, despite its extraordinarily rich documentation, is not an object of
widespread scholarly consensus; mutually exclusive heuristic scenarios still com-
pete against each other in research. As a matter of fact, the history of Qur’anic
discourse itself reaches back in time before this redactional history. It is through
the persuasiveness of the arguments brought forward in the reconstruction of
the sequence of Qur’anic discourses on the one hand and through an accurate
history of the transmission of the codex on the other that the historicity of the
Qur’an, which has been questioned by some researchers, has to be tested. (chap. 4,
“History of the Text and Its Redaction”).
Equally of fundamental significance is the reconstruction of the chronology
of the Qur’an. In which way—​continuing, modifying, or revoking—​do indi-
vidual suras build on each other? Although an abundance of material has already
been brought together for the assessment of extra-​Qur’anic intertextuality,81 the
inner-​Qur’anic references between suras have hardly been noted or studied at all.
The basis for the reconstruction of the chronology is the textual unit of the sura,
the semantic and formal-​structural elements of which can be traced across the
course of the Qur’anic development. It is surprising to find that Western research

80.  Paret, “Das Geschichtsbild Mohammeds.”

81. Speyer, Die biblischen Erzählungen im Qoran, and many others; cf. as well Hartwig, “Die ‘Wissenschaft des
Judentums.’ ”
28  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

has only rarely chosen to investigate the unit of the sura, the (re)discovery of
the sura being a relatively recent phenomenon. Nevertheless, a structural anal-
ysis of the sura is indispensible, since only if chronological ascriptions are based
on a multiplicity of formal and semantic evidence can the reconstruction of a
Qur’anic chronology be safeguarded against circular reasoning. As a third cate-
gory of chronological evidence, alongside form and semantics, the strategies for
the authorization of the Qur’anic message reflected in the texts must be taken
into account (chap. 5, “Sura Structure and Chronology”).
The fait accompli of the “book” Qur’aneasily allows one to forget that the text
represents, so to speak, a twin of the Qur’anic community, which enters into his-
tory simultaneously alongside it, and which first constitutes itself as a community
of worshippers. In view of the fact that the Qur’anic proclamation documents the
emergence of the community, while also acting as a liturgical text to influence
the formation of this community, the two should be treated in close connection.
This duplicity is supported by the distinction made in the early Islamic tradi-
tion itself between two manifestations of the Qur’an: qurʾān, “recitation, reading,”
and muṣḥaf, “codex.” In the mostly synchronic readings of the Qur’an in recent
Western research, only the fixed text is considered, without attention paid to the
dynamic development of its thought and its continuous engagement with a pre-​
Islamic milieu. Parallel to the development of the text, a development of cult
takes place, which has gone largely ignored, and which reaches a turning point
in the middle Meccan and again in the Medinan period. Two mutually opposing
processes are manifest here: the emergence of complex sura structures and, later
on, their dissolution, both achieved within the Qur’anic development. It is the
investigation of the text as to the traces of its performance, set within particular
coordinates of place and time, that can set the Qur’an into relief as a liturgical text
and allow it to be comprehended as a dynamic confrontation with pre-​Islamic
traditions (chap. 6, “The Liturgical Qur’an”).
Once one does not set up the person Muhammad as author but rather rec-
ognizes a steadily growing and changing group of actors standing in discussions
with the proclaimer, it becomes legitimate to search for particular “discourses,”
following onto each other that should have occupied the minds of the proclaimer
and the community successively. We must elicit key questions for the individual
periods, the sequence of which can lead to insight about the ideological develop-
ment undergone by the community. In this process, a number of thematic com-
plexes can be recognized, ranging from consolation, affirmation of providential
care, Prophetic warning, and an elementary theology of signs in the early Meccan
phase, to the self-​construction of the community as a new people of God and a
new self-​presentation in cult in the middle Meccan period, to the production of,
and reflection on, the textual genre of the parable or “likeness,” which in the late
Meccan phase provides not only a new forum for the critique of tradition but
also a strategy of self-​authorization. In Medina, we note a new reflection on the
 Introduction  29

covenant with God, reflections on violence in the context of military activities,

legislation, and, above all, the integration of the ancient Arabic cult into the new
ritual. Finally, the new religious-​political situation proves challenging, since the
new community is confronted by learned representatives of Jewish and occasion-
ally Christian exegesis, not only raising claims for the interpretive monopoly over
the biblical tradition but also putting forward significant and novel statements
of belief developed within their own exegesis. A comprehensive “theologizing,”
a sharpening of insight into the ideological significance of tradition, becomes
manifest, often in the form of polemic, leading in the Medinan period to a pro-
found re-​reading of individual suras that were already proclaimed in Mecca. This
sequence of discourses, resulting frequently in later revisions of earlier texts, is
only plausible against the background of a continuous oral proclamation (chaps.
7–​9, “Stations of Community Formation”).
A third part (chaps. 10–​13) is dedicated to the literary, kerygmatic, and theo-
logical dimensions of the Qur’an. It first explores the relation between Qur’an and
Bible. Eliciting the similarities and differences between the two corpora in their
entirety allows us to refine the hermeneutical and theological questions that can
be adapted from Jewish and Christian scholarship on the Bible and applied to the
Qur’an, above all the question of the either allegorical or literal reading of textual
passages. While we find only occasional and reticent employment of allegorical
discourse, and biblical and post-​biblical allegories are occasionally even resolved
veritatively in the Qur’an, the hermeneutical tool of typology proves crucial in
the Qur’an. The new positioning of the Qur’an in Late Antiquity invites investi-
gations in the exegetical strategies developed post-​biblically and then employed
in the Qur’an as means of connecting to the biblical paradigm of a scriptural
religion. A comparison of biblical and Qur’anic prophetic speech as appellatory,
and a treatment of the narrative forms in both text corpora, allows us to set the
Qur’an’s autonomy more sharply into relief (chap. 10, “Qur’an and Bible”).
The characterization of the Qur’an’s particular narrative technique is still
heavily contested in Qur’an research. Here, the question of authorship presents
a difficult problem, in that we cannot assume for the proclaimer a continuously
maintained and intentional mode of presentation. Narrative in the Qur’an seems
to convey a different intention than that of biblical narrative: as in Jewish and
Christian traditional literature, rather than in the Bible itself, the Qur’an privi-
leges references to authoritative texts and their norms, over an interest in the
imitation of lived reality. Moreover, the appellatory gesture of speech entailed in
the communication of “prophecy,” by which a divine plan “behind the things”
is made present, persistently colors the narrative presentation. Reading the
Qur’anic narratives not as communications about biblical protagonists but rather
as evocations of authority-​inspiring models, and above all as the reflection of a
sharpening consciousness of the significance of these figures for the gradually
forming communal vision of history, one should attend less to the deviations
30  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

from putative biblical models and more to Late Antique strategies of persuasion,
interpretation, and typology (chap. 11, “Biblical-​Qur’anic Figures”).
Bound up with the sequence of discourses is the question of the distinct “Arab
character” of the Qur’an, and thus its relationship to the literary corpus of ancient
Arabic poetry that already laid claim to paramount collective significance before
the Qur’an’s appearance. In the biblical tradition, not only are prophecy and po-
etry closely interweaved, but the relationship between these two modes is even an
object of controversy within the Bible, as it is in the Qur’anic context. Yet a con-
textualization of the Qur’an alongside ancient Arabic poetry is almost entirely
lacking in contemporary research. The existing comparative studies that seek to
connect the ethical orientations of Qur’an and poetry present the Qur’an as tes-
timony of a worldview sketched in opposition to poetry, where particular values
upheld in poetry are inverted.82 This approach, since it is pursued synchronically,
does not pay due attention to the dynamic quality of the debates between the
traditions that were in contest with each other at the time of the genesis of the
Qur’an. The Qur’an texts still await to be studied more systematically in relation
to the broader spectrum of intellectual-​historical questions raised in the poetry
(chap. 12, “Qur’an and Poetry”).
Not least, the Qur’an is also a document of a community and a society that
was familiar with highly developed rhetorical and intellectual poetry, for whom
language itself stood out as an object of artistic experiment and reflection. As
a Late Antique text, standing within a culture of debate, the Qur’an is not al-
ways spontaneous prophetic speech but is also, and to a large degree, exegesis,
reflective engagement with predecessor traditions both sacred and profane; it is
therefore, to a much higher degree than the Bible, a text founded in rhetoric. The
rhetorical dimension of the Qur’an is inextricable from its liturgical function; the
primacy of the mode of realization of formal recitation is manifest clearly in the
textual form. The aural form of presentation, whose affective power can hardly be
overstated, carries forth a tradition of performance of scriptural texts refined and
backed by cantilena that was ubiquitous in the religious cultures of the Near East.
Acoustically, and above all as a clearly rhetorically marked theological text, the
Qur’an shows itself to be a document of Late Antiquity (chap 13, “The Rhetorical
Qur’an”).

I.7.1  The Two Faces of the Qur’an

Like a number of other research initiatives on the Near East currently being
undertaken, the description of the Qur’an offered here is meant as a contribution
to the project of integrating early Islam into Late Antiquity. Through the strict
observance of chronology, and the combination of historical and literary-​critical

82. Izutsu, God and Man in the Koran.

 Introduction  31

approaches, this volume aims to contribute to the setting of the Qur’an on the
same level with the biblical scriptures, and thus to contribute something new
alongside the two companion volumes to the Qur’an83.
This new element consists in the discovery of the “not yet Islamic,” Late
Antique dimension, which complements the Qur’an’s significance as the founding
document of the Islamic religion. The Qur’an has two faces, and they are diffi-
cult to hold in view at once. One needs to resort to a maneuver familiar from
visual representation: one can treat the Qur’an as a puzzle-​picture, revealing two
quite different faces, depending on the perspective of the beholder. From one
perspective, we see the founding text of Islam; from the other, we see a “Near
Eastern–​European” text that participates in the formation of later Europe. This
latter face, which has been so little noticed, should become more visible and
nuanced in what follows. By inscribing itself in the complex cultural palimpsest
of Late Antiquity as the last world-​historically significant scripture, the Qurʾan
became interwoven forever into the texts that preceded it. By virtue of its histor-
ical effects as scripture, the Qur’an can still be viewed as the exclusive inheritance
of the Muslims; but at the same time it makes its entry into the Western textual
canon and offers a significant legacy of Late Antiquity to Europe.84

83. McAuliffe, Cambridge Companion; Rippin, Blackwell Companion.

84.  Maria Teodorova, “Europa als Palimpsest,” differentiates between “legacy as continuity” or “inheritance”
and “legacy through perception.” While the former pertains to the safeguarded relationship Muslims have with
the Koran, the latter is more of a latent connection that should be claimed for the relationship of Europeans to the
Koran, even if they have not yet become aware of their relationship to the Koran.
 1

How the Qur’an Has Been Read So Far

A SKETCH OF RESEARCH

1.1  Projects of Biblical Scholarship

The historical-​critical reading of the Qur’an that forms the basis of this study
is indebted to models from biblical scholarship.1 In that field, for more than
two hundred years, historical-​critical reading has constituted the backbone of
research and laid the foundations not only for a historically conscious micro-
structural reading of the text but also for the variety of new, no longer diachron-
ically oriented approaches that now fill out our image of the text. Although since
the 1970s, a paradigm shift has taken place—​one now reads the Bible in modes
that are poststructuralist,2 psychoanalytical,3 ideological,4 feminist,5 and not least
narratological and poetological—​it remains the historical reading, that which
seeks to understand the text as a document of its cultural environment and the
ideological currents of its time, that provides the necessary pre-​condition for
any recognition of what is decisively new in the text.6 It is the step of historical-​
critical research, the freeing of the scriptures from their theological context, that
makes possible all later, secularly oriented approaches. But there are problems
within this historical-​critical reading project that must not be overlooked. Recent
Jewish and Christian exegetes have drawn attention to the fact that the onset
of the historical-​critical method around the middle of the eighteenth century
signaled a severe break in the history of biblical interpretation, a rupture that,
according to Marius Reiser, “was more decisive than all earlier breaks. . . . With
the emergence of the historical disciplines in the eighteenth century, Bible schol-
arship became its own world,”7 adopting as its object a new context, far removed
from religion. It is well known that no comparable change of orientation has

1.  Individual parts of this chapter are based on an overview of scholarship published in 2007, “Ein Versuch der
historischen und forschungsgeschichtlichen Verortung des Koran,” and on the essay “Die Korangenese zwischen
Mythos und Geschichte.” For a brief introduction, see Andrew Rippin, “Western Scholarship and the Qur’an,”
and Fred Donner, “The Qur’an in Recent Scholarship.” Critical assessments are offered in contributions by Harald
Motzki, “Alternative Accounts,” and Marco Schöller, “Post-​enlightenment Academic Study.”
2.  Carroll, “Poststructuralist approaches.”
3. Ricœur, Hermeneutik und Psychoanalyse.
4. Sternberg, Poetics of Biblical Narrative.
5.  Loades, “Feminist Interpretation.”
6.  For an introduction and defense, see Barton, “Introduction,” and Barton, “Historical-​Critical Approaches.”
7. Reiser, Bibelkritik und Auslegung.

33
34  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

occurred in the inner-​Islamic reception of the Qur’an. It is true that a number of

Islamic exegetes heralded the arrival of a historicizing approach to the Qur’an as
early as the nineteenth century.8 Their readings of the Qur’an in isolation from
its centuries-​old tradition however appeared too theologically explosive to be
hermeneutically acceptable to the majority of traditional Muslim scholars. But
it would be an exaggeration to speak of any systematic inner-​Islamic historical-​
critical research program centered on the Qur’an. Furthermore, even if such a
project were applied to the transmitted text as it stands, this would not lead to a
break with tradition comparable to that in the Jewish-​Christian tradition, since
the most serious result of such a project, the breaking down of the scripture into
individual texts of various origin and authorship, is not feasible for the Qur’an in
view of the text’s original emergence over a period of scarcely more than twenty
years. Thus, Richard Bell (1876–​1952)—​in his attempted “documentary analysis”
of the Qur’an9 was compelled to attribute all the individual traditions that he
declared as “doublets” to a single, original author, the Prophet himself. His de-
construction of the text into numerous short units shows itself to be a meth-
odological dead end. John Wansbrough (1928–​2001),10 in his related attempt to
elicit varying individual transmissions by means of form criticism, had to extend
the traditionally accepted period of the Qur’an’s emergence by more than a hun-
dred years in order to allow for the participation in the Qur’an’s genesis all the
plural authors and traditions that he posited. Wansbrough’s deconstruction of
the Qur’an by means of form criticism led to results that have since been refuted
on the basis of the external facts of textual history. What, then, if we turn to the
second fundamental pillar of historical-​critical research, that is, the probing of a
new context of scripture, the replacement of “exegetical tradition” by “historical
environment”? To what extent does a historical reading distinguish itself from a
traditional one? If one considers that between the emergence of the text and its
canonical reception no breaks occurred comparable with the Jewish-​Christian
situation, then one must assume a smoother transition from the collective of
hearers to the later religious community. For unlike in the case of the Hebrew
language, which had ceased to be spoken in its biblical form, no such extraordi-
nary linguistic development took place in Arabic in this intervening phase; nor
did a centralized religious authority appear, as in the case of the New Testament,
to enforce the dogmatic obligation of new interpretations often quite far from the
literal sense. What changed fundamentally between the collective of hearers and

8. On the modern Muslim exegetes of the Qur’an, see primarily Rotraud Wielandt, Offenbarung und
Geschichte, and Wielandt, “Exegesis, Modern.” On Arkoun, see Rippin, “God”; on the contemporary aspects of
Muslim intellectuals’ dealing with the Qur’an in general, see Stefan Wild, Mensch, Prophet; on the Turkish exegetes,
see Felix Körner, Koranhermeneutik in der Türkei heute, and Körner, Revisionist Koran Hermeneutics. Apart from
the exegetes introduced here, who are trained in methods of Western scholarship, there are also the traditional, en-
cyclopedic Qur’an commentators; see Johanna Pink, “Sunnitische Korankommentare.”
9. Bell, Qur’an.
10. Wansbrough, Quranic Studies.
 How the Qur’an Has Been Read So Far  35

the later religious community is less the semantic understanding of individual

pronouncements than, as will be shown, the hermeneutic approach to the text
as a whole. The post-​canonical Qur’an, that is, the text read through commen-
tary, loses its dialectical tension once it is uprooted from the debate landscape of
Late Antiquity. By its loosing from the communication situation and its exclu-
sive binding to a transcendent source, the text is “immobilized,” so to speak, it
changes from a polyphonic, aural text, a document of processes of exchange, into
a monologic text, a transcendent discourse. A fundamental break in the percep-
tion of the Qur’an is thus achieved, whose long-​term effects cannot be ignored.
The full dimensions of this break can only be grasped through diachronic studies.
New methodological approaches are now available for the redressing of this
break. In biblical scholarship, a number of researchers are working toward a re-
assessment of the text’s hermeneutical development, considering the possibilities
of a renewed linking of the biblical text back to the exegetical tradition.11 At the
same time the rigorous analytical orientation of the historical-​critical is being
relaxed. The initial search for a putative “original text” and “original meaning”
has long since given way to an interest in the process of the text’s development
as a site of interaction between writers and recipients, between proclaimers and
their hearers. One speaks now of a “canonic process”12 leading through many
intervening phases to the end form of the text. But while in the case of the Bible,
this continual writing and rewriting of a growing nucleus of texts reached across
centuries,13 in the case of the orally communicated Qur’an the canonic process
stretches over slightly more than twenty years, a period in which the Qur’an
existed as an open-​ended communal engagement with earlier texts, in which we
can trace the successive canonization of text units through the acceptance of the
hearers.14 If one wants to treat the Qur’an not as post-​canonical fait accompli,
a published text for reading, but rather as the pre-​canonical manifestation of a
proclamation, one must engage with both historical-​critical analysis and with the
complementary “canonical approach” to reading.
But since this proclamation occurred in poetic language, it also requires a
literary analysis. Here, certain new approaches in current Bible scholarship, ori-
ented more toward rhetoric than the narratively focused approaches mentioned
above, seem to provide the most promising avenues for progress.15 Indeed, the
Qur’an is not a narrative but rather a discursive text, one that is marked, to put
it briefly, by engagement with other, mostly equally discursive texts. This “origin
of the Qur’an from textual engagements” is reflected in the text’s literary from,

11.  Wilken, “In Defense of Allegory,” and Kugel, The Bible as It Was.
12. Childs, Biblical Theology; Sanders, Canon and Community. This approach has been probed for the Qur’an
in Neuwirth, “Referentiality and Textuality.”
13.  On this, see primarily Kugel, The Bible as It Was.
14.  Cf. Sinai, “The Qurʾān as Process.”
15.  See Ricœur, Biblical Interpretation, and Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament.
36  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

which discourages and impedes cursory reading and immediate understanding.

For this reason, research began from early on to attempt the reconstruction of
the historical context of the Qur’an, but it has greatly oversimplified this task,
relying on the Sira tradition, that is the biography of the Prophet that arose a
century and a half after the emergence of the Qur’an. This often uncritical re-
course to a myth of origin16 not only has led to the drawing of an image of the
emergence of the Qur’an that remains anachronistic but also, even more seri-
ously, has introduced an element of teleology to the history of the Qur’an, so
that both the Qur’an as it is available to us today and the early triumph of the
Islamic community appear to be the necessary results of divine revelation and
right guidance given to Muhammad, his inspired speech and charismatic action.
What a historical reading requires, then, is both releasing the Qur’anic genesis
and the formation of the community epistemically from the later framing within
Islam and relocating the text and listenership within the epoch from which Islam
emerged. The Qur’an must be recognized as a Late Antique text that arose along-
side a community of hearers that gradually took shape, who were acculturated
to Late Antiquity. In our view, such a contextual reading stands in agreement
with the readings of individual Islamic scholars, such as Amin al-​Khuli, Fazlur
Rahman, Nasr Hamid Abu Zaid, Mehmet Paçacı, and Ömer Özsoy.17 Thus, Abu
Zaid distinguishes between the universal Qur’anic message and the contingent
“code” in which it was dressed.18 But we must go yet a step further and decline to
treat the text as a fait accompli, focusing instead on the engagement of the com-
munity with the pluricultural traditions of the period, an approach which carries
with it theological consequences.
It would be an oversimplification, however, to treat the Qur’an according to
the modern Protestant conception of the Bible and to describe it, for example, as
“a universal message in a contingent code.” As is evident from the strong reser-
vations of wide circles of observant Muslims to any approach to the Qur’an that
suppresses its transcendent claim that this text does not merely correspond to
a scripture, understood as “subjected to the conditions of understanding of any
other literature”19 but constitutes the hypostasized word of God, capable of being
experienced sensibly in recitation, a conception that comes close to that of the
incarnate word of God.20 An accurate reading of the Qur’an as a Late Antique
text must include in its horizon the complexly differentiated concepts of God’s
word that developed in this epoch and which had already prevailed in the two

16.  The model of the Qur’an’s genesis in Wansbrough, Quranic Studies, only appears as an exception, since
he also contextualizes the Qur’an with the Sira, judging both of them to be contemporaneous later historical
constructions.
17.  On Rahman, see Saeed, “Fazlur Rahman”; on Paçacı and Özsoy, see Körner, Revisionist Koran Hermeneutics.
18.  Abu Zaid, Mafhūm al-​Naṣṣ; see Kermani, Offenbarung als Kommunikation.
19.  See Bultmann, Glauben und Verstehen, 2:231.
20.  See Wild, Mensch, Prophet, 6ff., cf. chap. 2, 89–95.
 How the Qur’an Has Been Read So Far  37

older religions by the time of the Qur’an’s genesis. What is revolutionarily new in
the Qur’anic proclamation can only be extracted from a study of the synergism
between speaker, community, and the representatives of traditions present in this
environment.
The reading suggested here is primarily an engagement with historically ori-
ented Western research, but it also attempts to give an account of the complexity
of the Qur’anic forms of appearance by paying attention to particular forms
of inner-​Qur’anic intertextuality. The Western tradition of research demands
an initial approach oriented to biblical scholarship, if only to warrant an equal
treatment for the Qur’an and to “synchronize” the three scriptures, to set their
respective perceptions on the same level. The following presentation will sketch
the path of Western research up to now, so that, viewed through a critical lens
occasional excesses of historical analysis can be discerned. Apparently what is
lacking here is the hermeneutic corrective of knowledge accumulated in the
inner-​Arabic linguistic-​stylistic tradition. At present, historical Western research
is only breathing with one lung, so to speak. The second lung, the Arabicity and
poeticity21 of the Qur’an, has not yet been utilized. Engagement with the aesthetic
dimension of the Qur’an still remains the exclusive domain of inner-​Islamic ex-
egesis. It has hardly been treated in Western research and, consequently, is only
discussed marginally in this volume (see c­ hapters 12 and 13). But the aesthetic
knowledge that awaits discovery, and which could ultimately permit the Qur’an
to be set into relief as an “Arabic scripture” in an Arabic literary context, is neces-
sary for any future comprehensive interpretation of the Qur’an.

1.2  A Great Research Tradition and its

Violent Interruption
1.2.1  The Science of Judaism (Wissenschaft des Judentums) as Founding
Discipline of Critical Qur’an Research
The challenge to read the Qur’an more as a Late Antique text than an Islamic
one, that is, to assign it back into its pre-​Islamic pluricultural milieu, become
an urgency only in recent times.22 It is however not at all new: it is a direction
of research that bore fruit for over a century, originating within the Science of
Judaism.23 Already from the 1830s onward, scholars within this field began to
read the Qur’an historically against the background of the plural cultures of Late
Antiquity. Abraham Geiger (1810–​1874), in his groundbreaking work Was hat

21.  Here, the works by Kermani, Gott ist schön, and Graham, “Recitation and Aesthetic Reception,” deserve
attention as rare exceptions. Cf. also Sells, “A Literary Approach to the Hymnic Surahs”; Sells, “Sounds, Spirit and
Gender in Sūrat al-​Qadr”; Sells, “Sound and Meaning in Sūrat al-​Qāriʿa.”
22.  The discussion was initiated by Wansbrough, Quranic Studies; see also his Sectarian Milieu, and cf. Rippin,
“The Qur’an as literature”; Rippin, “Quranic Studies, Part IV,” 39–​46; and Rippin, The Qur’an: Style and Content.
23.  On this, see now Neuwirth, “Im vollen Licht der Geschichte”; Hartwig, “Die ‘Wissenschaft des Judentums.’ ”
38  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

Mohammed aus dem Judenthume aufgenommen (What did Muhammad adopt

from Judaism) (1833), was the first to attempt to identify the biblical and post-​
biblical traditions reflected in the Qur’an. The critical Qur’an research introduced
by Geiger,24 which built on the historical-​critical research of the Bible, was carried
forward by other researchers with Jewish training (after Geiger, above all Hartwig
Hirschfeld [1854–​1934] and Ignaz Goldziher [1850–​1921]), in conjunction with
scholars trained in classical Arabic literature or biblical texts (such as Theodor
Nöldeke [1836–​1930] or Julius Wellhausen [1844–​1918]). Later researchers from
the tradition of the Science of Judaism, above all Josef Horovitz (1874–​1931)
and his school, especially Heinrich Speyer [1897–​1935]), further refined this ap-
proach in the first half of the twentieth century and employed it fruitfully in im-
portant studies on personal names,25 narrative forms,26 eschatology,27 polemics,28
and prayer.29 In recognizing the receptions of biblical and, above all, post-​biblical
Jewish literature in the Qur’an, they made a decisive contribution toward the
transfer of the Qur’an from its traditional frame of reference in relation to a ster-
eotyped and “wholly other” paganism, jāhilīya, connecting the Islamic revelation
to the wider context of formative Near Eastern traditions. The contextualization
of the Qur’an text alongside rabbinic literature,30 introduced by Abraham Geiger,
was to characterize Qur’an research decisively and until the violent abruption
of this research tradition with the seizure of power by National Socialism pro-
duced a number of standard works that remain indispensable down to today. The
last significant work of this school, Henrich Speyer’s Die biblischen Erzählungen
im Qoran,31 makes conveniently available the Jewish traditions reflected in the
Qur’an, as far as they were known up to that time, without laying claim to these
traditions as direct templates for the Qur’an.
But we must not neglect the fact that the perspective adopted in Qur’an re-
search within the Science of Judaism, according to which Muhammad was
viewed as slavishly dependent on the earlier traditions the Qur’anic texts being
presented as reproductions or often distortions of older texts, constitutes a se-
rious weak point in this research, marring its results especially in the beginning.
Here traces are recognizable of the old established Christian polemical tradition
against Islam, which asserted Muhammad’s responsibility as author of the Qur’an
only in order to indict him as a willful falsifier of divine truth.32 Even if, after the

24. For the preliminary, prescientific interpretation of the Qur’an, see Bobzin, Koran im Zeitalter der
Reformation.
25. Horovitz, Jewish Proper Names.
26. Horovitz, Koranische Untersuchungen.
27.  Horovitz, “Das koranische Paradies.”
28. Ettinghausen, Antiheidnische Polemik.
29. Goitein, Gebet im Koran.
30.  Lassner, “Abraham Geiger.”
31. Speyer, Die biblischen Erzählungen im Qoran. The work had to be backdated to the year 1931, in order for
it to be published in Nazi Germany in 1935; see Rosenthal, “Speyer.”
32.  Bobzin, “Pre-​1800 Preoccupations of Qur’anic Studies.”
 How the Qur’an Has Been Read So Far  39

Enlightenment, the person of the Prophet was rehabilitated as a sincere seeker of

God without false intentions,33 nevertheless the Qur’an itself was reduced, despite
this new evaluation, to the lesser dimensions of an epigonal text produced by an
author of only moderate theological understanding.
This perception was supported not least by the historical-​critical approach
itself, one of whose primary objectives is the search for the “original” text, the
urtext. In relation to the Bible, this search had brought to the fore a great number
of ancient Near Eastern traditions apt to illuminate the historical context of the
biblical texts and thus facilitated their earliest meaning. But while these early
traditions were scarcely ever seen to seriously compete with the Bible in their
literary form and theological significance, in the case of the Qur’an the oppo-
site was true: what came to light in the form of predecessor texts was not mere
documents of “cultural precursors” but rather the most prestigious text of all, the
Hebrew Bible itself. Its authority was to overshadow the Qur’an from the very
beginning. What was bear on the image of the Qur’an most heavily was the ex-
clusivity of the historical analysis, which did not allow for alternatives: unlike the
Bible, which was familiar to every educated person even beyond the context of
historical-​critical research, the Qur’an, at least at the time when it was submitted
to Geiger’s rigorous source criticism by Geiger, was a widely unknown text even
in scholarly circles. Thus, what in Western biblical scholarship represented a crit-
ical turning point and renewal was taken in Western Qur’an research not as a
re-​thinking but as an absolute and unprepared beginning. The variety of methods
prevalent in Bible scholarship were not accessible to Qur’anic scholarship, which
was historical-​critical without alternatives. Since its critical deconstruction was
not preceded by overarching studies of the Qur’an as a whole, there was no image
of the Qur’an as a scripture in its own right,. fit to balance or to cancel the hasty
verdict of epigonality.
In the wake of the Science of Judaism, the measuring stick for the evaluation of
the Qur’an was provided almost exclusively by biblical texts—​which being more
ancient counted as more “authentic.” The early representatives of the Science of
Judaism, who oriented their evaluation of the Qur’an exclusively toward more
ancient texts, were not unique in underestimating the Qur’an:  others arrived
to a pejorative evaluation of the Qur’an by measuring it against the standards
of earlier secular literature. The founder father of Qur’anic philology, Theodor
Nöldeke, whose Geschichte des Qorans (History of the Qur’an) (1860) offers a still
unsurpassed chronology of the suras and who assumed Muhammad’s role as au-
thor to be self-​evident granted him an essentially lower artistic status than the
ancient Arabic poets, on grounds of linguistic and stylistic deviations from the
poetic language.34

33.  Sinai, “Orientalism.”

34.  Nöldeke, “Zur Sprache des Korans.”
40  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

All these initiatives were pursued in a space wholly aloof from contemporary
Muslim scholarship. It is astonishing to discover that the critical Qur’an scholars
of the nineteenth and early twentieth century almost never took notice of con-
temporary Muslim research activities, although some outstanding researchers,
such as Alois Sprenger (1813–​1893) and later Ignaz Goldziher (1850–​1921) and
Josef Horovitz (1874–​1931), did cooperate closely for some time with Muslim
scholars. In fact, in the nineteenth century and especially the early twentieth, new
approaches developed in India and above all in Egypt were opening the Qur’an
for new modern questions independently of the premodern commentary liter-
ature that had served as the exegetical basis up to that point. This inner-​Islamic
work on the Qur’an not only remained wholly absent from contemporaneous
Western Qur’an research (apart from Gotthelf Bergsträsser’s [1886–​1933] text-​
historical researches which he carried out in cooperation with Arab scholarly
circles)35 but also has never been adequately integrated into the Western horizon
of research in the time since. Rather, this period of inner-​Islamic research has
been “objectified” in retrospect, made an object of rather than a contribution to
research. Western Qur’an research thus begins with a double asynchrony:  on
the one hand in relation to biblical scholarship, to which it ultimately connects
only superficially, and on the other hand in relation to Muslim research, which it
excludes from its scope from the start.

1.3  Retreat to Islam-​H istorical Positions

1.3.1  The “Life of Muhammad Research”

The innumerable “intertexts” of the Qur’an, that is, those biblical and post-​
biblical traditions reflected in the text that were identified by representatives of
the Science of Judaism, are currently being amassed and studied in the frame-
work of the Berlin project Corpus Coranicum. But these intertexts will only be
fruitful for Qur’an research if they are evaluated in relation to Qur’anic the dis-
course, that is, if the decisive questions around their reworking and refunction-
ing in the frame of the Qur’anic communication process between proclaimer and
community are addressed. Nonetheless, the early research, in its uncovering of
the polyphony of the Qur’an, has the unquestioned merit of having reopened the
possibility of recognizing texts as what they were in the phase of their emergence,
prior to the canonization of the Qur’an as the founding document of a new re-
ligion, namely:  answers to burning questions of the time, confrontations with
theological positions of the neighboring religions—​partly to be accepted, partly
negotiated, altered, refuted, or replaced by new ones. It is this process that above

35.  See Marx, “The Koran According to Agfa.”

 How the Qur’an Has Been Read So Far  41

all illuminates the success of the proclamation manifest in the emergence of a

community that lasted beyond the death of the proclaimer.
The loss that set in with the politically compelled deletion of this tradition of
research and the expulsion of Jewish scholars from German universities cannot
be overstated. The researchers of the Science of Judaism had viewed the Qur’an
as a text still untouched by exegesis, and thus focused on its transitional state
during the phase in which the new pious were still on their way toward their later
self-​understanding as a religious community. The disappearance of this direc-
tion of research within German scholarship brought about a serious downturn
in Qur’an research, the salient contributions of the Science of Judaism not only
remaining without further progress but also soon downplayed in their signif-
icance. Although in the 1920s, researchers such as Tor Andrae36 (1885–​1948),
Richard Bell,37 Wilhelm Rudolph (1891–​1987),38 and Karl Ahrens39 uncovered
traces of Christian traditions in the Qur’an in analogy to the reception research
of the Science of Judaism, by the 1930s a new tendency was setting in. Most
prominently, the Arabicist Johann Fück40 (1894–​1974) laid the stress on the
“originality of the Arabian prophet” and viewed the “examination of questions
of dependency” as a dead end that entailed the “dismantling [of] the being of the
Prophet into a sum of a thousand particulars.” The “Muhammad research” that
became prominent at this point took up the task of showing “how the Prophet,
drawing from the spiritual stimulations of his environment, succeeded in uniting
a number of elements of the most various kinds into a synthesis that was original
and viable in its consummation.”41 Additionally, they looked to the Qur’an as a
document of the psychological development of the Prophet, an impulse that led
positively to the composition of several biographies of the Prophet.42 But an un-
mistakable narrowing of the previous horizon of considerations was evident: in
its view toward the genesis of the Qur’an itself, scholarship became oriented,
anachronistically, to the Islamic biographies of the Prophet that were fixed in
writing from about a century after his lifetime.
There is a notable exception in the approach followed by Richard Bell in his
translation of the Qur’an, where he turns back to the text itself to test a “doc-
umentary hypothesis.”43 His two-​volume 1953 translation44 is still valuable

36. Andrae, Ursprung; Andrae, Mohammad, sein Leben und sein Glaube.

37. Bell, Origin of Islam.
38. Rudolph, Abhängigkeit des Qorans.
39.  Ahrens, “Christliches im Qoran.”
40.  Fück, “Die Originalität des arabischen Propheten.”
41.  Ibid., 510. For a more recent evaluation of this “life of Muhammed scholarship,” see the overview by Peters,
“The Quest of the Historical Muhammad.”
42. Andrae, Mohammed; Buhl, Leben Muhammeds.
43. Bell, Qur’an; cf. Nagel, “Vom ‘Qur’an’ zur Schrift.”
44. Bell, Qurʾān; Bell, Introduction, revised by Watt, Bell’s Introduction. Cf. Rippin, “Reading the Qur’an with
Richard Bell.”
42  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

today and is one of the most dependable Qur’an renderings. But in his reor-
dering of the text, Bell pursues the no longer tenable thesis that the striking
phenomenon of the multiple formulations of individual stories and themes in
the Qur’an is to be explained mechanically by the external circumstance of the
limited availability of writing materials. Recurring text elements, considered
as doublets, would then be explained as new versions written on the reverse
sides of older ones, thus leading to multiple versions being included in the final
text collection. Bell, who drew here on biblical source criticism, disassembled
the text into a variety of individual revelations, which he assigned to various
contexts of emergence, thus fragmenting the text into unrecognizability.
In the Qur’an research of the postwar period, which was largely marked by
W.  Montgomery Watt (1909–​2006),45 Regis Blachère (1900–​1973),46 and Rudi
Paret (1901–​1983),47 but for which the standards had already been set by August
Fischer (1865–​1949) and Johann Fück, the person of the Prophet generally stood
as the central point of interest—​an emphasis that can best be explained in rela-
tion to the model of the critical “life of Jesus” research that was pursued vigor-
ously in Germany in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Disenchanted
by the philological treatments of the Qur’an because of the lack of literary-​critical
criteria,48 and unable to appreciate its dialectical relation to the religious prede-
cessor texts due to a lack of the necessary knowledge of Jewish traditions, they
turned to the psychological development of the putative “author” of the Qur’an,
that is, the Prophet. Earlier approaches had attempted to illuminate the textual
form, if not in terms of literary-​artistic criteria, then at least in terms of formal
ones. Thus, Karl Vollers (1857–​1909)49 investigated the language of the Qur’an
for its dialect interferences, and Alphonse Mingana (1878–​1937)50 attempted
to determine its Syriac interferences. Around the same time, Anton Baumstark
(1872–​1948)51 contributed fundamentally to a new appreciation of the Qur’an
as a liturgical text by pointing out the Jewish and Christian liturgical formulas
echoed in the Qur’an. The only contribution that was literary-​critical in a strict
sense, after David Heinrich Müller’s (1846–​1912) early and still rough attempt
to detect biblical-​prophetic speech forms in the Qur’an,52 was Gustav Richter’s
(1906–​1934) Der Sprachstil des Koran (The rhetorical style of the Qur’an), which
remained incomplete.53

45. Watt, Muhammad at Mecca; Watt, Muhammad at Medina.

46. Blachère, Coran, Blachère, Introduction, Blachère, Littérature arabe.
47. Paret, Mohammed und der Koran; Paret, “Der Koran als Geschichtsquelle.”
48.  On the current literary evaluation of the Qur’an, see Wild, “ ‘Schauerliche Öde.’ ”
49. Vollers, Volkssprache und Schriftsprache.
50.  Mingana, “Syriac Influences on the Style of the Kur’an.”
51.  Baumstark, “Jüdischer und christlicher Gebetstypus im Koran.”
52.  D. H. Müller, Grundgesetze der ursemitischen Poesie.
53. Richter, Sprachstil des Koran.
 How the Qur’an Has Been Read So Far  43

Approaches within literary studies remained largely invisible in the postwar

period; only text-​critical work continued to be pursued.54 In retrospect, we can
see in this option a significant step backwards, in that the attempt to deal with
the reception of earlier materials in the text is given up, and even the most
fundamental groundwork of historical Qur’an research itself was relinquished,
namely, the chronology of the suras worked out by Theodor Nöldeke. In Rudi
Paret’s commentary, which has been treated as standard since its appearance,55
the chronology of the suras is given hardly any significance. The commentary
treats the texts in the order of their occurrence in the text corpus and gives
hardly any notice to the chronological sequence and accompanying functional
relationships between the suras. However useful as Paret’s work remains, in-
cluding as it does what is widely considered the most reliable translation56
into German alongside his reissuing of a collection of earlier research into the
Qur’an,57 his strongly simplifying perception of the Qur’anic text expounded
in his summary presentation Muhammad und der Koran, where he attempts to
explain the Qur’an entirely in terms of the personal disposition of the Prophet,
is utterly disappointing. This perspective, which remains aloof from the text,
had already impaired his commentary. Since it does not allow to recognize
the Qur’an’s complex intertextuality and substantially new approach to pred-
ecessor texts, this discursive level falls short of that of earlier authors such as
Josef Horovitz and Tor Andrae, whose work he himself reissued.
In the time since, we can document a true boom of presentations of
Muhammad—​occasionally in fulfillment of demands for concise new summaries—​
but most notably two extensive monographs by Tilman Nagel,58 which, however,
do not mark any revolutionary step forward. Although Nagel’s extensive studies
explicate the life of the Prophet in detail, the mode of presentation remains se-
lective and ultimately arbitrary, drawing on hadith traditions without employing
the requisite methodological step of isnād-​cum-​matn analysis, and thus mixing
late material with early.59 A wholly new approach is ventured by Tarif Khalidi,
who, in his detailed history of the inner-​Islamic reception of Muhammad,
takes account also of the biographies of Muhammad that have emerged in the

54.  See the works of Bergsträsser and Pretzl, and also Beck, “Der uthmanische Kodex in der Koranlesung des
zweiten Jahrhunderts,” and Beck, “Studien zur Geschichte der kufischen Koranlesung.” The most recent monograph
on textual history and textual criticism including oral tradition is Kellermann, Koranlesung im Maghreb (still un-
published dissertation from 1994).
55. Paret, Koran: Kommentar und Konkordanz.
56. Paret, Koran: Übersetzung.
57. Paret, Der Koran.
58.  See Bobzin, Muhammad; Bobzin, Der Koran; Cook, Muhammad; Schöller, Mohammed; Nagel, Muhammad;
and Nagel, Allahs Liebling.
59.  On this, see Schoeler (lecture, Frankfurt, November 2009). Engagement with the international research on
early Islam that has emerged in recent years is missing in Nagel’s work.
44  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

Arab world since the 1920s, which are elsewhere often disregarded in Western
research.60
The Qur’an research that has occurred in the postwar period and later
seems, if treated summarily, to be characterized by a narrowing of perspective.
This “Muhammad research” has not been able to avoid the tendency to assume
Muhammad to be the lone decisive actor in communal formation and the au-
thorial composer of the Qur’an. It also harbors a simplified conception of the
emergence of the Qur’an and of Islam, failing to interrogate critically the tradi-
tional Islamic image of the miraculous nature and transhistoricity of the Qur’anic
event, but only, in the best case, reversing it: in place of the miracle of “a holy
book virtually falling out of the sky,” the new image—​no less miraculous—​of
the refashioning of older traditions by Muhammad himself, raising the figure
of the proclaimer to the rank of the sole actor responsible for the theological
development reflected in the Qur’an and the formation of the nascent Islamic
community. With this understanding, Muhammad’s individual “correct” or
“false” understanding of previous textual traditions would alone be decisive for
the emergence and shaping of the new belief as it takes shape, ignoring the con-
tinuous interaction between proclaimer and community and allowing no shared
creative treatment of previous traditions. The Qur’anic question of authorship is
not to be solved simply by substituting the person of Muhammad for God, nor
can the history of the Qur’an’s genesis be written merely on the basis of the Sira.

1.3.2  Problematic Bird’s-​Eye Views

Flashing out the open question of the development of the Qur’anic message,
Gustav von Grunebaum attempted in 1960,61 and then again in 1965,62 to explain
the success of the Qur’anic message by means of a particularly suggestive theo-
logical sketch of the Prophet. Von Grunebaum’s (1909–​1972) impressive presen-
tation is still worthy of attention as an understanding of the reform work brought
about through the Qur’an.63 But it is heavily impaired by a lack of criticism of tra-
dition and, more so, by the author’s teleological projection of later cultural polar-
izations back into the period of the Qur’an’s genesis. Von Grunebaum finds that
“from an Arabic standpoint, the teaching of Muhammad [signifies]unmistakable
progress toward greater religious and intellectual maturity.”64 But he stipulates
teleologically that “the Arabs” were the intended “receivers of the teaching of
Muhammad,” thus removing them by essentialist logic from the wider circles of
listeners educated in Late Antique lore and establishing a firm polarity between
the Jews and Christians (who appear only later as theological opponents) on the

60. Khalidi, Images of Muhammad.

61.  Von Grunebaum, “Ausbreitungs-​und Anpassungsfähigkeit.”
62.  Von Grunebaum, “Experience of the Holy and Concept of Man.”
63.  Additionally see Noth, “Früher Islam.”
64.  Von Grunebaum, “Ausbreitungs-​und Anpassungsfähigkeit,” 14.
 How the Qur’an Has Been Read So Far  45

one hand and the putative pure “Arabs” on the other. Although he highlights
central characteristics of the Qur’anic message, these characteristics do not seem
to have constituted any doctrinal program during the period of Muhammad’s
ministry. Von Grunebaum does, however, convey the impression that there is an
effective economy in the treatment of theological themes in the Qur’an:

It must be maintained that the Qur’anic revelation limits itself to rela-

tively few themes, all of extraordinary significance for the peoples of the
Middle East in the seventh century, both within and outside the Arabian
Peninsula. This begins with the revelation through the elected speaker,
and the securing of inviolable authority in the life of the community, and
the assurance of direct divine guidance; this is followed by monotheism
and the book. The recognition of these concepts opened a level of reli-
gious thought to the Arabs that had arrived to their future subjects some
centuries earlier, and without which the conqueror would not have been
capable of dialogue or intellectual respectability. (One should be clear that
the reliance on revelation and a book contributes to the development of
identical criteria of what is cognitively acceptable and the recognition of
similar theological and epistemological problems—​a further factor in the
creation of an atmosphere in which shared basic beliefs ensure the success
of a new teaching.) In any case, for quite a long period the belief in a Final
Judgment that would hurl sinners into eternal fire and the pious into par-
adise, alongside the conviction in a pre-​existing end of the world, created
a cluster of themes of extraordinary emotional power.65

As apt as this characterization of the Qur’anic message may be from the birds-​eye
view of theology, it grants no rightful place to the characteristics of the Qur’an
that consist not simply in the assumption or discarding of earlier theologumena
but in such novelties as the crucial interpretation of the world as a “sign system”
of God66 and the granting of the faculty of understanding, logos, which is bound
up in creation. Von Grunebaum conceives of the genesis of the Qur’anic teaching
as a kind of pre-​meditated project with the goal of simplifying the available the-
ologies thus offering a promise of salvation that is more easily won:

The discarding of an overly complicated Trinitarianism, that recourse to

Docetism that among Christian sects fulfilled the function of a certain
primitive rationalism; the rejection of original sin and of the burden of
unavoidable original guilt that also represents the personal responsibility
of the believer; an optimistic view of human nature as more in need of
guidance than salvation, and thus the elimination of the more extreme

65.  Ibid.,  14–​15.

66.  See chap. 7, 264–277.
46  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

forms of askesis . . . ; in short, Islam’s more realistic but also more crude
alignment with this world provided the average believer with a system of
beliefs that satisfied his essential religious needs and freed him from the
Christian paradox of being in but not of the world, and which further
freed him from participation in the debates over doctrinal subtleties the
acceptance or rejection of which all too often bore actual consequences.
With this different view of man and his contractual relation (ḥukm) to
the majesty of God, all lived significance fell away from the mysteries of
salvation through the suffering of God-​man, who was God’s son but not a
second divinity, mysteries the formulation of which had so often led into
error—​indeed, the Islamic God is above all will, which can be felt by man
in the experience of his majesty; obedience becomes the door to salvation,
a door that is not difficult to open.67

In von Grunebaum’s work, the Qur’an is presented as a teaching that reflects,

and was developed by, the proclaimer, for which he presupposes uncritically the
scenario sketched in the Sira, where Muhammad is confronted predominantly
by “the Arabs,” and not a heterodox or syncretistic group of people with plu-
ricultural formation within a peripheral space of Late Antiquity. The birds-​eye
view adopted here not only arrives at a de-​historicization of the Qur’an but also
leads at the same time to an affirmation of its otherness, its origin from a pu-
tative purely Arab context, and its exclusive designation for “the Arabs.” With
the demotion of the theological points recognized in the Qur’an to the status of
mere conveniences or maneuvers required tactically to achieve politically advan-
tageous facilities in debate, this perspective relinquishes the possibility of per-
ceiving the Qur’anic teachings as the result of behaviors and adaptations of the
theological traditions of the Late Antique environment and, above all, fails to
understand them as communicative contributions to debates that reach across
religious borders. Von Grunebaum’s perspective is closed to the perception of the
Qur’an as a new voice in the polyphonic concert of Late Antique post-​biblical tra-
ditions that has today come to be seen as the spiritual underpinning of Europe’s
later development, a heritage from which the Qur’an has been excluded due to
such perspectives. Von Grunebaum’s influential presentations have strongly im-
pacted later research, without the methodological flaw of the teleological pro-
jection of later developments back into the Qur’anic beginnings having been
objected. Wherever a theological-​historical contextualization of the Qur’an has
been undertaken in recent research, it has been in a summary form, as if the
codification of the Qur’an text was not preceded by successive negotiations of
the positions of belief that were current in that space and time. Most notably, the

67.  Von Grunebaum, “Ausbreitungs-​und Anpassungsfähigkeit,” 15.

 How the Qur’an Has Been Read So Far  47

essentialist scenario of interaction involving an “Arab proclaimer” and “Arabs as

hearers” has widely been maintained.

1.4  The Qur’an Without the Memory of the

Community? New Voices in the “Authenticity Debate”

1.4.1  Wansbrough, Crone, and Cook

In part as a response to such tendencies to “flatten” the text, we should con-
sider the revolutionary work of John Wansbrough, who categorically questioned
the notion of the Prophet’s authorship that had been accepted up to that point,
sketching a new scenario. It is hardly an exaggeration to claim that Wansbrough’s
Quranic Studies68 introduced a decisive turn in research on early Islam.69 Through
his work, the entire historical paradigm developed by the Islamic tradition, held
as foundational up to that point, was called into question: in view of its striking
echoes of biblical and post-​biblical traditions, the Qur’an appears, according to
Wansbrough’s thesis, to be the product of inter-​religious debates that can best be
conceived as having occurred in Mesopotamia during the eighth/​ninth centuries,
among scholars of a syncretistic community containing Jewish and Christian
adversaries. The Qur’an would thus appear to be a later compilation, and the
scenario of the Arabian Peninsula and the depiction of the Prophet would ap-
pear to be retrojections supplied as necessary proofs of the Arabian “rootedness”
of the origins of the new religion. Wansbrough’s Quranic Studies was followed
in the same year, 1977, by a similarly rigorous attempt at deconstruction by
Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, who in Hagarism introduced an alternative
origin scenario in the form of a messianic movement connected to Palestine.
In this presentation, distilled wholly from non-​Islamic sources, Muhammad
acted politically as a messianic proclaimer, not, however, as the proclaimer of the
transmitted Qur’an. While his original teaching within the messianic movement
that he led focused on the genealogical derivation of the Arabs from Abraham
and Hagar (thus “Hagarenes” and “hagarism”), this teaching later, following the
Umayyad caliph ʿAbd al-​Malik’s break with the Jews, had to be universalized,
thus leading to the stylization of the person of Muhammad as a prophet on the
model of Moses in the Qur’an as it was now being compiled.70
These works, with their classification of the Qur’an as a compilation achieved
later with political considerations in mind, introduced a turn, primarily in
Anglosaxon research on early Islam (Andrew Rippin, Patricia Crone, Michael

68.  See the reviews by Graham, Ullendorff, Nemoy, and Neuwirth.

69.  For a detailed, tradition-​critical discussion of Wansbrough’s thesis, see Radtke, Offenbarung, and see now
Sinai, Studien zur frühen Koraninterpretation,  23–​31.
70.  An extensive presentation, with criticisms of sources and methods, is offered by Robinson, Discovering the
Qur’an, 47–​59. See now also Sinai, Studien zur frühen Koraninterpretation,  35–​38.
48  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

Cook, Gerald Hawting).71 Only few researchers, such as Neal Robinson72 and
David Marshall,73 resisted this change in orientation and saw through the prob-
lematics of its complete suppression of the memory of the community. According
to the revisionist researchers of the Wansbrough school, it is not Muhammad
who “took over” the traditions of other religions; rather, a circle of redactors,
who cannot be further defined, members of a sectarian milieu in Syria or
southern Iraq, introduced questionable doctrines into the text. Alongside this,
they embedded the “logia” of a mythical Prophet in diverse text sorts, chiefly
simulations of disputes, thus compiling a “Meccan-​Muhammadan” gospel, with
the goal of rooting the later-​developed founding myth of Islam’s origin in the
original homeland of the Arabs. Any notification of Islamic tradition would thus
be groundless, since historical reality had been so fundamentally deformed by
ideological compulsions that nothing precise could be yielded regarding the pre-
history of the Islamic scripture. The form-​historical approach introduced into
Qur’an research by Wansbrough, that once had been developed in biblical schol-
arship to deal with secondarily compiled texts of various authors, was applied
in isolation from the rest of philological methods, such as the preconditional
step of lower criticism; it equally led far away from the drama-​theoretical ap-
proach required for the analysis of the communication process. Even within his
ambitious project, Wansbrough is not consistent: he omits lower criticism, as a
means of testing the unity or secondary compilation of the individual Qur’anic
texts, the first step required in the sequence of methods of biblical scholarship.
The suras, which are clearly delineated already in early manuscripts, and which
are clearly intended units whose formal design suggests a genetic coherence, go
unnoticed by him. Wansbrough’s form-​critical attempt at atomization of a text
that, if treated with a consistent method, is clearly recognizable as coherent, is a
theoretical dead end. His thesis of a late dating, developed in analogy to the re-
daction of the Mishna and the New Testament Gospels, stands as a whole-​cloth
judgment rather than the result of concrete comparative analysis. But Quranic
Studies, by breaking down hardened positions and raising a wide spectrum of
new questions, represented an epistemological breakthrough. Although his im-
portant assertion of the processuality of the emergence of the Qur’an “threw out
the baby with the bathwater” by leaping to a late dating and foreign ascriptions,
nevertheless the idea that the Qur’an is the result of a dynamic, complex com-
munication process is a step forward from which Qur’an research can no more

71.  On Rippin’s position, see his introduction in Rippin, Approaches. Furthermore, see Cook, The Koran;
Hawting, The Idea of Idolatry and the Emergence of Islam. This thesis is repeated in Hawting, “Introduction.”
Hawting’s continued adherence to a later emergence of the Qur’an outside of the Hijaz is difficult to comprehend in
view of clear evidence for an early complete text of the Qur’an.
72.  See Robinson, Discovering the Qur’an, who adopts the Qur’an analysis of Neuwirth, Komposition der mek-
kanischen Suren, which appeared contemporaneously with the works of Wansbrough and Crone/​Cook.
73.  See Marshall, God, Muhammad and the Unbelievers.
 How the Qur’an Has Been Read So Far  49

retreat. It is however not enough to accept this claim alone, but the further step of
reconstructing this process, a step that has not been attempted by the revisionist
researchers is still due. Indeed, because codicological research now indicates a
much earlier final Qur’an redaction,74 much of the revisionist approach to recon-
struction has become obsolete.75
It should not go unmentioned that almost twenty years later, in an article
published in 1994,76 Patricia Crone suggested a softening of the late dating put
forward earlier, but still assuming the drafting of the final text to have occurred
later, in the Umayyad period. This is based above all on “a whole sequence of
anomalies in early Islamic Qur’anic usage, which indicate a striking disconti-
nuity between the Qur’an on one side and tafsīr and fiqh on the other, . . . which
are not to be explained against the background of the conventional scenario
of the Qur’an’s emergence.”77 Nicolai Sinai has examined all of the individual
arguments critically and found convincing explanations for the phenomena that
Crone claims make a late dating necessary. But the basic error, the proton pseu-
dos, lies rather in the approach itself. What probably would require no special
pleading in the case of any other premodern text must always be stressed again
in the case of the Qur’an: as long as one renounces a microstructural reading
of the text on the basis of philological research previously conducted and does
not consider the text’s Late Antique references, no adequate judgment can be
rendered about the text’s drafting. External testimonies gleaned from the re-
ception of the text that argue against a composition of the text in the time of
Muhammad must be taken seriously and checked, but they cannot be taken to
outweigh the internal indices that argue for such a drafting. The revisionist re-
search in de-​embedding the Qur’an from its coordinates of place and time and
brusquely assigning the genesis of a Meccan-​Medinan original community to
the realm of legend turns away high-​handedly from these traces of the contem-
poraneous development of text and community.
Revisionist scholarship induced a paradigm shift. The removal of temporal-​
spatial definition from the Qur’an genesis and the shift of the historical event
that occurred with this genesis to another time and place was, after initial rec-
ognition, brought into doubt and rejected by later research, yet it did introduce
a sustained reinterpretation of the Qur’an:  the Qur’an became an “open” text,
that is, a text that was ultimately not to be defined safely in terms of time, space,
and authorship. What was to remain effective was a rigorous de-​historicizing of

74.  Cf. chap. 4, 158–​161.

75.  It should be noted that certain hermeneutically insensitive formulations of the revolutionary hypotheses of
the Wansbrough school, whose publications were rapidly disseminated in the Middle East due to the English lan-
guage and the authors’ prominence, contributed to a palpable decline in the relationships between Muslim scholars
of early Islam and their Western colleagues; see Neuwirth, “De-​mythifying Islam.”
76.  Crone, “Two legal problems.”
77. Sinai, Studien zur frühen Koraninterpretation, 35.
50  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

the Qur’an; the new perspectives on the Qur’an as a historically undefinable text
seemed for some time to have removed the foundations from the philological
approach that had been pursued up to that point. Thus, for example the Studien
zur Kompositin der mekkanischen Suren (Inverstigations into the Composition of
the Meccan Suras) that appeared by the present author in 1981, offering the first
form-​and genre-​critical analysis of the individual Meccan suras, was long dis-
regarded, overshadowed by the revisionist theses. Likewise, an opposing model
that was contemporary with Wansbrough’s negation of the Qur’an’s genesis, and
which conformed to tradition, developed in another British university by John
Burton,78 was scarcely taken into consideration. Supported by observations
drawn from legal history and hadith criticism, Burton argued for a text collec-
tion already completed by the Prophet himself.
Is Wansbrough’s work a long overdue introduction of methods of biblical
scholarship into Qur’an research? It appears rather to be an ambitious attempt in
this direction that runs up against a fundamental objection. It targets his proce-
dure to derive entire models of thought, concepts of genre, and historical concep-
tions from biblical scholarship and to impose them on the Qur’an or early Islam.
Wansbrough attempts to generate a kind of “form history” on the model of bib-
lical studies, that is, to explain forms through their history, which however first
needs to be reconstructed. But this had already been recognized within biblical
studies as producing a vicious cycle.79 In Qur’an research, it is a rash step. What is
first required is a form analysis that closely reads the particularities of the various
suras and sura sections, a close description of this formal texture.80

1.4.2  The Qur’an—​An Originally Christian Writing?

Two other attempts at a revision of the traditional image of the Qur’an genesis,
developed in German research, show themselves to be essentially simpler and
more positivist, claiming that the Islamic Qur’an should be considered merely
a corruption of a Christian predecessor. Already in 1972, Günther Lülling81 had
started a controversy, claiming that the Qur’an text transmitted to us was not au-
thentic, but that behind it, as an ur-​Qur’an, lay a collection of Christian strophic
songs in Arabic dialect that was then reworked into a new text by Muhammad,
who, as the “author” of the text, exploited the ambiguity of the old Arabic script
that was not yet vocalized. In the form in which we have it, the Qur’an text would
then be due to yet a later redaction, which, as Nicolai Sinai summarizes, “inverted
Muhammad’s original message, which had been a radical critique of monotheist

78. Burton, The Collection of the Qur’an. See also Neuwirth’s review of Burton.
79. Bultmann, Geschichte der synoptischen Tradition, 5.
80.  Cf. Richter, Exegese als Literaturwissenschaft,  72–​79.
81. Lüling, Ur-​Qurʾan.
 How the Qur’an Has Been Read So Far  51

high religion from the standpoint of ancient Arabian polytheism, into its very
opposite, due to political opportunism.”82
Lülling, who resumes Karl Vollers’s (1906)83 hypothesis of an originally di-
alectical form of the Qur’an, presupposes a background for his “ur-​Qur’an”
that is heretical Christian, or at least positioned against the imperial church.
The Arabian Peninsula of Late Antiquity would then be “the refuge of an anti-​
Trinitarian Jewish Christianity, not yet contaminated by the speculations on
the Trinity in Greek theology. Byzantine orthodoxy, armed with the imperial
means of compulsion, would have pushed this authentic ur-​Christianity back
ever more on the defensive, ultimately into Arabia, and Muhammad responded
to this through a sharpening of the Jewish-​Christian critique of Hellenized the-
ology, with the intention of restoring a pagan fertility cult,” which Lülling also
sees as a driving force of ur-​Christianity. Jesus and Muhammad thus share the
same fate:  both revolted against a type of militant orthodoxy for which they
were appropriated posthumously.  .  .  .  Lülling’s undertaking is motivated by a
fundamental impulse that is radically civilization-​critical, whereby human his-
tory appears as a history of human self-​forgetting and self-​deception, a chron-
icle of the fall from good origins.84
Critics found his theory to be conspiratorial and selective, and, above all, be-
holden to a circular logic85—​but what seems even more grave is the basic attitude
of the author, whose own reconstructions of the “ur-​Qur’an” text, in contrast to
the transmitted Qur’an, sound conventional and without tension: Lülling’s “au-
thenticity parameter,” the maximal closeness of the texts of the “ur-​Qur’an” to
Christian hymns, is ultimately based on a prejudice, which affords to Christianity
alone a genuine religious self-​expression and sees Muhammad or his community
as nothing more than manipulators of Christian poetry. The correct observation,
that certain Qur’anic forms developed according to earlier Christian ones, all too
quickly turns into a claim of one-​sided dependency, into epigonality.
In more recent times, Christoph Luxenberg has offered a further attempt
at reconstruction in his book Die syro-​aramäische Lesart des Koran (The Syro-​
Aramaic Reading of the Koran),86 which appeared in 2000. He argues within the
discourse of linguistic history. The work postulates a lectionary as the basis of
the Qur’an, consisting of a translation from Syriac into a form of Arabic that did
not have any literary precedent. In view of its strong proliferation of Syriac ele-
ments, this language would represent a Syriac-​Arabic admixture, which would

82.  Sinai, “Lülings apokalyptische Koranphilologie.”

83.  Vollers’s thesis, which holds that the Qur’an was recorded in a Hijaz vernacular, was based on the assess-
ment of dialectal variants in the non-​canonical readings. This thesis was refuted in a review by Geyer and Nöldeke,
“Zur Sprache des Korans.”
84.  Sinai, “Lülings apokalyptische Koranphilologie.”
85.  See Hawting’s review of Lüling.
86.  See Marx, “Ein neuer Impuls”; Marx, “Was ist eigentlich der Koran?”
52  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

have been immediately comprehensible to the addressees of the Qur’an but not
to the later Arab elite that was removed in place and time from this place of or-
igin, who reinterpreted the hybrid text as purely Arabic. For Luxenberg, a non-​
Arabic Christian original text lies behind the Qur’an, which was rewritten into an
Arabic-​Islamic text in a way that he himself cannot explain. Once again we find
the accusation of epigonality.
Luxenberg demonstrates his method of reconstruction of the “original”
wording, which often presupposes several steps of transformation, through a
number of examples.87 What is central is the elimination of two Qur’anic theo-
logumena, which he holds to be irreconcilable with a post-​biblical text: the com-
munication of the proclamation through divine inspiration (waḥy), and the
existence of maidens of paradise (hurun ʿīn). According to Luxenberg, both owe
their presence in the Qur’an to errant conclusions drawn from misunderstood
Syriac predecessor texts. The Qur’anic self-​designation wahy, “inspiration,” must
signify, if clarified by means of Syriac etymology, nothing other than “transla-
tion.” The Qur’an thus reveals itself as the translation of an earlier text. The con-
ception of the maidens of paradise in the Qur’an also appears to be the result of
misreading—​in its place we should see reference to white grapes, an interpreta-
tion that ignores the fact that already in Syriac literature, such as in the Hymns
of Ephrem, grapes within a paradisiacal context are not to be taken in the literal
sense but rather stand allegorically for sensory pleasures, above all the erotic.
Even the putative Syriac predecessors are, however, reproduced by Luxenberg
in a curtailed form. In order to demonstrate his sensational thesis, a number
of “misreadings” in the context of the passages involving the maidens, have to
be “corrected” as well, again through recourse to Syriac etymologies, producing
connections to grapes. It is a linguistic tour de force, whose positive provoca-
tion for research lies in the fact that it contests the exclusive interpretive mo-
nopoly of Arabic studies over the Qur’an; but along with this legitimate critique,
which ably demonstrates that one cannot approach the historical situation of
emergence without profound knowledge of the non-​Arabic religious writing of
Late Antiquity, Luxenberg himself attempts to lay claim to just such an interpre-
tive monopoly. If one thinks Luxenberg’s thesis through to its end, Arab readers
would have no access to the “true Qur’an,” which would be the exclusive domain
of experts and specialists in the Syriac-​Aramaic church language.
But perhaps the most convincing demonstration of the “reductionism”
of the Luxenberg approach is provided by a contrast of his high-​handed con-
structions of dependencies with examples of methodologically well-​founded

87.  Luxenberg’s methods of linguistic derivation encountered intense criticism within Semitic studies; see De
Blois, “Islam in Its Arabian Context”; see also his review of Luxenberg, and the review by Hopkins. See also Wild,
“Lost in Philology?,” and Saleh, “The Etymological Fallacy.” In contrast, Luxenberg’s theses were widely received as
a welcome provocation by a number of scholars without linguistic access to the Qur’an, and by those unwilling to
recognize the Qur’an as a literary artifact; see the reviews of Baasten and Jansen.
 How the Qur’an Has Been Read So Far  53

contextualizations of Qur’anic texts with their predecessor traditions in

Syriac: here, above all, the works of Joseph Witztum are encouraging.88 The Syriac
predecessor traditions do not figure in his work as “urtexts,” but rather consti-
tute an exegetical “middle stage” in the palimpsest of traditions based on the
Bible and its initial Jewish exegesis, then overlaid by Christian interpretation,
into which the Qur’an ultimately enters. Witztum’s investigations also open new
insights into the Qur’an’s particular approach to Christologically laden traditions
and their earlier foundations; his work thus promises to yield important findings
for the history of theology.
Such curiosity stands outside discussion in Luxenberg’s tendentious approach.
This is all the more deplorable since his thesis of the Christian origin of Islam has
provoked far-​reaching speculations on the part of researchers who are not spe-
cialists in the study of the Near East. The volume edited by the theologian Karl-​
Heinz Ohlig with Gert Rüdiger Puin, Die dunklen Anfänge:  Neue Forschungen
zur Entstehung und frühen Geschichte des Islam (Dark beginnings: New research
on the emergence and early history of Islam) (2005),89 and Ohlig’s book, edited
with Markus Groß, Schlaglichter:  Die beiden ersten islamischen Jahrhunderte
(Highlights: the first two Islamic centuries)(2008), attempt to rewrite the early
history of Islam into one that is entirely Christian. Both initiatives gamble away a
number of highly relevant individual results through an openly exhibited apolo-
getic stance, which ridicules the requirements of unbiased research.
The construction of a supposed Christian history that extends for more than a
century into the Islamic period is bound up with a new explanation of the name
Muhammad, literally: “the praised,” which is asserted, through the use of philo-
logical acrobatics, to designate Christ rather than the Arab Prophet. This inter-
pretation permits the person of Muhammad to be eliminated from history. But
even this foundational element of the argumentation has been called into doubt.
The suggestive reinterpretation of the name cannot be maintained in view of the
parallel cases documented in South Arabian research of the adoption of divine or
theophoric titles of honor reclaimed by privileged persons from the circle of wor-
shipers. The name Muhammad, “the praised,” which first occurs in the Qur’an
in the Medinan suras (Q 3:144, 33:40, 47:2, and 48:29), appears plausibly in this
light as a title of honor given to the Prophet as one sent by God.90

88.  See Witztum, “The Foundations of the House (Q 2:127)”; a more extensive study on the revision of Syrian
treatments of Biblical stories (Joseph and Adam) in the Qur’an is now in preparation.
89.  See Sinai’s review, as well as the objection from the research group Corpus Coranicum to Ohlig’s invec-
tive against Islamic scholarship, published in the feuilleton of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on November 21,
2006: “Die Koranforschung tritt in die kritische Phase ein.”
90.  Comparable to the case of his rival Prophet, Musaylimah, called “Raḥmān al-​Yamāma” after the name of
his God, al-​Raḥmān. Robin cites an earlier example from the third century: the designation of the Roman emperor
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus as Elagabalus or Heliogabalus, the name of the god of Emesa, whose cult was intro-
duced to Rome by the emperor. Following this analogy, Muhammad could have been named after his god; on this
see Robin, “Himyar et Israel,” 876.
54  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

In any case, the burdening of a single lexical element with serious real histor-
ical conclusions points to a reductive approach. Such equivalencies as the claim
of a correspondence of Muhammad to “Benedictus,” thus indicating Christ, or
Luxenberg’s equation of qurʾān and “lectionary,” thus indicating a factual Syriac
predecessor scripture to the Qur’an, could certainly arise within a Late Antique
sectarian milieu, but this derivation of history from the explanations of single lex-
emes belongs rather to polemically motivated speculation than to serious schol-
arship. The immensely complex background of individual and collective naming
is shown by the studies of Carsten Colpe,91 who probes a Jewish-​Christian char-
acterization of the earliest community.
Despite the ideological coloring of the investigations presented in the Ohlig
circle, its results must be checked in detail. The conference volume edited by
Neuwirth, Sinai, and Marx, The Qur’an in Context:  Historical and Literary
Investigations into the Qur’an, confronts critically some of the ideas set out in the
volumes compiled in the service of the hypothesis of Christian origin.92 Above
all, the studies by Norbert Nebes,93 Barbara Finster,94 Stefan Heidemann, Peter
Stein,95 and Mikhail Bukharin96 demonstrate the significance of archaeology, ar-
chitecture, numismatics, and epigraphy for the reconstruction of the original
milieu of the Qur’an. A  first general overview was offered in 2001 by Robert
Hoyland.97
In the meantime, recent research on South Arabia has shaken the legitimacy
of the long-​unquestioned focus on the northern Hijaz and Syria as the primary
cultural catchment area of the ministry of Muhammad, challenging also the
derivation of early Islam from Christianity. Christian Robin,98 whose research
concentrates above all on pre-​Islamic South Arabia, has opened a new scope on
important religious phenomena that were previously derived summarily from
the Syriac-​Christian region. Meanwhile, Jewish mediations of concepts from
South Arabia have been found to be central in the formation of ritual and li-
turgical elements that were previously set wholly in a Christian context, such as
zakāt, “almsgiving,” or ṣalāt, “prayer.” It is nothing new that important ancient
Arabian festivals that entered Islam not only coincide with Jewish festivals in
their annual locations and earliest etiology but in part also have names identical
to Jewish festivals. A connection to South Arabia, which was marked by Judaism
for over two centuries, could plausibly clarify these correspondences that have

91. Colpe, Das Siegel der Propheten.

92.  Heidemann, “Das Problem der frühislamischen Numismatik,” responds to Popp’s account, “Die frühe
Islamgeschichte.”
93.  Nebes, “The Martyrs of Najrān and the End of Himyar.”
94.  Finster, “Arabia in Late Antiquity.”
95.  Stein, “Mecca on the Caravan Routes in Pre-​Islamic antiquity.”
96.  Bukharin, “Literacy in Pre-​Islamic Arabia.”
97. Hoyland, Arabia; Hoyland, Seeing Islam.
98.  Robin, “Himyar et Israel”; Robin, “Les Filles de Dieu”; Robin, “Des inscriptions aux traditions.”
 How the Qur’an Has Been Read So Far  55

remained unexplained for so long. While the pre-​Islamic and Qur’anic ḥajj is
synonymous with the ḥag ha-​sukkot, the Festival of Tabernacles, the pre-​Islamic
ʿumra corresponds to the Jewish spring festival, Pesach. 99 The fast that is not
named explicitly in the Qur’an but identified unambiguously in the tradition, the
“Ashura” fast100 observed by the community before the institutionalizing of the
Ramadan fast, carries a name in the tradition (but not in the Qur’an) that is de-
rived from the Aramaic name (ʿasora) for the fast day known in Hebrew as Yom
Kippur. The religious pluralism that we see here appears to have been formative
for ancient Arabian culture, as we see with clarity in the anthologies edited by
Gerald Hawting, The Development of Islamic Ritual, and Francis E. Peters, Arabs
and Ancient Arabia on the Eve of Islam. This plurality is ill served by a distortion
of history that limits it only to Christianity.

1.5  The Arabic Side of the Qur’an: Mirror of the

Arabian Environment

Thomas Bauer has rightly denounced a further one-​sidedness found in Qur’an re-
search up to now, the fact that the Qur’an is systematically contextualized with its
Christian and Jewish neighboring traditions, while its relation to its own Arabian
environment remains thoroughly neglected. Although since Julius Wellhausen101
early Arabic religious conditions have been studied and recognized as impor-
tant reference points for Qur’an readings,102 such attention has not been paid to
the ideological coordinates, in a broader sense, that are reflected in the ancient
profane texts. Rather, as Aaron Hughes points out,103 a “hermeneutically sealed
border” has been constructed between Islam and pre-​Islam in the research, in
a manner that follows the Islamic tradition.104 Ludwig Ammann has rightly
pointed out that between religion and poetry there exists a “division of labor,
which assigns to religion the task of dealing with occasional conflicts and crises,
and leaves to poetry the reflection on enduring malaise and aporia.” Poetry must
therefore be brought into view alongside ancient Arabic religion, if one wants to
mark out the spiritual horizon of ancient Arabia. An important new approach is
sketched by Bauer in his programmatic article “The Relevance of Early Arabic
Poetry for Qur’anic Studies,” which demonstrates a powerful “negative inter-
textuality” in Qur’anic citations of poetry.105 Beyond this, the Qur’an reflects a

99.  See Neuwirth, “Gewalttexte und Versöhnungsliturgien.”

100.  Hawting, “The Tawwābūn”; Hawting Islamic Ritual, 173–​188.
101. Wellhausen, Reste altarabischen Heidentums.
102. Fahd, Panthéon; Krone, Al-​Lāt; Chabbi, Seigneur; Peters, Arabs and Arabia.
103.  See Hughes, “The Stranger at the Sea.”
104.  This construction doesn’t allow for the Qur’anic reflections of older Arabian myths to be seen as reason-
able adoptions. They are viewed merely as theologically polished retellings, for example, in J. Stetkevych, Golden
Bough; cf. Hughes, “The Stranger at the Sea,” 262.
105.  One example is discussed in chap. 12, 436–​441.
56  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

decisive reinterpretation of ancient Arabic concepts of time and fate, wherein the
cyclical conception of time of ancient Arabic poetry is replaced by a linear one.
This important change of orientation in the Qur’an has not yet been systemati-
cally studied,106 and is less derived from explicit Qur’anic pronouncements than
it is indirectly deduced from the positions taken on history and the future: the
Qur’anic proclamation accomplishes this change of orientation through the fact
that it throws into question the norms of behavior bound up in pre-​Islamic po-
etry to the perception of cyclical time; above all, the Bedouin ethos founded on
a cyclical perception of time is transmuted into an ethics oriented to the unique-
ness of God and a linear construction of history.107
In the comparative analysis of poetry and Qur’an, special significance should
be attached to the diverse literary genres and topoi that figure in both literary
corpora. Deserving special attention here is the text type of the mathal,108 the
parable speech built up into a short narrative, which is already familiar from po-
etry,109 but in the Qur’an also reflects New Testament and Jewish precedents.110
Which tradition does the Qur’anic parable follow? Does it stand in the service of
an “empirical explanation,” as the poetry would suggest, or rather in the service
of a theological interpretation of its object, as in religious tradition?111 A further
example can be found in “praise,” fakhr, which recurs in the Qur’an as hymn, and
“invective,” hijāʾ, which is also known to the Qur’an.112 Here too, systematic com-
parisons are still lacking. Finally, there are topoi, such as the unanswered ques-
tion expressing an existential aporia, which belong to a repertoire of discourse
forms employed in poetry and Qur’an alike.113 Poetic topoi can also be trans-
ferred into an entirely new context, such as the “immortality discourse,” khulūd,
which is predominant in poetry, and which is transmuted from a hero’s striving
through physical endurance toward inner-​worldly praise into an assurance of
the timelessly preserved blessedness of the righteous. Certain pre-​Islamic virtues
recur in the Qur’an, such as jūd “generosity,” which is transmuted from the hero’s
ultimately self-​interested bravado expressed in self-​expenditure on behalf of the
Bedouin collective into the responsibility required of the individual toward the
body politic of an urban society, or ḥamāsa, “bravery,” which is repurposed into
ṣabr “patience,” a concept of heightened intensity and permanence. All of these
terms are divested of their ancient Arabic excessiveness. The Qur’an is thus just
as much a new reading of the poetry as it is a new reading of biblical traditions.

106. Tamer, Zeit und Gott, concentrates on poetry. For the Qur’an, he limits himself to an investigation of
concepts of time, without however interrogating the text in its entirety in terms of statements about time.
107.  Cf. chap. 12, 434–​441.
108.  Lohmann, “Die Gleichnisse im Koran”; Sister, “Metaphern und Vergleiche im Koran.”
109.  Cf. the introduction to Bauer, Altarabische Dichtkunst.
110.  Ben-​Shammai, “The Status of Parable and Simile.”
111.  Cf. chap. 8, 300–​308.
112.  See Fischer, Wert der vorhandenen Koran-​Übersetzungen.
113. Ammann, Die Geburt des Islam.
 How the Qur’an Has Been Read So Far  57

This approach to the Arabic heritage has not yet been pursued, although impor-
tant beginnings have been made, which we see in the studies of Omar Farukh114
and M.  M. Bravmann,115 and, in more recent times, Jaroslav Stetkevych116 and
Suzanne P. Stetkevych,117 Agnes Imhof,118 and Salam al-​Kindy.119

1.6  The New Center: Not Book or Prophet,

But Community

1.6.1  In Western Research

In the wake of the critical rejection of the hypotheses of Lülling and Luxenberg,
who posited a pre-​Qur’anic Christian form of the Qur’an, and the failure of
Wansbrough’s reduction of the Qur’an to a kind of “Islamic Mishna,” we must
confront a new challenge:  to make the Qur’an recognizable as a rhetorically
marked text and a mirror of collective formation. This means that we must set
the two great developments that were formative for the genesis of Islam into
meaningful relation: the emergence of the community and the collection of texts
with canonical authority that are united in the Qur’an. This task is evaded by the
skeptical researchers, who obstruct their own access to this problematics and too
quickly ignore the Qur’an itself, which must be the textual basis for this investi-
gation, degrading it to a salvation-​historical construct tailored to later collective
requirements, or even to an ideologically motivated “rewriting” of ancient “orig-
inal texts.”
The accusation that is implied in this, which Andrew Rippin has made ex-
plicit,120 that the Qur’an shows no stylistic continuity and therefore could scarcely
be the creation of “one and the same forming hand,” remains a mere prejudice,
as Nicolai Sinai stresses, so long as composition and the gradually developing
formation of the successive discourses and leitmotifs are not submitted to sys-
tematic study. “If one emphasizes, on the other hand, the emergence of the text
not from a preexisting overall plan, but rather from the complex interaction be-
tween a charismatic leader, an increasingly heterogeneous set of followers, and
a group of opponents setting his authority into question polemically, then the
literary heterogeneity of the Qur’an appears to be thoroughly comprehensible.”121
The skeptical position, represented most often by historians, stands opposed to
the positive view held by literary scholars, who recognize no substantial breaks in

114. Farrukh, Das Bild des Frühislam; see also Müller, “Die Barmherzigkeit Gottes.”
115. Bravmann, Spiritual Background of Early Islam; Goldziher, “Muruwwa und Din.”
116. J. Stetkevych, Golden Bough.
117. S. Stetkevych, The Mute Immortals Speak.
118. Imhof, Religiöser Wandel.
119.  Al-​Kindy, Voyageur sans Orient.
120.  Rippin, review of Neuwirth, Komposition der mekkanischen Suren.
121. Sinai, Studien zur frühen Koraninterpretation, 35.
58  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

the stylistic development.122 That the assumption of several forming hands would
open up new historical questions, which remain unanswered by the proponents
of these theories, makes this hypothesis even more problematic.
But after the shifting of positions once thought to be secure that was trig-
gered by Wansbrough, one can no longer simply assert the person of the Prophet
as the sole “originator” of the Qur’an but should rather assign more weight to
the contribution of the hearers and transmitters. The very preservation of the
proclamation, in oral tradition, was a task that lay on many shoulders, and its
codification after the death of the proclaimer required further transmitters. Like
the Bible, the Qur’an is not “author literature” but rather a piece of “tradition lit-
erature.” What Ernst Axel Knauf stresses for the Bible is true, mutatis mutandis,
for the Qur’an: “The biblical absence of the ‘author’ corresponds to the absence
of the book as artifact, as product, as a good in the biblical world. Certainly there
were books, i.e., scrolls, in the archives. . . . But literature remained the spiritual
possession of each group that possessed it and had access to it. . . . The expec-
tation of a particular author figure for a text referred by tradition back to di-
vine inspiration ultimately stems from the Enlightenment and Romantic period,
which did away with divine inspiration to make room for the ‘genius of the orig-
inal author.’ ”123 In the Qur’an too, the concept of “tradition literature” should be
rethought, as a designation for a text emerging from the interaction of a group
“formed by tradition,” even if this text may have received its final form through
a single forming hand.
Here, Islamic tradition, if viewed critically, is of inestimable value. As the
source-​critical studies of Gregor Schoeler,124 Harald Motzki,125 Marco Schöller,126
and Andreas Goerke127 show, tradition supplies relevant historical contexts for
the changing situations of the proclamation. It is doubtful, however, if a coherent
image of the proclaimer will ever emerge such as was provided, for example,
for Jesus by David Flusser (1917–​2000),128 who was able to check the words of
the Gospels against the Hebrew and Aramaic traditions current at the time of
Jesus for possible ideological reworkings. While Flusser proceeds with carefully
sorting out later additions and reinterpretations of the Gospels to bring forth a
clear image of Jesus, the procedure of the biographer of Muhammad, Tilman
Nagel,129 is marked by a contrary bias:  to give voice to the bulk of traditional

122.  See Neuwirth, “Form and Structure.”

123.  Knauf, “Pentateuch-​Redaktion.”
124. Schoeler, Charakter und Authentie.
125. Motzki, Anfänge der islamischen Jurisprudenz.
126. Schöller, Exegetisches Denken.
127.  Goerke and Schoeler, Korpus Urwa b. az-​Zubair.
128. Flusser, Jesus (1998). This work, building on an earlier presentation (1970), stands out among the nu-
merous attempts put forward since 1970 to represent the historical, Jewish Jesus through a sensitive exploration of
Jesus’s exceptional, messianic self-​image; on this scholarship, see Vermes, Changing Faces of Jesus, 267.
129. Nagel, Mohammed.
 How the Qur’an Has Been Read So Far  59

material that emerged in the century after Muhammad, failing however to convey
Muhammad’s personal aura and the factual impact of his ministry. The immense
mass of material should not obscure the fact that it reflects a later perception; it
stems from a phase in which the community no longer stood in dispute with oth-
ers, but was already established as a religious community of its own. What pos-
itively can be brought to light about the proclaimer is essentially his convictions
that resound in his proclamation. Since these proclamations—​unlike in the case
of Jesus—​are not elaborations of firmly identifiable biblical traditions but rather
answers to current questions and challenges that are today difficult to grasp, a
biography of the proclaimer in the present state of research can in no way rely on
secure foundations.
What is much more amenable to research is the Meccan and Medinan mi-
lieu.130 Exemplary investigations of this are available in the works of the “Jerusalem
school” around M. Y. Kister (1914–​2010), who, building on Ignaz Goldziher’s ap-
proach to the critical evaluation of hadith, succeeded in historically illuminating
important stages in Muhammad’s ministry.131 His work has been continued by
Michael Lecker.132 Uri Rubin—​a pioneer in the history of the early community’s
cult—​in a number of groundbreaking studies has demonstrated how the intricate
cultic practices of ancient Arabian Mecca and Medina that shed light on the re-
ligious personality of the Prophet can be reconstructed even from contradictory
reports133—​an approach that follows on the works of Shlomo Dov Goitein (1900–​
1985),134 Julius Wellhausen (1844–​1918),135 and—​despite his tendentiousness—​
Henri Lammens (1862–​1937).136 The new store of knowledge that Rubin gleans
from hadith and historical texts is meanwhile being supported by the findings
of epigraphical and archaeological studies, of which Robert Hoyland137 has pro-
vided a first synoptic overview. An important further document, the work on
pre-​Islamic history preserved on papyrus by Wahb ibn Munabbih (110/​728 or
114/​732),138 who drew extensively on non-​Muslim sources, promises further
insights into the historical picture of the environment of the Prophet.
While future Qur’anic research will not be able to do without either archae-
ological or epigraphical evidence, nor without the critical evaluation of Islamic
tradition, it is not this archive of knowledge that should form the starting point
for Qur’an research but rather the text itself, read as the mirror of a commu-
nication. The communication structure of the Qur’an, which has received little

130.  See Noth, “Früher Islam.”

131.  Kister, “Labbayka.”
132.  Lecker, “On the Markets of Medina.”
133.  Rubin, “Ilaf ”; Rubin, “Meccan Trade”; Rubin, “The Shrouded Messenger”; Rubin, “Hanifiyya and Kaʿba.”
134. Goitein, Islamic History and Institutions.
135. Wellhausen, Reste altarabischen Heidentums.
136. Lammens, L’Arabie occidentale.
137. Hoyland, Arabia and the Arabs.
138. Khoury, Wahb ibn Munabbih.
60  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

attention up to now, finally has to be focused in its relation to the interaction

between the proclaimer and his hearers. In Nicolai Sinai’s words, the Qur’anic
texts document a process that can be characterized as trial and error as a gradual
mutual approach of text and hearers’ expectations: the role of Muhammad must
accordingly be thought of anew. It consists on the one hand of his speaking to
the hearers, perceived by Muhammad himself more and more clearly as inspired
speech, and on the other hand of his triggering of debates that were to engage the
hearership. His import would thus rather consist in his role as a catalyst and ulti-
mate form giver than in that of an author in the conventional sense.
What is required, then, is not to describe the Qur’an in retrospect as an al-
ready homogenized founding document or divinely designed unit—​this has
already been done in numerous presentations of the canonical Qur’an; rather—​
we must trace the text in statu nascendi, in its genesis through the interplay of
multiple actors and traditions. The cultural and social environment of the Hijaz,
which lay on the periphery of two great empires, is still widely unresearched,
though the negative assessment of this region as being devoid of culture, barren,
and monotonous has by now become obsolete.139 It has also been contested en-
ergetically by Jacqueline Chabbi,140 whose monograph Le Seigneur des Tribus is
based on the conviction that it is above all local Bedouin traditions that mark the
characteristics of the Qur’an. Though this requires a further discussion of details,
it confirms the notion that the Hijaz poses no serious problems as a milieu for the
emergence of the Qur’an.141 The Hijaz is the homeland not only of ancient Arabic
poetry but also of an epic-​narrative tribal tradition that still awaits evaluation as
historical evidence. At present, epigraphical and material evidence already at-
test amply to the liveliness of cultural activity intensive enough to render the
search for another milieu of emergence for the Qur’an superfluous. One of the
most careful and insightful experts in the history of this region, Robert Hoyland,
summarizes: “This makes it difficult to see how historical scenarios that require
for their acceptance a total discontinuity in the historical memory of the Muslim
community—​such as that Muḥammad did not exist, the Quran was not written
in Arabic, Mecca was originally in a different place etc.—​can really be justified.
Many of these scenarios rely on absence of evidence, but it seems a shame to make
such a recourse when there are so many very vocal forms of material evidence
still waiting to be studied.”142 Recent studies show that neither the (non-​Arabic)
written sources from the period nor the received epigraphical and numismatic

139.  Montgomery, “The Empty Ḥijāzī.”

140. Chabbi, Seigneur, and recently Chabbi, Le Coran décrypté. The monotheistic intertexts do not however
receive their deserved attention here. The attempt at a reconstruction of the “réalité vécue” is carried out as in self-​
delimitation against tradition, labeled “le phantasme et l’illusion” (Le Coran décrypté, 23). In doing so, the Judeo-​
Christian traditions already echoing in the Qur’an are suspected as reflections of later Islamic thought.
141.  See also Finster, “Arabia in Late Antiquity”; Stein, “Literacy in Pre-​Islamic Arabia”; and Bukharin, “Mecca
on the Caravan Routes.”
142.  Hoyland, “New Documentary Texts and the Early Islamic State”; Hoyland, Arabia and the Arabs.
 How the Qur’an Has Been Read So Far  61

evidence call into question the localizing of the Qur’an in its traditional milieu
of emergence. Religious diversity, held together by a shared Hellenism-​imprinted
culture, should be assumed for the Near East in general so also for the milieu and
period of the ministry of the Prophet. What is required is not speculation but
rather the comparative accounting of the diverse religious and profane traditions
that were involved in this, so as to illuminate the cultural “space of resonance” in
which the emergence and reception of the Qur’anic texts played out.143

1.6.2  In Arabic-​Language Inner-​Islamic Research

That being said, it is hard to overlook the fact that the text-​centered, literary ap-
proach proposed here has a major correlate, baffling in certain important points,
within inner-​Islamic research, in the school of tafsīr adabī, “literary exegesis,” as
it was named by its founder, Amin al-​Khuli (d. 1966).144 The new Qur’an reading
that was developed by al-​Khuli, Bint al-​Shati (A’isha Abd al-​Rahman, d. 1998)145
and Muhammad Ahmad Khalafallah (d. 1998)146 stands in the tradition of the
reform of religious thought that was introduced in the nineteenth century by
Muhammad Abduh (d. 1905)147 and Rashid Rida (d. 1935)148 and the new crit-
ical philology endorsed by Taha Husayn (d. 1973).149 With some daring, one
could speak of this exegetical direction, which has not yet been made fruitful
for Western scholarly dealings with the Qur’an, as an analogue to the somewhat
earlier emergence of Western critical Qur’an research introduced by Abraham
Geiger in 1833; indeed, both new directions are clearly historically directed. They
move beyond the traditional Islamic commentary focusing on the text itself. The
fact that in these two cases, the historicizing of the Qur’an was to proceed on
two distinctly different paths—​Western historical-​critical research concentrating
on intertexts versus inner-​Islamic exegesis focused on the form of the Qur’an—​
renders the task to “synchronize” the two strains as phenomena of a period of
rupture, in Europe the nineteenth century and in the Near East of the early twen-
tieth century, no less urgent.
The “Egyptian school” of new Qur’an exegesis, in contrast to the beginnings
of critical Qur’an research in the West, is still widely unresearched. The éclat
caused by the censorship measures with which the local religious establishment
reacted to the new approaches was internationally noted:  bans on publication

143.  A new, exemplary study of the genesis of the Qur’an that provides a long overdue, stringent model of re-
flection, is offered by Sinai, Studien zur frühen Koraninterpretation.
144.  Al-​Khuli, Manāhij al-​ṭaqālīd.
145.  Abd al-​Rahman (Bint al-​Shati’), al-​ʿIjāz al-​Bayānī. On her, see Boullata, “Modern Qur’an Exegesis”; on
the tafsīr adabī in general, see Wild, “Die andere Seite.”
146. Khalafallah, al-​Fann al-​Qaṣaṣī; Khalafallah, al-​Qurʾān wa-​mushkilāt Ḥayātinā.
147.  Abduh and Rida, Tafs ̄ır al-​Mana ̄r. On Abduh, see Hasselblatt, Herkunft und Auswirkungen.
148.  Ziyadeh, “Rachid Rida.”
149. Husain, Fī al-​Shiʿr al-​Jāhilī. On him, see Cachia, Taha Husayn.
62  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

such as that imposed on Taha Husayn in the 1930s, and even firings, as experi-
enced by Muhammad Khalafallah and, in more recent times, Nasr Hamid Abu
Zaid;150 Sayyid Qutb (executed 1966),151 who in the early years of his work also
belonged to this movement, fell victim to state power for more far-​reaching re-
ligious reasons. The Arabic scholar Islam Dayeh, who works on the history of
modern Arabic philology, notes: “All of these scholars pleaded for the necessity
of treating the Qur’an as a literary and aesthetic work, alongside other prose or
dramatic literature, visual art or music. The text appears to them as a verbal arte-
fact, ruled by an inherent and coherent logic, stylistics, and grammar.”152 In tafsir
adabi, the Qur’an is released from the confines of the centuries-​old, dogmatically
binding commentary tradition to be investigated as to its language, its literary
topoi, and its imagery. Rotraud Wielandt, who has provided the most detailed
analysis of the “literary exegesis” conducted by Khalafallah, cites the justifica-
tion put forward by the author himself: “It is clear that the Qur’an is human in
its means of expression, human in style, and that it appeared in agreement with
what was customary among the Arabs in linguistic art and eloquence—​in view of
all this, how can one claim that one should not understand the Qur’an according
to these rules and stylistic characteristics?”153 Khalafallah goes one step further in
his historical contextualization, claiming that “a new religion . . . will meet with
belief only if it connects to what is long known,” which for him entails not only
the linguistic but also the earlier ideological positions and usages, which were
“corrected” through the proclamation of Muhammad. The studies of Khalafallah
and his circle, which have precursors in the often less rigorous work154 of earlier
scholars such as Muhammad Abduh, Rashid Rida, and al-​Shatibi,155 are inter-
esting not least as engagements with the European thought models of the time.156
But up to now, they have been taken into account only by means of a kind of “ob-
jectification,” that is, as the object of research on modern exegesis, and not dia-
logically, as scholarly contributions as such toward an inclusive Western-​Eastern
Qur’an exegesis. The studies that emerged from the so-​called Egyptian school,
even if they often present themselves apologetically as demonstrations of the
inimitability of the Qur’an, should be synchronized with the contemporaneous
Western Qur’an research as important contributions to a critical Qur’an exegesis.

150.  On this, see Wild, Mensch, Prophet, whose observations demonstrate that it was in particular the insist-
ence on the nonhistoric paraenetic quality of the Qur’anic Prophet legends that led to the drastic measures taken by
the religious authorities against modern exegetes in individual instances; this pattern has indeed been continued.
On Sadek Jalal al-​Azm (1934–​2017), see ibid., 40ff.
151. Qutb, Fī Ẓilāl al-​Qurʾān.
152.  Dayeh, “Plain Sense and the Allegorical—​Lessons from the Egyptian School.”
153. Wielandt, Offenbarung und Geschichte, 147. She quotes Khalafallah, Al-​Fann al-​Qasasī, 137ff. See also
Wielandt, “Exegesis, Modern.”
154.  Al-​Shatibi, Al-​Muwāfiqāt.
155.  See above all Wielandt, Offenbarung und Geschichte, and Jomier, Commentaire coranique du Manar;
Jomier, “Quelques positions actuelles”; and Caspar and Jomier, “L’exégèse scientifique.”
156.  See Haddad, Contemporary Islam.
 How the Qur’an Has Been Read So Far  63

Already through their focus on the text and its addressees, in place of the ear-
lier concentration on the transcendent speaker, they deserve recognition as new
contributions to literary Qur’an reading. In this, they go a decisive step further
than those exegetes from the Indian subcontinent, Ashraf Ali Thanavi (d. 1943),
Hamid al-​Din al-​Farahi (d. 1930), and Amin Ahsan Islahi (d. 1997), whose work
has been brought to attention by Mustansir Mir.157 Their pronounced interest in
the Qur’an’s composition, its nazm, is documented not least in the fact that they
treat the individual sura as a unit of interpretation, which they attempt to under-
stand through defined recurring ideas. Yet they do not go so far as to accept a
reading of the Qur’an as a literary artifact like other texts.
What is true for the tafsīr adabī, which can be accounted not as a majoritarian
exegesis but as a relatively well-​known and thoroughly challenging reading, is
true also for the approach of Nasr Hamid Abu Zaid,158 who submits the Qur’an to
text-​linguistic analysis. “In his model, we find the following scheme: a code of the
message, Arabic; a message, the Qur’an; the receivers of the message, the Prophet
Muhammad and his contemporaries; and the sender of the message, God.”159 Abu
Zaid introduces a concept of scholarship that—​excluding from its purview of re-
search the “inspiration,” namely, the stage preceding the communication of the
Qur’an to the hearers—​makes the view clear toward the communication pro-
cess: “What the researcher can provide is an understanding of the Qur’anic text as
the contemporaries of the Prophet understood it. Language usage, cultural back-
ground, and the horizon of understanding of the contemporaries of the Prophet
become the inherent factors in the understanding of the text.”160
Though it is true that within Islamic scholarship the Qur’anic use of
language—​in the context of the proclamation’s social setting—​has already come
to occupy the central place of a new interpretation, this is still not yet the case
for the other languages involved in the history of the Qur’anic emergence. The
cultural background, the landscape of debate of Late Antiquity, which can only
be tapped through historical and theological-​historical investigations that reach
far into the non-​Arabic language tradition, still remains a domain of Western
scholarship. It is here that the dialogue must begin between Islamic and more re-
cent Western Qur’an research, which is occupied with collecting and evaluating
these plurilinguistic Syriac, Hebrew, and Greek intertexts. We must approach the
Qur’an text from both perspectives—​from the inner-​Arabic aesthetic, linguistic,
and hermeneutical perspective and from the historical-​critical perspective—​to
rid ourselves of the currently prevailing one-​sidedness and to achieve a theo-
retically well-​founded modern Qur’an exegesis. Western and Eastern research

157.  Mir, “The Sura as a Unity.”

158.  Abu Zaid, Mafhūm al-​Naṣṣ. Cf. Kermani, Offenbarung als Kommunikation.
159. Wild, Mensch, Prophet, 49ff.
160. Ibid.
64  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

strains are already converging to a higher degree than it may seem. Even if Abu
Zaid’s Qur’an exegesis, whose ultimate interest is in the implementation of the
“inner meaning” of the Qur’an, its maghzā, in social life, seems to be less a con-
tribution to the historical or literary exploration of the text than a normative new
reading of the Qur’an, its reform intention is nevertheless based on a reading of
the Qur’an that remains very close to the text. This reformist direction, which
already distinguished the modern interpretations of the “Egyptian School,” may
ultimately provide the most promising interface between the interpretations cur-
rently operating in East and West. Indeed, reflective Western research—​when it
is aware of its inescapable political role as cultural critique—​is ultimately also an
act of reform, if not of Islamic culture itself, then of the European perception of
this culture. We must decisively reset our perspective on the Qur’an, recognizing
it as a genuine and historically documentable testimony of the emergence of a
new religion, if the third scripture of monotheism is finally to be set on the same
plane as the others.
 2

The Qur’an and Scripture

2.1  “Sending Down,” Tanzīl, and “Inspiration,” Wa ḥ y

We are accustomed to designating the Qur’an immediately as the “revealed

scripture” of the Muslims. In doing so, we carry out the transference onto Islam
of a Jewish-​Christian concept1 whose appropriateness still requires systematic
testing—​even if this designation, frequent in Western media, has long been used
also by Muslim researchers themselves. With this designation we direct our at-
tention primarily to the transcendent dimension of the Qur’an, its being a reve-
lation, which—​deemed exclusively a matter of belief of Muslims2—​frees us from
the necessity of reflecting on the position of the Qur’an beyond the limits of its
Islamic reception history, within our own theological history. In what follows,
a change of perspective will be suggested:  in place of the “Islamic revelation,”
the “Qur’anic proclamation” should come to the fore, entailing a reading of the
Qur’an not as the exclusively Muslim founding document of a religion but rather
“inclusively,” as a document of Late Antique theological debates. At the same
time, a view should be given to the process reflected in the Qur’an of the com-
munication of its message, and thus its genesis. The Qur’an does indeed yield
information self-​referentially about the process of its emergence, information
that is given already in the early suras through the depiction of various scenes
of emergence. The designation “revelation,”3 which is so commonly used today,
in fact stands for several Qur’anic concepts at once: for waḥy, “inspiration,”4 and
for tanzīl, “sending down.”5 In what follows, we will seek to illuminate the central
Qur’anic texts on waḥy and tanzīl and then present the Qur’anic conception of
an orally recited scripture, alongside Late Antique reflections over heavenly and
earthly writing. After a detour through debates conducted in Western research
about the concept of “inlibration,” an attempt will be made to sketch an overall
image of the medialities of the Qur’an, which in reality are more complex than
they might seem.
Yet, skepticism is warranted not only in relation to the Jewish-​Christian
designation “revelation”: the two inner-​Qur’anic designations waḥy and tanzīl,

1.  On the biblical background of the concept, see Van der Toorn, Scribal Culture, 205–​232.
2.  Cf. Arkoun, Lectures du Coran; Arkoun, “The notion of revelation.”
3.  See Wiedenhöfer, “Offenbarung.”
4.  Abu Zaid, Mafhūm al-​Naṣṣ; cf. Kermani, Offenbarung als Kommunikation.
5.  See Wild, “We have sent down to thee the book.”

65
66  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

which in Islamic exegesis are used without distinction for the whole Qur’an, also
should not be accepted immediately as a Qur’anic-​sanctioned fait accompli. For
more than twenty years, the Qur’an was a communication process, before it be-
came fixed as a text and was later canonized. It is precisely its self-​referentiality,
brought to expression in the images of “sending down” and “inspiration,” that
must be investigated and “historicized,” that is, viewed in connection with the
otherwise detectable traces of the process of text genesis, alongside an engage-
ment with extra-​Qur’anic predecessors.
Islamic tradition itself also clearly marks a distinction between two manifesta-
tions of the Qur’an, as fixed written text and oral communication, in that it distin-
guishes between the concepts muṣḥaf, “codex,” and qurʾān, “reading/​recitation.”6
It would be difficult to overstate the importance of this distinction. Only after the
oral communication process, qurʾān, came to a standstill with the death of the pro-
claimer were the texts gathered systematically and perceived, through a process
of textualization, as canonical scripture (muṣḥaf),7 to be read both ahistorically as
a divine monologue and historically as a document initiating a new epoch and
marking the victory of Islam over the rivaling traditions. Once this latter manifes-
tation of the Qur’an came to play a predominant role in the identity construction of
the religious community, those traits of the Qur’an’s genesis that are significant for
the researcher of Late Antique religious history, the traces of the Qur’anic commu-
nity’s engagement with the older traditions, became virtually irrelevant for Islam.
Accordingly, they were marginalized in inner-​Islamic exegesis, and it is on this one-​
sided exegesis that Western Qur’an translations and overview presentations down
to today are still strongly dependent,8 so that both scholarly traditions draw the
image of a largely homogenous Arab scenario of the Qur’an’s emergence. Indeed,
Islamic tradition allows for the participation in the Qur’anic communication sce-
nario of individual Christians and Jews who were knowledgeable about, or even
quite learned in, religious traditions, but these always remain minor characters. It is
historically warranted, however, to assume that there was a lively exchange between
members of the different traditions that went well beyond such a circle of people,
since the Qur’an reflects a multiplicity of negotiations, modified appropriations,
rewritings, and even decided rejections of earlier traditions.

2.1.1 Tanzīl
The image evoked by tanzīl, “sending down,” the vertical communication of the
divine message, is by no means present in the Qur’an from the very beginning.

6.  Cf. chap. 3, 109–​114.

7. The process of canonization should be seen as gradual. On its implications, see Al-​ Azmeh, “The
Muslim Canon,” and Al-​ Azmeh, “Chronophagous Discourse,” and see now also Sinai, Studien zur frühen
Koranauslegung,  1–​22.
8. So in Fück, “Die Originalität des arabischen Propheten”; see also Watt, Muhammad at Mecca; Watt,
Muhammad at Medina; Paret, Mohammed und der Koran; Paret, “Der Koran als Geschichtsquelle.”
 The Qur’an and Scripture  67

The idea of the sending down of the Qur’an through the divine sender, which
occurs for the first time in early Meccan suras (Q 97:1, 69:43, and 56:80), seems
on first view rather to cohere with the older Arabian conception of the vertically
conceived communication of supernatural wisdom associated with poetic inspi-
ration.9 “God’s sending down” could then be understood as a corrective of the
common pre-​Islamic imagination of supernatural verbal conveyances through
inspiring spirits, jinns10 or satans, which “bring down” their wisdom, gleaned
through eavesdropping on the higher spheres, to the individuals to be inspired,
that is, to poets or soothsayers. The associating of the proclaimer to these com-
municators is rejected implicitly in the middle Meccan sura Q 26:221–​222.:

hal unabbiʾukum ʿalā man tanazzalū l-​shayāṭīn

tanazzalu ʿalā kulli affākin athīm

Shall I let you know upon whom the satans descend?

They descend upon every sinning liar [i.e., poets]

Other early texts, such as Q 69:41–​43, even turn explicitly against this insinu-
ation of the proclaimer’s inspiration on the model of the poets, whose “muses”
in the ancient Arabian context are the inspiring demons. Their qawl, that is,
their “speech,” which is not guaranteed transcendently, is contrasted to the word
of God:

wa-​mā huwa bi-​qawli shāʿirin qalīlan mā tuʾminūn

wa-​lā bi-​qawli kāhinin qalīlan mā tadhakkarūn
tanzīlun min rabbi l-​ʿālamīn

It is not the speech of a poet—​how little you believe!

Nor that of a seer—​how little indeed you recall!
It is rather a sending down from the Lord of the worlds.11

So the sending down, set into this “pagan” context, should be understood at first
in the sense of a “correction,” that is, an apologetically motivated replacement
of an existing mythic configuration, not the result of theological reflection. It is
notable, however, that tanzīl in later Qur’anic texts is also the mode of commu-
nication of the other scriptures, which are viewed collectively as munazzal, “sent
down,” and represented as “excerpts” from a preexisting heavenly writing. In the
later period, then, tanzīl is not a trait specific to the Qur’an.
But was tanzīl ever a trait specific to the Qur’an, a mode of reception that only
occurred in the Qur’an? The earliest tanzīl verses suggest the possibility that the
image of sending down connects to older monotheistic conceptions rather than

9.  See Wild, “We have sent down to thee the book.”

10.  Cf. Chabbi, “Jinn”; on reflections of jinn in the Qur’an, see Hawting, “Eavesdropping.”
11.  On these texts, see chap. 12, 427–​429.
68  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

pagan ones. In Q 97:1, we read innā anzalnāhu fī laylati l-​qadr, “Truly, we sent
it down in the night of destiny,” a verse which, interpreting “it” in the sense of a
determined text, would give rise to an interpretive aporia. The referent of—​hu,
“it,” cannot be identical to that which has just been recited; Q 97:1 refers to a new
usage. It stands rather for an authoritative manifestation of the word of God,
an analogue to the “embodiment” of the word of God in the neighboring tradi-
tions.12 In the Nicene Creed it is said of Christ, “He descended from the heavens”
(Greek katelthonta ek tōn ouranōn, Arabic nazala mina l-​samāʾ). The image of the
sending down should then be considered in the early Meccan period to be a man-
ifestation of the word of God that goes beyond the verbal-​semantic proclamation
and thus stands as a “vocal embodiment” alongside the teaching and guidance
given with scripture. Although the Qur’an becomes manifest not through incar-
nation but rather as the verbally delineated word of God, it nonetheless shows
distinct structural analogies to the word of God becoming man, to the incarnate
logos (see p. 90–​92). It has recently even led to discussions of the Qur’an in terms
of “ ‘inlibration,” “the becoming book of God’s word.” This designation reflects
a problematic understanding of the Qur’an, as will be shown below, and reveals
how far apart we still are from a proper understanding of al-​qurʾān and al-​tanzīl
in relation to “writing,” or in relation to a manifestation of God’s word that tran-
scends writing.

2.1.2 Waḥy
The mode whereby the message arrived to the proclaimer is presented in two
distinct scenarios in the early texts. The first is a vision. Here, the message itself is
designated as waḥy, “inspiration,”13 and its authority is corroborated through the
evocation of a divine communication, Q 53:4–​12:14

in huwa illā waḥyun yūḥā

ʿallamahu shadīdu l-​quwā
dhū mirratin fa-​stawā
wa-​huwa bi-​l-​ufuqi  l-​aʿlā
thumma danā fa-​tadallā
fa-​kāna qāba qawsayni aw adnā
fa-​awḥā ilā ʿabdihi mā awḥā
mā kadhdhaba l-​fuʾādu mā raʾā
a-​fa-​tumārūnahu ʿalā mā yarā

12.  On the hypostatization of the word of God in the Jewish tradition of Late Antiquity, cf. Boyarin, “The
Gospel of the Memra,” and Van der Toorn, Scribal Culture, 221–​227; cf. below, 91–94.
13.  See Izutsu, “Revelation as a Linguistic Concept,” and Izutsu, God and Man in the Quran, although he does
not take account of biblical and non-​biblical traditions. Cf. also Chabbi, Le Coran décrypté, 81–​92, which connects
the delivery of the message to an inspiration of jinns.
14.  Cf. on the vision and its relationship to the narrative of calling.
 The Qur’an and Scripture  69

It [the reading] is but an inspiration inspired,

taught to him by one immense in power
of great prestige. Erected high he sat enthroned
on the upper horizon,
then he drew near and hung suspended
and was two bows’ distance away or nearer
and inspired in his servant what he inspired.
The mind did not question what it saw.
Do you dispute with him what he saw?

This scenario reflects in some details Isaiah’s vision in Isaiah 6:1–​11:15

In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord, high and exalted, seated
on a throne; and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him were
seraphim, each with six wings: With two wings they covered their faces,
with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying. And they
were calling to one another: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty; The
whole earth is full of his glory.” . . . Then I heard the voice of the Lord
saying, “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?” And I said, “Here
am I. Send me!” He said, “Go and tell this people . . .”

The historically embedded, dynastically dated first-​person report of Isaiah’s

calling as a Prophet contrasts with the Qur’anic report of the communication of
divine teachings to the proclaimer, which is told in the third person and not set
into historical time. The proclaimer’s vision is not reported for its own sake, but
is embedded within an argument that sets out to authenticate the transcendent
origin of the proclamation as such. But still, the two visions are related: in both
scenes, the envisioned sits upright on the throne. The verb istawā, “to stand/​sit
upright,” is to be understood as an abbreviation for ʿalā l-​ʿarshi stawā, “he sits up-
right on the throne” (Q 20:5, 13:2, 10:3, passim); dhū l-​ʿarshi, “he of the throne,”
“the enthroned,” (Q 81:20), a frequent image in ancient Near Eastern and biblical
tradition,16 may reflect the image of the enthroned pantokrator,17 which is fre-
quent in Late Antique iconography and is present verbally in both Jewish and
Christian liturgy.18 In both vision scenes, something is proclaimed: in the bib-
lical text the praise of God articulated by the seraphim, in the Qur’anic text an
inspiration to the proclaimer. But the two throne visions differ in some crucial

15.  On the scene with Isaiah, see Irsigler, “Gott als König.”
16.  Cf. Hooke, Myth and Kingship; Brettler, God Is King; Schmidt, Königtum Gottes.
17.  Rippin, “God,” bases the kingly image of God on the Qur’anic predications of God, without naming con-
crete biblical intertexts.
18.  The Kedushah, an exclamation evoking the divine holiness within Jewish prayer, contains the encomium
of the seraphim from Isaiah 6:3, “Holy, Holy, Holy, The Lord of Hosts, The entire world is filled with His Glory.” The
Christian liturgy recapitulates this calling in an anaphoric prayer during mass (“with Your Glory”).
70  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

characteristics: in contrast to Isaiah, the divine appearance in the Qur’an is not

static, but seems rather to move toward the onlooker.19 The two prophet visions
also part ways in further details: unlike the speech of God in Isaiah, the “inspi-
ration,” waḥy, in the Qur’an does not form part of a prophetic calling, even if
the inspired speech is identical semantically with the proclamation whose tran-
scendent source the report of the vision is meant to confirm. Above all, the bib-
lical image of God undergoes decisive changes in the Qur’an that does not allow
for anthropomorphic traits.
This is in tune with the report in the earlier sura Q 81:19–​23 of the vision of
a phenomenon that also appears on the horizon (bi-​l-​ufuqi l-​mubīn), a report in
which the proclamation is identified not as God’s immediate speech but rather
as the “word” (qawl) of a “noble messenger with power before the enthroned”
(rasūlin karīm /​dhī qūwatin ʿinda dhī l-​ʿarshi makīn). Here too the entire procla-
mation is authorized through the vision of a supernatural phenomenon, but now
of an angel, similar to the seraphim in Isaiah, one who is “closely related to the
enthroned.”
The two vision scenes that evoke Isaiah’s vision (Q 81:19–​23 and 53:4–​12)
are complemented by a third, immediately following Q 53:4–​12, in which no
divine communication is given to the proclaimer. Here, the experience of divine
closeness is confined to the visual, the divine person manifesting himself only
emblematically through a natural phenomenon, a bush changed in its appear-
ance (Q 53:13–​18)—​an evident reference to the shrub figuring in the calling of
Moses. All the three Qur’anic vision reports are clearly not immediate imitations
of reality, but rather are “overdetermined,” charges with biblical textual evoca-
tions. At the same time, the biblical models are also “corrected”: in sura 81, an
angel is interposed as speaker, so that God himself does not need to speak. In Q
53:4–​12 a divine communication follows, but manifests itself, unlike in the bib-
lical report, as nonverbal speech. Again unlike the message of the angel, which
appears as “(understandable) speech,” qawl, God’s address is introduced as waḥy,
“(nonverbal) inspiration.” The striking fact that God speaks directly in none of
the visions is no accident: the Qur’anic presentation here undertakes a “correc-
tion,” quite in concert with the theological tendencies of its time, of the anthro-
pomorphism that dominated the biblical reports to various degrees. With waḥy,
unlike in the case of angelic speech, no clear communication is intended—​but
what exactly then is meant by waḥy?
The word, already common in pre-​Islamic poetry, indicates not an articu-
lated message but rather one signaled through suggestive signs, as might exist

19.  This is not a Qur’anic innovation, but rather reflects a biblical notion developed after Isaiah: James Kugel,
How to Read the Bible, 600–​606 (as suggested in a personal communication from Dirk Hartwig) points out that the
throne was already understood to be in motion in Ezekiel’s time; God left Jerusalem and was ascending to heaven in
a transportable chariot throne, having left his temple during the first wave of exile to Babylon.
 The Qur’an and Scripture  71

for example in the chirping of birds or in an unreadable writing on a rock.20 The

Egyptian thinker Nasr Hamid Abu Zaid21 recontextualizes the Qur’anic waḥy,
which is reclaimed in the Islamic tradition to mean divine speech, with its an-
cient Arabic usage, and determines that it refers to a communication that is not
yet verbalized, a “suggestion” or “inspiration” that can only become comprehen-
sible through a “translation” achieved by the recipient. Everything that precedes
this process of resetting into human speech remains inaccessible to the outsider,
and thus to the researcher as well (this is the important point for the reformist
thinker Abu Zaid), who must properly limit himself to the already verbalized
speech of the Prophet, that is, to his “horizontal” communication with his hear-
ers,22 dispensing with treating the transcendent side of the text. This “horizontal”
manifestation of waḥy can be understood—​to proceed beyond Abu Zaid’s ideas—​
as part of a drama23 that plays out between the proclaimer, the community as it
forms, and which is reflected in the Qur’anic texts that have been “translated” by
the proclaimer into verbal language. The Qur’an, it is true, is formally almost con-
tinuously the speech of a divine “I” or “we” to a Prophetic “you,” through which
one can, however, “hear” the social situation that is involved in the address. In
light of its dramatic communication to the hearers, the text is polyphonic, in that
some hearers and hearer groups enter the text alongside the proclaimer who is
present as the addressee, or at least are spoken about in their absence.
Only in the post-​Qur’anic period, after the death of the proclaimer, is waḥy
generalized to become a designation of the Qur’anic message as a whole. With
the proliferation of the dogma of the non-​createdness of the Qur’an in the ninth/​
tenth century, the concept of waḥy grew massively in authority. But only in recent
times has this authority come to operate so restrictively within conservative cir-
cles as to withdraw the Qur’an entirely from the access of analytic approach. Pre-​
canonically, that is, understood with Abu Zaid in the context of ancient Arabic,
extra-​Qur’anic evidence, waḥy means a preverbal inspiration that is far remote
from its understanding in the later developed dogma of verbal inspiration.

2.1.3  Vigils as Frames of “Inspiration’

The visions, of which there are three recorded in the Qur’an, are rare exceptions
as a frame for the communication of messages.24 There is a second scenario that

20.  Cf. the function of waḥy in early Arabic poetry, see chap. 12, 444–​447.
21.  Abu Zaid, Mafhūm al-​Naṣṣ; see also Kermani, Offenbarung als Kommunikation.
22.  This occurred in conjunction with the Muʿtazila theology, which, in the eighth/​ninth century, assumes a
distinction between the uncreated, intrinsic, knowledge of God and his created word, and asserts the existence of a
necessarily not-​eternal substrate for the retention of this word; see the evidence in Maalouf, La place du verbe. The
fact that this position was replaced a century later with the dogma of the uncreatedness of the Qur’an is related to
anti-​Christian polemic.
23.  See Neuwirth, “Structure and the Emergence of Community.”
24.  The Qur’an gives accounts of two visions in three places: Q 53:4–​12; 53:13–​18 and one, Q 81:23f., that is
arguably identical with the first vision mentioned in sura 53.
72  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

presents the receipt of God’s word less dramatically, namely, as the result of as-
kesis, as new texts growing out of the nightly recitation of texts that were already
in circulation. Here, the receipt of texts presents itself as resulting from the recita-
tions performed by the proclaimer in his vigils, which must have been conducted
with highly intense concentration. The most evident case is Q 73:1–​9:

yā ayyuhā l-​muzzammil
qumi l-​layla illā qalīlā
niṣfahu awi nquṣ minhu qalīlā
aw zid ʿalayhi wa-​rattili l-​qurʾāna tartīlā
innā sa-​nulqi ʿalayka qawlan thaqīlā
inna nāshiʾata l-​layli hiya ashaddu waṭʾan
wa-​aqwamu  qīlā
inna laka fī l-​nahāri sabḥan ṭawīlā
wa-​dhkuri sma rabbika wa-​tabattal ilayhi tabtīlā
rabbu l-​mashriqi wa-​l-​maghribi
lā ilāha illā huwa fa-​ttakhidhhu wakilā

You who are enwrapped in your garment,

Stand the night, the large part of it,
Half of it, or take away some of it,
Or add something to it,
And chant the reading in clear chant.
We will charge you with a weighty speech.
In the beginning of the night impression are strongest and words
are the most collected.
You have in the day long-​lasting activity.
So remember the name of your Lord
and give yourself entirely to him.
He is the lord of the sunrise and the sunset.
There is no God but him! So take Him as a protector!25

Although here we also find language related to divine visitation—​God himself

gives the proclaimer admonitions for the right disposition toward the reception
of the messages and “gives to him heavy speech”—​the new texts emerge not least
through human effort, namely, through the recitation in vigils of texts already
known. These vigils may have consisted of recitations of Psalm-​like liturgical
texts such as constituted by the early suras. The text itself reflects this close re-
lation to the Psalms: verse 2, qumi l-​layla, “stand the night,” recalls “at midnight
I stand up, to praise you” (Psalms 119:62); verse 8, wa-​dhkur sma rabbika, “recall

25.  On the relationship between text genesis and cult development, cf. chap. 6, 205–​208.
 The Qur’an and Scripture  73

the name of your Lord,” recalls “praise the name of the Lord” (Psalms 113:1), and
verse 9, rabbu l-​mashriqi wa-​l-​maghribi, “Lord of the sunnrise and sunset,” recalls
“from rise to setting of the sun” (Psalms 50:1).
The early Qur’an consists to a large extent of paraphrases of psalms; it forms part
of Late Antique psalmic piety which for the first time finds its place in the Arabic
language, there being no Arabic translation of the Psalms extant before the ninth
century.26 At this early stage, the text is still very little interested in self-​definition; the
word qurʾān itself at the beginning refers to the process of recitation rather than to
the text itself. Only with the growth of the community and the emergent necessity of
self-​assertion does the urgency of self-​authorization arise, which, as we should ex-
pect, occurs on the one hand through self-​distinction of the proclaimer against an-
cient Arabic predecessors, in particular the poets,27 and on the other hand through
contrast between the text and the preceding scriptures of the two older religions,28
which are known in the form of scrolls or codices.

2.2  Al-​Q urʾān: Communication of Texts from the

Heavenly Scripture

In contrast to these scriptures, the Qur’an presents itself at first as a new formation
in altered verbal dress, as a new message that follows, and confirms, the earlier scrip-
tures. But above all, already in the earliest community, the conception took shape
that the oral Qur’an stemmed from the “preserved tablet” that is with God, al-​lawḥ
al-​maḥfūẓ, an original and heavenly writing;29 cf. Q 85:21–​22.: bal innahu qurʾānun
majīd /​fī lawḥin maḥfūẓ, “Truly, it is a glorious reading [qurʾān] /​on a preserved
tablet.” The Qur’an thus has its origins and roots in a transcendent original writing,
from which excerpts are “sent down,” so to speak, as divine messages for recitation
(Q 56:77–​78: innahu la-​qurʾānun karīm /​ fī kitābin maknūn, “Indeed, it is a generous
reading [qurʾān] /​preserved in a hidden writing”).
Narratives in the later Meccan suras are often explicitly presented as elements
of “the writing,” al-​kitāb. This writing is viewed as unchanging and extensive,
perhaps a Qur’anic adaptation of the idea of the book of the heavenly register,
which is found in the book of Jubilees, a Jewish apocryphon of the second cen-
tury bce, but which was a widely prevalent notion already in the ancient Near
East.30 The Qur’anic references to the writing, al-​kitāb, presuppose a kind of ar-
chive, a store of narratives that exist already fixed in writing to be communicated

26.  On the Arabic tradition of the psalms, see Schippers, “Psalms.”

27.  See Farrukh, Das Bild des Frühislam, and now also Bauer, “The Relevance of Early Arabic Poetry.”
28.  There have only been a few studies on this, primarily Speyer, Die biblischen Erzählungen im Qoran; Busse,
Die Theologischen Beziehungen; and, on Qur’anic engagement with the Psalms, Neuwirth, “Psalmen.”
29.  See Jeffery, The Qur’an as Scripture; Madigan, The Qur’an’s Self-​Image.
30.  On the role of writing in the book of Jubilees, see Najman, “Interpretation as Primordial Writing,” and
Kugel, The Bible as It Was. On the history of this idea, see Van Doorn, Scribal Culture, 214–​227.
74  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

to the proclaimer by the sender in the form of clearly defined pericopes, resem-
bling the textual units read out in the services of Jews and Christians. In the
Qur’anic proclamation, these pericopes are framed by introductory and closing
parts and are set into a Qur’anic unit of recitation, a sura, which includes various
sorts of texts.
Narrative communications from the heavenly scripture are at first clearly dis-
tinguished from less universal elements, such as debates over ephemeral issues
of the community. The particular rank and ceremonial function of the narratives
transmitted from biblical tradition but ultimately originating from the heavenly
scripture is underlined by introductory formulas such as wa-​dhkur fī l-​kitāb, “re-
call in [the communication of] the scripture” (Q 19:16). It is only in a later phase,
in Medina, that the entire message communicated to the community is consid-
ered to constitute “scripture,” that is, that communal issues discussed in Qur’anic
speech are themselves recognized as a part of salvation history, so that entire
suras are counted as manifestations of al-​kitāb.31
But even at this stage of development, the distinction between the message and
its transcendent sources is maintained. The claim raised so energetically today in
fundamentalist circles of a transcendent rank also for the materially present text,
a rank that withdraws it from scholarly analysis, is not founded in the Qur’an. It
can rather be connected to the dogma of the uncreatedness of the Qur’an that be-
came widespread in the ninth/​tenth century,32 according to which the Arabic lan-
guage of the Qur’an does not stem from social convention but rather from divine
imposition, so that exegesis of the Qur’an falls within strict theoretical limits of
veritative, “literal” explanation. That the insistence on the transcendent character
of the Qur’an as an exclusive feature of Islam is in no way an inherited tradition
but rather something new, and that it represents a withdrawal into essentializing
self-​isolation that is obviously politically conditioned, is shown by the tradition
of the Qur’an interpretation through the past 1,300 years. Throughout history,
the Qur’an was in fact always of two natures: a scripture of transcendent origin
and the inner-​worldly focal point for a form of life, and thus the object of wide-​
ranging theological reflection.
Above all, to give a monopoly to the transcendent origin of the Qur’an con-
tradicts the text itself, which insists on the shared origin of all three monotheistic
scriptures and invites Jews and Christians, as older “possessors of scriptures,”
ahl al-​kitāb, to acknowledge the shared genealogy of the three monotheistic reli-
gions, which according to the later evidence of the Qur’an all stem from one and
the same transcendent archetype. The Qur’an here occupies a pioneering posi-
tion, since, as William Graham emphasizes,33 the concept of holy writings beyond

31.  Cf. Neuwirth, “Structure and the Emergence of Community.”

32.  See Wild, Mensch, Prophet, 7.
33.  Graham, “Scripture and the Qur’ān.”
 The Qur’an and Scripture  75

one’s own religion, which has become widely familiar only since the nineteenth
century, is already self-​evident in the Qur’an: countless verses speak not only of
the heavenly writing, kitāb, but also of its forms of appearance already established
in this world, the “writings,” kutub, of other religions, the Jews and Christians.
The later Qur’an sketches a “scriptural community,” a concept that is then
thwarted by the process of canonization after the closure of the proclamation.
But while the Qur’anic text itself stresses at great length its consubstantiality with
the other scriptures, it nonetheless features unambiguously in later Islamic the-
ology as the final manifestation of divine speech that perfects all other scriptures.
Between the statements of the proclaimed Qur’an text and its later interpretation
lies the break of canonization,34 which grants a new predominance to the tran-
scendent dimension. The historic-​dialogic character of the Qur’an at the time
of the proclaimer, a polyphonic religious conversation with and about others,
becomes a univocal text after the death of the proclaimer, a divine monologue. In
the context of the reading of the Qur’an as a Late Antique text, we therefore have
to go back behind canonization.
Canonicity, which involves the social recognition of the already victorious
community, imposes a substantially new reading. It no longer reflects the his-
torical drama of engagement with others characterized by trial and error, but
rather sees the scripture as a triumphant symbol of victory, even granting it the
authority to unseat chronometrical time. If we follow the historian and cultural
critic Aziz al-​Azmeh, the canonical text not only raises the claim of eternal va-
lidity but is also structured a-​historically.35 Canonization is a reconfiguration, so
to speak, from a sequence of speeches conditioned by time into an array of time-
less individual texts. In place of the historically developing genesis of the text
as it unfolds under the eyes of the analytical-​historicizing reader, the reader of
the canon beholds an original myth, which henceforth covers the text like an
opaque screen: namely, the myth of the event, transcending history, of the grant-
ing of the scripture to the Prophet. Each individual or collective Qur’an recita-
tion is thus a restaging of the event of revelation, in that it repeats mimetically
the act of the physical-​acoustic recording of the heavenly writing by the Prophet
Muhammad. Thus the universalist character of the Qur’an is drowned out by the
emphasis laid on its “Islamic character,” its particularistic belonging to one single
religious community exclusively, which is conveyed by the daily prayer ritual. Yet
this cultic role of the Qur’an over the course of Islamic history was only one of
several manifestations of the text, which was simultaneously present as a literary
text, as a rhetorical model, and as a kind of score for artistically sophisticated
recitations.36

34. Sinai, Studien zur frühen Koraninterpretation,  1–​22.

35.  Al-​Azmeh, “Chronophagous Discourse,” 163–​164.
36.  On this image, cf. Kermani, Gott ist schön, 197–​205.
76  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

2.3  Orality as Theologumenon

Like the other scriptures, the Qur’an emerged out of an extensive corpus of
heterogeneous traditions, from which excerpts eventually crystallized into a
coherent writing, a process which occurred through the proclamation to the
emerging community. What distinguishes the Qur’anic situation is its spe-
cific milieu, in which scripture had already materialized into written codices
and become a familiar phenomenon. As Nicolai Sinai has convincingly dem-
onstrated,37 the emerging Qur’an had to assert itself vis-​a-​vis Jewish-​Christian
conceptions of scripture, in order to set out its own claims to authority. It is
surprising that in this process it was not the conception of a written manifesta-
tion of scripture that was followed, but a new concept, that of an “oral writing
was developed. Daniel Madigan first propounded the thesis that “nothing about
the Qurʾān suggests that it conceives of itself as identical with the kitāb [i.e., the
heavenly book],”38 that is, in no phase of its development did the Qur’an pursue
the objective of a closed written corpus. This claim of “an ontological differ-
ence between the recitation and its transcendent sources” is linked to certain
conditions, as Sinai shows.39 The first requirement was the consciousness of an
essentially oral character as the goal of the Qur’an in its process of formation,
independent of the occasional use of writing as a mnemotechnic aid. Secondly,
convincing arguments were required to explain the absence of the conventional
ceremonial frameworks that surrounded the revealed word of God in the neigh-
boring cultures.
The community’s consciousness of the special feature of Qur’anic medial-
ity took shape gradually. It is striking that in the earliest suras, there is not
yet explicit language about the divine source of the recitation. Clearly, some
time was required before the revelation claim implicit in the Prophetic second-​
person address was perceived reflexively enough that the problem of the rela-
tion of the Qur’an to written models could arise. This development, which was
at first gradual, is easily comprehensible in view of the Qur’anic beginnings.
The earliest suras stand in an already pre-​founded tradition, that of the Psalms;
they thus existed in a genre of oral liturgical speech and required no explicit
authorization.
The important step toward Qur’anic self-​legitimation, toward the introduc-
tion of an explicit reference to authority in the texts, was required only later,
toward the end of the early Meccan period, and in reaction to a challenge from
outside. This can be deduced from verses such as Q 69:40–​42:40

37.  Sinai, “Qur’anic Self-​Referentiality.”

38. Madigan, The Qurʾān’s Self-​Image, 177.
39.  Sinai, “Qur’anic Self-​Referentiality,” 110.
40.  Ibid, 111.
 The Qur’an and Scripture  77

innahu la-​qawlu rasūlin karīm

wa-​mā huwa bi-​qawli shāʿirin qalīlan mā tuʾminūn
wa-​lā bi-​qawli kāhinin qalīlan mā tadhdhakkarūn

It is the speech of a noble messenger

not the speech of a poet—​how little you believe!
Nor the speech of a seer—​how little you recall!

An antagonistic “misreading” of the literary genre of the recitation, with implica-

tions about its particular type of inspiration, is “corrected,” through reference to
its divine origin, verse 43: tanzīlun min rabbi l-​ʿālamīn, “A sending down from
the lord of the worlds.”
This specific Qur’anic self-​referentiality, which legitimizes speech through ref-
erence to its transcendent origin, “must thus be understood as having grown up
successively out of the process of confrontation with the audience, whose expec-
tations and views had to be convincingly addressed.”41

2.3.1 Strategies of Justification for the Orality of Scripture

The Qur’an itself confronts the problem of its non-​written form and the lack of
the paraphernalia of writing. Sinai points to the problematic already raised by
Madigan: according to Madigan, the central problem in every attempt to inter-
pret the concept of kitāb lies in the fact that the Qur’an understands itself on
the one hand as “of a piece with carefully guarded, lavishly appointed, and scru-
pulously copied sacred codices and scrolls, while itself remaining open-​ended,
unwritten, and at the mercy of frail human memory.”42 According to Sinai, this
tension can best be explained via “a need to balance the obvious situatedness of
Muḥammad’s recitations with a strategic interest in imparting to them the glow
of scripturality that was felt, by his audience, to be an indispensible concomitant
of genuine revelations.”43
The familiar complaint brought against the proclaimer by his opponents is
brought to a point in the question in Q 25:32:  law lā nuzzila ʿalayhi l-​qurʾānu
jumlatan wāḥidatan, “Why is the reading not sent down to him in one go, as
a complete communication?” The incompleteness and situation-​boundedness
of the message were clearly perceived as defects by the hearers, which set these
recitations apart from the conventional manifestations of God’s word, and which
therefore had to be compensated for through additional forms of authentication,
so that they might better correspond to the familiar models. These had to do with
writing, since revelation in the Jewish and Christian context was tied to the con-
cept of a written corpus.

41. Ibid.
42. Madigan, Self-​Image, 45, cited in Sinai, “Qur’anic Self-​Referentiality,” 113–​114.
43.  Sinai, “Qur’anic Self-​Referentiality,” 114.
78  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

Sinai sees this compensation realized in a group of early suras, which assert a
connection to the heavenly book as a form of authorization. Thus, in Q 80:11–​16,
the Qur’anic communications are presented as a kind of excerpt from the heav-
enly original text:

kallā innahu tadhkirah

fa-​man shāʾa dhakarah
fī ṣuḥufin mukarrama
marfūʿatin muṭahharah
bi-​aydi safarah
kirāmin bararah44

No indeed, it is a reminder
—​Who so desires may remember it—​
inscribed in hallowed scrolls
sublime immaculate
by the hands of scribes
noble, virtuous.

The expectations of the hearers could only be fulfilled in this way because the
“heavenly writing” as an emblem of authority was a firm component of the
differentiated spiritual conceptions in Late Antiquity. Karel van der Toorn,
who has retraced the long process of the Bible’s formation as a corpus charac-
terized by scribal culture, points to the conception, common since the books
of Enoch (third century bce) and Daniel (ca. 160 bce), of the heavenly source
of writing, which is accessible to individual Prophets through visions.45 Such
efficacious older traditions concerning heavenly writings as the sources of
revelation should also—​the real, physical, manifestations of writings in the
neighboring traditions notwithstanding—​have played a role in the Qur’anic
authorization of the message through heavenly writing. The heavenly source
of the Qur’anic message is elsewhere designated as a “tablet” (Q 85:22) and
somewhat later, in the middle Meccan period, even as “the mother of the
script,” umm al-​kitāb (Q 43:4), conceptions which may ultimately go back to
the book of Jubilees. This apocryphal work,46 which posits a heavenly tablet
written by divine instruction on which all wisdom and the events of salvation
history are recorded, had an intense reception in Late Antiquity and brings to
a point the complex conceptions of writing that are reflected in various late
books of the Bible.

44.  See Q 85:21–​22: bal huwa qurʾānun majīd /​fī lawḥin maḥfūẓ, and 56:77–​80.
45.  Van der Toorn, Scribal Culture, 227–​231.
46.  Najman, “Interpretation as Primordial Writing”; Grintz, “Jubilees.”
 The Qur’an and Scripture  79

2.3.2 Qurʾān versus Kitāb

What is the relationship between the performed qurʾān and the heavenly kitāb?
After the two had long been kept neatly separate from each other, the dichotomy
between the Qur’anic recollections from the kitāb (i.e., biblical recollections)
and other types of Qur’anic proclamation increasingly softens in the late Meccan
suras: al-​kitāb becomes the designation of a heavenly “mode of storage,” as Sinai
formulates it, while al-​qurʾān comes to refer to earthly realization. But the two are
never treated as wholly identical, since the proclaimer does not receive excerpts
from the kitāb in an unchanged form, but rather these excerpts are adapted to
the particular needs of the recipients in the course of their transmission. Sinai
stresses this difference, which the Qur’an itself reclaims as a particular herme-
neutic coding, even designating it with a particular technical term:  tafṣīl. The
locus classicus for this perception is Q 41:2–​3:

tanzīlun mina l-​raḥmāni l-​raḥīm

kitābun fuṣṣilat āyātuhu qurʾānan ʿarabīyan
li-​qawmin yaʿlamūn

A sending down from the Merciful, the Compassionate,

a scripture, whose verses are made distinct
an Arabic reading, for a people who have knowledge.

According to Sinai, tafṣīl thus implies a kind of paraphrase of the kitāb, by

which the texts are adapted to the horizon of the hearers.47 This observation also
throws light on the fact, often perceived with irritation, that individual stories
are recalled in more than one place and in differing versions in the Qur’an. In
light of the tafṣīl hermeneutic, these differing narratives can be seen as succes-
sive repetitions of a single kitāb pericope, which are formulated anew multiple
times and adapted to changing communal situations. Sinai then states: “From the
qurʾānic perspective, then, the celestial scripture cannot be given to man in any
other shape than mufaṣṣalan (Q 6:114). The kitāb is partially accessible, but never
available: it can be tapped via divine revelation, but due to the need to tailor such
revelations to a specific target audience, the kitāb as such is at no one’s disposal,
not even in the form of excerpts.”48 Thus, in late Meccan time, the orality of the
holy script assumed the rank of a Qur’anic article of belief, a theologumenon—​a
phenomenon that is unknown in the case of any other scripture.
This being said, the basic conception of the possibility of adapting scripture
to the changing situations of the recipients is not specifically Qur’anic, but is al-
ready a biblical stereotype. The textual growth of the Bible also incorporates the

47.  A similar conception is advocated by Kadi and Mir, “Literature and the Qur’ān.
48.  Sinai, “Qur’anic Self-​Referentiality,” 126.
80  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

advent of new expectations in the addressees. Multiple biblical books appeared

that retold things already known but provided new aspects to the subject. James
Kugel even sees this possibility of “self-​actualization” as one of the principles of
the Bible’s development. The Qur’an, with its retelling of biblical stories, sets itself
in this tradition, which was already established in the development of the Bible.49
Indeed, it puts this praxis into the service of its own oral mediality. Orally com-
municated versions of the biblical stories are more flexible than written texts;
they allow for back-​references and even, on the occasion of the renewed per-
formance of an already preached text, of clarifying expansions, a kind of oral
glossing.
Only in Medina are there critical reflections on the medium of sacred scrip-
ture in human hands.50 The members of the two older religions are now perceived
as competitors vying with the Qur’anic community for the inheritance of the
monotheistic tradition, which until that point was available to all, and was not
assigned to particular confessions. It is in this function that the members of the
older religions in the late Meccan period are designated as “possessors of scrip-
ture, ahl al-​kitab, in their function as “rivals in a contest of inheritance,” making
claims on the basis of their writings as a kind of “title deed.” Their first mention in
Q 29:46 already stands in the context of a virtual conflict, which can only be pur-
sued through “fair dispute”: wa-​lā tujādilū ahla l-​kitābi illā bi-​llatī hiya aḥsanu,
“Do not dispute with the people of the scripture, except in a way that is seemly!”
This first designation of the members of other religions as ahl al-​kitāb should be
surprising, since it seems to evoke a characteristic also shared by the Qur’anic
community. Since there is no disparaging connotation in this quotation, the ex-
pression may reproduce a self-​designation of the Jews and/​or Christians, which
perhaps was linked to their most important distinction: Jewish-​Christian scrip-
turality against the Qur’anic orality of God’s word. In contrast to the scripture
that was claimed by these others and reified materialiter, the Qur’an remained
a “virtual sacred script” at the time of the Prophet, an orally preserved message.

2.4  Late Meccan Reflections on Heavenly

and Earthly Scriptures

2.4.1 Announcements and Confirmations of Revelation

The late Meccan suras attest to a greater degree of attention paid to the function
and significance of writing. Exegesis now comes to the foreground. The idea of

49. Kugel, The Bible as It Was. Furthermore, one could refer to the Targumim, which convey Bible texts not
only in a new language but in one that would be appropriate to the expectations of later listeners and readers. Cf.
also Shinan, “Midrash on Scripture.”
50.  On the differentiation made at this time between various kinds of written verses, unambiguous and ambig-
uous, see Neuwirth, “Mary and Jesus,” and cf. chap. 9, 324–​327.
 The Qur’an and Scripture  81

God’s people, which was already developed in the middle Meccan period, and
which implied the idea that election is expressed through the communication of
scripture, becomes the key point of a new discourse: the reflection about one’s
own role in the “scripture,” that is, the status and function of the continuously
unfolding or already unfolded communications of the heavenly “writing.” In
view of the expanding circle of hearers, which seem to also have included mem-
bers of the neighboring religions, these communications had to be reflected on
anew. This reflection is mirrored in the late Meccan period not only in later “cor-
rections,” that is, additions to older suras, but also in a critique of the handling
of writing of the earlier possessors of scripture, whose idealized role comes into
doubt in this phase.
The Qur’anic sign theology, according to which God manifests his presence
in creation and intext,51 is refined, so that the successive oral communication
of transcendently written pericopes adapted to the respective situations of the
hearers comes to be understood as a specifically Qur’anic privilege—​this is quite
different from the scriptures of the Jews and Christians, which are presented as
having been revealed all at once.
In the late Meccan period, the sura structures become stereotyped to such a
degree that a particular typus develops for the sura’s beginning: the “announce-
ment of revelation,”52 a form that occurs only twice in the middle Meccan suras
(suras 26 and 27).53 As a rule, it correlates with a later mention of scripture, a
“confirmation of revelation,” that regularly introduces the sura’s closing part.
With only six exceptions, all late Meccan suras begin—​either implicitly or explic-
itly deictically54—with an introduction that is related to scripture. This incipit sets
the tone, so to speak, for the further course of the text, and is referred to again at
the close of the sura.
One should perhaps imagine the frequently deictic announcement to have
been underscored by gestures. In any case, a ceremonial significance comes to
attach itself to this stereotyped beginning, which first becomes frequent in the
late Meccan suras. Their introduction authorizes what follows as a speech of tran-
scendent origin, and this is as a rule underlined again by the closing confirmation
of revelation. That the recited text is thus itself understood as “signs” or a “sign
system” seems to be confirmed by the initiatory naming of letters or letter com-
binations in the form of minimal textual units.55 The majority of all late Meccan

51.  See chap. 7, 244–​277.

52.  When labeling both kinds of texts, the term “revelation” is used for the Qur’an despite the preliminary
problems with the term, since it most clearly relays the transcendental origin. Cf. chap. 5, passim.
53.  Mentions of the Qur’an were also common before, but they rather assumed the form of an oath, see
Neuwirth, Studien zur Komposition, 264–​289.
54.  That is, fifteen of twenty-​one suras. For the exceptions, meaning those with a different introduction, such
as with a hymn in suras 6, 34, 35, or suras without a distinctive introduction, such as Q 16, 29, 30, reference should
be made to Neuwirth, Studien zur Komposition, 276–​313.
55.  Cf. chap. 4, 144–​146.
82  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

suras that are introduced by references to writing also begin with detached letter
names, such as for example ṣād, alif lām rā, etc. Although there is no consensus
in the tradition or in Western research about the function of these letters, their
interpretation as representing the smallest elements of the acoustic performance
of the word of God seems to be the most convincing. More explicitly, this under-
standing of the text as signs, which sets before the listener/​reader the epistemic
task of decoding, is evinced by its frequent designation as the “signs of scripture,”
ayāt al-​kitāb. As in Q 12:1–​2:56
alif lām rāʾ tilka āyātu l-​kitābi l-​mubīn
innā anzalnāhu qurʾānan ʿarabīyan laʿallakum taʿqulūn

Alif lam ra. Those are the signs of the clear scripture.
We send it down to be an Arabic reading,
so that you may understand.

The notion of signs of writing is supplemented by the further sign dimension

of the hearers’ native tongue,57 through which knowledge (ʿaql) will be enacted.
The frequency of the description of the qurʾān as “Arabic” seems to allow fur-
ther conclusions: here clearly a transformation is attested, of a universal kitāb
into a sensorily, aurally perceptible manifestation that serves to communicate
the message but exceeds the semantics of the proclamation as something new
and unique. In these verses, the Qur’an assumes a new dimension as a tran-
scendent communication, which approaches a hypostasis, an “embodiment,” in
this case sonic, of the word of God. Nasr Hamid Abu Zaid has spoken in this
connection of a “trans-​formation” of God’s word into the form of the Arabic
language.58
At the conclusion of the sura, in Q 12:111, the intention standing behind the
narration of biblical stories is named:

qad kāna fī qaṣaṣihim ʿibratun li-​

la-​ albābi mā kāna ḥadīthan
ūlī l-​
yuftarā wa-​lākin taṣdīqan li-​lladhī bayna yadayhi wa-​tafṣīla kulli shayʾin
wa-​hudan wa-​raḥmatan li-​qawmin yuʾminūn

In the telling of them is a lesson to those possessed of minds. It is no story

that has been invented, but rather a confirmation of what came before it, a
clear explication of all things and a guidance and mercy for a people who
believe.

56.  Also in suras 10, 11, 13, 28, 31, and 41.

57.  On this particular self-​referentiality, see Wild, “An Arabic Recitation.”
58.  See Abu Zaid, Islam und Politik, 63; cf. on “inlibration” 92–​95.
 The Qur’an and Scripture  83

The written signs confirm the message of the earlier revelations (taṣdīq); they set
out their message as adapted for the respective proclamation situations (tafṣīl)59
and teach those with understanding (ūlū l-​albāb).
The introductory announcement of revelation and closing confirmation of
revelation correlate also in sura 14, which in its opening verses (1–​2) raises the
high claim of leading the community out of the condition of ignorance into that
of insight:
alif lām rāʾ kitābun anzalnāhu ilayka li-​tukhrija l-​nāsa mina l-​ẓulumāti
ilā  l-​nūri

Alif lam ra. A scripture, which we have sent down upon you, so that you
may lead men from darkness to light.

The initial pronouncement gains further pathos through the following hymnic
recollection: allāhu lladhī lahu mā fī l-​samawāti wa-​mā fī l-​arḍi, “It is God, to
whom what is in heaven and earth belong” (verse 2). This entails an expressive
statement about the transcendent dimension of the two works of creation: tran-
scendent writing and cosmos. Yet, despite this sublime origin, scripture should
serve the pragmatic goal of the teaching of men. The closing confirmation (verse
52) thus declines to offer an affirmation of the transcendent character, underlin-
ing instead the appellatory character of the message for those with understanding
(ūlū l-​albāb).

hādha balāghun li-​l-​nāsi wa-​li-​yundharū bihi wa-​li-​yaʿlamū annamā huwa

ilāhun wāḥidun wa-​li yadhdhakkarū ūlū l-​albāb

This is a proclamation to the people. Let them be warned thereby, and rec-
ognize that He is but one God, so that those possessed of minds remember.

In sura 28, the announcement and confirmation of revelation are motivated apol-
ogetically (verses 1–​3):

ṭa sīn mīm
tilka āyātu l-​kitābi l-​mubīn
natlū ʿalayka min nabaʾi Mūsā wa-​Firʿawna bi-​l-​ḥaqqi
li-​qawmin yuʾminūn

Ta sin mim.
Those are the signs of the clear scripture.
We recite to you the reports about Moses and Pharaoh in truth,
to the people who believe.

59.  Sinai, “Qur’anic Self-​Referentiality.”

84  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

In this sura opening, the intermediary role of the proclaimer is confirmed

alongside the authenticity of the scripture, whereas at the sura’s end he is exon-
erated of the accusation of authorial interference; the sura’s conclusion begins
thus (verses 85–​88):

inna lladhī faraḍa ʿalaya l-​qurʾāna la-​rādduka ilā maʿādin

qul rabbi aʿlamu man jāʾa bi-​l-​huda wa-​man huwa fī ḍalālin mubīn
wa-​mā kunta tarjū an yulqā ilayka l-​kitābu illā raḥmatan min rabbika
fa-​lā takūnanna ẓahīran li-​l-​kāfirīn
wa-​lā yuṣuddunnaka ʿan āyāti llāhi baʿda idh unzilat ilayka

He who ordained the Qur’an upon you will bring you back to a home
place. Say: my Lord knows better, who brings right guidance and who
is in clear error.
You had not expected that scripture would come down to you,
it happens only through mercy of your lord.
So do not be a supporter to the unbelievers
And do not turn yourself away from the signs of God, after they have been
sent down to you.60

This reflection over the status of scripture as a text world that opens itself to the
receivers not through their own witnessing (Q 3:44), or through their appropri-
ation of wisdom (Q 18:26–​27), but only through inspiration is also thematized
elsewhere; cf. Q 29:48.
That the proclaimer himself perceives signs of creation and of scripture as in-
extricably linked is shown in Q 45:1–​6:

ḥā mīm
tanzīlu l-​kitābi mina lladhī l-​ʿazīzi l-​ḥakīm
inna fī l-​samawāti wa-​l-​arḍi la-​āyātin li-​l-​muʾminīn
wa-​fī khalqikum . . .
tilka āyātu llāhi natlūhā ʿalayka

Ha mim.
A sending down of scripture from God, the powerful and wise.
In the heaven and the earth are signs for the believers,
And in your creation . . .
Those are signs of God that we recite for you.

The neglect of the signs, which are not specified, is set into a description of hell
as a reason for punishment, which is followed by a doxology that closes the sura;
Q 45:35:

60.  For an example of the resistance to similar misrepresentations, cf. Q29:48–​49.

 The Qur’an and Scripture  85

dhālikum bi-​annakumu ttakhadhtum āyāti llāhi huquwan wa-​gharratkumu

l-​ḥayātu l-​dunyā

That, because you have taken God’s signs lightly and this lowly world has
beguiled you.61

The sign value of scripture is strengthened several times by the sign character of
creation. Thus, there is the complaint in the closing part of sura 29, which begins
exceptionally without kitāb-​introduction, that the unbelievers require “[wonder]
signs,” even while the recitation itself consists of clear signs that can be under-
stood by knowledgeable hearers; Q 29:50–​51:

wa-​qālū law lā unzila ʿalayhi āyātun min rabbihi qul innamā l-​āyātu ʿinda
llāhi wa-​innamā anā nadhīrun mubīn
a-​wa-​lam yakfihim annā anzalnā ʿalayka l-​kitāba yutlā ʿalayhim

They say: if only a sign came down to him from his Lord!

Say: the signs are with God; I am only a clear warner.
Is it not enough for them that we have sent down the scripture upon you,
so that it can be read out to them?

Miracle signs and written signs are indicated through a homonym in Arabic,
as in Syriac,62 which is a shibboleth for the unbelievers, and at the same time a
hermeneutic challenge for the pious. In the same sura, and for the first time in
the Qur’an, we find mention of the existence of present hearers who are also in
possession of scripture, with whom a disputation is clearly underway; Q 29:46:

wa-​lā tujādilū ahla l-​kitābi illā bi-​llati hiya aḥsanu

illā lladhīna ẓalamū minhum
wa-​qūlū amannā bi-​lladhī unzila ilaynā wa-​unzila ilaykum
wa-​ilāhunā wa-​ilāhukum wāḥidun
wa-​naḥnu lahu muslimūn

Do not dispute with the people of the scripture except in a seemly way—​
save those who do wrong—​
and say: we believe in what has been sent down to us and to you,
your God and our God are one, and to Him we submit.

Although the exhortation does not allow us to draw precise conclusions about
the concrete content of the exegetical controversy, it transpires that the previous
imagination of being able to deal with biblical tradition autonomously has begun
to totter.

61.  Furthermore cf. Q42:1–​2, taken up again in Q42:48–​49.

62.  On the Qur’anic theology of signs in more detail, chap. 7, 264–​277.
86  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

2.4.2  Decryption of Signs as a Touchstone among

the Receivers of Scripture
While the signs (āyāt) still serve in these texts as pointers toward insights into the
truthfulness and divine origin of one’s own scripture,63 they elsewhere become
the object of struggle between religious parties. Sura 11 begins:

alif lām rāʾ kitābun uḥkimat āyātuhu

thumma fuṣṣilat min ladun ḥakīmin khabīr

Alif lam ra. A writing, of which the signs are set right,

and then made distinct from on high by one wise and knowing.

The hymnic statement is relativized at the beginning of the sura’s close, which is
not a confirmation of revelation of the Qur’anic message but rather confirms the
revelation character of earlier messages, namely, the scripture of Moses. The mes-
sage to Moses has triggered dissent, Q 11:110:

wa-​la-​qad ataynā Mūsā l-​kitāba fa-​khtulifa fīhi

wa-​law lā kalimatun sabaqat min rabbika la-​quḍiya baynahum
wa-​innahum la-​fī shakkin minhu murīb

We gave Moses the scripture, and disputes arose concerning it.

Were it not for a prior word from your Lord
judgment would have been passed upon them.
They are in perplexing doubts concerning it.64

Sura 10 begins similarly with an announcement of scripture signs; Q 10:1:

alif lām rāʾ tilka āyātu l-​kitābi l-​ḥakīm

Alif lam ra. Those are signs of the wise scripture.

Here too, the closing part of Q 10:93 makes reference not to the Qur’anic mes-
sage but to the benefactions granted to the Israelites, and the same disunity is
stated:

la-​qad bawwaʾnā banī Isrāʾīla mubawwaʾa ṣidqin

wa-​razaqnāhum mina l-​ṭayyibāti
fa-​mā khtalafū ḥattā jāʾahumu l-​ʿilmu
inna rabbaka yaqḍī baynahum yawma l-​qiyāmati
fī-​ma kānū fīhi yakhtalifūn

63.  Further suras, which argue apologetically in the opening section and/​or closing section based on the signs
of scripture and creation, are sura 46 (verse 1 and 29ff.), 40 (verse 1 and 77ff.), 39 (verse 1 and 41ff.), and 31 (verse
1 and 20ff.).
64.  Also the case in sura 32, which in the closing section (verses 22–​25) depicts the collapse of consensus;
accordingly also Q41:1 and 41ff.
 The Qur’an and Scripture  87

We have given to the Israelites an abode befitting the just

and supplied them with good things.
They quarreled not until knowledge came to them.
Your Lord will judge between them on the day of resurrection,
about that over which they quarreled.

The dissent is not named explicitly, but in terms of religious history it is probably
best to think here of the Jewish-​Christian schism, which also resonates in the po-
lemical commentary on the story of Jesus in sura 43.65 What is important is that
the historical fact of the splitting of the earlier communities on account of dis-
agreement over the meaning of given signs compromises them as predecessors
of the community. The new community must rely on itself to cope with its prob-
lems. They now confront the hermeneutic problem that persists until the end of
the Meccan period, that of communicating the signs probatively to those who do
not yet believe: sura 30, which begins without a kitāb introduction, contains the
passage Q 30:52–​53:

fa-​innaka lā tusmiʿu l-​mawtā wa-​lā tusmiʿu l-​ṣumma l-​duʿāʾa

idhā wallaw mudbirīn
wa-​mā anta bi-​hādi l-​ʿumyi ʿan ḍalālatihim
in tusmiʿu illā man yuʾminu bi-​āyātinā fa-​hum muslimūn

You will not make the dead hear, nor make the deaf hear the call,
if they turn and walk away.
Nor can you guide the blind away from their error.
You will only make hear those who believe in our signs
and submit themselves.

The passage closes with a controversy over the much disputed Late Antique tex-
tual type of the parable (mathal), in which the Qur’anic speaker recognizes a
particular medium for authorization of the message, but which is a weak point of
his rhetoric in the eyes of the opponents. Q 30:58–​60 states:66

wa-​la-​qad ḍarabnā li-​l-​nāsi fī hādhā l-​qurʾāni min kulli mathalin,

wa-​laʾin jiʾtahum bi-​āyatin, la-​yaqūlanna lladhīna kafarū,
in antum illā mubṭilūn
ka-​dhālika yaṭbaʿu llāhu ʿalā qalbi lladhīna lā yaʿlamūn
fa-​ṣbir inna waʿda llāhi ḥaqqun
wa-​lā yastakhiffanka lladhīna lā yūqinūn

65.  See chap. 8, 300–​301.

66.  See chap. 8., 305–​310.
88  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

We have struck for people in this reading all kinds of parables. But when
you bring them a sign/​verse, those who disbelieve speak:
you only put forward what is preposterous.
So does God stamp the hearts of those who do not understand.
Have patience, the promise of God is true.
And be not disheartened by those who are not convinced.

Resignation is expressed even more drastically in sura 13, although the begin-
ning confirms both the character of scripture as revelation and the election of the
proclaimer, Q 13:1:

alif lām rāʾ tilka āyātu l-​kitābi

wa-​lladhī unzila ilayka min rabbika l-​ḥaqqu

Alif lam ra. Those are the signs of the scripture.

What was sent down by your Lord to you is the truth.

The close of the sura, which again confirms the sending of the proclaimer, also
complains of the stubborn unbelief of the opponents, who are not impressed
even by the long history of punishment sentences. Even exceedingly clear signs
such as miracles remain unnoticed, as Q 13:30–​31 states:

ka-​dhālika arsalnāka fī ummatin qad khalat min qablihā umamun

li-​tatluwa ʿalayhimu lladhī awḥaynā ilayka
wa-​hum yakfurūna bi-​l-​raḥmāni . . .
wa-​law anna qurʾānan suyyirat bihi l-​jibālu
aw quṭiʿat bihi l-​arḍu aw kullima bihi l-​mawtā
bal li-​llāhi l-​amru jamīʿan67

We have sent you to a nation, before whom many nations have passed away,
so that you may recite to them what has been inspired in you,
while they do not believe in the Merciful . . .
Even if it were a reading wherewith mountains are moved from their place,
or the earth is cut into pieces, or the dead are spoken to. Indeed, this entire
matter is God’s.

The signs themselves are not thrown into question by the failed handling of scrip-
ture by the earlier peoples, nor by the doubt of those without understanding. Nor
are they shaken in their truth value by the “possessors of scripture,” who appear
on the stage later in Medina, and whose polemic brings to light the existence of
divergences between the old and new scriptures.68 Already in Mecca, one sees a

67.  Sura 7 commences similarly, and it also remains apologetic in the closing mention of the proclamation.
68.  In the dispute with these new adversaries, there was an increase in the frequency of the introduction of
arguments that had already been tried and tested in the long tradition of biblical scriptural apologetics. See Lazarus-​
Yafeh, Intertwined Worlds,  19–​28.
 The Qur’an and Scripture  89

softening of the erstwhile firm conviction in the persuasive power of the scrip-
ture, as the sura dispenses in its final part with the positive confirmation of revela-
tion and replaces it with the mention of the scripture of Moses with its schismatic
consequences, thus sending out a negative signal. Though this reorientation does
not affect the announcement of revelation at the start of the suras, which remains
stable due to its ceremonial function, the previously prevailing ring composition
of the late Meccan suras is broken. This maceration of the composition, alongside
the replacement of the narrative section by a discursive middle part, which also
occurs in the late Meccan period, is a further step toward a freer, or at least less
predictable, sura structure.
But faith in scripture as such remains unshaken. The scriptural signs of God
are presented as beyond measure. Q 31:27 takes up an idea also familiar from
the Bible:

wa-​law annamā fī l-​arḍi min shajaratin aqlāmun

wa-​l-​baḥru yamudduhu min baʿdihi sabʿatu abḥurin
mā nafadat kalimātu llāhi inna llāha ʿazīzun ḥakīm

If all the trees of the earth were writing pens

and the sea [full of ink] extended so that beyond it were seven more
seas, still the words of God would not be exhausted; God is powerful
and wise.

2.5  Inlibration or Qur’anic Logos Theology?

The designation reserved for the members of the older religions, ahl al-​kitāb, lit-
erally “people of scripture,” which already occurs once in a neutral sense in a late
Meccan sura (Q 29:50), becomes in Medina an expression of a decidedly critical
perception of the Jewish and Christian treatment of scripture, to which is now
ascribed an exclusivist and particularist bias that eliminates the new believers.
The very concept ahl al-​kitāb has long been treated as an ideal starting point
for interreligious dialogue.69 The essential commonality between the three reli-
gions seemed to lie in their shared access to scriptures with a monotheistic mes-
sage. According to this paradigm, Muhammad becomes a figure corresponding
to Christ, in that both brought a message that would become a scripture.70 But the
fact that this analogy does not hold has long been recognized. What should in-
stead be seen as analogous, as Stefan Wild and Daniel Madigan have stressed, are

69.  Madigan, “Gottes Botschaft an die Welt.”

70.  This parallelization is the main content of the inscriptions in the Dome of the Rock from the year 691,
which include almost exclusively Qur’anic verses; see Neuwirth, “The Spiritual Meaning of Jerusalem.”
90  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

Christ and the Qur’an.71 Madigan, who follows the traces of this insight through
early Islamic theological history investigating the concept kitāb, “writing,” arrives
to the image of the Qur’an as a hypostasis of God’s word.
But what we still lack is an investigation of the Qur’anic proclamation itself as
to development of the understanding of the received word of God. The question
arises to what extent the reception of the message was understood already by the
community itself through the categories of Jewish or Christian logos-​theology.
The Qur’an was constituted in Late Antiquity, a period in which scripture-​
discourse had become highly differentiated. Alongside scripture, other forms
of the appearance of God’s word had manifested themselves by this time, such
as wisdom, Sophia, or the “word,” memra (Aramaic for logos), that functions
to communicate divine knowledge to men. The perception of the divine logos,
memra, at work in the world, which was upheld in early synagogue Judaism, but
which—​as a “second power in heaven,”72—​was to draw heavy polemics from the
rabbis, in Christian tradition is interpreted Christologically, most emphatically in
the prologue of John.73 The word of God, embodied in the logos or even incarnate
in Christ, thus takes its place alongside the divine self-​communication through
scripture. This increase in complexity in the understanding of the word of God
is reflected not only in the later treatment of the Qur’an, whose formal recitation
in the Friday communal worship stands in the position of the Eucharist of the
Christian service,74 but also already in the genesis of the Qur’an itself. It has left
behind clear traces, above all in the much-​recited prologue to sura 55.75

2.5.1  Preexistence of the Qurʾān?

2.5.1.1  Traces of a Logos Theology in the Qur’an
This prologue (Q 55:1–​4) presents a praise of the Qur’an as the preexistent word
of God, in a solemn-​pathetic tone that is unexampled elsewhere in the entire text
corpus. With its linguistic style and its theological claim, it raises the expectation
that an authoritative pronouncement from the older traditions is being answered.

al-​Raḥmān
ʿallama l-​qurʾān
khalaqa l-​insān
ʿallamahu l-​bayān

71. Wild, Mensch, Prophet, 6.  Recognition of this problem was primarily advanced by Madigan, “Gottes
Botschaft an die Welt.” Madigan refers to Nathan Söderblom (1866–​1931) as the first advocate of the analogy
Christ-​Qur’an.
72. Segal, Two Powers.
73.  See Boyarin, Borderlines, 89–​127; Boyarin, “The Gospel of the Memra.”
74.  On the dispute between early theologians, for whom the proximity of the Qur’an to the incarnate word of
God itself became a problem, see van Ess, Theologie und Gesellschaft, 4:615, 6:411; Thomas, Early Muslim Polemic
against Christianity, 37–​59. On the Islamic dogma of the “inimitability of the Qur’an,” cf. chap. 13, 458–​462.
75.  Cf. chap. 3, 125–​127.
 The Qur’an and Scripture  91

The compassionate,
He taught the reading,
He created man
And taught him understanding /​clear speech.

The word qurʾān in verse 2 raises problems. It cannot mean the later-​achieved
text corpus, nor can it mean the praxis of recitation. That something else is in-
tended here, something that transcends history and reality, comes out already
from the naming of qurʾān before the naming of the act of creation. The power of
divine-​human communication that is at work here shows clear similarity to logos
conceptions, which present this power as an intermediary between the divine
and human spheres.
The particularly solemn form of the sura prologue is striking. It may have
originated in a competitive situation, through the necessity of offering an equiva-
lent to an already available and similarly outstanding text. Such a theological key
text within the Christian tradition, dedicated to the same phenomenon of the
word of God, is the prologue to the Gospel of John (Jo 1:1–​5). As Daniel Boyarin
has shown,76 this text reflects a wisdom literature midrash on the creation re-
port preserved in the Targumim, which tells of the memra that descends into the
world in order to strengthen the bond between God and man, but which fails in
this and. In the Christian version of the prologue it is only able to accomplish its
work through incarnation.

In the beginning was the word,

And the word was by God, and God was the word.
The same was in the beginning by God
All things are created through it, without it nothing is created.
In it was life, and life was the light of men.
Light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not taken it. . . .
He was in the world, the world arose through him, but they rejected him.

A short comparison of the texts yields no truly consistent parallels:  both pro-
logues present the word of God as preexistent—​in the sura this is named simply
as qurʾān, and is therefore not terminologically distinct from the Qur’an text it-
self. But the qurʾān possesses no power of creation, which belongs only to God.
Rather, God manifests himself in the communication of wisdom insofar as it
is “taught” (verse 2); the Qur’anic logos thus appears, not unlike the Torah in
earlier Jewish tradition, in the form of the revelation. Its fate among men is not
disclosed, but there is no indication either of its failure. The failure of the logos
attested by the older traditions is avoided in the Qur’anic view through divine
intervention. For the addressees are prepared for its reception, as shown by verse

76.  Boyarin, “The Gospel of the Memra.”

92  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

4, which displays yet another trace of the logos: ʿallamahu l-​bayān, “he taught
him understanding.” This capability of understanding, which is granted to man,
enables him to receive the logos. At the same time, it lends plausibility to the
Qur’anic conception of the world as a sign system that man must read—​a vision
that recalls Philo’s conception of the kosmos noetos, the archetypal world of ideas,
which has its origin in logos and is made amenable to understanding through
logos.77 Thus on the one hand logos is hypostasized as qurʾān, as authoritative
power that manufactures human-​divine communication, and on the other hand
logos is represented through the capability of understanding given to men by
God, his bayān, through which the world becomes intelligible. A very particular
significance thus comes to adhere to language, which again recalls Philo’s logos
teaching. “Philo idealizes language more than man. For him, the ideal language
does not at all belong to the realm of createdness. It rather seems to have preex-
isted with God Himself.”78 In the Qur’an, this dimension of the logos is repre-
sented through bayān, which oscillates in meaning, and which can mean “clear
speech,” as well as “faculty of understanding.”
Certainly, the thrust of the sura prologue is different from that of the Gospel’s
prologue. It does not aim to raise the logos up to a “second power in the heaven,”
as rabbinic polemic found objectionable in the early Jewish logos-​teaching.
Rather, the Qur’anic logos manifests itself in divine teaching and in the epi-
stemic proliferation of creation. The Late Antique and Qur’anic conceptions of
the working of the logos on the world are thus different. Yet it should not be
overlooked that sura 55 engages with logos conceptions and reinterprets them in
the light of the new manifestation of God’s word. As the text treats the working
of the logos from a new perspective, not as failure but rather as divinely prepared
success, it inverts the negative prehistory of the Johannite incarnation. Since the
logos is not dismissed but rather adopted, the theological necessity of incarnation
is invalid. Although the logos given by the qurʾān does not possess far-​reaching
powers in comparison to the Jewish-​Christian equivalent, it is still the logos that
successfully penetrates the world and works in it. This initial investigation of a
single text makes the exploration of the Qur’an’s self-​referentiality for further
logos references appear a promising avenue of research.79

2.5.2 Inlibration?
What could be set in parallel, then, both in terms of theological history and in
terms of the Qur’anic pronouncements themselves, is the becoming-​human of

77.  On the forces involved in Logos and Sophia, see Schäfer, Weibliche Gottesbilder im Judentum,  64–​68.
78.  Niehoff, “What Is in a Name?” 224, cited in Boyarin, “The Gospel of the Memra,” 115.
79.  The power to produce order is, however, granted to the Qur’an through the force of liturgical texts. An
extensive litany commemorating the Laylat al-​Qadr names a number of beneficial interventions in creation, which
are solicited “through the Qur’an,” bi l-​qurʾān. (The age of these texts, which is taken for granted in contemporary
usage, is difficult to determine.)
 The Qur’an and Scripture  93

God’s word in Christ, and the “becoming Qur’an” of God’s word. The historian of
philosophy Harry A. Wolfson attempted to bring the relationship between these
two to a point with the neologism “inlibration,” which he coined for this pur-
pose.80 The Qur’an would then be the embodiment in book form of God’s word,
just as Christ is the word’s embodiment in the flesh. For the historian of philos-
ophy, this abbreviation will possess particular suggestive power. At least on first
view, it seems that later reflections over the eternality or createdness of the Qur’an
cannot be imagined in isolation from the Christological challenge. Already soon
after the death of the Prophet, the recording of the Qur’an on the “preserved
tablet” appeared to some traditionists to have been accomplished before the crea-
tion of the world;81 but it was only later, after the objections voiced by the rational
theologians of the Muʾtazila, who felt the closeness to Christology to be a threat
and who were partisans of the createdness of the Qur’an, that the preexistence of
the Qur’an as a divine attribute became a precondition for correct belief in Sunni
theology.82 And it was only later still that its eternality became dogma.83
But even outside of theological speculation, the parallels between the
becoming-​human and “becoming Qur’an” of God’s word go even further: the phi-
losopher of religion Seyyed Nasr writes that “the medium of the divine message
in Christianity is the Virgin Mary, while in Islam it is the soul of the Prophet,”84
thus making a parallel between the virginity of Mary and the traditionally main-
tained illiteracy of the Prophet: just as Mary bore a child although she “knew no
man” and God’s work was thus accomplished, so according to Islamic tradition
Muhammad is presented as wholly untouched by previously acquired knowledge
of scripture. Al-​nabī al-​ummī (Q 7:157–​158) is thus understood as “illiterate
prophet,”85 so that the Qur’an can be recognized as a purely divine work.
Despite these incontestable parallels, which were already recognized in early
Islamic history, some skepticism regarding the designation “inlibration” is re-
quired, as Madigan has already pointed out. The designation not only reads
Islamic phenomena through a Christian lens, transferring onto Islam the myth-​
imprinted Christian thought figure of the divine assumption of corporeality,
despite the fact that Islam is broadly amythical and myth-​critical. Even more
misleading is the fact that the suggestion of an entelechy “book” or “writing”
leads wrongly to the assumption that “while the Christians believe in a living,
active and personal word of God, the Muslims have only a closed canon, dead

80. Wolfson, The Philosophy of the Kalam, 244–​245.

81.  See Madigan, “Preserved Tablet”; Maalouf, La place du verbe.
82.  Madigan, “Gottes Botschaft an die Welt.”
83.  See van Ess, Theologie und Gesellschaft, 4:628.
84.  Seyyed Nasr, Ideals and Realities of Islam, 43ff.
85.  See Günther, “The Illiterate Prophet.” This interpretation is not tenable in historical-​critical scholarship. In
the Qur’an, the designation of the proclaimer as al-​nabī al-​ummī designates rather his affiliation with the “faithful
among the (non-​Jewish) peoples”; see chap. 11, 402–​405.
94  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

letters.”86 This sounds something like the Pauline polemic against the “dead let-
ters” of the law, which are contrasted to the “heart writing” of the Christian
Bible. But it is just such a writing of the heart that is reclaimed for Islam by the
Muslim religious philosopher Seyyed Nasr, in arguing for the analogy Christ-​
Qur’an, when he claims that the medium of the divine message in Christianity
is the Virgin Mary, while in Islam it is the soul of the Prophet.87 We cannot deny
in substance the analogy Christ-​Qur’an that already struck some early Islamic
theologians, whose verdict makhlūq, “created,” can be recognized as a negative
echo to the Nicene genēthenta ou poiēthenta, Arabic mawlūd ghayr makhlūq,
“born, not created.”88 But the term “Qur’an” must be filled out differently. Thus,
Seyyed Nasr does not speak explicitly of the Qur’an’s manifestation as a book as
analogue to Christ. This would scarcely be conceivable for a Muslim, because
the written character of the Qur’an is only one, and by no means the central,
manifestation of the divine message. The central manifestation is instead the
recitation, performed by heart. What must be maintained then is the analogy of
logos embodiment: the incarnated word of God in Christianity and the acousti-
cally present word of God in Islam.
One cannot capture the dimension of significance of logos in the Qur’an if one
reduces the Qur’an to its message. Hartmut Stegemann notes: “Bible and Qur’an
are not merely ‘holy scriptures’; beyond that, in both religions, they are the ‘word
of God,’ but in quite different senses.”89 These differing “self-​understandings in
Islam and Christianity” that are illuminated by Stegemann cannot be reduced
to contrasting statements: “For Islam, the Qur’an is the direct word of God, for-
mulated by Allah himself and communicated only to the Prophet Muhammad.
The Qur’an is a gift from God, which guides men rightly and enables them to
lead their lives according to the directives of God. For Christians on the other
hand, their Bible is only indirectly the word of God. It becomes the word of God
in the sermon.  .  .  .  Apart from that, the Bible is at the same time the word of
humans. . . . The Bible is testimony . . . on a scale that is personal.”90 Here, the
evidence of the Qur’an itself is ignored, which never speaks of a pre-​formulation
by God (according to Stegemann, “Allah”). The Qur’an not only is “writing” and
“word of God in the sense of right guidance,” but also claims for itself, already
during the course of the proclamation, the status of a unique, sensorily percep-
tible self-​manifestation of God’s word—​its own reception of logos theology.
Nasr Hamid Abu Zaid has offered a challenging contribution to the clarifi-
cation of the Christian-​Islamic analogy, which, as Andreas Meier emphasizes,

86.  Madigan, “Gottes Botschaft an die Welt.”

87.  Cf. note 84 above.
88.  Thus, we can see here an attempt within the proclamation of the Qur’an to avoid proximity to a Trinitarian
idea of God; see Nader, Le systeme philosophique, 101, and Maalouf, La place du verbe, 85–​107.
89.  Stegemann, “Gedanken zum Johannesprolog,” 178.
90. Ibid.
 The Qur’an and Scripture  95

draws for illustration on the concept of transformation (taḥawwul), which is re-

lated to traditional Christian dogma: “The Arabic language represents the me-
dium of the Islamic revelation, into which and through which the transformation
becomes real, just as flesh and blood, namely, Mary, represent in Christianity the
medium into which and through which the transformation is made real.” Meier’s
interpretation, that the “paradoxical reality of incarnation must be taken seri-
ously in a view toward the Qur’an and humanity,” is certainly applicable.91 Abu
Zaid’s observation, which gives terminological priority to an early Islamic posi-
tion,92 gains even more weight if one considers the Qur’anic-​Christian analogy
not simply as a fait accompli, nor, as has been done up to now, merely as an object
of early Islamic theological discussion, but rather takes into view the epistemic
relationship with the Late Antique and incarnate logos that developed over the
course of the revelation of the Qur’an. The observation then shows itself to be
an important corrective to the inlibration theory, which is so widely taken at
face value.
It is then not that a book stands in place of the incarnation as the embodiment
of God’s word, but rather, as Madigan also stresses, that a sensorily perceptible
acoustic-​linguistic manifestation takes on this status, which does not first come
to the fore in the tradition studied by Madigan but is inherent in the Qur’an itself.
A religious conversation with Islam that does not aim to remain arbitrarily selec-
tive therefore would gain substantially from a diachronic reading of the Qur’an.
For the determination of the Qur’anic relation to Christian traditions, the nego-
tiations of logos theology, that is, the dialectic of the Qur’anic self-​localization in
relation to the surrounding logos conceptions, must be taken into account—​a
task that can only be accomplished through a diachronic treatment of the Qur’an.

2.6  Medialities of the Qur’an

2.6.1  The Restaging of the Sending Down in Recitation

Writing is just one of the medialities of the Qur’an. With the conclusion of the
canonization of the Qur’an, at the very latest, a third, new foundational experi-
ence is thus set beside the Old Testament and Christian myth of origin. Not the
inscription of the tablets of the law for Moses as the document of God’s covenant
with the elected people nor the notion of “love as fulfilment of the law” guar-
anteed by Christ’s self-​sacrifice (Romans 13:10), but rather the divine teaching,
continuously over many years, of God’s verbal addresses to Muhammad and his

91.  Meier, “Gottes Wort in Knechtsgestalt,” 71–​73, cited in Elsas, “Religionswissenschaftliche Vermittlung,”
185–​186.
92.  Here we can think of someone like Ibn Kullāb, a contemporary of Ibn Ḥanbal, according to whom the mes-
sage communicated by Gabriel to the Prophet is only a rendition, not the direct word of God; see van Ess, Theologie
und Gesellschaft, vol. 4, 614–​615.
96  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

community, stands as the central event in Islamic self-​understanding. In com-

parison to this event, what is narrated in the Qur’an about other Prophets is
downsized to the status of typological precedents. Since the speech of God is
recalled as a decisive event of listening, the Qur’an remains, even later, chiefly an
acoustic experience. From the very beginning, there is a particular “language” of
the Qur’an that adheres to its acoustic realization.
According to Islamic tradition, the Qur’anic message begins with the chal-
lenge to announce the divine word: “Read, iqra’, in the name of your lord, who
created” (Q 96:1). This verse is traditionally interpreted as the first divine ad-
dress to the Prophet. Although what stands behind this exhortation maybe a cur-
rent liturgical exhortation familiar from the Jewish and Christian tradition, the
verse remains emblematic of the early Meccan suras, in which the occurrence of
the proclamation, qur’an, is a central theme. Navid Kermani has justly spoken
of the Qur’an as a score, which requires a musical resetting for its realization.93
Indeed, the speech of God is cultic speech, which can only be adequately re-
flected through the backing of the text by a cantilena. This sacral performance of
the text is not a new discovery of the Qur’anic community but rather an answer
to the forms of worship of the plural cultures in the milieu of the Qur’an’s emer-
gence, which however assumes a central significance for Islam.
Already for the earliest Qur’anic community, the recited Qur’an had its own
setting in life, its Sitz im Leben in ritual prayer, which in its form, fixed at the latest
in the second Islamic century but probably already during Muhammad’s min-
istry, and valid down to today, consists of a sequence of short formulas accompa-
nied by gestures and, as its most crucial component, several instances of Qur’an
recitation. Through this ceremony, the worshipper exits the profane frame of
time and space and enters a sacral state that includes him in an imaginary simul-
taneity with all the other worshipers and places him in a spatial proximity to the
central sanctuary. This sacral frame opens a space for different degrees of spir-
itual fulfillment, which were described by the medieval theologian Muḥammad
al-​Ghazālī (1058–​1111):  “If I  recite, I  hear the Qur’an immediately just as if a
reciter performed it for me, then with greater profundity, as if the Prophet recited
it for me, and then finally I hear it as if it were spoken out by God himself.”94
It is not by chance that the Qur’an’s physical-​spiritual reception, accomplished
through recitation, has been compared with the taking-​into-​self of the Eucharist
in Christian ritual.95 Not the book, then, but the recitation is the manifestation of
God’s word approachable by humans.96

93.  Cf. the discussion of the sura in chap. 7, 248–​252.

94.  Al-​Ghazālī, Iḥyāʾ, 1:402.
95.  Cf. Wild, Mensch, Prophet.
96.  Cf. Lacocque, Apocalyptic Symbolism.
 The Qur’an and Scripture  97

The anthropologist Kristina Nelson has referred to the Qur’an as a text that is
oral in its very being.97 In fact, one can easily extract the Qur’anic determination
for recitation out of the text structure itself. Not only does the Qur’an consist of
verses, first of short, rhythmically catchy poetic verses and later of long and syn-
tactically complex speech units that manifests themselves as verses through their
rhyming end colons.98 It is also structured rhetorically so that units of sense and
breath coincide—​differently, for example, from the case in the speech units of the
Hebrew Bible, the Gospels, or the letters of Paul. Namely, in its early parts the
Qur’an comes very near to the Psalms or the speeches of the biblical prophets. But
even in its later suras, where one must speak of artistic prose rather than poetry,
the Qur’an is rhetorical to a very high degree. Here, in place of the tonally marked
rhymes, closing clausulas are now formed, which allow the text to be scanned
not only rhythmically but also semantically, or theologically, so to speak, again
and again introducing references to transcendence into the text. Thus, many of
the long narrative Qur’an verses end with a closing clausula such as inna llāha
l-​samīʿu l-​baṣīr, “God is the hearing, the seeing” (Q 17:1), or inna llāha yuḥibbu l-​
muqṣiṭīn, “God loves those who act justly” (Q 60:8). These commentary formulas
sprinkle divine evaluations of justly repaid human deeds or references to God’s
ubiquitous presence and almighty power throughout the text. The commenting
clausulas are not monotone interruptions that halt the flow of speech, as is often
claimed in the critical literature; rather, through their linking back of all events to
the will of God, they form the backbone of Qur’anic discourse.99 It is no wonder,
then, that in the praxis of recitation they undergo a particular melodic design,
similarly to the concluding half verses in Gregorian choral. The sacral recitation
of the Qur’an is thus designed to strengthen the significance of the transcendent
origin of the Qur’an, which has come to be regarded as so central in recent times.
This particular speech praxis also re-​enacts the emergence of the Qur’an, which
is said in the origin myth to have come from a process of divine oral inspiration.
But independently of the linkage to prayer, Qur’an reading, as Andreas
Kellermann stresses, is “in itself already ritual.”100 It creates a unity of reader and
hearer that would never exist in a solitary reception of a written text. The per-
formance as a “ceremonial making present of the social stock of sense”101 repeats
the proclaimed truth not with the goal of the communication of information
but rather as “practiced wisdom,” in order for “institutionalized forms of coming
together” to come into existence.102 A striking example of this is the widespread
praxis in the countries of the Maghreb, especially Morocco and Algeria, of group

97. Nelson, Art of Reciting.

98.  See chap. 5, 321–324.
99.  See Neuwirth, “Yūsuf-​Sure”; cf. chap. 13, 472–​477.
100.  Kellermann, “ ‘Die Mündlichkeit’ des Koran.”
101.  Assmann, “Nachwort,” 270.
102.  Ibid., 274.
98  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

reading (qirāʾa jamāʿīya), in which those who have learned the Qur’an by heart
or are currently learning it meet daily in order to recite together a thirtieth part
of the Qur’an, juz, at a very fast tempo. This group reading is also practiced on
festive occasions.103 The performance, described in detail by Kellermann, is con-
cerned above all with the rules of pronunciation, “orthoepy” (tajwīd), and the
melodic shaping of the reading.104 While the orthoepy of tajwīd within the canon
of knowledge is no more than a propadeutic for the science of reading,105 the
tajwīd rules remain practically indispensable for the Qur’an reader.

They come to be considered as a component of the text itself, so that their

omission counts as a distortion of the text and thus a sin: man lam yujaw-
widi l-​qurʾāna athīm, “He who does not recite the Qur’an with tajwīd is
sinful.”106 We see here a clear position that emerged in the course of the
tradition, taking the Qur’an to be the word of God even on the level of its
expression; tajwīd preserves the text’s archaic language condition, which
guarantees the distinction of the divine speech from colloquial language
and intensifies the effect of secondary complexity generated through po-
etic means, as it controls the text’s intonation.107

Regarding the melodic forming of the reading, two styles are distinguished: murat-
tal and mujawwad. The former is a relatively unadorned style used in teaching
and liturgy, “characterized by a stereotyped melodic course. The emphasis lies
in the exact realization of tajwīd rules. The latter, on the other hand, is formed
as art music, characterized by frequent repetitions of single passages, strong
contrasts of registers, and an interaction with the listeners that is articulated
through cheers.”108 Kellermann concludes his presentation of the conditions of
the Qur’anic performance thus: “A classification of the Qur’an into the category
of purely written literature must . . . appear inadequate. The designation of the
Prophet as author of the Qur’an, which was often adopted automatically by ear-
lier Orientalists, is rooted in this kind of treatment, whereby the text is uprooted
from its social situation and, in Goody’s words, ‘decontextualized,’ thus having to
rely on a ‘name that supports it.’ ”109 In contrast to this, the Qur’an always requires
performance in a ritual context. Here, the individual metaphysical experience of
the Prophet as the addressee of the revelation and sender of the message in its
reenactment becomes a sonic experience that always manifests itself again as new
and different, in which the personal religiosity of the reader finds its medium

103. Kellermann, Koranlesung im Maghreb, describes this in detail.

104.  Kellermann also dwells on the particular of the text used (qirāʾāt); cf. chap. 4, 149–​155.
105.  Bergsträsser and Pretzl, Geschichte des Korantexts, 232.
106.  Thus Ibn al-​Jazarī in his didactic tajwīd poem, the so-​called Jazarīya, 13.
107.  Kellermann, “Die ‘Mündlichkeit’ des Koran,” 18.
108.  Ibid., 22.
109.  Assmann and Assmann, “Nachwort,” 276.
 The Qur’an and Scripture  99

of expression, so that he has the possibility to encode his “I” for the purpose
of “knowledge and determination of his own wisdom.”110 The ritual of Qur’an
reading consists in the personal reliving of the act of revelation, so that not only
an “initial speech act” but also the positioning of the receiver and of the contem-
porary oral transmitters are comprehended as a means toward the public glorifi-
cation of God—​and that is much more than can be represented with writing.”111
It is notable that the aural performance of the Qur’an in no way remains lim-
ited to the private and collective cultic sphere, but also exists in more recent times
as a means of the proliferation of the Qur’an alongside the printed volume. Since
the 1960s, alongside the printed muṣḥaf, the “codex,” there also exists a muṣḥaf
murattal, a “recited codex.” In 1961, Egyptian radio broadcast the first complete
recording of the Qur’an, recited by the highest authority in Qur’an recitation at
the time in al-​Azhar University, Mahmud al-​Husari.112 Since then, innumerable
recordings by various readers have become available, which are distributed on all
the newest audio devices. Although already in the 1930s audio records of Qur’an
readings were being produced and individual Qur’an recordings were broad-
cast on radio,113 the regular radio broadcast of the muṣḥaf murattal represents
something new. With the muṣḥaf murattal, according to Andreas Kellermann,
“we find an intention that goes well beyond mere conservation, and throws light
on the Muslim understanding of the Qur’an: namely, the usage of modern mass
media for the maintenance of the tradition of performance of the Qur’an vis-​à-​vis
the progressive textualization of Islamic culture. . . . For even today, with the un-
limited written reproducibility and availability of the Qur’an, the conception has
not been abandoned that the text must be made into sound in performance’114

2.6.2  Writing as Coding

The Qur’an not only is ubiquitous in discourse through its text, and in sound
through its recitation, but also proliferates as calligraphy in Islamic art, so that
one can speak of the visual as a further “language” of the Qur’an. The Arabic al-
phabet itself, although fully developed only through the praxis of Qur’an writing,
is already a theme in the Qur’an itself: twenty-​nine suras begin with the naming of
one or several letter names, such as ṣād, alif lām mīm, etc.115 The heavenly writing
paraphernalia, the reed pen and above all the writing tablet, also play a striking
role in the Qur’an and can be seen at the intersection of important developments,
in a phase of the community’s new orientation toward a writing-​supported

110. Lotman, Die Struktur literarischer Texte, 101.

111.  Kellermann, “Die ‘Mündlichkeit’ des Koran,” 22.
112.  Cf. Al-​Saʿid, al-​Jamʿ al-​Ṣawtī; on its reception, see “Die ‘Mündlichkeit’ des Koran,” 1–​3.
113.  On the reception, which was initially met with skepticism among religious scholars, see Jomier, “La place
du Coran.”
114.  Kellermann, “Die ‘Mündlichkeit’ des Koran,” 2.
115.  On these letters groups, misleadingly denoted in scholarship as “ciphers,” see chap. 4, 144–145.
100  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

biblically inspired self-​understanding. Indeed, we can see an analogy between

what occurred for Arabic culture in the genesis of the Qur’an and what has
been described for various ancient cultures by Jan Assmann as a transition from
“ritual” to “textual coherence” that occurs with the onset of writing.116 After an
early phase, in which the new proclamation still stood in the frame and context
of the Kaaba rites, a profound process of change can be observed in the early
Meccan community, namely, from an ancient Arab self-​positioning to a bibli-
cally imprinted one. The biblical stories that had up to that point been evoked
in short allusions now come to the foreground, and the protagonists of the early
historical narratives, ancient figures of the Arabian Peninsula, give way to bib-
lical figures, while the Holy Land itself—​though less as a geographical space
than a spatial oscillation between heaven and earth—​enters as a backdrop in
place of ancient Arabia. The biblical sacred-​historical past, set in place of the
inherited historical memory, crystalizes into a text world that competes with the
now-​problematic Meccan realities. This “other world” is referred to in gestures,
enacted in prayer:  through the new direction of prayer toward Jerusalem, the
central biblical sanctuary. The act of writing plays an important role in this—​it
is in this phase that the proclamation is recorded for the first time (admittedly
for purely mnemotechnic aims) in writing;117 written scripture was the emblem
of the older religions, the Jews and Christians who are later designated as “pos-
sessors of scripture.” In the Qur’anic view, their revelations owe their authority
to their relation to writing; like the emerging Qur’an, they are excerpts from the
heavenly original writing, given visual form as the “preserved tablet,” al-​lawḥ
al-​maḥfūẓ. A poet of the early twentieth century, the Egyptian Ahmad Shawqi,
presented the process of the communication of this “writing” to men as a kind of
liquefaction of letters into drops of speech:118

wa-​l-​waḥyu yaqṭuru salsalan min salsalin

wa-​l-​lawḥu wa-​l-​qalamu l-​badīʿu rawwāʿū
ismu l-​jalālati fī bahāʾi ḥurūfihī
alifun hunālika wa-​smu Ṭāhā  l-​bāʾū

Inspiration pours down in drops of pearls,

While the tablet and the astounding pen are shining
The name of Majesty in the glory of its letters
The A is there, and the name of the Prophet follows like B.

116.  Assmann, “Kanon und Zensur”; on an application of the model to the Qur’an, see Neuwirth, “Vom
Rezitationstext”; cf. also chap. 6, 205–​208.
117.  This newly introduced textualization is referred to in the introduction of the suras by the invocation
formulation bi-​smi llāhi l-​raḥmāni l-​raḥīm “In the name of God, the compassionate the merciful,” the so-​called
Basmala—​analogous to the Christian practice of preluding textual elements with the formulation, “In the name of
the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.”
118. Shawqi, al-​Aʿmāl al-​Shiʿrīya al-​Kāmila, 34.
 The Qur’an and Scripture  101

From this perspective, writing transcends its functionality as a sign system:  a

transcendent universe out of letter signs, which obtain their significance through
their supernatural beauty, their “glory,” corresponds to the writing that is percep-
tible in the world, which consists of semantically functional signs, granting to it
and elsewhere unknown aura.
Although supported by the same object of the tablet, the Qur’anic process
of becoming scripture is thus substantially different from the episode of the
granting of the tablets in the Hebrew Bible, and even more so from its later
Christian interpretation. The theologian Friedrich Wilhelm Graf has clearly
outlined the significance of the description of the tablet for religious history,
which is foundational above all from the Protestant perspective: “At Sinai, the
transcendent God sealed a covenant with his people, of which the conditions
are literally the moral laws. This sealing of the covenant at Sinai, seen from the
perspective of religious history, signifies an entirely new conception of the rela-
tion between God and man, characterized by radical transcendence of God, an
unconditioned claim to exclusive worship by his people, and a moralistic and
legal order.”119
It is true, already in rabbinic Judaism, a more comprehensive perception of the
communication of God’s word, the tora mi-​Sinai, the teaching communicated on
Sinai, had been superimposed onto the event of the handing down of the tablets,
so that the post-​Mosaic tora she be-​ʿal pe, that is, the oral teaching, had come to
outweigh the written. For the Qur’an, the Mosaic event is submerged into an epi-
sode that, reported in an entirely de-​dramatized text in sura 7, has completely lost
its history-​generating dimension.120 The Ten Commandments, which are listed
three times in the Qur’an, are never linked to this event. Seen from the Qur’anic
perspective, divine writing is withdrawn from human access, God sends only
oral excerpts from the heavenly tablet to his Prophets—​a transformation that
negates the uniqueness of the biblical event without, however, devaluing it. What
occurs in medieval Christian reception, where at the entrance to Gothic cathe-
drals we find the figure of the synagoga, a feminine figure blindfolded and with
broken staff, symbolizing the “fall of the tablets,” which literally slip down from
the figure—​an allegory of Judaism deemed obsolete in pre-​modern Christian tra-
dition —​is not imaginable in an Islamic context.
The Islamic equivalent of the tablets, the heavenly writing, is a source of cultic
rather than moral authority. It not only manifests God’s transcendence but also
remains transcendent itself. For that reason, not only is there no image of the
handing down of the tablets in Islam, but there is also no historic precedent for
such a representation in written form of the divine word such as is so common

119. Graf, Moses Vermächtnis.

120.  See Neuwirth, “Meccan Texts, Medinan Additions?”
102  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

in Western reception121—​an even stronger challenge to the imagination of the

believers to take possession of this ultimately heavenly writing through art.
For according to the Qur’an, not only letters or the Qur’an verses but in-
deed all created things are “signs,” āyāt, of God. Creation is understood as a sign
system in analogy to writing, which man is constantly called upon to “read” in
the Qur’an.122 These signs of creation, such as the cosmic order, the blessings of
nature, and the historical fortunes of the community, are unfolded narratively in
the Qur’an, and thus take on a verbal form through the prophetic proclamation.
But since they had already existed in written form in the original Qur’an, the
“mother of the writing,” umm al-​kitāb, they are at the same time coded in writing.
Without this coding, things could be represented figuratively without problem—​
as they are in other cultures. Instead, in view of their anchoring in the heavenly
writing, it is the form of writing that suggests itself as their visual, inner-​worldly
presentation; in place of the image, we thus have the “script image.” Language
and writing unite in this image, which, as in Ahmad Shawqi’s poem, glorifies the
majestic name of God.

2.6.3  Text, Sound, and Body

In looking for commonalities between the three monotheistic religions, it is
problematic to rely on external shared traits, which can be represented in sug-
gestive coinages such as “Abrahamic religions,”123 “possessors of scripture,”124 or
“revealed religions.” More interesting are the differences, expressed for instance
in the diverse medialities of the respective proclamations. We could observe here
that what we are accustomed to designating as “Qur’anic revelation” was con-
nected by its receivers with other, completely different experiences. Alongside
the communication that was experienced quasi-​vertically, the “sending down”
(tanzīl) and the “inspiration” (waḥy), which both also describe the experience of
earlier prophets, there was the completely amythical emergence of performance
texts, generated during the intensive ascetic practice of the proclaimer during
his vigils. Here, it was an aural experience, also called waḥy, that came about in
the course of the recitation of already received texts. An important feature is the
still preverbal quality of the “inspiration” waḥy, discussed by Nasr Hamid Abu
Zayd,125 which first had to be decoded and verbalized before it could be passed on
to the hearers. With the absence of the proclaimer, rearticulation came to take the
place of the listening. The recitation of the community or of the single worshiper
is an imitatio of the Prophet.

121.  See the evidence of this in images and texts in Graf, Moses Vermächtnis.
122.  Cf. chap. 7, 264–​277.
123.  On the problem of abbreviating the three monotheistic religions as “Abrahamic,” see Nagel, “ ‘Der erste
Muslim’—​Abraham in Mekka.”
124.  On “inlibration,” see above, 92–​95, and Madigan, “Gottes Botschaft an die Welt.”
125.  See Kermani, Offenbarung als Kommunikation.
 The Qur’an and Scripture  103

Even as it makes use of the same verses, the Prophet imitatio implies an en-
tirely new reading of the Qur’an. It de-​historicizes the earlier message, since the
divine communication, which had once been spoken in a defined historical time
through the resumption of Prophetic time, the illud tempus, becomes a sacral
recollection that removes the reciting hearer/​speaker from time. Simultaneously,
it restages the original scene of the genesis of Islam; the text thus becomes exclu-
sively Muslim.
Contrarily, within the Qur’anic self-​understanding, the divine message re-
corded on the “preserved tablet,” from which the proclaimer receives his commu-
nications, was still perceived as universal, that is, it was destined for monotheistic
believers in general. The “mother of the scripture,” umm al-​kitāb, most likely has
its equivalent in the hypostasizing of the logos or wisdom as the first-​created
thing of God known from ancient Judaism; cf. Prov. 8:22–​36. In that all crea-
tion is already recorded in the “original writing,” it is coded “scripturally”—​a
Qur’anic conception that can be traced back to preceding Jewish speculations
over the relationship between word/​book and body, even if the acoustically real-
ized word remains of prime importance for the Islamic conception of divine
self-​communication. What the American Kabbalah researcher Elliot R. Wolfson
has claimed for the Jewish and Christian relationship between word and body
can be extended also to Islam. According to Wolfson, both Jewish and Christian
thought are based on a particular correlation of body and book/​word,126 but with
a reversal of their respective emphasis, in a way that can be summarized as fol-
lows: “For Christians the body is the embodiment of the book, for Jews the book
is the textualization of the body.”127
Looking for an “embodiment of God’s word” in Islam, one should not seek
to find it in a “book” representing scripture, as presupposed in the concept of
“inlibration,” but rather in the living recitation of the Arabic Qur’an. This has its
place in an organic “resonant cavity,” which, as is appropriate for a ceremonial-​
acoustic performance such as Qur’an recitation, is fit to incorporate spoken word
and cantilena. This “resonant cavity” is not to be sought in transcendence but
rather, since spiritual and aesthetic experience are innate in the creation of man,
in human nature itself.

126.  Wolfson, “The Body in the Text.”

127.  Ibid. 482.
 3

The Qur’an and History

3.1  History of Communicated Speech

3.1.1  The “Ahistorical” Qur’an
The consciousness of historicity is often perceived to be a discovery of European
culture that is claimed to have been developed nowhere else independently. The
Qur’an, whose central interest in timelessness is indisputable, seems to confirm
this verdict. For many critics, it serves as a key example of indifference to history.
This is the judgment of the historian of early Islam Fred Donner:

The purpose of stories in the Qurʾān, then, is profoundly different from

their purpose in the Old Testament; the latter uses stories to explain par-
ticular chapters in Israel’s history, the former to illustrate—​again and
again—​how the true Believer acts in certain situations. In line with this
purpose, Qurʾānic characters are portrayed as moral paradigms, emblem-
atic of all that is good or evil. Moreover, as stories, they are not imbued
with much, if any, development—​which is why they can appear as de-
tached fragments. In this sense, the Qurʾān can be seen to be profoundly
ahistorical; it is simply not concerned with history in the sense of devel-
opment and change, either of the prophets or peoples before Muḥammad,
or of Muḥammad himself, because in the Qurʾānic view the identity of the
community to which Muḥammad was sent is not historically, but morally
determined.1

This verdict by Fred Donner does not stand alone. Hans Zirker, author of two
monographs on the Qur’an with a Christian-​theological bent,2 bemoans the lack
of a linear conception in the Qur’an: “Revelations are in the Islamic view grant-
ings from God that recurred in the past numerously and identically. They were
meant to remedy the harms caused by men and to enable them to live according
to God’s directives. Accordingly, they are always isolated occurrences that in-
deed triggered historical consequences, but which cannot be integrated into an
encompassing goal-​directed history of revelation.”3

1. Donner, Narratives of Islamic Origins, 84.

2. Zirker, Christentum und Islam; Zirker, Der Koran: Zugänge und Lesarten.
3. Zirker, Christentum und Islam, 68.

105
106  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

This negative judgment against any Qur’anic interest in history is not new.4
In comparison with the two older monotheistic scriptures, it on first glance does
appear plausible. Certainly, the Qur’an offers no sacred historical drama pursued
through the great acts of creation, election, exodus, conquest, exile, and the hope
of liberation, as does the Hebrew Bible, nor does it offer a goal-​oriented history
of proclamation and of the earliest believers, as does the New Testament. The
canonized Qur’an begins famously not with the story of creation but rather, after
an introductory prayer (sura 1), with a kind of dedication to the receivers, that is
the community that is constituting itself, followed by narratives, legislation, and
polemic (sura 2).5 Above all—​apart from the final partial corpus, the “final thir-
tieth,” juz’ ʿamma,6 that stands at the text’s end—​the suras that follow each other
generally belong to different periods of emergence, and thus do not connect to
each other with any narrative logic. Nor do the biblically inspired Qur’anic narra-
tives follow the order of their biblical sequence; nearly all narratives occur more
than once, not only in different versions but also in different contexts. Some nar-
ratives that take shape early follow one and the same striking model: a messenger
of God preaches the message of the one God and of eschatological reckoning to
his people, but meets with rejection and must experience the fatal punishment
that falls on his people, while he himself is saved from catastrophe. Evaluating
this narrative type to the exclusion of all others, scholars have often alleged to the
Qur’an as such a cyclical view of history.7
But is the Qur’an wholly “ahistorical”? Are the earlier, pre-​Qur’anic rev-
elations that are recalled in the Qur’an truly “numerous and interchangeable”?
Can one designate the messenger figures of the Qur’anic narratives universally
merely as “moral models,” that is, ideal types without development that are only
of avail for the ethical message of the Qur’an? Above all, does the image of the
proclaimer remain static, without change or development? This widespread im-
pression in current research emerges if one reads the Qur’an post-​redactionally,
post-​canonically, that is, as a document closed in itself, a composite of chron-
ologically and theologically equivalent evidence, without registering the pro-
cesses of change reflected in the language, style, and referentiality of the Qur’an.
Narratives featuring the same actors displaying the same behavior must in this
synchronic reading appear as historically irrelevant reiterations. This “holistic”
approach—​though without the concomitant negative valuation correlates with
the perspective of the Islamic tradition itself, where the invariability of the image
of the Prophets—​indeed, the ideality of the prophetical type as such—​possesses
a dogmatically binding significance. Islamic theology’s lack of interest in the

4.  Cf. Neuwirth, “Qur’an and History.”

5.  Among these, an extensive story of creation is depicted in Q 2:29–​39.
6.  Cf. chap. 5, 166–​170.
7.  This assessment from Rudi Paret’s influential essay “Das Geschichtsbild Mohammeds” (1951) is generally
adopted by later scholars without further critical examination.
 The Qur’an and History  107

historical communication process—​though not true without exception for the

entire tradition—​is not surprising. It is a consequence of canonization, which
established an obligatory teleological reading, according to which the Qur’an
reflects not the process of trial and error in the development of a socially con-
sensual mode of thought but rather merely different manifestations of one and
the same truth. This reading obscures the progressive self-​reflection of the pro-
claimer and his community and their increasingly innovative exegetical treat-
ments of biblical stories, which in Medina even lead to a kind of counter-​history
in the face of biblical history, a rewriting of biblical narratives that involves a
reversal of their ideological thrust.8
In what follows, we intend to free the Qur’an from its perception as an authorially
conceived “book” and reclaim it as an open-​ended communication process occur-
ring in history. The conception of the Qur’an as the homogenous scripture of Islam,
which is suggested most persuasively by the Sira, will be flashed out. The value of
a traditional reading oriented toward the Sira is not to be contested, tradition does
however treat the Qur’anic genesis from the teleological viewpoint assumed by the
later community, and therefore cannot illuminate the text in statu nascendi. The Sira
must therefore be perceived not as a rival to the historical image, as evidence of a
competing truth claim, but rather as a document of a distinctly new scriptural dis-
course. At the same time, what must be avoided is the eclectic perception upheld in
Western research that identifies the Qur’an with the later canonized codex reading
it—​ignoring its non-​chronological sura order and sacral coding—​as a historical
report, as if it were immediately evaluable as a document of the state of affairs in
Mecca or Medina. Such a reading skips the step of a microstructural examination of
the texts of the respective suras registering the topoi, formulas, and speech modes
called for by the textual genre of the sura as such, which is required before the text
can be evaluated for its historical information.
In addition, the current study does not share the skeptical premises that de-
mand that the temporal and spatial coordinates of the Qur’anic emergence should
be suspended; rather, we assume heuristically, despite the almost complete lack of
explicit namings of place, the traditional scenes of Mecca and Medina.9 Nothing
compels us to view the milieu of the Qur’an as a culturally undeveloped space.
Indeed, the cultural and social scenario of the peripheral Hijaz is only being
explored by research; yet the literature that we already possess, in particular
poetry and heroic prose narratives, justifies an image of a society whose verbal
sensibilities and literary formation defy all clichés of an “empty Hijaz.”10 The

8.  See chap. 11.

9.  This heuristic position distinguishes the account presented here from the position of those skeptical schol-
ars, many of whom no longer insist on the late dating of the Qur’an, but who continue to consider a shift in its local-
ization, or treat it altogether as a purely literary creation; for example, see Hawting, The Idea of Idolatry, and Crone,
“What Do We Actually Know about Mohammed?”
10.  Montgomery, “The Empty Ḥijāz.” Cf. also Noth, “Früher Islam.”
108  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

extensive corpus of hero stories of the so-​called ayyām al-​ʿarab,11 the “battle days
of the Arab tribes disparately transmitted prose texts interspersed with poetry
that report the tribal confrontations of sixth/​seventh centuries, offers—​despite
the fact that it was written down only in retrospect—​an authentic record of au-
tochthonous nomadic culture, and provides convincing explanations of the so-
cial and ideological preconditions for the changes that set in with the Qur’anic
proclamation. Despite the gaps in research that still exist, a rough image is al-
ready taking shape, allowing historians such as Robert Hoyland to state positively
the compatibility of the known facts about the peninsula with the basic data of
the Islamic tradition.12 Peter Brown even claims that within the Arabic language
area, the living heritage of Hellenism, which developed a universal nomenclature
and iconography for the locally worshipped pagan divinities and united different
cultural groups through the phenomenon of a shared verbal koine, was at least
partially responsible for the fast success of Islam with its strongly universalizing
tendency.13
Seen against this background Jaakko Hameen-​Antilla’s hypothesis, based on
the stylistic closeness of the early Qur’anic proclamation to the ancient Arabic
soothsayer speech, that Muhammad first worked on the peninsula as a wan-
dering “seer” (kāhin), before settling down in Yathrib/​Medina as a Prophet in the
biblical style, proves anachronistic.14 The Qur’an in its early parts is not mono-
lithically ancient Arabic, but rather makes frequent recourse—​as a glance at the
intertextual inventories such as Heinrich Speyer’s Die biblischen Erzahlungen
im Koran (The biblical narratives in the Qur’an) evinces—​to a multitude of Late
Antique religious traditions, which it appropriates through creative reposition-
ing. Even if we cannot generally name these traditions with any precision, they
nonetheless call for an open, intertextual microstructural reading of the Qur’an
that pays attention to the older traditions that resonate recognizably in the text.
The text is thus to be perceived as polyphonic, as a conversation with other texts;
it justifies its emphatic message—​presented or the first time Arabic language
through its nearness to the older traditions and grounds its authority not least
in its participation in existing debates underway among the learned traditions of
the two older religions.

11.  A convincing depiction of the social significance of this literature is conveyed by Montgomery, Vagaries
of the Qasidah. The ayyām al-​ʿarab have been given very little scholarly attention since Bräunlich, Bistām ibn Qais,
Caskel, “Ajjām al-​Arab,” and Meyer, Aiyām al-​Arab. Al-​Qadi, “La composante narrative,” represents a newer study.
A research project by Toral-​Niehoff, Die Ayyām al-​Arab als “Tribal History” der arabischen Spätantike, is currently
being conducted at the Freie Universität Berlin.
12.  See Hoyland, “New Documentary Texts and the Early Islamic State”; Hoyland, Arabia and the Arabs: From
the Bronze Age to the Coming of Islam.
13. Brown, The World of Late Antiquity; cf. also Bowersock, Hellenism in Late Antiquity.
14.  Hämeen-​Anttila, “Arabian Prophecy.” On this connection, see chap. 12, 424–​430.
 The Qur’an and History  109

3.2  Two Manifestations of the Qur’an

If we do not accept to understand the Qur’an,15 in conformity with much recent

scholarship,16 as a kind of apocryphon, as a mere rewriting and reconfiguration of
biblical and post-​biblical traditions, that is, as a written text conceived for readers
and of random origin, we cannot avoid reflecting on the conditions of its emergence.
It is not a matter of indifference whether a text designs a particular new formation
of extant materials “for readers,” or if rather these readers—​as hearers—​themselves
participate in this reconfiguration. Some of the prima facie most compelling inter-
pretations of single verses or passages17 that result from the synchronic reading of the
Qur’an as an authored text lose their persuasiveness once they are checked against
the communication situation of the pre-​canonic Qur’an, that is, the protracted “re-
ligious dialogue” occurring over time and involving a number of agents. To ascribe
to the whole Qur’an the intention of “decentralizing and subverting earlier tradi-
tions,”18 as occurs sometimes in recent American research, entails the assumption
of an authorial intention that is not compatible with its character as proclamation.
However many liberties a purely canon-​referential interpretation may offer to the
researcher, it is unwarranted in the case of the Qur’an, as long as it cannot be adapted
historically to the proclamation process. It is not merely that synchronic readings go
halfway.19 They also implicitly contest the Qur’an’s status as a founding document
of a gradually formed communal consensus and thus the rank of the foundational
document of a new religion—​a methodological short circuit with ideological impli-
cations, arising from the essentialist perception of the Qur’an as a kind of biblical
apocryphon.
It is an unmistakable fact that the early history of Qur’anic discourse went
through two phases. These can be identified with some simplification as the phase
that lasted up to the death of the Prophet, which was primarily oral, and the one
belonging to the generation after him, which additionally relied on writing. But
these two phases are rarely differentiated strictly either in the tradition or in later
research, partly because of their close chronological sequence. Since this distinc-
tion relates not only to pure chronology and different media of communication,
but also to different configurations of the text in the consciousness of the recipi-
ents, we will consequently distinguish in the following between “two Qur’ans,”

15.  This section is based on previously published preliminary works, such as Neuwirth, “Eine europäische
Lektüre des Koran.”
16.  See the methodologically insightful essay by Hughes, “The Stranger at the Sea”; similarly, Cuypers, The
Banquet.
17.  This also applies to Hughes’s essay “The Stranger at the Sea” (where a later-​achieved, critical picture of
Moses is employed to explain an earlier text) and, most importantly, to Brown, “The Apocalypse of Islam,” which
adduces a Qur’anic position only reached in Medina through the involvement of Jewish exegetical principles, to
explain a middle Meccan text.
18.  Brown, “The Apocalypse of Islam,” 87.
19.  On the overall problem, see Sinai, “The Qur’an as Process.”
110  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

the pre-​canonic and the canonic text.20 It is worth remarking that the Islamic
tradition itself maintains a distinction between two different perceptions of the
Qur’an, even if it does not apply the two concepts as terms relevant to religious-​
historical development. It distinguishes between the oral text, the recitation of
the Prophet, qurʾān, and the written Qur’an codex, muṣḥaf, which was handed
down through the centuries by tradition subjected to strict philological controls,
until finally, it merged in the year 1925, into the form of a printed text.
The Qur’an codex lies before us as a “anthology” of individual texts, suras,
the arrangement of which follows no chronological order, let alone any narra-
tive logic. Its 114 suras are arranged according to a conceivably arbitrary crite-
rion: their length, in descending order. But it is just this “raw form” of overall
structure that fits poorly with the presupposition of skeptical researchers of a
compilation of the corpus by anonymous scholars undertaking the construction
of an Arabic foundational myth based on the sayings of a mythical prophet. The
mechanistic representation of text reflected in the Qur’an codex would be quite
astonishing to find within the later epoch assigned by skeptical researchers—​the
eighth century—​a time from which we have artfully composed extant literary
texts. But it fits unproblematically into the scenario suggested by the Islamic tra-
dition: that of a “dealing with inheritance” practiced on the part of Qur’an col-
lectors after the Prophet’s death. Indeed, the heterogeneous masses of text that
the redactors brought together from memory and from the transcripts of the
companions of the Prophet (ṣaḥāba) can most plausibly be thought of as an un-
ordered stock published without exterior intervention. The ancient canonic for-
mula “You must add nothing and take nothing away” (Deut 13:1) was already
deeply inscribed in the consciousness of the proclaimer, for whom the problem
of the integrity of his proclamation had often been an occasion for troubling
self-​testing, as the Qur’an itself shows. Clearly, at the time of its proclamation
the text was already sacrosanct as an “inspiration” (waḥy) or a “sending-​down”
from God (tanzīl). It is likely this perception of the protected character of indi-
vidual texts that motivated the redactors to renounce every insertion on their
side into the text, so that it emerged without any literarily ambitious formula-
tion of its theology, such as could have recommended itself following the model
of the biblical books. Abstaining from every semantic or chronological control
over individual texts, the redactors however at the same time denied the reader
any aid and support of their approaching the text—​a serious shortcoming often
bemoaned by outsiders. From the perspective of the redactors, such a renunci-
ation of readability would have been acceptable, since at the time of the text’s

20.  Zwettler, “A Mantic Manifesto,” also insists on a distinction between the “scripture” existing in codex form
and its pre-​canonical, previous “revelation.” However, in our context the communication of the text to listeners
should be at the fore in place of this distinction. The mantic quality of the oration should not be marginalized, as it
forms part of the persuasio of the communication, the persuasion strategy.
 The Qur’an and History  111

first binding codification, a period following Muhammad’s death by at most sixty

years and perhaps as few as twenty,21 the written form of the text was meant only
as a control: through writing, the textual stock could be authoritatively delimited,
and the ordering and the shape of the individual texts be fixed.22 What was not
fixed, however, was the exact articulation of the text, as the early scribal tech-
nique foresaw neither the representation of short vowels nor the differentiation
of graphically identical signs for consonants.23

3.2.1 Muṣḥaf, a Ceremonially Framed Sacral Text

Regardless of the mechanistic sequencing of individual texts, the codex serves
the formal expectations bound up in Late Antiquity with a scripture: that the
most sublime “book” should have a beginning highlighted by special pathos
and a correspondingly expressive end. In fact, the Qur’an text is embedded
in a solemnly phrased frame that is clearly recognizable as such. The intro-
ductory unit, al-​Fātiḥa, “the opening,” is an exceptional text, not a sura in the
strict sense; since it does not consist of God’s speech to men, but is rather a
prayer spoken by the community of believers, forming the religion’s central
communal prayer, comparable to the Christian Our Father.24 The Fātiḥa, which
opens the corpus as a sort of prooemium, serves as a petition for divine guid-
ance in the ritual situation of approaching the scripture. The text is not chosen
by accident:  although the name al-​Fātiḥa could indicate its function as an
opening of the written corpus, it was clearly already in use in a scarcely less
prominent opening role, namely as an entrance formula or introitus for the
Islamic ritual of prayer, which should go back to the praxis of the Qur’anic
community. With the Fātiḥa then, a liturgically central text of the community
was chosen as an opening of the Qur’an codex.25 Analogous to this also are
the last two suras, which, despite the fact that they are introduced formally
through the divine command qul, “Speak [the following text],” and thus are
presented as divine speech addressed to the proclaimer, are also not conven-
tional suras. In these texts, two apotropaic formulas that were arguably already
common use—​marked by the words aʿūdhu bi-​rabbi, “I take refuge with the
Lord . . .”—​are adapted for a new function, to shield the Qur’an from the influ-
ence of demons. The positioning of suras 1, 113, and 114—​which are lacking in
the early Qur’an exemplar of Ibn Masʿūd, an early collection that preceded the
canonized edition26—​must apparently be attributed to the formal conceptions

21.  Cf. chap. 4, 140–​144.

22.  Neuwirth, “Structure and the Emergence of Community.”
23.  Cf. chap. 4, 212–​213.
24.  Winkler, “Fatiha und Vaterunser.”
25.  Neuwirth and Neuwirth, “Sūrat al-​Fātiḥa.”
26. Nöldeke, Geschichte des Qorans, 1:108–​110, identifies both of the last two suras as preexisting texts
“adopted” in the Qur’an. On the absence of the suras in Ibn Masʿūd, see Jeffery, Materials, 20–​24. On the editing
the Qur’an, see chap. 4.
112  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

of the redactors of the so-​called Uthmanic text, who were confronted with the
task of fixing a textus ne varietur, a text with claims to bindingness. It is no
wonder that a similar apotropaic formula—​not recorded in the muṣḥaf—​that
is traditionally pronounced before the beginning of a Qur’an recitation, aʿūdhu
bi-​llāhi mina l-​shayṭāni l-​rajīm, “I take refuge with God from the accursed
Satan,” sounds like an echo of the two closing suras.
If one looks past these framing parts, what is yielded for the Qur’an is a “book
block,” at the beginning of which stands a kind of dedication of the corpus; the
scripture is intended for those who share the belief in the oneness of God and
fulfill three basic obligations (Q 2:1–​5):

alif lām mīm
dhālika l-​kitābu lā rayba fihi
hudan li-​l-​muttaqīn
alladhīna yuʾminūna bi-​l-​ghaybi
wa-​yuqīmūna l-​ṣalāta
wa-​mimmā razaqnāhum yunfiqūn
wa-​lladhīna yuʾminūna bi-​mā unzila ilayka
wa-​mā unzila min qablika
wa-​bi-​l-​ākhirati hum yūqinūn
ulāʾika ʿalā hudan min rabbihim
wa-​ulāʾika humu l-​mufliḥūn

Alif lam mim.
That is the scripture—​no doubt is in it,
a right guidance for the God fearing,
who believe in the unseen and perform the prayer
and spend from that which we supply them,
and who believe in that which was sent down to you,
and who are aware of the life hereafter.
They are rightly guided from your Lord
and they are the blessed ones.

It ends with a concise formulation of the Islamic creed in sura 112, “the Pure
Faith”:27

qul huwa llāhu aḥad

Allāhu l-​ṣamad
lam yalid wa-​lam yūlad
wa-​lam yakun lahu kufuwan aḥad

27.  The sura is discussed in chap. 13, 477–480.

 The Qur’an and History  113

Say: He is God, one
God, the constant.
He did not beget and was not begotten,
and there is none equal to him.

The two more ancient scriptures commence and end quite differently: the Hebrew
Bible begins and ends historically. At its beginning, we even find two reports
about the creation of the world: “In the beginning God created the heaven and
earth” (Gen 1:1), and “On the day when God created heaven and earth . . . God
planted a Garden in Eden. . . .” (Gen 2:4, 2:8). Just as the oldest event of human
history stands at the beginning, so at the end we find the chronologically most
recent events in the history of the people of Israel, their return to the prom-
ised land: “As the word of God was fulfilled out of the mouth of Jeremiah, God
awoke the spirit of Cyrus, and he had the following announced by mouth and by
writing: so speaks Cyrus, the king of the Persians: God gave to me all kingdoms
of the earth, the God of the heavens. He commissioned me to build Him a house
in Jerusalem. Whichever of you how belongs to his people, let his God be with
him! Let him go up!” (2 Chr 36:22–​23.)
The New Testament is given a similar historical frame: The Gospel of Matthew
begins with a genealogy of Jesus: “Book of the ancestry of Jesus Christ, of the
son of David, of the Son of Abraham. Abraham begot Isaac” (Mt 1:1),28 and the
Gospel of John even begins with a reference to Gen 1:1: “In the beginning was
the word, and the word was by God” (Jo 1:1). The New Testament ends with an
eschatological announcement of the Second Coming of Christ: “He who testifies
this, says: yes, I am coming soon. Amen. Come Lord Jesus!” (Rev 22:20).
Contrarily, the Qur’an does not take up history in its two ultimate positions.
Rather, at the beginning it takes up scripture, kitāb, that is, the divine teaching,
and at its end the image of God in distinction from that of the two older religions.
It begins with three of the emblematic letter names (alif lām mīm) and ends with
the word “one,” aḥad. The redactors could have easily found a report of creation
or a Qur’anic evocation of events from communal history, if they had intended to
make the Qur’an recognizable as a “history book” of the new community with a
setting of history in initial and final positions. The most likely explanation for the
fact that this did not occur is the still undeveloped notion of a scripture, which
prevented the proclaimer or his contemporaries from envisioning such a project
of compilation.29

28.  The Gospel of Mark begins with a quote from Isaiah: “The beginning of the good news about Jesus the
Messiah, the Son of God, as it is written in Isaiah the Prophet: I will send my messenger ahead of you, who will
prepare your way” (Mark 1); the Gospel of Luke begins with a historical localization: “In the time of Herod King of
Judea, there was a priest named Zechariah, who belonged to the priestly division of Abijah; his wife Elizabeth was
also a descendant of Aaron” (Luke 1).
29.  See Madigan, The Qur’an’s Self-​Image; cf. chap. 2, 140–​144.
114  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

The Qur’an after the death of the Prophet continued to be communicated

orally, supported by the memory of the companions of the Prophet. The out-
come of the first codification, an initiative that was—​according to the tradition—​
prompted by state power, therefore was not the production of a continuously
readable book, as in the cases of the Hebrew Bible or New Testament, but rather
the production of what the word qurʾān alongside “recitation” and “reading” also
signifies: a lectionary. The official Qur’an is a lectionary, a collection of pericopes,
that is, a corpus of texts for the selection of liturgical recitations. The Qur’an
in a unique way insists on its liturgical function—​not only by virtue of its self-​
designation—​while also maintaining its close connection to the other scrip-
tures. William Graham has stressed that the recognition of scriptures beyond
one’s own, which in the West was first developed in the nineteenth century, is
already evident in the Qur’an:30 countless verses speak of the “scripture,” kitāb,
or the “scriptures,” kutub, of other religions, a category that the Qur’an, although
still oral, will also claim for itself by the end of its development. According to
Graham, the Qur’an is the only scripture that identifies itself as such through its
self-​referentiality.
One should or course not imagine this “community of scriptures” of Torah,
Gospels, and Qur’anic proclamation, sketched in the Qur’an itself, to be a kind of
co-​equal siblinghood valid for all time. As much as the text of the Qur’an stresses
at length its essential compatibility with the other scriptures that it seeks to con-
firm, so too is the Qur’an valid within Islamic theology as the final legitimate
scripture that perfects all others. Between the pronouncements of the Qur’an
text and its later interpretation lies the break of canonization,31 which effects a
transformation in perception: the historical-​dialogical character of the Qur’an as
a religious conversation with and about others becomes, through canonization,
turns into a divine monologue.

3.2.2  The Pre-​canonical Qur’an (Qurʾān)—​Drama

of Community Formation
Yet before the text is solidified through codification and finally assumes the form
of a binding codex, muṣḥaf, it is a drama, an interaction in flux between a pro-
claimer and his community. As Andreas Kellermann has pointed out, research
has too often treated the texts assembled in the Qur’an “implicitly as a ‘literary
product’ compiled by an ‘author” in a fixed form.”32 Thus Theodor Nöldeke refers
to the Qur’an as a book “the text of which is preserved for us quite unadulter-
ated,”33 and Carl Brockelmann and others automatically apply the concept of

30.  See Graham, “Scripture and the Qurʾān”; Wild, “Why Self-​Referentiality?”
31.  On the implications of canonization, see Sinai, Studien zur frühen Koraninterpretation, 1–​22; al-​Azmeh,
“Muslim Canon.”
32.  Cf. Geyer’s review of Vollers, Volkssprache, cited in Kellermann, “Die ‘Mündlichkeit’ des Koran,” 3.
33. Nöldeke, Sketches from Eastern History, 1–​2, cited in Kellermann, “Die ‘Mündlichkeit’ des Koran,” 3.
 The Qur’an and History  115

drafting in writing to the Qur’an.34 In critical philology, the question of the “orig-
inal text” of the Qur’an dominates, prompting the quest to arrive at the original
sense intended by the Prophet, as well as the search for possible source texts and
for the original “speech form” employed “by the author.” Thus, the written ver-
sion of the Qur’an is often viewed as a unity, and studied with the criteria of liter-
ature composed and received in writing, with no regard for the differing contexts,
functions, and forms of the originally independent individual texts. In this, the
Qur’anic language and style (or the “talent” of the author) are often denigrated
in a trivial35 and prejudicial way.36 In this unquestioned assumption of literality
and authorship, Kellermann sees an obscuring of the complex character of the
Qur’an, which is equally oral and written; preferring to position the Qur’an in
the “gray zone between a purely written and a purely oral literature,”37 he there-
fore approaches the text text-​linguistically. Although the present attempt to dis-
tinguish these two commingled manifestations of the Qur’an follows a more
historical-​traditional goal, it confronts the same necessity: to call into question
the supposed written form of the Qur’an and its ascription to an “author.”
In order to do justice to the text-​generating interaction between the char-
ismatic speaker and his community as it took shape, one should replace the
conventional author-​reader relation with a model borrowed from the theory of
drama, which distinguishes between two levels of communication. There is on
the one hand an “inner communication level,” the “interaction drama” that plays
itself out between the protagonists (the proclaimer and his community), which
can be described by historical research;38 here, dialogues emerge and a mass of
rhetorical strategies are applied as a means of persuasio. This level is vaulted by
the “outer communication level” occupied by the “I” or “we” speaker, it is man-
ifest in the text and in the later readers/​hearers of the Qur’an. In the that initi-
ates the text corpus (Q 2:2), it can be demonstrated how distant the view of the
Qur’an as a “textual result of a charismatic interaction” (Nicolai Sinai) is from
conventional Islamic and Western approaches: reading the Qur’an as a homog-
enous, post-​redactional corpus, as muṣḥaf39 (the “outer communication level”),
one has to translate the verse cited above (Q 2:2), dhālika l-​kitābu lā rayba fīhi
hudan li-​l-​muttaqīn, as “This [i.e., the Qur’an] is the scripture in which is no
doubt, a right guidance to the God fearing”; reading it however as a testimony of
the proclamation process, the “inner communication level,” one will take kitāb
to mean not the Qur’anic corpus, but rather the heavenly scripture reclaimed by

34.  Cf. in detail Zwettler, Oral Tradition, 174, note 15.

35.  Cf., e.g., Kopf, “Religious Influences,” 48, cited in Kellermann, “Die ‘Mündlichkeit’ des Koran,” 3.
36.  Kellermann, “Die ‘Mündlichkeit’ des Koran,” 3.
37. Ibid.
38.  The further text-​immanent level of communication, generated by rhetorical effects, in which a divine
speaker turns to a Prophetic recipient—​and occasionally also directly to the remotely addressed listeners—​needs
to remain outside our scope.
39.  See Madigan, The Qurʾān’s Self-​Image.
116  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

the Prophet as a “template of revelation”:  “That is the [heavenly] scripture, no

doubt is in it, a right guidance for the God fearing.”40 The text read in this way has
been reconfigured from an already closed “book”, the “Qur’an)”—​present here
and now—​to an open text that is still on its way to closure. The canonic “mis-​
reading” of this important verse is not, however, arbitrary. If we set the Fātiḥa
aside as an introductory prayer and look past the introductory letter names alif
lām mīm, the verse presents the first pronouncement of the Qur’an. It can easily
be comprehended that, understood in this sense by the redactors after the death
of the Prophet, appeared as particularly suited for the beginning of the codex,
where it can fulfill the function of an expressive dedication of what the Qur’an
book that has become the substitute for the voice of the proclaimer addressing
the already constituted community.41

3.3  The Conversation with the Older

Traditions: Stations of Community Formation

Certainly, the pre-​canonic Qur’an formally is almost consistently the speech of

a divine “I” or “we” addressing the proclaimer—​“you”; but, as in an overheard
telephone conversation, the situation in which the conversation takes place can
be reconstructed easily from the fragments of speech that are heard. In view of
the plurality of actors that participate in this Qur’anic drama, the text becomes
polyphonic; for alongside the addressed speaker Muhammad, individuals and
groups of hearers are pictured as present in the text or at least spoken of in their
absence. These persons and groups are for their part involved in debates that are
not always explicitly divulged in the text, but without knowledge of which the
innovativeness of the Qur’anic position remains obscure.
Let us take three simple examples: in the Qur’an, Jesus is identified as ʿĪsā ibn
Maryam, “Jesus, Son of Mary.” Since other prophets appear without genealogical
distinction, such a reference should not be strictly necessary for Jesus. Clearly
what is occurring is a “theological correction,” a replacement, recognizable to
the hearers, of the Christian title “Jesus son of God,” a title that—​being a clear
confessional designation—​did not fit with the new strict monotheism. Without
this title—​which is eliminated and reformulated for the hearers—​Jesus can be ac-
cepted without problems among the biblical prophets by the universally oriented
community. An even more striking parallel case is the Basmala, the wording of
which, bi-​smi llāhi l-​raḥmāni l-​raḥīm, “In the name of God, the compassionate
merciful,” is a clear reworking of the Christological formula of invocation “In the
name of the Father and the Son and Holy spirit.” Both the Qur’anic designation of

40.  It should not be surprising that the translations usually undergird the distant deictic reference to the “scrip-
ture,” which is presented as already existing, through renditions with “this is” (Paret).
41.  Neuwirth, “Structural, Linguistic and Literary Features.”
 The Qur’an and History  117

Jesus and the new coinage of an Islamic invocation formula, are samples of com-
munal interpretive history. A further example would be the “preserved tablet,”
al-​lawḥ al-​maḥfūẓ (Q 85:22): in the Qur’an, unlike in the Hebrew Bible and the
Jewish tradition, there is no mention of two tablets written exclusively for Moses’s
covenant with God, but rather of a single tablet preserved in heaven42 as textual
support of the revelation. This tablet, unlike the tablets of Moses, does not suffer
destruction within history, but rather remains “preserved” in the transcendent
realm. It also enjoys universal authority; contrary to the Jewish tradition, since
it is not an elected people of God but rather all men who obtain the writing
preserved on the tablet. Although this tablet is already known from the biblical
apocryphon of the Book of Jubilees, the express qualification as “preserved”
should be read as an intentional Qur’anic response to the biblical tradition.
A similar innovation emerges in the phrasing of the Islamic creed in sura 112,
“The true belief,” which has already been cited. Its opening verse, “Speak: God
is one,” qul huwa llāhu aḥad, is a free translation of the Jewish creed “Hear
Israel: the Lord, our God, is One,” shemaʿ Yisraʿel adonai elohenu adonai eḥad
(Dtn 6:4), the key word of which “one,” eḥad, still resounds in the Qur’an text in
its Arabic shape, aḥad. This audible citation across linguistic borders underlines
all the more clearly the Qur’anic turn—​signalized through qul, “speak!,” directed
to all mankind—​from a national to a universal cult.43 It is interesting that this dis-
covery has also been made in recent Turkish Qur’an research by Mehmet Paçacı,44
but it is not attributed in his work to the innovation of the Qur’an but rather is
seen as an indication of the continuity of local traditions. Paçacı sees in the “ci-
tation” not an engagement between the Qur’an and an individual older text but
rather a manifestation of the monotheistic “Semitic religious tradition,” which
is presupposed by Paçacı to be a constant. The novelty of the Qur’an, the social
handling and new theological formulation of older texts, thus remains obscured.
One thus avoids the fundamental question of how far the Qur’anic communi-
cation process reflects the theological intentions of the community itself—​for
example, the intention to “counter” a tradition already firmly founded by the
surrounding religions, in order to set up its own new formulation according
to its developing theology. Investigations of the Qur’anic intertexts have so far
not attempted to take into account the dialectical engagement of the commu-
nity with older traditions. Yet the Qur’anic new formulations are, according to

42.  This source of authority exhibits an affinity with the important divine book of accounts or registers the
book of Jubilees (second century bce), which also exists in a competitive relationship with Mosaic writing on the
tablet. This intertext still remains relevant for the later period, where the divine “original” is denoted as kitāb, “scrip-
ture”; cf. chap. 8, 285–​286.
43.  See Sinai and Neuwirth, “Introduction”; cf. chap. 13, 472–​475.
44.  Paçacı, “Sag: Gott ist ein einziger.” On more recent Turkish Qur’an theology overall, see Körner, Revisionist
Koran Hermeneutics. While attempts at contextualization seem to be missing in Arabic Qur’an scholarship, they
have been taken up with great enthusiasm in Iranian scholarly circles, especially within the Merkaz-​e Adyan in
Qom, as a lecture tour by the supervisor of the Berlin project Corpus Coranicum in 2007 demonstrated.
118  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

our hypothesis, stations within a communal formation, milestones along the way
from a post-​biblical syncretism to a Qur’anic theology of its own.45
If one does not deal with the connections between individual versions of
respective themes received in the Qur’an, then what is historically new in the
accentuations of the Qur’an remains unrecognized. The purposeful pronounce-
ments of the Qur’an lose their pungency and their direction of impact to become
monotonous to the outside reader. For the Muslim reader, who reads the Qur’an
as a canonical text and as the founding document of an already established, ex-
clusivist religion, the prophetic politics of universalization documented in the
text belong to a history that is already decided, and thus is without great impor-
tance for the perception of the Qur’an. The aura of a victorious religion that sur-
rounds the Qur’an, and its status as the immediate self-​communication of God,
do not encourage the reconstruction of its historical unfolding. The critical re-
searcher will however recognize the “prophetic politics” reflected in the text as
one of the discursive strategies that can help explain the wondrous success of the
Qur’an in history.
In contrast to the fixed canonical codex, the pre-​canonic Qur’an should be
understood as the transcript of a communication process, an ensemble of texts
that have their Sitz im Leben in a public and audibly pronounced performance
(qurʿān). These performance texts document the results of theological debates
carried out within this very community. It is not that the proclaimer “devel-
oped himself ” as an individual (as conventional Western research sees it), but
rather that debates in the community took shape. In this process a consensus
emerges concerning particular messages; whose evaluations of individual figures
therefore do not require justification when the texts are recited again by the pro-
claimer. This is clearly reflected in the figure of Satan, who first occurs as Iblīs,
“Diabolos,” in much the same sense of the Satan figure of the Book of Job, en-
tertaining a dialectic relation to God and ambivalent in many respects, and who
is later slips into the role of the New Testament Satan, as a manifestation of evil,
the dualist opposite to God.46 The community at this stage has agreed on an ex-
clusively negative understanding of the figure in the sense of the Christian Satan.
Such a result of community formation can also be recognized in the stratagem
of the clausula that becomes frequent in the middle and late Meccan periods,
forms such as inna l-​llāha l-​ʿazīzu l-​ḥakīm, “God is the powerful, the wise,” which
reflect a consensus reached by the community in their image of God as a ubiq-
uitous power.47
Yet another striking textual characteristic can be added:  textual correc-
tions, which can occasionally already be observed in Mecca, but which become

45.  See chap. 8, 278–282.

46.  Neuwirth, “The Qur’ān, Crisis and Memory.”
47.  See chap. 13, 472–477.
 The Qur’an and History  119

frequent in Medina. As the community broadens and over time comes to include
Jews among the hearers in Medina, certain recitation texts turn out to be in need
of later revision and expansion. The Medinan expansions of Meccan suras, many
of which were first studied by Nöldeke and Schwally, have frequently been treated
as simple additions, evidence of later states of knowledge, or even as bothersome
interruptions of the flow of suras, but rarely considered as evidence for the con-
tinual process of community formation.48 Yet the “additions” clearly attest to new
religious-​political demands: the presentation of theologically significant episodes
of Israelite salvation history time and again needed to be deepened discursively
or to be revised. Such a revision was intended by the Medinan extension of the
Meccan narrative of the Golden Calf in sura 20, where, following an initial rec-
itation of the episode as an edifying story within a longer Moses cycle, a strong
interpretive point is added to it in Medina. In its extended Medinan form, which
in individual formulations evokes the Jewish Yom Kippur liturgy, it is reread
through a new theologically significant interpretation, which accommodates the
discourse of sin and guilt which in Jewish tradition is bound up with notions of
history.49

3.4  History Discourse

3.4.1  Jāhilīya: Attaching Taboo to the Pagan Way of Life

The historical period in which Islam emerged is disputed in both Western and
inner-​Islamic research. We find a shibboleth in this period’s frequent designa-
tion as jāhilīya, namely, “(time of) ignorance,” a highly ambivalent concept in
the Islamic tradition that has not been unanimously explained in Western re-
search.50 Aaron Hughes has investigated the concept’s representation in recent
research and has criticized the persistent perception of this period as “separated
from Islam by a sealed border.”51 Etymologically, jāhilīya is a derivative of jahl
(“rashness”), the antonym of ʿilm (“level-​headedness”), and refers to excessive,
heroic zeal,52 so that jāhilīya came to mean a “time of barbarism.”53 In view of the
Qur’anic equation of the jahl of the pre-​Islamic heroes, their heroic passion, with
religious ignorance, jāhilīya has been understood in the Qur’an in the sense of

48.  Numerous later additions to the early suras were already recorded in the inner-​Islamic tradition. Nagel
attempted to show historic evidence for these additions They are, however, often not congruent with the additions
established in critical scholarship. In order to identify later expansions, one has to adhere to Nöldeke’s formal crite-
ria and systematically subject alleged additions to the same historic examination as those of all other Qur’an texts.
49.  Neuwirth, “Medinan Additions”; cf. chap. 10, 318–​324.
50.  Ultimately, see Rosenthal, Knowledge Triumphant,  31–​35.
51.  Hughes, “The Stranger at the Sea.”
52.  See Goldziher, “Was ist unter al-​Gāhilijja zu verstehen?” Cf. also the discussion in Hawting, The Idea of
Idolatry.
53.  A different etymology is suggested in Chabbi, Le Coran décrypté, 28–​29, which seeks to understand the
word in the sense of an inaccessible space auguring calamity.
120  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

“(time of) ignorance.”54 The word occurs in the Qur’an no more than four times,
always in the context of Medinan critiques of pagan emotionality or excessive
forms of behavior. In European translations, jāhilīya—​appearing as an abstract
term because of its -​īya ending—​is generally reproduced neutrally as “paganism.”
The four Qur’anic jāhilīya verses are as follows:

Then, after grief, he sent down to you safety and drowsiness,

which overcame a group of you,
indeed the people of another group
were anxiously occupied with themselves,
while they employed conjectures about God,
as one kept doing in paganism [jāhilīya], and said:
“Does something stand before us of the matter [for decision] (Q 3:154)

Do you wish for yourselves the modes of decision of paganism [jāhilīya]?

Who could better decide for people
who are convinced than God? (Q 5:50)

Remain (you women) in your house,

do not show yourselves off, as one was accustomed to do in paganism
[jāhilīya], perform the prayer. (Q 33:33)

(Then,) when the unbelievers let the impetuousness of paganism [jāhilīya]

penetrate their hearts,
upon which God sent down his sakīna [inner peace]
on his messengers and the believers
reminding them of the word of fear of God.
They deserved it truly and were worthy of it
God has knowledge of all. (Q 48:26)

Although the translation of jāhilīya as “paganism” may appear fit at first glance, in
the Qur’an the concept certainly had not yet acquired its later epoch-​referential
meaning, a sense that would presuppose the breakthrough of a new period that
had not yet occurred at the time of the proclamation. The translation as “pa-
ganism” is only legitimate under the presupposition of a canonized Qur’an that
has already “formed history,” so that the time before the proclamation could
be viewed as a “prehistory” that had already been overcome. But what did this
word mean for the proclaimer and his community, who were not yet aware of
this looming development? The only inner-​Qur’anic explanation is due to Franz

54. Wellhausen, Reste altarabischen Heidentums, 71,n1, already saw a correlation between jāhiliya and the
Pauline agnoia, the “days of ignorance” (Acts 17:30); so also Pines, “Jāhiliyya.” This Christian term may in fact have
been known and could have been transmuted into jāhiliya. But even if such a precursor was already available, the
pathos with which the term is used in the Qur’an (esp. in Q 48:26) points to a different understanding: less in the
sense of a temporal attribution than in a sense of an approach to life.
 The Qur’an and History  121

Rosenthal. He interprets the ending -​īya as a plural rather than abstract ending,
so that al-​jāhilīya would mean in all instances “the unknowing ones,” the “reli-
giously stubborn”—​in the Qur’anic context, a characteristic of the unbelievers.
Yet, given the special emphasis with which the morphologically unfamiliar word
is used in the cited verses, there seems “to be hidden a specific and more sig-
nificant connotation.”55 Rosenthal is struck by the categorical devaluation of a
clearly outmoded way of life, brought to expression by the word jāhilīya, and this
recalls for him a similar categorical devaluation of a culturally nonconforming
life mode encountered in post-​exilic Judaism. His proposed solution56 would be
to understand jāhilīya as an echo of the Jewish concept of galut, Aramaic galutha,
“exile,” “diaspora,” the articulation of which is similar to the new word formed
from the root j-​h-​l, being identical in two consonants.57 This calque, a neologism
integrating elements from two languages, could according to Rosenthal have

emerged at any time, since the usage of the widespread Jewish term does
not necessarily presuppose friendly or close contact with Jews. It is easy
to recognize the affinity between galut in the way in which it was un-
derstood by Jews and jāhilīya as the expression was likely understood by
Muhammad. In the Mishna, Avot 5:9, it is said that exile comes into the
world as a result of idolatry, unchastity (incest), and bloodshed. Exile is
a punishment for these sins, which however are not thereby repaid. Exile
remains therefore a situation in which these sins persist. . . . Galut thus
stands for the same characteristics of barbarism, lack of morals, and igno-
rance in face of the true God that Muhammad criticizes in the jāhilīya.58

Thus understood, the neologism jāhilīya would confirm the strategy that can be
observed already by the middle Meccan period, the linking of individual new
ideas to special and additional authority through connections to already estab-
lished religious discourses of the surrounding environment.
If one accepts this interpretation and pushes it yet further, the galut discourse
that is central to post-​exilic Judaism can hardly be overestimated as a counter-
part to the perception of jāhilīya: by way of this connection of the situation of
the unbelievers to the concept of an exclusion from salvation imposed by God,
the division between believers and unbelievers could evoke the notion of a deci-
sive point between epochs. In connecting itself through the keyword jāhilīya to
a Jewish historical dichotomy according to which there exists a condition that
needs to be viewed as absolutely negative and only used as a negative foil, not as

55. Rosenthal, Knowledge Triumphant, 33.

56.  For prior clarifying suggestions, see the discussion in ibid.; cf. also Tamer, Zeit und Gott, 6.
57.  Hebrew gimel, g, corresponds to the Arabic jīm, j.
58. Rosenthal, Knowledge Triumphant, 35, further underlines the connection of jāhiliya and sakīna, Hebr.
shekhina, in Q 48:26, which also has a precursor in rabbinic literature, see Avot de-​Rabbi Nathan: “As long as Israel
commits these sins, the shekhina will stay far away from the Jews.”
122  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

a historical time relevant in itself, the Qur’anic community laid the basis for the
ostracizing of the prehistory of Islam. But reservations regarding Rosenthal’s in-
terpretation remain. It is striking that the community itself did not fully exploit
the polemical potential of this distinction. Mentions of jāhilīya in the Qur’an are
limited to no more than four pronouncements, all closely bound up to situation
and context, and not at all programmatic.
The construct of jāhilīya was to prevail for only a short period. As is well
known, the verdict against the “pagan” past suggested by the Qur’an held only
for the first few Islamic generations, for whom al-​jāhilīya may have signified a
“an age of wrong belief, dominated by conflicting tribal interests and rivalries.”59
This position in the Umayyad and Abbasid periods gave way increasingly to a
new evaluation, in which jāhilīya stood for a “ past, where the Arabs were uni-
fied, in which the ‘true’ values of Arab ethnic identity were manifested, and even
emphasized as against Persian values.”60 It was only with later epochs, when the
Islamic religion was given top status as the uniting bond of society above and be-
yond Arabic nationality and culture, that the pendulum swung back in the other
direction.

3.4.2  Qur’an and Ancient Arabic Time: Qur’anic Answers

to the Images of History in Poetry
However insecure the boundaries of the preceding period might have been, it can
nonetheless be asserted that the self-​positioning of the new religious movement
in the continuum of time was an important concern of the community from an
early point. The entry into a history discourse indeed began long before an aux-
iliary construction for the demarcation was found in the name jāhilīya. It can
even be claimed that the initial discovery of an irreconcilable conflict between
pagan thought and that of the new movement had to do with a conflict between
two incompatible understandings of time. In a recent monograph, Georges
Tamer61 has discussed the connection between the ancient Arabic perception of
“all-​consuming time,” dahr, in the poetry, which is also reflected polemically in
the Qur’an, and earlier Greek and Hellenistic conceptions. In doing so, he has
brought to light an important “overlaying”: the role of the Hellenistic Aion, who
“turns the ages,” being superseded by the working of the one God, whose dis-
position over time is occasionally equally expressed through the metaphor of
turning. This trace should be pursued, since this paradigm shift does not exclu-
sively consist in the replacement of a cosmic or mythical figure by the personal
unique God. The Qur’anic engagement with the understanding of time of the

59.  Drory, “The Abbasid Construction,” 35.

60. Ibid.
61. Tamer, Zeit und Gott, 6. A new reflection on time in ancient Arabic poetry is offered in Dmitriev, Das
poetische Werk, 129–​139.
 The Qur’an and History  123

pre-​Islamic poets does not only manifest itself in supersession or polemic, nor
is it confined to descriptions of God’s dealing with the times of day and their
particular metaphors,62 although such examples are particularly striking. The ap-
plication of the new conception takes place above all in quite neutral, seemingly
“non-​discursive” contexts, which already imply the new understanding of time.
Because this has to do with the predominance of eschatological thinking and the
replacement of a cyclical understanding of time with a linear one, the argumenta-
tions are frequently embedded into eschatological contexts. Examples are found
already in the early Meccan period, for example, in sura 95, “The Fig Tree,” al-​tīn:

wa-​l-​tīni wa-​l-​zaytūn
wa-​ṭūri sīnīn
wa-​hādhā l-​baladi  l-​amīn
la-​qad khalaqnā l-​insāna fī aḥsani taqwīm
thumma radadnāhu asfala sāfilīn
illā lladhīna amanū wa-​ʿamilū l-​ṣāliḥati
fa-​lahum ajrun ghayru mamnūn
fa-​mā yukadhdhibuka baʿdu bi-​l-​dīn
a-​laysa llāhu bi-​aḥkami l-​ḥākimīn

By the fig tree and the olive tree

by Mount Sinai
and this [hādhā] secure city.
We created man in the most beautiful form
and brought him down to the lowliest measure.
But those who believe and do good,
for them is their deserved reward.
What then [fa-​mā] leads you still to lie about the judgment?
Is God not the most righteous judge?

The hymnic sura63 is one of the earliest Qur’an texts to give poetic form to the
new linear understanding of time. It begins with four oaths, which closer study
reveals to contain an implied notion of time: a pair of types of tree (or fruit) are
invoked, which figure as symbols of the divine abundance of creation, but also
as trees/​fruits emblematic of the Holy Land, thus referring to the biblical topo-
graphia sacra. What follows, also in pairs, is the naming of two places: Mount
Sinai64 and Mecca, which is recognizable from the deictic hādhā, “this.” As the

62.  Tamer cites Q 39:5 and Q 24:44 as convincing examples, Zeit und Gott, 209.
63.  On structure, see Neuwirth, Studien zur Komposition, 230.
64.  Ṭūr sinīn in place of saynāʾ, with the pronunciation sinīn compelled by the rhyme, is the Qur’anic
Arabization of an Aramaic toponym; see Jeffery, Foreign Vocabulary, 184–​185; the Aramaic ṭūrā de-​Sīnā—​the
common name of Mount Sinai for Jews and Christians—​appears in the Targum to the Song of Songs 8 as the site of
the conveying the divine teachings, in juxtaposition with the Mount of Olives, ṭūr zetāyā, the site of the resurrec-
tion. Traditional juxtapositions like this (see Horovitz, Koranische Untersuchungen, 123–​125) may resonate in the
124  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

parallelism with the place of revelation Sinai signalizes, Mecca is addressed

likewise as a sanctuary, the sacral inviolability of which is elsewhere expressly
highlighted (Q 106:4). The two oaths upon places combine two no longer com-
pletely parallel references to authority that are not wholly parallel, for while the
apparition on Sinai, which is a frequent them in early suras (Q 79:15ff., Q 53:36,
Q 87:19), is supported through a biblical narrative, the sacredness of Mecca is
vouched for only by the local cult of the rabb hādhā l-​bayt, the “Lord of this
[holy] house” (Q 106:3).65 Nevertheless, both constitute references to the divine
self-​communication in prehistoric times. A  pagan, ancient Arabic convention
of style, the oath cluster belonging to the discourse of the seer, is filled out with
biblical references (fig tree, olive tree, Mount Sinai), and is thus reclaimed for a
context that is biblically imprinted.
The oath pronouncement focusses as is frequent with the topos of the rep-
rimand of man (cf. Q 75:3, 80:17, 86:5, 90:4, 91:6, 100:6), in an assertion of the
weakness of “man,” insān,66 which here refers to an instability not to be blamed
on man himself but rather to one dependent on the creator: after the achieve-
ment of physical perfection, man-​falls prey to the frailty of age. Leaving the ad-
ditional verse 6 aside the closing pair of verses, presents a general exhortation to
the hearer, They compress what is said into an argument that draws the conclu-
sion (fa-​mā, “what then”) of the logical necessity of the Final Judgment.
Involved in this construction are, first, the notion of primordial time reach-
ing back to creation and the communication of divine teaching, then the limited
period of human life, and then finally the eschatological time of judgment. In
what relation do they stand together in the sura? There is no immediately evident
logical-​causal relation between the discursive elements suggested by the rhetor-
ical question “What lets you still lie about the judgment?” The relation becomes
clear only through the sequence of symbols,67 already schematic in the early
suras which starts with evocations of creation (here: figs /​fig tree, tīn, and olive
/​olive tree, zaytūn), to be followed by references to divine self-​communication
(here: Sinai and Mecca), and which have to be understood as initial scenes arous-
ing the expectation of corresponding concluding settings. Thus creation, which
in verse 1 is evoked with the image of the trees, ends necessarily with the end
of the created world, not alone with the death of the individual (verse 5), but
more generally with the resolution of the cosmos in the final day. Equally, the di-
vine self-​communication/​teaching highlighted with the Sinai reference in verse

Qur’anic oath cluster alluding to the covenant, verses 1–​2. Evocations of Sinai as an emblem of divine self-​revelation
are found in the early suras (see Q 61), even before Moses’s revelation was presented in narrative; on the Qur’anic
stories of Moses, cf. Speyer, Qoranische Erzählungen.
65.  Cf. on such authorization references chap. 5, 171–172.
66.  On this topos, see ibid.
67.  See Neuwirth, “Images and Metaphors.” Cf. also chap. 5, 166–​168.
 The Qur’an and History  125

2 necessarily requires the repayment of the pledge of knowledge through the ac-
counting at the end of times. A mention of the final day, which indeed follows
at the end of the sura (verse 7–​8), has therefore already been anticipated by the
hearer after the mention of creation and divine self-​communication.
The sura closes with a suggestive rhetorical question about God’s function
as judge. It reverses the empirically grounded verdict about the negative fate
of man hurrying to life’s end (verses 4–​5) introducing an element of God’s ac-
tive intervention: God cancels the end and grants to man a duration that goes
beyond death. This reversal of the sentence of mortality is also implemented
rhetorically: indeed, man sinks down to the “lowest measure” (literally: to the
“lowliest of the lowly”), but God, who already at the beginning of times worked
as creator and teacher, appears at the end of times as restorer of order, as judge
of all judges68—​the identical comparative construction in Arabic of both pro-
nouncements (verses 5 and 8) underlines their comparably secure truth. God
removes the power of cyclical time, according to which the end of mankind
brings death, while he extends linear time back into preexistence (khalaqnā, “we
created,” verse 4) and forward into eternity (dīn, “judgment,” verse 7). A “sacred
historical time,” an eschatologically determined term for mankind, has begun
with this teaching. It runs in opposition to his natural created lifetime in a non-​
cyclical way, and thus softens the threat of the physical end given by the accom-
plishment of the cycle.69

3.4.3  Sura 55: Qur’anic Answers to Biblical Images of History

While the time discourse in sura 95 appears as an already achieved position
embedded in a creation theology and does not seem to require explicit justifica-
tion against other points of view, there are also Qur’anic attestations of histori-
cally specific positions taking shape before the ears of the hearers, so to speak, in
contradistinction to existing models of thought. The example that is perhaps the
most striking for its intertextuality is the early Meccan sura 55, which engages a
widespread biblical text that is very prominent in the liturgy of the Jewish and
Christian traditions.
The sura, celebrated in Islam as ʿarūs al-​qurʾān, “bride of the Qur’an,” can for
its part be counted as one of the most poetic texts of the Qur’an. It presents a cen-
tral theological point, the complete symmetry of the divine order of creation, not

68.  On God’s function as a judge, see Rippin, “God.” God as judge is a common image in the Psalms: Psalms
67:5: “because you judge people with fairness”; Psalms 98:9: “because He comes to judge the earth; He will judge the
world righteously; and its people fairly.”
69.  The formulation of exception in verse 6 is revealed to be a post hoc addition through the excessive verse
length and the analytic construction. It expresses the audience expectations of a later period, when the faithful
listeners desired to be excepted from the negative judgment on man through a general eschatological reassurance.
The fact that these softening formulas collide semantically with the pronouncements of the sura and contrast with
its poetic character through its formulaic-​analytic style has been accepted only reluctantly; cf. chap. 5, 185–187.
126  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

only semantically but also grammatically, that is, morphologically, syntactically,

and tonally. It begins with a short hymn (Q 55:1–​4):

al-​Raḥmān
ʿallama l-​qurʾān
khalaqa l-​insān
ʿallamahu l-​bayān

The merciful
he taught the Qur’an
he created man
taught him understanding /​clear speech.

The conveyance of teaching (verse 2)  and the faculty for clear thought/​speech
(verse 4) on the one hand and of creation (verse 3) on the other are the two great
themes of the sura. While the text is dedicated semantically almost constantly
to creation or to its fulfillment in paradise, the secondary theme of teaching and
clear speech70 is unfolded less in argument than linguistically, by means of rhet-
oric. Balanced order is thus a characteristic of the signified, creation, as also of
the sign itself, language. Since the recital of the Qur’an itself counts as the most
sublime speech act, bayān, “clear speech,” can be understood above all as an evo-
cation of Qur’anic language, and the sura should be recognized as an exposition
of the interworking of khalq, “creation,” and qurʾān, “revelation, divine teaching.”
Two ideas invested in creation itself pervade the sura: the symmetrically balanced
order that informs both the world, physis, and the medium of its hermeneutical
understanding, logos. The morphological dual form that pervades the entire sura,
though it is often judged pejoratively as merely ornamental in research, cannot be
disparaged in its form and functionality.
We thus have a text that is almost philosophical, which sets itself outside of
the communication scenario that is so frequently bound up with circumstances
in other Meccan texts of this period. It is not merely that the frequent refrain,
with its rhetorical questioning, is directed to the mythical dual group of men
and demons rather than to the historical hearers.71 In addition, the discursive
thread of the sura itself moves outside of worldly reality. The first part (verses
1–​13) summarizes the primordial work of creation, while the second part (verses
14–​36) contrasts the creation of men and demons and refers to potential reb-
els among the demons, who would rebel against the order of creation within its
cosmically determined limits. The eschatological ending (verses 37–​78) recalls
cursorily the “historical” liars (verse 43) but remains elsewhere devoted to the

70.  Bayān, literally “making clear,” “clarification,” can refer to thought as well as its articulation. On the pro-
logue to sura 55, see also chap. 2, 89–92.
71.  See Neuwirth, “Images and Metaphors.”
 The Qur’an and History  127

mythical ensemble of men and demons, who appear on the Final Day in the
situation of the judgment, where they are granted their verdict and retribution.
In this, the fate of the damned is only briefly glanced, while for the righteous
the place of their otherworldly bliss is painted with a detail unknown elsewhere,
employing a unique arsenal of stylistic means. This part, the double description
of paradise, forms the actual climax of the sura, as we shall see. The life in the
hereafter, occurring within a spatially imagined eternity, is the central theological
point of the sura.
A number of shared ideas and formulations, chiefly the unique antiphonic
structure of the sura, show that this text stands in an intertextual relation to
Psalm 136, which is also an antiphonic text. In sura 55, we not only have an exe-
getical reworking of this psalm but also a new theological reading, a counter-​text
intended as such, that deals above all with the psalmic understanding of time and
eternity and evaluates these anew. Already the characteristic that is most closely
bound to both texts, the refrain, is not identical. In the psalm it is an assurance of
providence, ki le-​ʿolam ḥasdo, “for in eternity shall be his grace.” In the Qur’an it
takes the form of a rhetorical question with a triumphant tenor, directed to crea-
tion as a whole, both men and demons: fa-​bi-​ayyi ʾalāʾi rabbikumā tukadhdhibān,
“Which of the signs of your Lord will the two of you two deny?” God’s grace is
here not a promise for eternity but rather a reality, which can be “read” out of the
signs of creation.72
Both texts at first unfold semantically in close relation to each other, as their
beginning parts treat creation. But then the sequence of thoughts of the sura
turns away from that of the psalm, which engages in a detailed recollection of
history. A number of divine interventions, acts of the annihilation of enemies,
are enumerated, whose salvific impact on the addressed confirms the truth of
the promise of divine providence that is pronounced in the refrain. Historical
recollection as a warrant of divine promise, as assurance of providence, had also
played a role at the start of the proclamation, when historical memory shared
with the pagan Meccans could still be set forth (e.g., sura 105).73 With the shift
toward the eschatological future, and with the appearance of the proclaimer as a
prophetic speaker in the strict sense, history presents itself in retrospect, in light
of the perception of contingency now standing at the center, no longer as worthy
of trust but rather as a sequence of episodes of human failure that have brought
about divine acts of punishment.
Although sura 55 remains beholden throughout to the refrain structure given
by the psalm, it develops into a counter-​text in its crucial section: it sets a dia-
metric opposite against the psalmic historical memory, offering a future projec-
tion and eschatological description that, following the principle that permeates

72.  Cf. chap. 7, 264–​277.

73. Ibid.
128  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

the sura of demonstration of symmetry, is further dominated by pairs. The fig-

uration of the “two gardens,” jannatān (verse 62), connected to two further gar-
dens, is not, as some critics claim, a result of the compulsion of rhyme74 but rather
depends on a stylistic convention of ancient Arabic poetry that employs dual
descriptions of place to express the vastness of space; jannatān signifies—​as some
native Arabic philologists have pointed out75—​“gardens upon gardens, endless
gardens.” As an illustration of the two paradise descriptions that are unfolded in
the sura, verses 46–​61 and verses 62–​78, we present the latter:

wa-​min dūnihimā jannatān

fa-​bi-​ayyi alāʾi rabbikumā tukadhdhibān
mudhāmmatān
fa-​bi-​ayyi alāʾi rabbikumā tukadhdhibān
fīhimā ʿaynāni naḍḍākhatān
fa-​bi-​ayyi alāʾi rabbikumā tukadhdhibān
fīhimā fākihatun wa-​nakhlun wa-​rummān
fa-​bi-​ayyi alāʾi rabbikumā tukadhdhibān
fīhinna khayrātun ḥiṣān
fa-​bi-​ayyi alāʾi rabbikumā tukadhdhibān
ḥūrun maqṣūratun fī l-​khiyām
fa-​bi-​ayyi alāʾi rabbikumā tukadhdhibān
lam yaṭmithhunna insun qablahum wa-​lā l-​jānn
fa-​bi-​ayyi alāʾi rabbikumā tukadhdhibān
muttakiʾīna ʿalā rafrafin khuḍrin wa-​ʿabqarīyin ḥiṣān
fa-​bi-​ayyi alāʾi rabbikumā tukadhdhibān
tabāraka smu rabbika dhī l-​jalāli wa-​l-​ikrām

And aside from these are two gardens.

Which of the signs of your lord will the two of you deny?
Of thick green.
Which signs of your Lord will the two of you deny?
Therein are two rich over-​bubbling springs.
Which of the signs of your lord will the two of you deny?
Therein are fruit trees, palms, and pomegranates.
Which of the signs of your lord will the two of you deny?
Therein are young girls, good, lovely—​
Which of the signs of your lord will the two of you deny?

74. Nöldeke, Geschichte des Qorans, 1:30: “If for example in sura 55 there is mention of two heavenly gardens,
two types of fruits, and two further similar gardens, one sees clearly that the dual form is used on account of the
rhyme”—​a passage that is taken over by Schwally unaltered in GdQ2, 40. Nöldeke repeated his assessment in 1910 in
Neue Beträge zur semitischen Sprachwissenschaft, 9: “Rhyme necessitates the heavy dual forms in sura 55.”
75.  See Neuwirth, “Symmetrie und Paarbildung.”
 The Qur’an and History  129

With black eyes, shielded in tents—​

Which of the signs of your lord will the two of you deny?
Which no man or demon has ever touched—​
Which of the signs of your lord will the two of you deny?
Leaning on beautiful green cushions
Lying there on abqari tapestries.
Which of the signs of your lord will the two of you deny?
Praised be the name of your lord, full of majesty and honor.

3.4.4  Sura 55: Qur’anic Answers to Historically Specific Aporias

of Ancient Arabic poetry
The vision of the ultimate future in sura 55 is surprising in its closeness to worldly
scenes. The striking references to civilization in the praising of paradise, verses
70–​76, require an explanation. Josef Horovitz76 has explained such references to
material luxury as the “green cushions,” and “abqari tapestries,” and the presence
of beautiful young women (verses 70–​74) in relation to the contemporary ap-
preciation of banquets, and above all the poetic descriptions of wine drinking.
But sensory pleasure in a promised hereafter is in no way unique to the Qur’an.
Early church fathers such as Irenaeus of Lyon (around 140–​200) claimed that the
interaction between the sexes will persist in paradise77. The paradise hymns of
the Syriac theologian and poet Ephrem (306–​373) although not explicit are also
clearly erotically encoded.78 But mere reference to literary models for individual
images does not suffice to explain the particular interweavings of nature, eroti-
cism, and civilization in the Qur’anic paradise. Indeed, ancient Arabic descrip-
tions of wine drinking occur without reference to luxuriant nature, and Ephrem’s
paradise hymns are without references to civilization. Yet all three elements do
play a central role within pre-​Islamic poetry: in the nasīb, the nostalgic opening
part of the ancient Arabic long-​form poem (the qasida).
The paradise description in sura 55 is thus not only an answer to the psalmic
presentation of the presence of God as lord of history that is expressed in Psalm
136. It is above all an engagement with late antique traditions that can be found
in texts lying closer to the Qur’an in time. The references to Ephrem’s paradise
hymns are unmistakable, although these still require systematic study. But the
sura is equally close to ancient Arabic scenes, though less to the poetic banquet
scenes assumed by Horowitz than to the situation presented in the nasīb, the
complaint of the poet on the ruins, the aṭlāl. For only this scenario makes recur-
ring reference to the entire trio of nature, erotics, and civilization. Not only do

76.  Horovitz, “Das koranische Paradies.”

77.  See McDannell and Lang, Heaven, 47–​68, who contrasts the representative of the sensual pleasures of par-
adise, Irenaeus of Lyon, with the ascetic Augustine of Hippo (354–​430).
78.  See Beck, Ephräms Paradieshymnen.
130  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

beautiful young women play a role there, so do the luxury objects found in the
paradise description, pillows and tapestries, which are among the accessories of
the litters carrying the women of the tribe, among whom is found the beloved
praised by the poet for her beauty, who disappears from his sight on the morning
of parting. What is present in the paradise description are objects of longing of
the ancient Arab poet as well. But above all, it is his poetic location, the space of
earlier social interaction that is now desolate, that serves as the trigger for the
poetic complaint of the past that has found an inverted image of the luxurious
and festive scenario of the banquet in paradise. While the poetic banquet scenes
merely depict a moment of temporary pleasure that also includes elements dis-
approved of by the Qur’an,79 the nasīb scenario stands closer discursively to the
Qur’anic paradise descriptions: the Qur’an takes up the poet’s complaint of the
past and transfers it—​with clear reference to the nasīb topos of complaint about
the loss of socially animated nature, erotics, and civilization—​into a praise of
immortality.
In sura 55 and Psalm 136 we have two contrasting texts about divine power
and God’s administering of care toward created beings. The psalm has to do
with God’s creation and preservation, and the election of his people throughout
time and history. The sura pertains to creation and worldly preservation as
well, but is substantially concerned with the restoration of lost communication
and historical reflection. While the psalm sees the proof of the divine presence
in the dramatics of salvation and annihilation, in the Qur’an it is the sensible
order of creation that stands at the center, and of which the verbal presenta-
tion of the proclamation is itself the proof.80 Putting it in a pointed way one
might say: the sura has less to do not with historical memory as such than with
hermeneutics.
The new Qur’anic reading of Psalm 136 thus marks a reversal of the direc-
tion of impact in history and inner-​worldly time, in favor of eschatology and
hermeneutics—​God-​man interaction consists primarily not in divine interven-
tion in social-​political life but rather in a sharing of signs, the verbal announce-
ment of revelation, and the “figurative handwriting” of creation. This kind of
self-​referentiality is foreign to the psalm. But the Qur’an, the product of an age of
rhetoric, is not confined to hymnic speech, but rather orchestrates, together with
the praising of God as the creator and teacher, a depiction of the triumphant idea
of verbal virtuosity reachable in Arabic, and thus implicitly praises the herme-
neutic sensibility of the historical community of hearers.

79.  The uninhibited speech (laghwun wa-​lahwun) favored in that setting is a target of Qur’anic criticism, see Q
88:11, 78:35, 56:25, 19:62. Still, the cups, wine, and musk that are attributed to the banquet may be reminiscences of
the poetic feast descriptions cited by Horovitz.
80.  Neuwirth, “Form and Structure of the Qur’ān.”
 The Qur’an and History  131

3.5  History in the Qur’an

3.5.1  Al-​Umam al-​Khāliya: The “Lost Peoples”

How does the Qur’an view the history that preceded the proclamation? In view
of the “canonical process”81 which is at work in the Qur’an and the plural dis-
courses that develop in succession within it, the question must be addressed on
several levels. At the beginning of the development stands the conception of the
divine assurance of providence, which derives from divine care experienced on
the personal level and intervention on the social level, as well as trust in the fur-
ther preservation and caretaking of God.82 But this discourse, which stands in the
psalmic tradition and counteracts the ancient Arabic worldview with its notion
of the “contested” and always threatened space, is superseded already in early
Mecca by a discourse based on eschatological visions, which are typologically
more Prophetic. In the center of this stands contingency, the reality of the order
of nature that is revocable at any time, and which was previously celebrated as
safe and supported by God. In this context, the punishment legends, the stories
of the “past/​lost/​by-​gone peoples,” al-​umam al-​khāliya, and the “messengers”
mursalūn, sent to them, who call out for a pure faith in unity of God but do not
prevail, play a central role. Here the Qur’an presents, as Tarif Khalidi has put it, “a
landscape where time is less a chronology than a continuum.”83 It is nonetheless
a continuum in which mankind is offered a kairos, unique point in time to make
a fateful decision.
The histories of the peoples of the peninsula who were obliterated by punish-
ment due to their refusal to accept belief in one God have been treated in the ex-
emplary study by Josef Horovitz.84 They occur in the Qur’an above all in the early
Meccan period, but are later called to mind again and again.85 All of them must
have been familiar to the hearers from oral tradition, as allusions to such legends
occur also in ancient Arabic poetry.86 As some of these legends are localized in
the further surroundings of the community, their traces can serve as empirically
founded instructions. The events reported in the stories ultimately reflect the sit-
uation of the proclaimer in his milieu and are meant to influence the decisions
required in reality by the hearers. Empirically perceptible “archaeology” finds a
theological interpretation in the Qur’an: ruins take on an explanation, supported
by the senses, as monuments of human moral failure in history. Together, the

81.  See the introduction, 22–​25.

82.  Cf. chap. 7, 244–​247.
83. Khalidi, Arab Historical Thought, 8.
84. Horovitz, Koranische Untersuchungen; see also the study by Marshall, God, Muhammad and the Unbelievers,
39–​115.
85. Wansbrough, Quranic Studies, 20–​25, bases his theory of a later Qur’an compilation from separate, indi-
vidual traditions inter alia on the frequent repetitions of these stories.
86.  See Hoyland, Arabia and the Arabs, 223–​224.
132  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

punishment legends give expression to the biblical perception exemplified by the

tower of Babel, that hubris before God cannot be maintained.
Yet unlike the case in Gen 11, it is not alleged to al-​umam al-​khāliya that
they intended, as did their arrogant predecessors, to make a name for them-
selves; rather, they simply behaved out of folly, out of arrogated “independence.”
The Qur’anic reference to the ruins of the predecessors goes beyond referring to
an intended moralist lesson. The model of al-​umam al-​khāliya and its centrality
can only be adequately explained if one sets it in the context of ancient Arabic
poetry—​concretely, if one connects it, as was proposed for the description of
paradise, to the central motif of the nasīb, the description of the aṭlāl, the weath-
ered traces of earlier encampments. The speech of the poet standing nostalgically
before these ruins opens to an aporia that is even often made explicit, the ques-
tion of the whereabouts of the inhabitants of the historical past, the ubi sunt qui
ante nos in mundo fuere?87 One might hold that the question that remains open
in the poetry finds an answer in the Qur’an. Certainly, the earlier inhabitants of
the peninsula are not identical to the poetry’s vanished inhabitants of former
settlements, who were forced to follow the climatically conditioned nomadic
cycles of movement and to disband at the new year, thus abandoning their places
and disrupting former amorous interactions, breaking their emotional and so-
cial bonds. But the standpoint of each of these respective observers is similar, as
in both cases he stands before abandoned traces of former social life. Indeed, in
the Qur’an the earlier occupants of the space have themselves brought about the
necessity of their disappearance and obliteration, for, as the punishment legends
clearly evince, they missed their chance to turn back, their kairos. The viewing of
their traces in the Qur’an is thus not the trigger of individual melancholy, as in
the poetry, but rather an incentive toward critical self-​reflection concerning the
fate of the collective.
The histories of destruction are not—​as in the biblical histories of the de-
struction of the enemies of Israel—​primarily proofs of the divine power to in-
tervene in history, nor are they primarily divine assurances of God’s continuous
caretaking out of loyalty to an elected people; indeed, the histories mention no
salvation of the community’s forebears. Their positive message lies elsewhere.
Punishment stories in the Qur’an are at the same time stories of the triumphs
of those who remain steadfast. The godly messengers involved in the respective
events, predecessors of the proclaimer, triumph even if their mission remains
unsuccessful; they are saved through divine interference and—​in a later phase—​
raised up to become part of the liturgical memory of the community, their
names receiving a eulogistic epithet, such as salāmun ʿalā Nūḥin, “peace upon
Noah” (cf. Q 37:79, 109, 120, 130). Through their persistence, the messengers

87.  See Becker, “Ubi sunt qui ante nos in mundo fuere?”
 The Qur’an and History  133

convert the virtue of “bravery,” ḥamāsa, which was practiced excessively and
sporadically by the ancient Arabic hero, into “patience,” ṣabr, mitigating but also
extending it. Ṣabr becomes a “cardinal virtue” of the Qur’anic community; the
punishment legends are therefore also exempla of patient persistence.88 Even if
this role of the godly messenger is only implied in sura 91, “The Sun,” nonethe-
less the unnamed godly messenger stands implicitly in this sura as the typus of
the patient man (Q 91:1–​15):
wa-​l-​shamsi wa-​ḍuḥāhā
wa-​l-​qamari idhā  talāhā
wa-​l-​nahāri idhā jallāhā
wa-​l-​layli idhā yaghshāhā
wa-​l-​samāʾi wa-​mā banāhā
wa-​l-​arḍi wa-​mā  ṭaḥāhā
wa-​nafsin wa-​mā sawwāhā
fa-​alhamahā fujūrahā wa-​taqwāhā
qad aflaḥa man zakkāhā
wa-​qad khāba man dassāhā

kadhdhabat Thamūdu bi-​ṭaghwāhā

idhi nbaʿatha ashqāhā
fa-​qāla lahum rasūlu llāhi nāqata llāhi wa-​suqyāhā
fa-​kadhdhabūhu fa-​ʿaqarūhā
fa-​damdama ʿalayhim rabbuhum bi-​dhanbihim fa-​sawwāhā
wa-​lā yakhāfū ʿuqbāhā

By the sun and the early morning

and the moon when it follows it.
By the day, when he lets it shine,
and the night when he covers it.
By the heavens and that which built it,
and the earth and that which spread it out.
By a soul and that which formed it
And gave it its disloyalty and its piety!
Blessed it the man who keeps it pure!
Woe to him who tramples on it!

The Thamud lied in their rebelliousness

when the wretched one appeared among them.
For the messenger of God said to them:
“God’s camel, let her to drink”

88. Cragg, The Event of the Qur’ān, 158.

134  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

But they called him a liar and threw it to the ground.

Your Lord came over them for their sin
And made them the same as the face of the earth,
Without fearing the consequences.

The two-​part sura prepares the way for the narrative with an eight-​verse oath
series (part 1: verses 1–​8). Although this series seems from its content to have
no reference to the punishment legends that follow, it offers the structural key
for an interpretation that goes beyond the mere moralistic message. It consists
entirely of contrasting or complementary pairs, so that the liturgical idea evoked
by the naming of the prayer time of ḍuḥā (cf. Q 91:1, 79:29),89 and thus a human
participation in the divine unity, is first hidden by the wealth of opposites within
creation: after the contrast in the cosmic domain of heavenly bodies (verses 1–​4)
and of heaven and earth (verses 5–​6), which is at first conveyed neutrally, that is,
shown without moral implications, the various contrary inclinations of man are
thematized as part of the divine work of creation (verses 7–​8). In that the oppo-
site pairs can be read at the same time as mutual completions representing the
divine work of creation in its totality, the ambivalent final oath verse fa-​alhamahā
fujūrahā wa-​taqwāhā, “and gave it its disloyalty and its piety” obtains a posi-
tive connotation: “God has put into the soul [the choice between] disloyalty and
piety.” Only on account of this freedom can man choose for himself. But if the
catalogue that becomes moral toward its end owes its impact above all to the con-
trast, it increases the tense expectation of the hearer for a breaking of the chain
of contrasts, until finally opening into the oath pronouncement (verses 9–​10). It
contains a liberating exclamation of benediction over those who have made the
right choice between the options of the relevant pair of contrasts90 and an evoca-
tion of woe for the thoughtless ones.
The punishment legend that ensues in the second part (verses 11–​15), the ear-
liest Qur’anic example of this genre, is not an isolated moral narrative, but rather
demonstrates the ambivalence of human creation evoked in the oath cluster in
a concrete event. The story, which may have been in circulation in pre-​Islamic
times as a familiar local legend regarding a cultic sacrilege of the Thamudians
(Thamūd),91 obtains in the Qur’an a theological point. Here the offense, the sac-
rilegious slaughter of a consecrated camel, is presented in connection with the
punishment-​legend topos of rebelliousness against the messenger of God. The
sacrilege is a hostile act against the messenger of God, who—​probably in re-
sponse to his sermon—​is accused of lying (verse 14). Sacrilege and defamation
are paid for with the destruction of the insubordinate people.

89.  Cf. chap. 5, 172–173.

90.  Neuwirth, “Images and Metaphors.”
91.  Bencheikh, “Iram ou le clameur de Dieu.”
 The Qur’an and History  135

But at the same time, the legend is presented in service of an argument. It is

an exemplum of the false choice between the contrasting possibilities offered in
the oath statement: “Blessed is the man, who keeps it [the soul] pure! Woe to the
man, who tramples on it!” (verses 9–​10). For it attests the refusal of the purifica-
tion of the “soul,” nafs. This purification (verse 9) is no purely individual act; it
is at once a contribution to the safeguarding of the structures of creation. For in
view of the extensive and increasingly moralistic catalogue of contraries, the pu-
rification comes to seem like a liberating interference into the chain of contraries,
which can only be broken if its ambivalence (verses 8–​10) is canceled by the in-
sertion of a positive position free of contrast.92 This and the contrary decision are
both eschatologically relevant, as both final calls aim toward the evaluation in the
hereafter of those deciding in the here and now, who must decide (verses 9–​10).
In that the legend demonstrates the failure to realize at the moment of deci-
sion, the kairos, initiated in the oath statement, which had been evoked again in
the call of the messenger of God (verse 13), it throws a threatening light onto
the situation of the hearers who refuse the message of the proclaimer, to whom
a kairos, a chance for their own salvation, is opened.93 At the same time, the per-
suasive power, persuasio, that stems from the creation-​theological embedding of
the legend makes possible an insight into the dimension of meaning attached to
the acceptance of the message of the messenger, one that far exceeds the decision
for one’s personal well-​being.

3.6  Prophetic Succession, Counter-​H istory, and

Chronological History

This early punishment-​legend discourse, which is much more concerned with

the theological anchoring of the delivery of the message than with concrete his-
tory, and from which linear historical perceptions cannot be gleaned, is to be
distinguished clearly from a later conception that takes shape in the middle and
late Meccan phases of the Qur’an genesis.94 Here, a new paradigm is established,
which redirects the focus from the abandoned settlements in the present envi-
ronment to the area, familiar only through textual references, of the messengers
of God of the earlier Jewish and Christian traditions. The new center, which also
becomes the orientation point of the direction of prayer, is no longer the local
but rather the “distant” sanctuary, the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The biblical
messengers of God are now thematized increasingly clearly as a succession of
prophets, a firm sequence, which stems from Noah through Abraham, Moses,

92.  Neuwirth, “Images and Metaphors.”

93.  The messenger’s direct speech and the account of its disregard (verses 14 and 16) probably originally stood
together, so that the sura would have ended with the destructions of the Thamudians in verse 15; see Neuwirth,
Studien zur Komposition, 228–​229.
94.  Cf. chap. 8, 277–​279.
136  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

and Jesus and finally reaches down to the proclaimer himself. Their activities not
only fill out a scenario composed of a differentiated sequence of historical epi-
sodes, but also show a tendency toward chronological order. Their interactions
reflect concrete social experience and show themselves to be suited to serve as
representative examples for the behavior of the proclaimer and the community
in situations of crisis and, even more often, to offer a key to the understanding of
their own plight.95 Here, we can no longer speak only of the projection of one’s
own contemporary experience against the image of the past, which was represen-
tative for the earlier discourse; on the contrary, it is the experiences of the past
that becomes a model for the understanding of one’s own present. The commu-
nity, which now inscribes itself as a new people of God in the salvation history
of the earlier ones, selecting the Israelites led by Moses as a model and assuming
the prayer direction of Jerusalem, thus constructs a counter-​history in the face of
its own local tradition.
It must have been the diverse upheavals in connection to the wholly new sit-
uation in Medina that later introduced yet another turn in historical perception.
In the Medinan period, salvation history was displaced from the Holy Land to
the peninsula itself. Thus, the community left the biblical text world that it had
shared with the older religious groups, which held the Holy Land as the core of
its imagined topography. This was manifested outwardly in the changing of the
prayer direction from Jerusalem to Mecca.96 But above all, the change of direction
is reflected Medinan narratives. The central protagonist now is no longer Moses
but Abraham, who is set into relief as the founder of the Meccan sanctuary and
originator of the pilgrimage. The Kaaba and its rites now obtain a new dimension
of meaning from the perspective of the exilic community, and now require, since
Mecca has assumed the rank of an exilic sanctuary, a clear localization in the new
religious discourse characterized by Abraham’s worship of God.
Abraham thus acquires diverse new functions, among which his building
of the Kaaba and his founding of the pilgrimage take pride of place.97 His ap-
pearance as builder of the Kaaba in Mecca is neither biblical nor vouched for by
post-​biblical traditions, but is all the same vested with biblical authority, as the
Qur’anic report restages an Abraham-​Isaac scenario that is unfolded narratively
in the Jewish and Christian tradition but now links the story to Abraham and
Ishmael.98 The foundation of the Kaaba presents itself here on the one hand as
an analogue to the consecration of the Solomonic Temple and on the other hand
as corresponding to the establishment by Isaac and Abraham of the sanctuary
on Mount Moria, the site of the later Jerusalem Temple. It follows the model of

95.  Neuwirth, “Erzählen als kanonischer Prozess.”

96.  See chap. 9, 332–​337.
97. Sinai, Studien zur frühen Koraninterpretation, 135–​144.
98.  See chap. 11, 401–​404.
 The Qur’an and History  137

post-​biblical retellings of the Abraham-​Isaac story, but it alters it from a legitima-

tion story for the election of the descendants of Abraham through Isaac into an
etiology of the Arabian Meccan sanctuary, exchanging the persons of the heirs
of Abraham: the forefather of the Arabs, Ishmael, takes the place of Isaac, who in
Judaism heads the Abrahamic tradition.99 The Meccan sanctuary is thus a foun-
dation of Abraham, deemed to be universal, but which is bound up in salvation
history to the forefather of the Arabs. Its cultic legend corrects, so to speak, the
older versions of a sanctuary foundation involving Abraham and Isaac, so that
here we can speak of a renewed Qur’anic counter-​history, counter to the biblical
story followed earlier.
Finally, in Medina some verses also refer to actual history—​military victories
and defeats, and confrontations waged with learned Medinan Jews. Although
these historical memories describe these events as divine interventions, or at least
as being achieved with God’s help, they do not assume a form of presentation that
would be suitable to mold the reports into a narratively coherent history to be
preserved for all time in memory. What therefore remains remarkable—​and here
we agree with Fred Donner—​is the fact that despite the increasing interest in
history in the Qur’an, the events in which the community itself is involved at no
point crystalize into a grand narrative100 such as we can read in the Hebrew Bible
or its emulation in the Gospels. The Qur’an reflects no sequence comparable to
the biblical world drama,101 as could be further developed in liturgy into an an-
nual cycle of worship. A corresponding realization of history is thus also lacking
in the finally fixed Islamic cult.
But one’s own participation in history, with the entrance of the Qur’anic
community into the world of communities equipped with scripture, which was
achieved in Medina, was understood as an event of seismic dimensions:  law
anzalnā hādhā l-​qurʾāna ʿalā jabalin la-​raʾaytahu khāshiʿan mutaṣaddiʿan min
khashyati llāhi, “If we had sent down this Qur’an on a mountain, you would see it
falling and shattered from the fear of God” (Q 59:21).102 Such a triumphant con-
firmation of the authority-​giving revelation could hardly have been thinkable in
the earlier stages of the Qur’anic development. It marks a caesura in the percep-
tion of one’s own history.
In view of the still awaited historical conclusions that can only be gained
through a microstructural diachronic reading, it must be surprising that the value
of a chronological reading of the Qur’an is more often than not disputed or even
relinquished by historians.103 Certainly, one might agree with Marco Schöller’s

99.  Witztum, “The Foundation of the House.”

100.  Cf. chap. 9, 313–​316.
101.  Cf. chap. 6, 208–​212.
102. Khalidi, Arab Historical Thought, 7. The verse is Medinan.
103.  Rippin, “Muhammad in the Qur’ān”; see additionally the criticism in Marshall, God, Muhammad and the
Unbelievers,  8–​15.
138  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

assertion of the merely “accidental historicity of the Quranic pronouncement.”104

The Qur’an itself is not essentially interested in exterior chronology, but rather
in the sense of what is presented. But even if the Qur’an stands particularly far
from the model of a history book in comparison to the two other scriptures,
and even if it speaks above all paraenetically and increasingly raises the claim to
timelessness in the course of its development, it should be deemed all the more
remarkable how clearly it gives information about the history of perceptions, as
it relates stories from different perspectives, from varying dispositions of space
and time. Although the Qur’an draws no continuous history of its past and pre-
sent, still a history of the Qur’anic perspective, that is, of the changing view of
world and self of the proclaimer and his community, can well be constructed in
its rough outlines.

104. Schoeler, Exegetisches Denken,  8–​15.

 4

Redaction and History of the Text

4.1  History of Transmission up to

the Uthmanic Redaction

In the dispute being waged at present in the media and in some polemical writ-
ings about Islam over the “authenticity” of the transmitted Qur’an,1 skeptics in-
creasingly focus on the relevance of unpublished manuscripts that putatively
conceal revolutionary alternative forms of the Qur’an—​as if the relevance of the
text should stand or fall entirely on its early manuscript transmission. But the
Qur’an text, which is intensively poetic and shaped to fit memorization, was not
transmitted primarily in writing but above all orally—​indeed, even the standard
modern print edition of 1925 is based not on manuscripts but rather, as Gotthelf
Bergsträsser has expounded in a thorough investigation, on oral philological
tradition.2 The scholarly storm surrounding the origins of the Qur’an, with its
stubborn focus on manuscripts, thus comes to nothing. What it does demon-
strate is exaggerated skeptical zeal, widespread in general vis-​a-​vis Islamic cul-
tural achievements or claims which in this particular case casts doubts on the
community’s capacity to have achieved the unprecedentedly rapid collective
agreement on a textus ne varietur for the Qur’an. As John Reeves has recently
shown,3 such ultra-​rigorous standards could never be applied to the Hebrew
Bible—​where it has long been accepted that the Masoretic text, regarded canon-
ical since the Middle Ages, is neither the oldest nor the best transmitted text. Yet
no one would seriously throw doubt for that reason on the text of the Hebrew
Bible questioning its “authenticity.” Nor does the diversity of apocryphal gospels
from the second century onward,4 illuminated by international Bible scholarship
in the modern period, undermine the canonical New Testament’s status as an
authoritative corpus. A glance at the much more transparent state of the tradi-
tion of the Qur’an not only shows that no comparable spectrum of competing
traditions is involved, it moreover compels the insight that in the case of the

1.  The chapter is an extended and revised version of an account in Neuwirth, “Der Koran.” On the contempo-
rary debates, see Burgmer, Streit um den Koran, 82–​97; Ohlig, “Einleitung”; see also Marx, “Was ist eigentlich der
Koran?”
2.  Bergsträsser, “Koranlesung in Kairo.”
3.  Reeves, “Problematizing the Bible.”
4.  On the theological relevance of the Nag Hammadi findings, cf. Pagels, Fünftes Evangelium, and in general,
Ehrman, Lost Scriptures, and Ehrman, Lost Christianities.

139
140  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

Qur’an we are confronted with only one single tradition, which seems in neither
its oral nor its written transmission to have generated substantial variants. The
accusations raised in early Shiite circles against Qur’an redactors, alleging that
they suppressed alternative text forms, do not make up a valuable counterar-
gument.5 The arguments adduced in the Shiite sources—​claiming that explicit
mentions of persons from the Prophet’s family have been eliminated in the ca-
nonical edition—​are hardly convincing in view of the Qur’anic general tendency
to leave contemporary individuals unnamed. Two short individual suras ascribed
to Ubayy’s codex have already been shown by Nöldeke6 to be no more than epi-
gonal imitations of short Qur’an suras.
Our emphasis on the reliability of the tradition that has come down to us
with the Uthmanic text is not meant, however, to downplay the significance of
manuscripts, on which we must rely, primarily for the accurate orthographic re-
construction of the oldest text forms. In view of the primacy of the oral transmis-
sion and the still little developed codicological research, the following summary
presentation will sideline the issue of the manuscripts and deal primarily with the
literary manifestation of the oral tradition.7

4.1.1  The Qur’an at the Death of the Prophet

Any attempt to reconstruct the first processes of collection after the death of the
Prophet in the year 632 meets with problems in evaluating the reports of the in-
digenous transmitters. Though the individual hadith traditions contradict each
other in personal and chronological details,8 they share the zeal to highlight the
miraculous, which is acknowledged as immanent in the Qur’an, to be equally
involved in the initiative of the gathering of the Qur’an. Their presentation, ac-
cording to which the corpus for the first Qur’an collection was carefully carried
out under the supervision of the Prophet’s scribe Zayd ibn Thābit under the reign
of Abū Bakr (r. 11–​13/​632–​634) or ʿUmar (r. 12–​23/​634–​644), drawing from dis-
parate fragmentary materials such as palm stalks, potsherds, shoulder bones, etc.
and only secondarily from the memory of the hearers, cannot be maintained in
view of the results of literary analysis and must therefore be considered a strong
exaggeration.9

5.  See Brunner, Schia; Brunner, “Einige schiitische Stimmen”; Amir-​Moezzi and Kohlberg, Revelation and
Falsification.
6.  Nöldeke and Schwally, GdQ2, 2:33–​43.
7.  An intensive examination of the script traditions, in continuation of an older, intermittently interrupted
survey project, is underway in the Corpus Coranicum project. See “Handschriften,” 267–​273.
8.  The various traditions are discussed in Welch, “Kur’ān,” 404–​409; cf. also Nöldeke and Schwally, GdQ2, 1–​27.
See now also Motzki, “The Collection of the Qur’an.”
9. Burton, The Collection of the Qur’ān, argued that the Prophet intended to make final edits himself and must
have left behind a complete codex intended to be normative. The surviving accounts of a post-​Muhammad edition
have no real basis, but rather served to enable the uṣūl-​scholars to ascribe the legal practices not supported by the
vulgate text to the Koran, the first source of law. By appealing to auxiliary traditions—​following Burton—​these
traditions would have been postulated for just this purpose. However, Burton does not sufficiently address the
 Redaction and History of the Text  141

For Theodor Nöldeke,10 who first submitted the indigenous tradition to sys-
tematic critique, this exaggerated notion of fragmentedness offered a confirma-
tion of his own image of the suras as often secondary, redactional compositions.
Contrarily, the editor of his work, Friedrich Schwally,11 in his analysis of the suras
arrived at the conclusion that a large number of them should have received their
final form already from the Prophet himself, though Schwally did not go so far
as to see this as the norm. Nöldeke’s reservation, repeated also in other works,
against the sura as an originally intended unit remained decisive for research,
despite Schwally’s revision. Régis Blachère again adopted the theory of the sec-
ondary compilation of the suras in his Introduction au Coran12 and repeated it
in his Histoire de la littérature arabe.13 Arthur Jefferey, who produced multiple
summaries on the first collection of the Qur’an,14 favored the view that the suras
received their traditional divisions and composition only through the later re-
daction. Richard Bell, in his Introduction to the Qurʾān,15 does assume a written
fixing of a larger sura groups by the Prophet himself, and considers the written
recording of all revelations within his lifetime possible, but assumes in many
cases later reworkings by the Prophet himself or, more frequently, errant confla-
tions of doublets and authentic textual materials by the redactors. According to
his scenario the Prophet when reworking already proclaimed messages, replaced
obsolete passages with revised versions, the new version being written on the
back side of the old version, so that both versions were erroneously taken to
be equal parts of the sura and accepted into the collection one after the other.
Bell attempted by using typographical means in his Qur’an translation16 to make
recognizable this kind of putative secondary expansion of suras labelling them
“doublets.” According to his hypothesis as well, a large number of suras would
have to be considered accidental forms or haphazard conglomerates of single
revelations that were no longer recognizable in their original form. Focusing on
the pre-​redactional text, this problem can only be approached on the basis of
literary-​critical studies.17

fundamental issue, that the theory of abrogation does not only refer to controversial interpretations or to missing
verses from the vulgate text, but rather is motivated to a much greater extent by contradictions in the Uthmanic
text itself. His approach could only explain elements of the codex variations that are relevant legally, while the ques-
tion about the emergence of merely stylistically or grammatically interesting variations remains unexplained; cf.
Neuwirth’s review of Burton, The Collection of the Qur’ān.
10. Nöldeke, GdQ.
11.  Nöldeke and Schwally, GdQ2, vol. 2.
12. Blachère, Introduction au Coran.
13. Blachère, Histoire de la Littérature arabe, vol. 2.
14. Jeffery, Materials,  1–​18.
15. Bell, Introduction; see also Watt, Bell’s Introduction.
16. Bell, The Qur’ān Translated; see also Nagel, “Vom ‘Qur’ān’ zur Schrift.”
17.  On the Meccan suras, see Neuwirth, Studien zur Komposition. On more recent studies, cf. chap. 5, 163–​166.
142  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

All Islamic traditions agree that at the time of the death of the Prophet, the
Qur’an did not yet exist as a closed official collection. That the Prophet had in-
tended such for a long time was taken for granted in view of putative Qur’anic
self-​references, which Arthur Jeffery discussed in detail in The Qur’ān as Scripture.
Since then, however, Daniel Madigan has shown18 that these Qur’an texts require
a different interpretation,19 there being no evidence within the lifetime of the
proclaimer for the ultimate goal of producing a distinct written scripture of its
own. It is true that the proclaimer felt challenged by the liturgical readings of
the “possessors of scripture” (ahl al-​kitāb) of his religious milieu to equip the
Arabic language speakers with similar liturgical texts for recitation, yet these
texts were not meant to take the form of a closed book, but were rather to be
communicated orally only. It is true that the term qur’ān, often adduced as evi-
dence for the written-​scripture-​conception, which within the Qur’an designates
“recitation,” “reading,” “text to be read,” in its Syriac signifies counterpart means
“lectionary” (qurʾān  =  qeryānā), yet at no phase of the Qur’anic proclamation
does the word signify a written corpus. The seemingly unambiguous word kitāb,
“writing,” “book,” “scripture,” indicates throughout the Qur’an the transcendent
writing, though excerpts from it had already assumed material form in the hands
of the Jews and Christians. Indeed, criteria such as the structure and length of the
middle and late Meccan verses, which are no longer easy to memorize, indicate
that the proclamations must have at some point assumed written form for mne-
motechnic support. It is plausible that already in the middle Meccan period the
proclaimer took care to fix the individual communications in writing.
One indicator within the text itself suggests that it was already in the middle
Meccan period, in the so-​called Raḥmān-​period, that is, the period in which the
name of God “al-​Raḥmān” becomes the norm, that the recording of suras had
begun. An important hint is given in this period by the practice of introducing
the suras with an invocation formula, the basmala: bi-​smi llāhi l-​raḥmāni l-​raḥīm,
“in the name of God, the merciful compassionate,” which in view to its use of the
term al-​Raḥmān. assigns itself to the so-​called-​Raḥmān-​period. That this for-
mula, a radical reinterpretation of the Christian invocation of the Trinity “in the
name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit,” should, like its Christian
counterpart, have been used not least to introduce a piece of writing is apparent
from a Qur’an verse that connects it to writing, namely, the quote from a letter
sent from Solomon to the Queen of Sheba, which in the Qur’an is introduced
by the basmala (Q 27:30). This attestation of the introductory function of the
basmala may indicate that already in this period the suras to which the basmala
was being added had obtained the form of written pieces in addition to their
oral manifestation. If one agrees with the frequently drawn conclusion20 that the

18. Madigan, The Qur’an’s Self-​Image.

19.  See chap. 2, 76–80.
20.  See Schoeler, “Schreiben und Veröffentlichen”; Nagel, Medinensische Einschübe, 113–​127.
 Redaction and History of the Text  143

writing down of suras began in Mecca, one has to assume the systematic partic-
ipation of writing in the process of the emergence of the suras—​a decisive turn
in the consciousness of the community that appears analogous, if incompletely
so, to the transition from ritual to textual coherence of a society described by
Jan Assmann.21 The assumption of a consequent recording of the proclamations
no longer must confront opposing arguments based on the assumption of the
relatively undeveloped knowledge of writing in ancient Arabia. Already Nabia
Abbott22 had shown that among the contemporaries of the proclaimer, literacy
should be assumed for a relatively wide circle of people.23
That parts of the Qur’an were memorized by numerous private persons for
liturgical use, and that larger groups of suras were even committed to memory
by official Qur’an reciters in Medina, is a fact well attested.24 Thus, the written
form receives the status of a mnemotechnic support for the oral tradition, func-
tioning as templates for the purposes of teaching and learning. As such, written
recordings were a necessary precondition for the preservation of the long verses
of the Medinan suras. A structural analysis of the Meccan suras has shown that
the inner logic of the sura compositions in this part of the corpus disproves the
hypothesis of a genesis from broken fragments or the assumption of rows of
duplicates.25 We are thus confronted with the task of a new interpretation of the
evidence, which also bears on the first Qur’an collection. Provisionally, the most
probable theory seems to be that at the death of the proclaimer, the revelations
received by this time had been fixed in writing, in the form of copies that had
been established with his approval by some of his companions, although these
forms were not submitted by the Prophet himself to a final redaction in the form
of a codex. The ordering of the suras in a particular sequence—​liturgically of sec-
ondary importance—​cannot be assumed to have been fixed by this time.

4.1.2  The First Collections

The indigenous tradition assigns the first official redaction, carried out by one of
the scribes of the Prophet, Zayd ibn Thābit, to the time of the first caliph, Abū

21.  Cf. chap. 7, 279–​282.

22. Abbott, Studies in Arabic Literary Papyri. See now Schoeler, “Schreiben und Veröffentlichen”; Stein,
“Literacy.”
23.  Bell’s assumption of a consequent written fixing of the text is thus warranted. Yet Bell takes the traditions
about the disparate and small-​sized writing materials too literally when he uses them as the basis for his explanation
of similar Qur’anic passages—​considered as doublets—​due to having been written on the two sides of such small
pieces of material. Indeed, as Grohmann, Arabische Paläographie, vols. 1–​2, demonstrated, writing materials were
widespread in ancient Arabia. Schwally, GdQ2, already noted a tendency in the accounts about the writing materials
to overemphasize the efforts of the early collectors. Especially for the long suras, the use of consistent writing mate-
rials like papyrus—​cf. Endress, “Handschriftenkunde”—​or parchment can certainly be assumed. Grohmann offers
a great deal of evidence for the existence of these materials at the time of the Prophet; see now Schoeler, “Schreiben
und Veröffentlichen.”
24.  Cf. Sayyed, Die Revolte des Ibn al-​Ashʿath.
25. Neuwirth, Studien zur Komposition; cf. chap. 5.
144  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

Bakr, and claims that his successor, ʿUmar, also participated in it. Though the
reports over this are obviously not free from bias,26 an unofficial yet systematic
collection of revelations undertaken by Zayd is probable; such early collections
(ṣuḥuf, “leaves”; maṣāḥif, “codices”), which one should imagine as complete to
varying degrees, are also attested for other companions of the Prophet (ṣaḥāba),
and slightly divergent readings are transmitted from them.27
It is a specific feature of the Qur’an’s textual transmission that due to the double
existence of written and oral traditions, many orally transmitted textual variants
are preserved in text-​historical and exegetical literature. Important materials have
been collected by Arthur Jeffery in Materials for the History of the Text of the Qur’an.
With the expansion of the Islamic hegemony, three collections by the companions
acquired the status of authoritative codices for reading in several of the new urban
centers (amṣār):  those of ʿAbd Allāh ibn Masʿūd (Kufa), Abū Mūsā al-​Ashʿarī
(Basra) and Ubayy ibn Kaʿb (Damascus). For the texts of Ibn Masʿūd and Ubayy,
not only do we have transmitted readings, but we also have two slightly divergent
lists of their contents and sequencing of the suras. Ubayy’s Qur’an contains two
short suras beyond the stock of the Uthmanic edition, whose original status as part
of the revelations appears very unlikely given the concerns about vocabulary and
phraseology raised by Schwally.28 They may represent early prayers from the time
of the Prophet, similar to the opening and closing suras of the Uthmanic edition
(suras 1, 113, 114), which are excluded by Ibn Masʿūd from his collection.
That further text forms were also in circulation alongside the standardized
codex has been shown by a new analysis of three early Umayyad fragments.29

4.2  The “First Official Qur’an Edition of ʿUthmān”

We are informed—​though only incompletely—​about the divergences between

the old codices of the amṣār by the non-​canonical readings that have reached

26.  The assumption that all the traditions about the process of collecting the Qur’an go back to the eighth or
ninth century was a hypothesis made in Wansbrough, Quranic Studies, who claimed that the individual revelations
were not collected during the generation after the Prophet but were rather united with the corpus “Qur’an” over the
course of the first two centuries. The Uthmanic redaction would thus belong to the realm of fiction, fabricated for
the purpose of reproducing the model of traditions on the rabbinic redaction of the Mishna. In truth, the corpus
itself, with its frequent modifications of a fixed group of topics, does not fit well with the notion of a redaction from
the different traditions retaining “logia” of the Prophet achieved only later, during the emerging of the community;
see chap. 1, 47–​50, and cf. Neuwirth’s review of Wansbrough, Quranic Studies. On the contrary, clear compositional
rules can be substantiated for the literary character of the Qur’an, so that a kind of technically external explanation
for the genesis must be eliminated. As precarious as the indigenous accounts may be individually, their portrayal
of the course of events is still the most plausible explanation for the form of the text we have available to us today.
27.  On the individual collections and the discernible relationships between them, see Jeffery, Materials; on
the value of codices that can be traced back to “pre-​canonical” interpretations, see 151–​152. Atwan, al-​Qirāʾāt,
illuminates local Syrian traditions.
28.  Nöldeke and Schwally, GdQ2,  33–​38.
29. Dutton, “An Umayyad Fragment”; cf. also the treatment of a further fragment in Puin, “Ein frühes
Koranpalimpsest.”
 Redaction and History of the Text  145

us, the qirāʾāt shādhdha or shawādhdh. The confrontations between the Syrian
and Iraqi troops over the correct textual form, which are said to have occurred
amid conflicts with the Armenians around the year 30/​650–​651, are reported to
have motivated the official redaction triggered by the caliph ʿUthmān (r. 23–​35/​
644–​656), thus already presupposing significant differences between the texts.
The varying forms of reading thus seem to have presented a danger for the early
Islamic state that could only be averted through the standardization of the text.30
According to the tradition, Zayd ibn Thābit was commissioned again, now in col-
laboration with three representatives of the Quraysh tribe, to produce transcripts
from the codex which he had already compiled, which were to be sent out from
Medina to the four most significant Islamic centers, Mecca, Damascus, Kufa, and
Basra, thus replacing the codices of the ṣaḥāba that were locally circulating—​a
process that must have come to completion more gradually than the tradition
about the old codices being destroyed by the order of ʿUthmān would suggest.
The reports of resistance on the part of Ibn Masʿūd on the one hand and com-
pliance on the part of Abū Mūsā on the other reflect a process of transition,
which—​depending on place—​was completed either slowly or quickly from one
reading tradition to another in these centers.31 It is the five centers designated as
amṣār, Medina, Mecca, Damascus, Kufa, and Basra, from which the later canon-
ical readings derive the names of for the slightly divergent orthographies of their
variants. Although the Uthmanic redaction cannot be safely verified historically,
the term rasm ʿuthmānī, “Uthmanic consonantal script,” has been adopted for
the ultimately canonized consonantal form of the text, which also underlies the
printed Cairene text edition that is standard today and on which the following
presentation also relies.

4.2.1  The Sequencing of the Suras and the Sura-​Opening Letter Groups

The three independent collections from which sura sequences have been trans-
mitted, the Uthmanic text and the pre-​Uthmanic codices of Ubayy and Ibn
Masʿūd, display different orders. These differences notwithstanding, they follow a
shared principle: putting the longest suras at the beginning, and then continuing
in descending order to the shortest ones.32 Hans Bauer succeeded in showing
that the ordering of the suras according to their length was applied relatively
strictly in all three versions, as long as this principle did not violate another pri-
ority: keeping together suras that already belonged together.33 This consideration

30. See GdQ2, 47–​50. On the social-​historical background and impact of the Uthmanic redaction, see Sayyed,
Die Revolte des Ibn al-​Ashʿath.
31.  None of the pre-​Uthmanian codices have reached us in writing; a few of the palimpsest sheets are still con-
troversial as to attribution (cf. Bergsträsser, GdQ2, 3:53–​57, 97–​100; Diem, “Geschichte der arabischen Orthographie.
I, II, III, IV”) or offer only very short excerpts of texts (see Dutton, “An Umayyad Fragment”).
32.  See Nöldeke and Schwally, GdQ2, 63–​68; Bauer, “Die Anordnung der Suren.”
33.  See now Dayeh, “Al-​Ḥāwamīm.”
146  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

is evident especially for suras whose text is preceded by individual letters or letter
groups, Arabic fawātiḥ “(sura-​) opening elements.” This principle, of keeping
together the suras with preceding letter names, is applied consistently in the
Uthmanic recension, partially in that of Ibn Masʿūd, but not in Ubayy’s Qur’an.
A solution to the problem of the letters therefore would also shed light on the
question of the original ordering of the suras.
The Islamic tradition treats the letters or letter groups that introduce the suras
as integral parts of the revealed text, interpreting them as abbreviations of words
or sentences with the function of sura names, or else as enigmatic demarcations
by the Prophet for cosmic phenomena and the like. According to a third view,
they represent the smallest elements of the language of revelation—​an inter-
pretation worthy of consideration, which is also taken up in arguments for the
inimitability of the Qur’an.34 In Western discussions,35 we find the additional in-
terpretation of the letters as redactional additions. This view, according to which
the letters were carelessly allowed to stay and then penetrated into the recitation
text, has little appeal in view of the care for textual integrity observed elsewhere
in the early Islamic community.36
An observation already maintained in the commentary of Fakhr al-​Dīn ar-​
Rāzī (d. 1209) is worthy of consideration: the beginning verses of those suras that
are “coded” by a letter or letters almost always indicate their content as revealed
word of God—​this inner connection between letters or letter groups and sura
types contradicts the assumption of the addition of the signs for merely technical
redactional reasons. The signs must have been found extant already by the redac-
tors at the start of the suras, since these redactors by grouping together with iden-
tically or similarly coded suras had to violate the principle followed elsewhere of
ordering according to length. One should therefore consider a genetically close
connection between the suras introduced by letters, an indication that they were
perhaps treated by the proclaimer himself in his disposition of texts as belonging
together. That the letters themselves were no accidental choice is corroborated by
Alford Welch’s observation37 that most of the suras so introduced continue in the
rhyme of the last-​mentioned letter’s name, and that the letters are identical with
the fourteen (consonantal) letter forms of the Arabic (Kufic) alphabet, leaving
out the fourteen further ones derived from them through additional signs. The

34.  The traditional interpretations are discussed in Abd ar-​Rahman, Al-​I`jāz al-​Bayānī, 127–​139.
35.  An overview is offered by Schwally, GdQ2, 68–​78 (up to 1908), Bellamy, “The Mysterious Letters,” and
Welch, “Kurān.” See also the contributions on the problem gathered by Paret in Paret, Der Koran.
36.  Nöldeke later rescinded his earlier interpretation, in Orientalische Skizzen, and affiliated himself with
Islamic tradition, which aims to recognize in the letters clues to the divine, original text of the Qur’an. Meanwhile,
Bellamy, “The Mysterious Letters,” attempted to find abbreviations of the basmala in the letters. The unintelligi-
bility of the symbols, which is already attested early on, does not agree well with the requirement that the letters
are supposed to stand for a universally known formula. See the attempts to explain this in Hans Bauer, “Über die
Anordnung der Suren”; Goosens, “Ursprung und Bedeutung”; Jeffery, “Mysterious Letters of the Koran”; Massey,
“Letters of the Qur’an”; Massey, “Mysterious Letters.”
37.  Welch, “Kurān,” 414.
 Redaction and History of the Text  147

conclusion here, that the fawātiḥ represent the Arabic alphabet, becomes plau-
sible against the background of the high esteem attributed to the phenomena of
writing, teaching, and clear speech.

4.3  The Imperial Project of ʿAbd al-​M alik

If the historicity of the Uthmanic redaction is hard to verify, it is even harder

to maintain the hypothesis of an essentially later compilation of the Qur’an.
Manuscripts discovered in the 1960s, only later evaluated, have brought to light
Qur’anic fragments that can be dated contemporaneously with, or even prior to,
the rule of the Umayyad caliph ʿAbd al-​Malik ibn Marwān (r. 65–​86/​685–​705).
These fragments remain unpublished but are known from non-​comprehensive,
scattered reports.38 According to our current state of knowledge, they essentially
attest to the textual form familiar to us today. Further, similarly ancient—​but
also incomplete—​manuscripts preserved in the collections of various European
libraries are now being studied in part by Francois Déroche.39 This transmission
develops historical contours thanks to unquestionable testimonies from early
Islamic literature about the initiatives toward fixing a textus receptus in this pe-
riod. Omar Hamdan describes an initiative of ʿAbd al-​Malik to unify the differing
Qur’an texts in circulation at his time, for which purpose a number of large-​
scale exemplary codices were produced.40 Estelle Whelan has brought to light
reports about scribal workshops, “scriptoria,” for the production of codices.41 It
is possible to reconstruct from the philological literature the important measure
of an orthographical reform during the time of ʿAbd al-​Malik, which coincides
approximately to the onset of the Kufic script, which comes to replace the earlier
“Hijazi” or māʾil script.42 Islamic tradition maintains that it was already the third
caliph ʿUthmān (r. 23–​25/​644–​655) who was responsible for the decisive stand-
ardization of the text, and that he was the first to produce an edition and publica-
tion of the Qur’an. In fact, some issues, above all the reports about a competition
between the versions maintained by reciters from the circle of the Prophet and
those of the newly binding text, undergird the assumption of an early complete
collection. But even with the contrary assumption of such a final redaction car-
ried out not before ʿAbd al-​Malik, as Alfred-​Louis de Prémare holds,43 the date of
the fixing of the Qur’an text draws quite near to the end of the textual production,

38.  Puin, “Observations on Early Qur’ān Manuscripts in San`ā`”; Dreibholz, Early Quran Fragments. See also
Leemhuis, “Codices”; Bothmer, “Architekturbilder im Koran”; Bothmer, Ohlig, and Puin, “Neue Wege.”
39.  On the transmission history, see especially Déroche, Les Manuscrits du Coran; Déroche, “Manuscripts”;
Déroche, La transmission écrite; cf. also Leemhuis, “From Palmleaves to the Internet.”
40.  See now Hamdan, Studien zur Kanonisierung; cf. also Hamdan, “The Second Maṣāḥif Project.”
41.  Whelan, “Writing the Word of God.”
42.  Fraser, unpublished lecture, given at the Freie Universität Berlin on December 19, 2010.
43.  De Prémare, “Abd al-​Malik.”
148  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

which is the death date of the Prophet. Even if one does not admit a redaction
by ʿUthmān around 655, in no case could more than sixty years have passed be-
tween the conclusion of the text and its binding publication—​a term that, despite
the conclusions of de Prémare, is too short to assign adequate space for authorita-
tive, targeted, and theologically relevant modifications of the text, let alone a new
construction of an Arab myth of a “golden age under the rulership of the Prophet
and his companions.” At the time of ʿAbd al-​Malik and the wars of expansion,
Islamic history was already in full swing,44 and Qur’anic texts were already the
object of learned disputes being played out at the court of ʿAbd al-​Malik.45
ʿAbd al-​Malik’s well-​attested initiative to unify the writing of the Qur’an is
referred to properly by Omar Hamdan as forming part of an “imperial project”
that also included the Arabization of the chancellery and the minting of coins.
Such a reform of orthography concentrated on the Qur’an should most probably
be conceived of as occurring on the basis of an already constituted binding text.
For the historicity of its emergence, we do not need to rely merely on reports but
can also see evidence in the traces of vocalization and differentiation between
consonants in the inscriptions in the Dome of the Rock that were carried out
under ʿAbd al-​Malik.
That building, which now stands as the most striking testimony of the “im-
perial project” of the caliph, shows in its inner ambulatorium a 240-​meter band
of inscriptions consisting almost entirely of Qur’an citations. This, the oldest
Qur’anic document,46 dating from the years between 690 and 700, has been ana-
lyzed by Estelle Whelan.47 In agreement with Christel Kessler,48 she argues for
distinguishing between two separate inscriptions. She concludes:  “With slight
deviations, these Qur’an passages reflect the text that is familiar to us from the
Cairene edition.” She holds that the insertion into the Qur’an citations of the
basmala and the repeated credo formulas (shahāda) is consistent with the image
familiar elsewhere from inscriptions. The inscriptions in the Dome of the Rock
offer an anthology of Qur’anic pronouncements about Christianity and the per-
sons of Jesus and Mary in particular—​both of whom are celebrated in Jerusalem
by numerous magnificently decorated churches. It is the religious-​political goal
of the inscriptions to downgrade Jesus, who is celebrated in Jerusalem as the son
of God, to his “Qur’anic dimension” as a mere servant of God, and to put the

44. Donner, Narratives of Islamic Origins, 84.

45.  See van Ess, “Abd al-​Malik and the Dome of the Rock.”
46.  At the same time, relevant works mention an epitaph from Cyprus from the year 650 containing sura
112; see Grohmann, Arabische Paläographie, 2:71, and Combe, RCÉA I, no. 5. This Qur’an document, possibly the
earliest, has not been found to date, and appears to be first attested in the pilgrimage account of al-​Harawī, Kitāb
al-​Ishārāt (personal communication by Jens Sauer).
47.  Whelan, “Evidence.” A photographic reproduction of the inscription is offered in Grabar, The Shape of the
Holy, 92–​99; an English translation can be found in ibid., 60. On the inscription text, see Neuwirth, “The Spiritual
Meaning,” and now Hoyland, “New Documentary Texts.”
48.  Kessler, “Abd al-​Malik’s Inscription”; see also Blair, “Date of the Dome of the Rock.”
 Redaction and History of the Text  149

Prophet of Islam, who is highly honored in heaven and earth—​as is pronounced

in the verse Q 33:56, cited several times in the inscription—​on equal footing
with him. Whelan discusses further reports of Qur’an inscriptions in the main
mosque of Medina that are no longer preserved and collects reports indicating
the existence of a copyists’ workshop in Medina prior to the rule of ʿAbd al-​Malik.
The assumption that the Qur’an, transmitted above all orally in the various
centers of the emerging realm, obtained a binding textual form consistent with
the form and arrangement of the text as we have it, perhaps around 655 but at
the latest in the reign of ʿAbd al-​Malik around 690, can no longer be dismissed
out of hand.
Of course, within these twenty or even sixty years, verses may have been
manipulated, added, or eliminated; above all, there is no guarantee that all of
the proclamations of Muhammad were preserved. There is a gray area here that
cannot be illuminated. There are indeed some few elliptical textual units that are
perhaps to be explained through the assumption of missing textual elements.
“Non-​canonical” readings, which are transmitted to us from some old pre-​
Uthmanic text traditions,49 occasionally show slight deviations. Palimpsests that
have recently come to light, which were found in the main mosque of Sanaa in
the 1960s and are now finally being analyzed, promise insight into further diver-
gences.50 But revolutionary finds are not expected.

4.4  Text History

4.4.1  Early History of the Uthmanic Text

With the replacement of the early Qur’an exemplars of the Prophet’s compan-
ions, the ṣaḥāba, in the new centers, amṣār, those text forms deviating from the
Uthmanic text were not yet eliminated. The victory of the Uthmanic text was
only guaranteed once it was recognized as the binding basis for the recitation.
In the early stage of the development, in which oral tradition was dominant, the
sensitivity for the exact reproduction of the text was not yet very developed; one
simply eliminated linguistic and semantic offenses through slight textual altera-
tions. Soon, however, two principles were established for the interpretation of the
consonantal text: linguistic correctness, ʿarabīya, and compatibility with the con-
sonantal text, the rasm, of the Uthmanic codex, the muṣḥaf—​thus the language
mastery of the Qur’an reader and instructor was considered the most important
source of authority for the formation of the text.51

49. Jeffery, Materials.
50.  They are currently being edited by Christian Robin, Paris, and Behnam Sadeghi, Stanford. Already pub-
lished are Dutton, “An Umayyad Fragment,” and Puin, “Ein frühes Koranpalimpsest.”
51.  See Beck, “Der uthmanische Kodex.”
150  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

With the spread of Islam and the concomitant increase in demand for reciters
and Qur’an instructors, the emphasis shifted from the oral transmission to the
written text. In his interpretation of a text that was ambiguous in both its con-
sonantal skeleton and its vocalization, the Qur’an reader initially was free to de-
cide his interpretation of the ambiguous consonant signs, al-​ikhtiyār bi-​l-​ḥurūf,
and choice about vocalization, al-​ikhtiyār bi-​l-​qirāʾa. But fixed schools soon took
shape, where only the eclectic texts of renowned scholars were recognized, so that
as a third criterion for the fitness of a reading now the principle of tradition took
hold, that is, the transmission on the basis of a reliable chain of transmission,
isnād. With increasingly firm adherence to the tradition, the guaranteed right
to one’s own critique warranted by the other two criteria became less perceived.
Roughly contemporary with the renouncement of independent interpretation of
the consonantal text, the non-​Uthmanic variants were also relinquished: while it
was only in the third/​ninth century that legal scholars reached agreement about
the cultic unfitness of all non-​Uthmanic text forms, it was already in the second/​
eighth century that the complete victory of the Uthmanic text was achieved.
Textual history entered a new stage with the introduction of signs to dif-
ferentiate between consonants and signs of vocalization—​a measure probably
adopted after the model of the Syriac and Hebrew Bibles, or simultaneously with
the Christian and Jewish practice. While the differentiation of consonants began
already in the first/​seventh century, the vocalization by means of additional signs
for short vowels,52 initially only in words with competing possibilities of pro-
nunciation, was introduced generally into the text from the end of the second/​
eighth century onward. In the third/​ninth century, we find the introduction of a
consistent scriptio plena for long vowels.53
The confrontation between advocates of a unified form of writing and trans-
mitters who championed an exact preservation of the old consonantal form,
the rasm, with all its orthographic arbitrariness, has been sketched by Edmund

52.  The legitimacy of the entry of additional characters into the holy text was initially controversial; the ritual
reservations are reflected in the consistent use of a different color of ink; see Endress, Herkunft und Entwicklung,
179; cf. also Gründler, Development. For examples beyond the literature mentioned there, see James, Qur’ans and
Bindings, nos. 2, 3, 5, 7, 10, 12, 15, 16, 17.
53.  On “orthography reform,” see Blachère, Introduction au Coran, 75–​102, where indigenous traditions are
discussed and paleographic evidence is evaluated, but see now especially Endress, “Herkunft und Entwicklung,”
171–​181, and Hamdan, Studien zur Kanonisierung. On orthography generally, Bergsträsser, GdQ2, 3:19–​26, stresses
the most important idiosyncrasies in the Uthmanian text. This fundamentally descriptive portrayal was expanded
with a historical outline in Diem, “Geschichte der arabischen Orthographie. I, II, III, IV.” An orthography of a pre-​
Uthmanic fragment is given in Bergsträsser, GdQ2, vol. 3, 53–​57. But see also Diem, “Geschichte der arabischen
Orthographie. I, II, III, IV.” On the idiosyncrasies of orthography of an Iraqi codex from the third century as against
later ones, see Jeffery and Mendelsohn, “Orthography.” On the orthographic characteristics of codices in the Hijaazi
ductus, see Pretzl, GdQ2, 3:254–​256. Pretzl offers an overview of the indigenous literature on writing the Qur’an in
GdQ2, 3:238-​240. Pretzl himself also edited what is considered in Islam to be the standard work on Qur’an orthog-
raphy, Kitāb al-​Muqniʿ by Abū Amr al-​Dānī (d. 444/​1053).
 Redaction and History of the Text  151

Beck.54 The conflict was decided in favor of the traditionalists, as is shown by the
Qur’anic orthography used down to today, which is not thoroughly consistent.55

4.4.2  Non-​canonical Readings

Due to the exclusion of the non-​Uthmanic textual form of the recitation, the early
“non-​canonical” readings (qiraʾāt shādhdha, shawādhdh), which date back to the
codices of the ṣaḥāba, had to rely entirely on an extra-​Qur’anic literary trans-
mission. Indeed, no longer recognized as part of a text for recitation (qurʾān) yet
bearing substantially the same meaning, the non-​canonical readings entered the
commentary literature and, on account of their close relation to the textus recep-
tus, were incorporated into Qur’an-​specific philological works.
Bergsträsser, in the context of his collection of materials for the Apparatus
criticus zum Koran (see under “Manuscripts”), published critical editions of
the only two existing early collections of non-​canonical readings known in his
time, those in the Mukhtaṣar fī shawādhdh al-​Qurʾān min Kitāb al-​Badīʿ by Ibn
Khālawayh (d. 370/​980) and those preserved in the collection by the founder of
scholarship on the Qur’an text, Ibn Mujāhid (d. 324/​936), in excerpts preserved
in the work of the grammarian Ibn Jinnī (d. 392/​1001).56 A further source, the
Kitāb al-​Maṣāḥif of Ibn Abī Dāwūd al-​Sijistānī (d. 316/​926), was edited by Arthur
Jeffery.57 Jeffery also supplemented Bergsträsser’s Ibn Khālawayh edition with
marginalia.58 The relevant chapter from the Faḍāʾil al-​Qurʾān by Abū ʿUbayd ibn
Sallām (d. 224/​838) has since been edited and evaluated by Anton Spitaler.59
Jeffery compiled an extensive collection of the scattered non-​canonical read-
ings available in his Materials,60 the material of which is culled from twenty-​
seven early codices in total. But Jeffery neither notes the respective sources of the
readings nor assesses their value; a major edition of the readings presenting all
of this evidence envisaged by Jeffery could no longer be realized. On the other
hand, in his collection of the variants of Ibn Masʿūd and Ubayy, Bergsträsser
attempted to produce an assessment:61 while the authenticity of the variants
ascribed to Ubayy appears improbable to Bergsträsser, a major portion of the
readings ascribed to Ibn Masʿūd seem in fact to go back to his codex. The ques-
tion of whether these readings are closer to or further from the original procla-
mation than the canonical text has not been addressed. A much more negative
picture is drawn by Edmund Beck for the readings of Ibn Masʿūd preserved in

54.  Beck, “Der uthmanische Kodex.”

55.  Cf. the characteristics of the orthography of the official Qur’an of Cairo in Bergsträsser, “Koranlesung in
Kairo”; on one of its special manifestations, see Spitaler, “Die Schreibung des Typus salāh.”
56.  Bergsträsser, “Koranlesung in Kairo.”
57. Jeffery, Materials. The work is made easily accessible by Magermans, Index.
58.  Jeffery, “Abu Ubayd.”
59. Spitaler, Fada’il al-​Qur’an.
60. Jeffery, Materials.
61. Bergsträsser, GdQ2, 3:57–​95.
152  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

the Qur’an commentary by al-​Farrāʾ (d. 207/​822).62 The variants collected here
appear for the most part to be secondary textual interventions complying with
the explanations of particular grammatical phenomena upheld by al-​Farrāʾ.
A narrower selection of non-​canonical variants, or shawādhdh, namely, forms
that are due to a punctuation or vocalization of the consonant text that is not
compatible with the rules of classical grammar, has been collected by Karl Vollers
in his Volkssprache, Popular Language and Written Language in Old Arabia.63 He
views these forms as representing the original textual form of the Qur’an. Even if
this thesis itself has been rejected,64 the work still shows that the transmitted dia-
lectal variants contain sufficient authentic linguistic material to be valuable, if not
for the Qur’an itself, then at least for Arabic linguistic scholarship. Comparable
language-​historical relevance can be presupposed for the dialectal variants that
have come to light since then.65

4.4.3  The Seven, Ten, and Fourteen Canonical Readings

The history of the Qur’an text since the second/​eighth century appears as a pro-
tracted process of standardization. The end of the first main phase is marked by
the elimination of the non-​Uthmanic text forms and the freely construed read-
ings. In the next phase of the development, which begins in the early third/​ninth
century, in which the oral tradition again predominates, there is a new criterion
applied to judge the reliability of the reading: the principle of the majority, ijtimāʿ
al-​ʿāmma, ijmāʿ, according to which a reading is only reliable when supported
by the majority of readers. The ijmāʿ principle, which came to replace the tra-
dition principle, further restricts the freedom of the reader and soon led to the
standardization within each of the respective amṣār, and later between the amṣār.
But a decision in favor of a particular textual form was still based on the critical
evaluations of particular readers, that is, the established praxis consisted in tartīb,
the linking together of readers of different origins, which in Bergstrasser’s view
would have led, had it continued unhindered, to the production of a more sat-
isfyingly representative textus receptus than the version that has received nearly
exclusive validity, if only very recently: Ḥafṣ ʿan ʿĀṣim (Ḥafṣ d. 180/​796; ʿĀṣim
d. 127/​745).
Meanwhile, at the initiative of the Qur’an scholar Ibn Mujāhid (d. 324/​936)
in the year 322/​934, seven readings, that is, seven transmitted versions of the en-
tire Qur’an each based on one authority, were recognized as canonical, while all
other forms of the recitation were excluded—​a concession to the Qur’an schools

62.  Beck, “Die Zuverlässigkeit”; Beck, “Die Ibn-​Masʿūd-​Varianten,” nos. 1, 2, 3.

63. Vollers, Volkssprache.
64.  See the review by Geyer and Nöldeke of Vollers, Volkssprache, as well as a detailed discussion in Zwettler,
Oral Tradition, 117–​121.
65.  Spitaler, “Die Schreibung des Typus salāh.”
 Redaction and History of the Text  153

loyal to the tradition principle (taqlīd). This constriction of the earlier freedom
must have impeded the formerly free discussions of the Qur’an text. Ibn Mujāhid
not only sought to work against the eccentric reading of individual passages but
was also interested in legitimizing complete recensions of the Qur’an through
chains of transmitters with respect to entire texts. The choice of the canonical
seven readings (al-​qirāʾāt al-​sabʿ), one for each of the amṣār and three for Kufa,
was not made arbitrarily, but rather confirms the prominence of individual rec-
ognized Qur’an authorities of the second/​eighth century in the recitation praxis
and in the schools operating at the time. Those selected were Nāfiʿ (d. 169/​785—​
Medina), Ibn Kathīr (d. 120/​738—​Mecca), Abū ʿAmr ibn al-​ʿAlā (d. 154/​770—​
Basra), Ibn ʿĀmir (d. 118/​736—​Damascus), ʿĀṣim (d. 127/​745—​Kufa), Ḥamza
(d. 156/​773—​Kufa), and al-​Kisāʾī (d. 189/​804—​Kufa). The choice did not go
unchallenged; the community understood the seven as an approximate and ne-
gotiable number allowing the unavoidable addition of other readings, and also
developed systems of eight, ten, and finally fourteen readings.
In this process of Qur’an teaching, closed readings came to take the place of
individual open types of reading. Ibn Mujāhid himself in his Kitāb al-​Sabʿa66 pre-
sented his treatment as a concordance of the seven parallel versions and thus laid
the foundation for an extensive commentary literature, ḥujaj al-​qirāʾāt, which
provided grammatical reasoning, taʿlīl, for the individual readings of the seven
and later also of the ten and fourteen readings. The oldest such commentaries are
the Kitāb al-​Ḥujja fī l-​qirāʾāt al-​sabʿ by Ibn Khālawayh (d. 370/​987), the Kitāb
al-​Ḥujja fī l-​qirāʾāt by Abū ʿAlī ibn Aḥmad al-​Fārisī (d. 377/​987), and the Kitāb
Ḥujjat al-​qirāʾāt by ʿAbd al-​Raḥmān ibn Muḥammad Abū Zurʿa (d. 403/​1013).
The development of grammatical explanations was strongly advanced through
close collaboration between grammarians and Qur’an readers at the court of the
Hamdanids in Aleppo and, after the dispersal of this scholarly circle, shifted to
the new center of Cairo. Here, it was also communicated to the two Maghrebian
Qur’an readers whose works on the seven readings and the phonetic formation
of the text, tajwīd (see pp. 155–​156), would be decisive for the later period: Abū
ʿAmr al-​Dānī (d. 444/​1053) and Makī ibn Abī Ṭālib al-​Qaysī (d. 437/​1045). With
them, the science of reading ultimately became bound up with grammar as a
propaedeutic science. In numerous supercommentaries, but especially the ver-
sification by Abū l-​Qāsim al-​Shāṭibī (d. 590/​1194) titled Ḥirz al-​amānī wa-​wajh
al-​tahānī, al-​Dānī’s work on the seven readings, Kitāb al-​Taysīr fī l-​qirāʾāt al-​sabʿ,
was preserved in Qur’an teaching down to the present day.67 The other approved
systems received corresponding treatment. For the ten readings, Ibn al-​Jazarī
(d. 835/​1431) wrote the decisive grammatical commentary, the Kitāb al-​Nashr
fī l-​qirāʾāt al-​ʿashr, whose numerous supercommentaries in the following period

66.  Ibn al-​Mujāhid, Kitāb al-​sabʿa.

67.  Cf. Neuwirth, “Koranlesung zwischen Ost und West”; Neuwirth, “Makī ibn Abī Ṭālib al-​Qaysī.”
154  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

provide the foundations for scholastic teaching. For the fourteen, Aḥmad al-​
Dimyāṭī al-​Bannāʾ (d. 1117/​1705) gives the standard explanation in Itḥāf fuḍalāʾ
al-​bashar fī qirāʾāt al-​arbaʿata ʿashar.
Existing attempts to describe the seven readings have not gone beyond the ge-
neral observation that the divergences are essentially of a phonetic kind.68 A more
exact description can be glimpsed through a “horizontal sectioning across the
mass of readings” in the reading of one of the fourteen, al-​Ḥasan al-​Baṣrī (d.
110/​728), undertaken by Bergsträsser.69 Among the differences relevant for the
assessment of the text of Ḥafṣ ʿan ʿĀṣim, which achieved success in the east of
the Arabic world, the treatment of the hamza, the glottal top, deserves particular
notice. Among the few dialectal interferences that can be presupposed for the
Prophet himself is a more propulsive pronunciation or “lightening” of the hamza,
which is reflected by the Qur’anic orthography. But the question of whether the
hamza was pronounced by the Prophet himself or his Hijazi followers within
verse contexts is not easy to answer.70 It is certain that some rhymes written with
hamza require the pronouncement of the sound, but others do not allow it. We
cannot exclude the hypothesis that hamza in the Qur’an was originally as a rule
articulated and lightened only where a rhyme required it. For the transmission, it
is significant that the Iraqi readers, among whom ʿĀṣim achieved validity in the
east, are just those who realize the hamza most consistently.71
One can easily be led by the dominance of the Ḥafṣ ʿAn ʿĀṣim reading in the
Islamic east, and its increasing prominence even in the Maghreb since the 1925-​
printed Cairo al-​Qurʾān al-​Karīm,72 to lose sight of the fact that it is only one of
the seven canonical readings that are held as equally valid by the strictest Islamic
orthodoxy. Correspondingly, the relation between the textual variants among the
seven systems are not to be understood in the sense of textus receptus and variant
readings.73 If one wants to speak of a textus receptus, one should understand by
this all seven readings and not any one of them, since in the classical period Ḥafṣ
ʿan ʿĀṣim was by no means the most widespread text, but rather stood behind
Abū ʿAmr (d. 154/​770) in the east and behind Warsh ʿan Nāfiʿ (Warsh d. 197/​
812; Nāfiʿ d. 169/​785) in the west. One must recall that there was not one uni-
form and unified text accepted everywhere, but rather a number of textual forms
in usage side by side, and that the educated Muslim knew this and was brought
up with an astoundingly productive freedom in dealing with his scripture. The

68.  See Pretzl, GdQ2, 3:186ff.

69.  Bergsträsser, “Die Koranlesung des Hasan von Basra.”
70. Neuwirth, Studien zur Komposition, 325–​359.
71.  Consequently, in the modern recitation of this reading, hamza is also realized in positions where it violates
the rhyme scheme.
72.  This edition and its philological foundation is described extensively in Bergsträsser, “Koranlesung in Kairo.”
73.  Paret, “Textkritisch verwertbare Koranlesarten,” emphasized the necessity of utilizing textual interpreta-
tion for the explanation of problematic passages. It should be added that even seemingly unproblematic passages of
a reading can appear in a new light through attention to textual variants.
 Redaction and History of the Text  155

projection of the notion of an official, unified text back into those highly crea-
tive times would equal a blacking out of one of Islam’s greatest spiritual and cul-
tural attainments and would be an enormous anachronism. The full scale of the
liveliness and legitimacy of the discussions of the grammarians, commentators,
jurists, and theologians is only to be understood against this background. The
final aim must be to realize that Islam in its classical period found a solution for
the problem of the textual uniformity of its scripture that was as pragmatic as it
was elegant, and which linked tolerance in view of the unattainability of an abso-
lutely uniform text to the legitimate need for unity in ritual, maintaining a high
level of linguistic sensibility.74
The extensive task of evaluating the canonical and non-​canonical readings ac-
cording to stylistic and compositional criteria remains to be done. Tradition has
sidelined the non-​canonical readings on purely practical grounds, and thus left
open questions about the respective “original” readings.75

4.5  Instructions for Qur’an Reading and the Controls

of the Textual Form

4.5.1  “Beautiful Pronunciation”

The doctrine of “beautiful pronunciation” (tajwīd) of the Qur’an developed out
of the comprehensive complex of ritual performance rules for Qur’an readers
(ādāb ḥamalat al-​qurʾān). They first received independent treatment in works of
the fourth/​tenth century, where they are represented according to purely linguis-
tically/​phonetically methods independently from the ritual aspects of approach-
ing the Qur’an. They find their initial treatment in the didactic poem of Abū
Muzāḥim ibn Khāqān (d. 325/​937),76 titled al-​Qaṣīda fī tajwīd. In that work,
varying ways of performance are characterized and diverse phonetical problems
are dealt with utilizing the terminological apparatus of Arabic linguistics. The
Qaṣīda was commented on by Abū ʿAmr al-​Dānī, who also composed an inde-
pendent tajwīd-​textbook, Kitāb al-​Taḥdīd fī ʿilm al-​tajwīd. His work, as also the
Riʿāya fī l-​qirāʾa of his fellow Andalusian and contemporary Makī ibn Abī Ṭālib
al-​Qaysī, offers detailed compendia on the articulation sites of the consonants,
the linking and doubling of the consonants, contraction, assimilation, the con-
textual use of case endings (tanwīn), and so on. In Abū ʿAmr al-​Dānī, we also
already find variations of vocalic pronunciation, such as the coloring of the a
(imāla), the dropping of vowels (sukūn, the pause), ishmām, rawm, nasalization.

74.  The following remarks are mostly based on an essay by the author, “Koranlesung zwischen Ost und West.”
75.  On the interpretations, see Pretzl, “Die Wissenschaft der Koranlesung.” The newest summary is offered
by Paret, Kirā’a. A depiction of Qur’an instruction in modern times is conveyed in Bergsträsser, “Koranlesung in
Kairo”; Cantineau and Barbès, “La récitation coranique”; and Kellermann, Koranlesung im Maghreb.
76.  Sezgin, GAS 1:14.
156  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

These materials become fixed inventories added as propaedeutic components to

the classical qirāʾāt-​works on the foundations of pronunciation, uṣūl, which form
the basis for the presentation of individual differences in pronunciation, farsh
al-​ḥurūf.
A special area of tajwīd, which already received theoretical discussion from
the second/​eighth century onward, is the teaching of the positioning of pauses in
speech during performance (waqf).77 The performance of longer verses required
a structuring of the elements of discourse into smaller semantic units, which
were most often preserved in the oral tradition, but which required express clar-
ification in syntactically controversial cases. For the application of such pauses,
several grades of necessity were distinguished, which are marked in the Qur’an
exemplars with various symbols. A literary-​critical investigation of the principles
of this internal structuring of verses would add essentially to our knowledge of
the indigenous reception of the Qur’an as a verbal work of art.
Also within the area of tajwīd falls the cantilena.78 Only in recent times have
attempts been made by Western researchers to write these with musical notation.79
Meanwhile, in the Islamic world sound recordings of the Qur’an on cassettes
and CDs are ubiquitous. This was initiated with the first complete recording by
Shaykh Mahmud Khalil al-​Husari, al-​Muṣḥaf al-​Murattal.80 This recording, com-
pleted in 1962, is an acoustic counterpart to the Cairene Qur’an edition, insofar
as the reciter chosen for the recording, al-​Husari, possessing the status of shaykh
al-​maqāriʾ al-​miṣrīya, represented the highest ranking representative of the Al-​
Azhar University on these matters. The sociological consequences of this influ-
ential recording for the tradition of recitation have been illuminated by Bernard
Weiss.81 The initiator of this collection of vinyl recordings, which was conceived
as an official recording, Labib al-​Saʿid (ʿAyn Shams University, Cairo), presented
its principles and motives in a treatise that accompanied it.82 The Qur’an reci-
tations broadcast by many Arabic radio and television stations would offer the
possibility of recording a diversity of different reciters and analyzing their types
of performance (in collaboration with musicologists). Important findings on the
musical and social significance of contemporary recitation practices83 can also be
gained from the recording of contemporary live Qur’an performances.84 These are
by no means always solo performances, but rather, as Andreas Kellermann has
shown, are frequently organized as group recitations, especially in the Maghreb.

77.  See Pretzl, “Die Wissenschaft der Koranlesung”; Pretzl, GdQ2, 3:234–​237.
78.  On its artistic configuration in time see Talbi, “La qirāʾa bi-​alḥān.”
79.  Bergsträsser, “Koranlesung in Kairo”; Cantineau and Barbès, “La récitation coranique”; and Kellermann,
Koranlesung im Maghreb.
80.  See Kellermann, “Die ‘Mündlichkeit’ des Koran.”
81.  Weiss and al-​Saʿid, The Recited Koran
82.  Al-​Saʿid, Al-​Jamʿ al-​ṣawṭī al-​awwal.
83.  See now the overview by Nelson, The Art of Reciting.
84.  An isolated example is offered in Kellermann’s unpublished dissertation, “Koranlesung im Maghreb.”
 Redaction and History of the Text  157

4.5.2  Verse Counting

The history of the tradition of verse counting, which goes back to the end of
the first/​seventh century, has been sketched by Otto Pretzl.85 Since the middle
of the second/​eighth century, the discipline of the counting of verses has been
transmitted as an auxiliary discipline alongside Qur’an reading; being bound up
practically with the positing of pauses in reading (waqf) it remains the object of
theoretical discussion. Reading pauses that are to be respected in performance—​
or to be avoided—​are regulated within a separate discipline, al-​waqf wa-​l-​ibtidāʾ,
“the pausing and beginning again,” which also has retained a slot for optional
pauses in reading that are neither obligatory nor forbidden. The position of
pauses in reading in some cases can decide between theologically relevant textual
interpretations but is in general relevant only for the reciter as a guide to produc-
ing a desirable sensory experience of the text, accordingly they are marked in the
text of the 1925 Cairene edition. The numbering of verses has been subject to
greater interest among researchers. A detailed overview and critical evaluation
of the individual works on verse numbering is given by Anton Spitaler at the
start of his systematic presentation of the Islamic verse-​numbering traditions,
which are related to the five amṣār.86 In the Cairene text, which reproduces the
Kufic reading of Ḥafṣ ʿan ʿĀṣim, the verse numbering follows the Kufic tradition,
namely, the presentation of al-​Shāṭibī (d. 590/​1194) in his work Naẓīmat al-​zuhr
fī l-​aʿdād wa-​khtilāf ahl al-​bilād.87
With his compression of all the recognized verse endings recognized in the
tradition into overview lists for each individual sura, Spitaler offered an impor-
tant contribution not only to textual criticism but also to the comprehension of
the indigenous understanding of form. For while Islamic tradition is primarily
concerned with verse numbering, it is worthwhile noting that the fixing or non-​
fixing of the verse end entails a decision about the structuring of the text, which
can be checked as to its validity through literary-​critical criteria. The Qur’an verse
as a rule bears a recognizable end marker in its final rhyme, but in some cases a
sound complex suitable for rhyme closure also occurs within verses, and in some
cases a rhyme does not correspond to the schema offered by neighboring verses,
so that differences in the treatment of respective verse groups can emerge. The
evaluation of the Islamic divisions and the principles that lie behind them is still
in its beginnings, but a critical review of the verse divisions of the Meccan suras88
has shown already that none of the Islamic systems reflects a consistent proce-
dure of verse division, and that not even a consensus of the traditional systems

85. Pretzl, GdQ2, 3:237f.

86. Spitaler, Verszählung.
87.  See the explanation (taʿlīqāt) following the Cairo text; cf. Bergsträsser, “Koranlesung,” 10, and Spitaler,
Verszählung.
88. Neuwirth, Studien zur Komposition,  11–​63.
158  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

can guarantee a “correct” division in agreement with the text’s discernable lit-
erary structure. Rather, in the Meccan suras alone in at least twenty-​one cases
a verse ending must be asserted or dropped against all traditional dictates. The
analysis of the text thus cannot blindly follow the privileged tradition, but must
rather recheck all transmitted verse endings critically.

4.6 Manuscripts

The predominance of the oral as against the written tradition in Qur’anic trans-
mission is unmistakable. Gotthelf Bergsträsser, though himself a pioneer of re-
search in Qur’anic manuscripts, highlighted the value of scholarship based on
orality, not overlooking however the necessity of evaluating manuscripts:

One could almost go so far as to claim that it was only the spirit of the ʿilm al-​
qirāʾāt that could create such an edition [i.e., the Cairo Qur’an of 1925]: all
European philological meticulousness and care toward collation would
hardly have reached the nearly absolute accuracy that was achieved by the
Egyptian Qur’an scholars thanks to their lifelong-​practiced memory, their
mastery of all details, and their religious reverence for the smallest items.
While it is the ancient tradition that lives on in this most punctilious ex-
actness, what is even more vividly alive are the signs of independent prog-
ress that goes beyond what is received from tradition.  .  .  .  We have to
accept the difference in scientific approach, whereby the Islamic scholar
takes as a basis the newest presentations and oral transmission, while our
historical methods require reference back to the oldest reachable sources,
the oldest manuscripts of the Qur’an itself and the oldest literature about
its text. For a textual edition, the difference in result is less than one would
expect. . . . We too, in an edition of the Qur’an text, could hardly offer an-
ything other than the consonants of the Uthmanic Qur’an with reading
signs following the recension of the Ḥafṣ ʿan ʿĀṣim; the number of places
where our alternate evaluation of the sources would lead us to present this
text differently would be slight.89

Yet this situation should not obscure the fact that for the recording of textual
forms prior to the prevailing of the closed readings, we must rely on the earli-
est Qur’an manuscripts in addition to the non-​canonical readings.90 In order to
determine the oldest reachable non-​reconstructed form of the consonantal text,
the Bavarian Academy of Sciences had conceived the project of a collection of
photographs of the oldest preserved Qur’an manuscripts,91 a project that, under

89.  Bergsträsser, “Koranlesung in Kairo,” 112.

90.  On the script, see the standard work by Déroche, Islamic Codicology.
91.  Bergsträsser, “Plan eines Apparatus Criticus zum Koran.”
 Redaction and History of the Text  159

the title Apparatus criticus zum Qur’an, was supervised from the late 1920s on-
ward by Gotthelf Bergsträsser himself. Following his death in 1934, it was carried
forth by Otto Pretzl.92 He set himself the goal of “determining through research
in the Qur’an manuscripts themselves the oldest attainable non-​reconstructed
form of the consonantal text, and illustrating the textual history of the Qur’an in
the earliest centuries through a critical apparatus of reading variants.”93 In 1938,
relying extensively on codices from Istanbul collections, Pretzl issued a brief in-
troduction to the problems and methods of research in Qur’anic manuscripts,94
wherein he distinguished on paleographic grounds between three groups of co-
dices, which on the basis of their information on orthography and verse divisions
can be assigned with some certainty to particular branches of tradition.
Prior to this, the textual history of the Qur’an had been the subject of inde-
pendent scholarly pursuits, which resulted in the well-​known great collections of
Qur’an manuscripts (above all in London, Paris, St. Petersburg, and Berlin) and
which led to the first publications of manuscripts. A palimpsest whose under-
writing (scriptio inferior) shows the Qur’an text in archaic ductus and whose
upper layer (scriptio superior) shows a Christian-​Arabic text was edited at the
start of the twentieth century.95 A substantial step forward in our knowledge of
the manuscripts was achieved by the manuscript finds of Sanaa: there, in 1972
and 2007, in a false ceiling of the great mosque, numerous Qur’an manuscripts
from quite different epochs were discovered, including some from the earliest pe-
riod. Among the manuscripts that became known in 1972 was a palimpsest with
a Qur’an text on both the superior and inferior surfaces.
Although manuscripts from the time of Muhammad do not seem to have sur-
vived, the oldest ones do reach back to the first Islamic century. One of these
codices, which can probably be dated to before the time of ʿAbd al-​Malik (r. 65–​
86/​685–​705), has been reconstructed to a great extent and analyzed by Francois
Déroche.96 Marcus Fraser dates several hundred fragments back into the first
century.97 Sergio Noja Noseda has made a number of early codices available in
facsimile editions with facing transcription in the Naskhī script that is current
today.98 While all of the early codices that have come down to us are preserved in
differing local varieties of the early Arabic monumental script (“lapidary,” with
its two variants, the Hijazi and the so-​called Kufic ductus), the earliest Qur’an
manuscripts are likely those unofficial documents that show a cursive that also
occurs in a highly developed form in secular papyri from the first half of the

92.  Pretzl, “Die Fortführung des Apparatus Criticus zum Koran.”

93. Pretzl, GdQ2, 3:247.
94. Pretzl, GdQ2, 3:249–​273.
95.  Mingana and Smith Lewis, Leaves from Three Ancient Qurâns.
96. Déroche, La transmission écrite.
97.  Fraser, unpublished lecture at the Freie Universität Berlin, December 19, 2010.
98. Noseda, Les manuscrits de style Higazi, vols. 1–​2.
160  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

first/​seventh century.99 In the Hijazi script, also called māʾil, “leaning,” due to
its form, different scribal hands can easily be distinguished. It is a great merit of
Marcus Fraser to have traced its development through comparison of the indi-
vidual characters not only in manuscripts but also in dated coins and inscriptions
from the first Islamic decades, and to have offered detailed documentation of the
transformation into the Kufic ductus through an intermediary phase.
In the next phase, the Kufic script represents a calligraphically sophisticated
scribal ductus, which Fraser associates with an orientation toward the Greek-​
Latin majuscule script; though the Kufic is not to be considered a new script,
but rather a monumental development from the Hijazi script. Dated inscriptions
allow us to date the beginnings of this calligraphically sophisticated script to the
time of the third Umayyad caliph, ʿAbd al-​Malik. The famous inscription on the
inner side of the circular arcade (ambulatorium) of the Dome of the Rock in
Jerusalem dates from the year 691; to the same period belong milestones with
engraved inscriptions, which mention the rule of ʿAbd al-​Malik. The begin-
nings of the Kufic script can thus be set at about sixty years after the death of the
Prophet.
Less is known about the scribal workshops, the scriptoria, from which the
oldest manuscripts originate. Estelle Whelan100 has collected reports from histor-
ical sources about scriptoria in Medina. Marcus Fraser succeeded in deducing the
sites of three centers of manuscript production from the paths of transmission
of concrete codices: Sanaa, Fustat, and Damascus. He considers the future dis-
covery of manuscript hoards on the peninsula to be possible—​perhaps confirm-
ing the scriptoria in Medina that are mentioned in historiographical sources.101
In recent years, first datings of writing materials with radiocarbon analysis
(carbon-​14 methods) have been carried out for Qur’an manuscripts.102 The re-
search of textual history, which, apart from the identification of text variants,
also undertakes the chronological assignment of all its textual evidence, is today
inspiring hope thanks to international collaboration. Above all, Bergsträsser’s
project of the apparatus criticus to the Qur’an,103 which was interrupted for a long

99.  On the history of the development of the Lapidaris, especially of the Kūfī, see Grohmann, Arabische
Paläographie, vols. 1–​2; a short overview is offered in Grohmann, “Die Entstehung des Korans”; reproductions
of old codices can be found in Abbott, The Rise of the North Arabic Script; Levi della Vida, Frammenti coranici in
carattere cufico; Vajda, Album de paléographie arabe; Al-​Munajjed, Le manuscrit arabe jusqu’au Xe siècle de l’Hégire
I; Lings, The Qur’anic Art of Calligraphy; James, Qur’ans and Bindings. A  detailed paleographic analysis of the
Damascene Qur’an scrolls, which supposedly go back in some parts to the first century, is given by Ory, “Un nou-
veau type de mushaf ”; synoptically, see Endress, “Herkunft und Entwicklung.”
100.  Whelan, “Writing the Word of God.”
101.  Fraser, lecture December 19, 2009.
102.  See Bothmer, Ohlig, and Puin, “Neue Wege der Koranforschung”; Rezvan, The Qur’an of Uthmân; Dutton,
“An Umayyad Fragment”; Dutton, “Some Notes.”
103.  The project was interrupted for a long time due to the archive being bombed in early 1945. Bergsträsser’s
collection of films and audio recordings on phonographic cylinders are, however, extant and have been handed
over to the Corpus Coranicum project, as a permanent loan from the Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften.
 Redaction and History of the Text  161

time after Otto Pretzl’s death in 1941, was taken up again in the year 2007 in a new
form: the approximately 450 Agfa film rolls left by Bergsträsser are now being
digitized as part of the Corpus Coranicum activities of the Berlin-​Brandenburg
Academy of Sciences and are being utilized for the systematic textual documen-
tation that forms part of that research project. Other parts of the bequest of the
Munich Qur’an Commission have now been partly examined and await evalu-
ation in the coming years. Bergsträsser’s conception of text-​historical analysis
proved groundbreaking for the activities of the academy, which in the coming
years will realize Bergsträsser’s research plan through the gradual publication of
the photo collections long thought destroyed.104 A French-​German research pro-
ject, Coranica, integrated with the Corpus Coranicum, has set itself the goal of
providing an edition and scientific investigation of the oldest preserved Qur’an
manuscripts—​a task to which Sergio Noja Noseda had devoted himself for well
over a decade, in collaboration with Francois Déroche and Christian Robin.
Special attention should be paid here to the dating of the relevant manuscripts.
The anticipated results should lay the groundwork for a history of the Arabic
script and the evolution of Arabic orthography, the development of the distri-
bution of text units within suras and so on. The goal of this research, which will
be supplemented through the inventory of the oldest datable Qur’an citations in
inscriptions on stone, coins, papyri, ornamental objects, textiles, and the like, is
the development and publication of relevant materials for a systematic scientific
edition of the text.

4.7  New Qur’an Editions and Translations

The spectrum of Qur’an texts available today is broad. Modern Qur’an manu-
scripts and lithographs in the Islamic east generally follow the tradition of Ḥafṣ
ʿan ʿĀṣim, in the west that of Warsh ʿan Nāfiʿ, or, in Libya, of Qālūn ʿan Nāfiʿ
(Qālūn d. 220/​835). They have not been treated bibliographically. Lithographs of
the Ḥafṣ over time text assimilated more and more to the standardized orthog-
raphy of secular texts. The first printed Qur’an edition in the Near East backed
this tendency with purist principles: in order to restore the Ḥafṣ text to its earliest
orthographic form, the editors of the official Cairo Qur’an (Qurʾān Karīm, 1344/​
1925) oriented themselves strictly to the Uthmanic script; their edition repre-
sents a reconstruction of the early consonantal text on the basis of individual and
relatively recent orthographic works. Since according to Bergsträsser’s judgment
the degree of exactness could scarcely have been heightened by the reproduc-
tion of older materials, the official Qur’an should be considered the best edition
currently available. It is generally used as a basis in Western research and has

104.  See Marx, “Ein Koran-​Forschungsprojekt”; Marx, “Der Koran nach Agfa.”

162  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

replaced the previous edition by Gustav Flügel,105 which is based on no consistent

Islamic tradition. While Flügel’s edition should be considered fundamentally ob-
solete, his accompanying concordance is still valuable,106 since in taking into ac-
count grammatical function words it goes beyond the concordance to the Cairo
text by Fuʾad ʿAbd al-​Baqi, Al-​Muʿjam al-​mufahras li-​alfāẓ al-​Qurʾān al-​Karīm.107
Such a vast number of translations is now available into European languages
that we can give no adequate account of them here. An overview of the earliest
European Qur’an translations is offered by Arthur Jeffery.108 Further translations
into European languages are given in summary by Jeffery109 and Rudi Paret,110
and into (non-​European) Islamic languages by J. Pearson.111 The critical schol-
arly translations of Richard Bell,112 Arthur Arberry,113 Regis Blachère,114 and Rudi
Paret115 still count as standard works. Paret’s German translation has not been
superseded by the newer and more readable editions of Adel Theodor Khoury116
and Hans Zirker,117 or by the outlandish one by Ahmad Milad Karimi.118 All
translations that have appeared in English from the start of the twentieth century
down to today are discussed critically by Matthias Radscheit.119 The most artisti-
cally valuable German translation, and the one that comes closest to the original
in its linguistic attitude, is still the selection by Friedrich Rückert.120 A new and
dependable translation with artistic claims has been made available by Hartmut
Bobzin;121 a modern poetic version is expected from Stefan Weidner.

105. Flügel, Corani textus arabicus; see Bergsträsser, “Koranlesung in Kairo,” 12–​13.

106. Flügel, Concordantiae Corani arabicae.
107.  Abd al-​Bāqī, Muʿjam.
108.  Jeffery, “Progress in the Study of the Qur’an Text.”
109.  Jeffery, “The Present Status of Qur’anic Studies.”
110. Paret, Vorwort zu Der Koran.
111.  Pearson, “Translations of the Kur’an.”
112. Bell, The Qur’ān Translated.
113. Arberry, The Koran Interpreted.
114. Blachère, Le Coran, vols. 2–​3.
115. Paret, Der Koran: Übersetzung, accompanied by Der Koran: Kommentar und Konkordanz.
116. Khoury, Der Koran.
117. Zirker, Der Koran.
118. Karimi, Der Koran.
119.  Radscheit, “Aktuelle deutsche Koranübersetzungen im Überblick.”
120. Rückert, Der Koran, im Auszuge übersetzt, ed. A. Müller. For criticism of some translations of the Qur’an,
cf. Fischer, Der Wert der vorhandenen Koranübersetzungen, as well as Paret, Der Koran, which collects reviews of
individual translations of the Qur’an.
121. Bobzin, Der Koran.
 5

Sura Structures and Chronology

5.1  The Sura as Novelty

5.1.1  An Unrecognized Genre
A desideratum articulated more than thirty years ago remains unfulfilled: “The
Qur’an has had a fate in Western research not dissimilar to that of early Arabic
poetry:  as historical, cultural, and grammatical-​verbal evidence, it became the
object of a scholarly literature that cannot be dismissed, but as that which it is
in essence, as it was conceived of from the very beginning, that is, as liturgical
discourse and text intended for recitation, it has scarcely ever been appreciated.”1
Indeed, in the time since then, research into ancient Arabic poetry has made sig-
nificant progress, so that the “evaluation” of the poetry for historical or practical
information is no longer the central pursuit, yet the Qur’an remains primarily a
quarry for data of the most various kinds: the life circumstances of the Prophet,
his ideological goals, the religious practices of his contemporaries, even their
means of physical nutrition. But the perception of the Qur’an as a text existing
in progress and reflecting a communal formation, which is always constructing
anew its scenario of proclamation and having its primary Sitz im Leben in litur-
gical performance, has not prevailed and, with the proliferation of the skeptical
approach, remains further than ever from the central focus of research.
If one wants to approach the liturgical Qur’an, the primary object of formal
investigation cannot be the textual compilation of the Qur’an, but must rather
be the unit that was intended by the Prophet himself as the formal medium of
his proclamation: the sura. Although smaller thematic units may have emerged
in connection to particular “occasions of revelation,” asbāb al-​nuzūl, what is rel-
evant for literary-​critical interrogation is not these external occasions for the
handling of a theme but rather their formation and insertion into a composi-
tion. In this investigation, we will adhere to the unit of the sura as a heuristic
basis—​despite the tendency predominant in recent research toward atomizing or
ignoring this form.
That the sura unit2 must have belonged to the formal conceptions of Qur’anic
discourse itself is attested externally by the oldest surviving Qur’an manuscripts,

1. Neuwirth, Studien zur Komposition, 1.

2.  Neuwirth, “Sura(s).”

163
164  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

which already mark the sura beginnings and ends as we find them in the later
canonized codex.3 The name sūra (pl. suwar) is apparently first coined within
the proclamation itself; it is reserved for the Qur’anic textual unit and is used
nowhere for texts outside the Qur’an (before the modern period). Within the
Qur’an, sūra signifies in the first instance a smaller textual unit of undefined ex-
tent. The word occurs first in the middle Meccan period, in the “challenge pro-
nouncements,” the so-​called taḥaddī-​verses, where opponents are challenged to
bring forth a textual unit of the same sort: “Speak: so bring then a sūra like it,
and call out to whom you can other than God” (Q 10:38, similarly late Meccan
Q 11:13 and Medinan Q 2:23; cf. also Q 9:64, 86, 124, 127; Q 24:1 and Q 47:20).
When exactly this textual unit became identified with the units distinguished as
suras in the codex remains unclear, but the most probable etymology seems to
indicate that what was initially intended was a short textual unit. It has long been
assumed the derivation of the Arabic sūra from a Syriac sūrtā, “line,” “line of
writing,”4 a connection now seems more likely with Syriac shūrāyā, “beginning,”
or, in a liturgical context, “introduction (of the reading of scripture by a psalm
reading).”5 The designation sūra would then in Qur’anic usage make reference to
a textual unit that elsewhere is clearly liturgical, and which, similar to the older
suras in ductus and extent, would be kept relatively short and poetic. What we
now have as suras may have circulated early on under individual names similar
to those used now, which pick up on either a beginning word of the text or an
especially striking word from within it, although secure information on the ear-
liest state of affairs is not available.6 That different names remain in circulation
until today for some suras show that the orally transmitted text was known well
enough to guarantee that its individual texts could be recalled by the help of var-
ious key words.7
It seems that for some time the sura unit came to fulfill for the Qur’anic
community the function of those liturgical reading pericopes known from the
neighboring religions; that is, they corresponded to the parasha in Jewish wor-
ship and the pericope in Christian worship. But while within those traditions,
the “excerpting” or pericopizing of the text for reading only occurred when the
canonical text was already available in its entirety, the Qur’anic sura unit was
from the beginning conceived as such and used as the object of a continuous
performance praxis, a social frame of communication that is reflected clearly in
many suras.8 Thus, suras are not excerpts from a complete delineated text, but

3.  This also applies to the manuscript finds of Sanaa; cf. chap. 4, 158–​161; they reflect a clear differentiation
between the suras, and in general follow the order of the suras in the dominant textual tradition.
4.  Nöldeke, GdQ, 1:31; Jeffery, Materials, 180–​182.
5.  On this hypothesis, see Neuwirth, “Sūra(s).”
6.  Occasionally, the Fātiḥa can be evoked in later texts with its concurrent name, al-​ḥamd, as in sura 15; cf.
Neuwirth, “Referentiality and Textuality.”
7.  On the names of the suras, see Kandil, “Surennamen,” 44–​60.
8.  For detail on this development, see chap. 6.
 Sura Structures and Chronology  165

rather elements of a communication that remained open-​ended for a significant

period. While Meccan suras as a rule clearly evince the character of intentional
performance units, the long Medinan suras yield problems in this light. In view
of the extent of time required for their performance, they can hardly have been
intended as singular performances. But not all the long Medinan suras can be
dismissed as secondary, redactional collections. In this sura type, which is no
longer suited to performance in its entirety, one must consider a newly conceived
aim, perhaps that of a biblical book. There is much to indicate that in Medina,
the polythematic sura, tailored in length and ductus for performance,9 is being
superseded by other forms of proclamation, so that the neatly composed Meccan
sura ultimately leaves the scene; it is largely for this reason that the unit “sura”
has received little attention in inner-​Islamic scholarship. Although the classical
commentaries follow the sequence of suras, they focus their exegesis as a rule
on individual verses and hardly ever sum up their exegetical results for an entire
sura. The modern “literary commentary,” the tafsīr adabī, also does not take en-
tire suras as its basis.
If one interprets “sura” not as a kind of chapter heading but rather as the des-
ignation of a genre in the context of proclamation, it becomes evident that the
genre “sura” has scarcely been adequately studied. For Richard Bell and Régis
Blachère, who both studied the style and composition of the Qur’an, the sura
does not stand as the central point, but rather the smaller compositional units
from which they are composed. As against that, Theodor Nöldeke had based his
chronology on the sura as a whole—​without however taking an interest in the
“sura” as a genre concept. A foundational contribution to the description of the
composition of suras is offered only by Josef Horovitz, who in the frame of his
treatment of Qur’anic narrative pays close attention to the appearance of formu-
las or coined expressions with introductory and concluding functions, and thus
provides an important criterion for the demarcation of the individual building
blocks of suras. It is only in recent times that analyses of suras have been under-
taken,10 in which the choice of the sura unit however seems to be pragmatically
motivated—​the sura is a clearly delimited unit—​rather than driven by an in-
terest in its literary form and function within the Qur’anic corpus—​an approach
from which only the much-​studied exceptional case of the monothematic sura
12, “Joseph,” is an exception. In what follows, the sura structures particular to
the individual phases of the Qur’an’s development will be presented briefly in

9.  Cf. chap. 6, 255–​229.

10.  See Mir, “Coherence in the Qur’an”; Mir, “The Sūra as a Unity”; Mir, “The Qur’ānic story of Joseph”;
Neuwirth, “Yusuf-​Sure”; de Prémare, Joseph et Muhammad; Sells, Approaching the Qur’an; Sells, “A Literary
Approach to the Hymnic Surahs”; Sells, “Sound, Spirit and Gender”; Sells, “Sound and Meaning”; Waldman, “New
Approaches”; Zahniser, “The Word of God and the Apostleship of ʿĪsā”; Zwettler, “A Mantic Manifesto.” Cf. also
Neuwirth, “Sura(s).” See now also Schmitz, Sure 2, and Cuypers, The Banquet. A list of his interpretations of indi-
vidual suras can be found ibid., 517.
166  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

their formal and thematic elements, and some new criteria will be drawn for the
chronological attribution of the texts.

5.2  The Early Meccan Suras

5.2.1 Overview
In contrast to the already-​established canonical codex, the pre-​canonical Qur’an
should be understood as the textual remnant of a communication process, and
thus as an ensemble of texts that have their Sitz im Leben in a public or at least
audibly performed recital (qurʾān). These individual texts are to be identified, at
least for the Meccan period, with the suras. The suras equate to the “scenes” of
the Qur’anic drama, so to speak, while the great “acts” are the discourses that de-
veloped one from the other, and which are debated within larger sura groups.11
In the attempt to recognize the individual “scenes” of this drama, it is still a valid
principle, 150 years after the first appearance of Theodor Nöldeke’s Geschichte des
Qorans, to divide the text corpus heuristically into three Meccan periods and one
Medinan period—​intending with “period” not chronologically determinable,
absolute, or even relatively dated text sequences, but rather text groups distin-
guished by formal similarities and unmistakable shared discourses.
In Nöldeke’s chronology, the first Meccan period includes suras 51–​53, 55–​56,
69, 70, 73, 75, 77–​83, 85–​102, 104–​109, and 111–​114: in essence, the so-​called
“last thirtieth” of the Qur’an, which down to today represents a partial corpus
of suras used prominently in ritual prayer.12 They are mostly short texts, at first
monothematic, later also polythematic. They testify to an experience of consola-
tion undergone by the person of the proclaimer, who is addressed as “you.” Apart
from the second-​person address, which is an element introduced by the Qur’an,
this consolation is conveyed in a style that is highly evocative of the Psalms,
which are in fact paraphrased time and again.13 This partial corpus, in which re-
search has long attempted to uncover biographical allusions to the proclaimer’s
situation, should rather be considered as an Arabic expression of psalmic piety, as
a microstructural reading shows. The early texts are text-​referential rather than
situation-​referential; they do not yet always reflect the scenario of the speaker-​
hearer situation that will soon become ubiquitous. With Harris Birkeland, one
can plausibly assume the earliest sura group to be the five suras (93, 94, 106,
107, and 108)  that give expression to comfort, encouragement, and the assur-
ance of providence.14 Closely following is a number of suras that project the Final

11.  On these discourses, see chap. 7–​9.

12.  On the overriding oral character of the Qur’an, see Graham, Beyond the Written Word; cf. also Nelson, Art
of Reciting.
13.  Neuwirth, “Psalms.”
14. Birkeland, The Lord Guideth; now also Sinai, “Qur’ān as Process”; cf. chap. 7, 241–​243.
 Sura Structures and Chronology  167

Judgment in metaphors that often recall the Revelation of John, a vision of the
future presented as shockingly close that radically redresses the erstwhile pre-
dominant cyclical understanding of time. Time is now extended linearly, back to
an original beginning before the chronological time of man, reaching from the
creation of the world and the first divine self-​communication down to the end of
human time: the dissolution of the created world, the judgment and the ensuing
retribution. The new theologumenon of linear time, central for this early phase,
wherein everything leads ultimately to a rendering account is instrumental for
a decisive “turn” in the worldview of the Qur’anic community, toward an escha-
tological fulfillment of time, a turn that is decisive enough to give every human
interaction a new, ethically relevant quality. But these “eschatological suras”—​
like the preceding ones—​do not yet draw their authority from the reference to a
divine speaker who has introduced himself as an actor. They rather make use of
authorization strategies drawn from pre-​Islamic sacral speech; such as clusters
of oaths upon natural phenomena, and ultra-​rhythmic, short speech units thus
exploiting the almost magical power of language to project the foreseen apoca-
lyptic events.
What in the early Meccan suras counts in consideration of the imminent judg-
ment is not only ethically correct behavior but also ritual observance. Day and
night are subdivided into sacral sections of time reserved for prayer, which are
often evoked in the introductory parts. But the most important time-​specific in-
novation is the introduction of eschatological prophecies. With their expressive
and strikingly repetitious structures, these prophecies strongly mark the audible
and rhythmic shape of the early suras. Their most important characteristics are
the oath clusters and the so-​called idhā-​phrase-​series—​rows of sentences begin-
ning with idhā “if (and when),” which conjure eschatological scenes at the begin-
ning of a sura.15 Unlike biblical oaths the Qur’anic oath clusters do not function
as invocations of a supernatural power from outside of the text, but rather draw
their authority from their very linguistic force. The value claim of the early suras
is not yet grounded in an extratextual authority: one should speak here of a po-
etic rather than a theological truth claim.
The hymnic passages, characterized by parallelism, also follow a scheme of
repetition. In their attitude of thankfulness for divinely guaranteed safety and
preservation, they seem to form counterpoints to the eschatologically marked
texts with their dreadful projections of punishment, yet the argumentation that
accompanies them often leads similarly into eschatological trains of thought.
Toward the end of the early Meccan period, the consolations and exhorta-
tions, at first directed toward the proclaimer individually and positioned at the
conclusions of suras, give way to a new mode to confirm the truth claim of the

15.  See Neuwirth, Studien zur Komposition, 190–​193; cf. below, 174–176.
168  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

proclamation now involving the collective of hearers: the “affirmation of revela-

tion,” which will become the prevailing form of sura conclusion in the following
periods.

5.2.2  Elements of Form and Semantics

5.2.2.1  The Sura Beginning
Of the approximately thirty early Meccan suras, no less than fourteen begin with
an oath or an oath cluster.16 This observation invites a closer treatment of the
oaths, firstly because typologically marked openings of literary compositions of
a shared genre often carry significance for the overall structure that goes beyond
their individual semantic value, as can be seen, for example, within pre-​Qur’anic
Arabic literature in the opening of the ancient Arabic qasida, the nasīb.17 On the
other hand, the Qur’anic oaths deserve attention since they are controversial in
research: although the few available studies on the overall composition of early
Meccan suras do not yet  allow conclusive judgments as to the function of the
introductory oaths, individual observations on these sura openings—​supported
by indigenous traditions that are by no means warranted—​have spawned far-​
reaching hypotheses about the specific Prophet type of Muhammad. In particular,
on the basis of the sura-​introductory oath clusters, whose rhetorical structure is
closely related to that of the pronouncements of the ancient Arabic seers and
soothsayers, the kuhhān, some have arrived at the conclusion that the early suras
might be seen as proclamations of this particular speaker type.18 In this argumen-
tation, a particular evidential power is assigned to the oath clusters, since these
clusters display an “obscurity of sense, which is everywhere more implicated than
executed.”19 In view of the insecure transmission of the few pronouncements of
the kuhhān that have been traced up to now from other sources, the comparison
itself cannot be verified. But it remains a desideratum to describe the types and
forms of oaths and oath clusters in the Qur’an as to their function in the Qur’anic
discourse.
It should be asserted at the outset that the discourse type “oath”—​which taken
in the strict sense consists of only the verbal part of an act made up of both
words and particular symbolic gestures20—​does not serve in the Qur’an as the

16.  On the complex problems of Qur’anic oaths, see Neuwirth, “Images and Metaphors”; Neuwirth, Studien
zur Komposition, 187–​188; Robinson, Discovering the Qur’an, 102–​103.
17.  See Lichtenstädter, “Das Nasib”; Jacobi, Poetik der altarabischen Qaside; J. Stetkevych, Zephyrs of the Najd;
S. Stetkevych, The Mute Immortals Speak; Montgomery, Vagaries of the Qasida.
18.  This circular reasoning was expressed by Wellhausen, Reste, 135: “The most important documents for the
style of the Kahin are the oldest suras in the Qur’an.” Cf. further Watt, Bell’s Introduction to the Qur’an, 77–​79; Paret,
Mohammed und der Koran, 24–​25. Contrast the more reserved statement in Blachère, Introduction au Coran, 178–​
179. A new attempt has been offered by Hämeen-​Anttila, “Arabian Prophecy,” 115–​146, which constructs a kāhin’s
career for the proclaimer of the Qur’an.
19.  Nöldeke and Schwally, GdQ2, 75.
20.  On the type of oath in the context of religious speech, cf. Heiler, Erscheinungsformen, 311–​314; Lehmann,
“Biblical Oaths.”
 Sura Structures and Chronology  169

trigger for any magic effect or legal obligation, but is rather used exclusively as
an artistic, literary means to produce an emphatic effect. With this in mind, one
can give an account of its striking formal characteristics: first, the accumulation
of oath formulae, which often form a kind of rhythmical startup for the suras,
corresponding here to other types of stereotyped introductory clusters. That nei-
ther magical influence nor legal obligation is intended becomes evident from
the simple verbal formulation, which is limited to the naming of the oath object
(“by X”) and the oath pronouncement, without any other immanent compulsion
being expressed, usually phrased “inna X la-​Y.” Yet there are shared character-
istics between the literary oaths of the Qur’an and genuine—​that is, binding—​
oaths, first of all the particular relation between the two parts of the oath. Both
types of oaths draw for their assertion on the reference not on phenomena of
the everyday world surrounding the speaker but to phenomena of a different,
in most cases hierarchically superior realm. Genuine oaths do this in order to
summon these phenomena as guarantors or testimonies for the truth of the ensu-
ing pronouncements, while literary oaths, on the other hand, employ enigmatic
phenomena to give particular force to the unambiguity of their pronouncements.
Between the oath cluster itself and the pronouncements that require underscor-
ing lies a clear break not only syntactically but also semantically. As a rule it is
only the ensuing section to which the oath cluster connects semantically pro-
viding it with a structural or iconic matrix (“Bildmatrix”) for its pronouncements.
Three major groups of oath clusters emerge in the Qur’an: (1) oaths by ani-
mate beings or phenomena not named explicitly (fāʿilāt oaths, “tableaux”): suras
100, 79, 77, 51, and 37; (2)  oaths by sacred sites:  suras 95, 90, and 52; and
(3) oaths by cosmic phenomena and times of the day and night: suras 93, 92,
91, 89, 86, 85—​this last category also includes some oaths that occur within the
interior of suras.21
5.2.2.2  Oath Clusters as Tableaux
There are five introductory oath clusters that do not name their oath objects
with a distinct designation, but rather employ a metonymical use of the femi-
nine active plural participle, identified in Arabic grammar as fāʿilāt. Not without
ambiguity, the verbs employed in the oath clusters communicate the impres-
sion of swift and violent movement (Q 100:1–​3: wa l-​ʿādiyāt ḍabḥā, “by the fast
runners”)22 or violent action (Q 79:  1–​4 wa-​l-​nāziʿāt gharqā, “by the violently
pulling”), contributing to a sensibly threatening tone. The frequent usage in the
Qur’an of this participle form for the metonymical paraphrase of a catastrophic
event, as for example al-​qāriʿa, “the knocker” (as herald of a natural catastrophe,
Q 101:1–​3), gives additional frightening effect to the pronouncement, which

21.  A discussion of all the oaths is offered in Neuwirth, “Der Horizont der Offenbarung.”
22.  Sura 100 is discussed in chap. 10, 359–​362, and chap. 12, 428–​434.
170  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

remains enigmatic in terms of its concrete accompanying circumstances. The

fāʿilāt series, in that they draw up entire tableaux in order to illustrate an onrush-
ing calamity through natural phenomena, can probably be best likened to a bib-
lical seer vision. An example is Q 77:1–​7:

wa-​l-​mursalāti  ʿurfā
fa-​l-​ʿāṣifāti ʿaṣfā
wa-​l-​nāshirāti  nashrā
fa-​l-​fāriqāti  farqā
fa-​mulqiyāti  dhikrā
ʿudhran aw nudhrā
inna mā tūʿadūnā la-​wāqiʿ

By those sent out in rows

Then violently roaring,
Then spreading out widely,
Then driving out from each other,
Then raining down reminding
Forgiveness or warning:
That which is threatened to you falls here.

The oath series (verses 1–​6) draws a panorama of meteorological and natural phe-
nomena, the stormy movement of which is translated finally into a verbal warning
(verse 6), thus achieving a threatening introductory tone. One can imagine storms
as the subjects of the movements referred to in this oath series, and the objects of
nāshirāt, “spreading” and fāriqāt, “driving apart,” are most likely rain clouds; both of
these occur in a shared context also elsewhere (cf. Q 79:1–​5). According to this in-
terpretation in the sense of forward-​driving rain clouds—​which is suggested by the
particular powers introduced only metonymically through qualification—​the oath
cluster evinces the immediately comprehensible image of a directed and contin-
uous sequence of movement. What is surprising then is how, at the end of the series
(verses 5–​6), the rain clouds are supposed to have the ability of verbal articulation
(dhikr, remembrance, ʿudhr “forgiveness,” nudhr, “warning”). Does this tableau, the
fāʿilāt forms of which are stereotypically bound up in the Qur’an with eschatological
connotations, conjure up the events of the Final Day, as in suras 10023 and 79? Or, in
view of the connection of the movements of nature with verbal pronouncements, is
it an illustration of the communication process of the Qur’anic message?
The oath pronouncement (verse 7) expresses explicitly the “coming down” of
the events announced in the oath series—​in the image of the rain clouds driving
on the storm: inna-​mā tuʿādūna la-​wāqiʿ, “that which is threatened to you falls
here.” In view of the parallels, this threat is clearly eschatologically directed. Even

23.  See the discussions of this sura, chap. 10, 359–​362, and chap. 12 428–​434.
 Sura Structures and Chronology  171

if the oath series, with its storm-​driving clouds (verse 1) possessing violent move-
ment (verse 2) and destructive power (verse 4), does not function exclusively as
a prefiguration of eschatological events and the loosing of creation, but rather at
the same time reflects the dynamic of verbal communication between heaven and
earth, still their morphological form in the fāʿilāt structure evokes unmistakable
eschatological associations. The oath series thus persists in its double readability
as an evocative nature tableau functioning as an apocalyptical harbinger, and a
(super)natural image of the process of revelation. It is this ubiquitous subtext and
matrix of images that remains present throughout the entire sura.24

5.2.3  Oaths by Sacred Sites

In addition to these fāʿilāt oath clusters, we find a small group of oath series upon
particular sacralized sites (suras 95, 90, and 52),25 which serve to evoke the existing
knowledge of the hearers regarding the salvation historical meaning of the given
sites that is only hinted at in the oath; for example, the naming of Sinai to evoke
the revelation to Moses. These oaths not only serve as epitomized recollections of
revelation recalling salvific acts of God but also form a kind of subliminal argu-
ment, even when no direct logical relation to the oath pronouncement obtains. In
Qur’anic thought, divine care through self-​revelation in history is tied to the ex-
hortation for fit human action that will become clear on the day of reckoning—​the
oaths thus stand in service of an argumentation for the necessity and unavoidability
of the Final Day. This progression of ideas is formed, for example, in Q 52:1–​8:

wa-​l-​ṭūr
wa-​kitābin  masṭūr
fī raqqin manshūr
wa-​l-​bayti l-​maʿmūr
wa-​l-​saqfi l-​marfūʿ
wa-​l-​baḥri l-​masjūr
inna ʿadhāba rabbika la-​wāqiʿ
mā lahu min dāfiʿ

By the mountain
and a writing, inscribed
on parchment, unrolled.
By the much-​visited house,
and the roof raised high,
by the roaring sea.
The punishment of your lord arrives,
none can avert it.

24.  Neuwirth, “Images and Metaphors,” 9–​11.

25.  Ibid.,  13–​18.
172  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

The oath series evokes two scenes of divine self-​revelation:  Mount Sinai and
Mecca. Both are clearly recognizable as symbols, for they are bound to each other
by two further elements of monotheistic emblematics: written down, “codified”
writing, kitāb masṭūr, and “parchment,” raqq, the material basis of writing. The
two sites are named indirectly, as in sura 95: Sinai is named through the Aramaic
term for mountain, ṭūrā, immediately recognizable as the holy mountain. Mecca
or its sanctuary is evoked in its function as pilgrimage site, bayt maʿmūr. The ho-
liness of both places is founded on the divine self-​revelation that occurred histor-
ically on site, in which an obligation was imposed on mankind. In agreement with
the conventions of early Meccan texts, the primordial divine self-​communication
(verses 1–​4) is bound up with the idea of the beginning of creation, which in this
symbolically laden context is evoked through two images culled from the cosmic
arena: the firmament of heaven and the sea (verses 5–​6). The conceptual combi-
nation of divine creation and teaching is, as elsewhere, the precondition for the
idea of eschatological resolution and rendering account, so that with the naming
of both an expectation is awoken in the hearers. Its fulfillment is not delayed, as
in the two other suras that begin with the same sequence of creation teaching,
suras 95 and 90, but rather the threat of punishment is immediately expressed in
the oath pronouncement itself (verses 7–​8).
5.2.3.1  Oaths by Heavenly Phenomena
The third and most extensive group of oath series are oaths by heavenly phe-
nomena,26 by times of day or, more frequently, night. These oaths stand in no
direct, unambiguous connection to what follows immediately. They are neither
projections of catastrophe nor expressions of the double thought-​figure creation-​
teaching/​dissolution of the cosmos-​accounting, but rather often thematize times
of prayer service, as Q 93:1 al-​ḍuḥā, “the bright day,” or Q 89:1 al-​fajr, “the sun-
rise,” and Q 103:1 al-​ʿaṣr, “the late afternoon,” which have to be assumed as prayer
times by the early Meccan period.27 References to the night can frequently be
understood as references to the vigils of the proclaimer and his community.
Moreover, these oath objects are often exploited hermeneutically: they are bound
respectively to oppositional or complementary pairs, and in some cases bring out
the ambivalent oppositionality of the elements of creation, as in sura 91,28 or, in
other cases, the balance of creation, which also implies the contradictory strife of
human inclinations, as Q 92:1–​4, 5–​13:

wa-​l-​layli idhā yaghshā

wa-​l-​nahāri idhā tajallā
wa-​mā khalaqa l-​dhakara wa-​l-​unthā

26.  Neuwirth, “Images and Metaphors,” 18–​28.

27.  Rubin, “Morning and Evening Prayers”; cf. chap. 6, 215–217.
28.  Cf. chap. 3, 132–135.
 Sura Structures and Chronology  173

inna saʿyakum la-​shattā

fa-​ammā man aʿṭā wa-​ttaqā
wa-​ṣaddaqa bi-​l-​ḥusnā
fa-​sa-​nuyassiruhu li-​l-​yusrā
wa-​ammā man bakhila wa-​staghnā
wa-​kadhdhaba bi-​l-​ḥusnā
fa-​sa-​nuyassiruhu li-​l-​ʿusrā
wa-​mā yughnī ʿanhu māluhu idhā taraddā
inna ʿalaynā la-​l-​hudā
wa-​inna lanā la-​l-​ākhirata wa-​l-​ūlā

By the night, when it covers everything

and the day, when it shines bright.
By Him, who created male and female.
Your striving is disparate.
He who gives and is God-​fearing
and recognizes the most beautiful as true,
for him we ease his way to easiness.
But he who is greedy and proudly repellent
and lies about the most beautiful,
for him we ease his way to hardship.
His possessions will not help him when he plummets.
The guidance is only with us
and to us only belongs the first and last.

The oath series (verses 1–​3) begins with the naming of the night, the time of the
vigil,29 which is bound by verse 2 to the oppositional pairing day/​night. Then fol-
lows, as a further pair of contrasts, the naming of the two genders willed by the
creator as such. These oppositions, immanent in creation, prepare the central pro-
nouncement of the sura, the reality of the morally differing directions of human
striving, with which the hearers are directly confronted in verse 4: “Your striving
is disparate.” The two elementary contrasting pairs of the oath series, day/​night
and male/​female, prove to be the structural matrix for the “contradictoriness of
the strivers” that is unfolded in the subsequent confrontation of the pious and the
proud (verses 5–​13). Verses 5–​7 and 8–​10 draw up a double image of the morally
and liturgically approved and of those deficient in both respects, whereby the
negative wing of the image (verses 8–​10) is strengthened through verses 11–​13
by a proportionally balanced extension (verses 11–​13). The righteous behavior as
well as the misconduct are twofold: they are manifest in social conduct (verses 5
and 8) and in belief/​unbelief in the hereafter (verses 6 and 9). The punishment of

29.  On the proclaimer’s vigils, see chap. 2, 71–73.

174  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

the damned emphasizes the frailness of supposed human power, and once again
refers the decisive oppositional pair, the here and the hereafter (verse 13), to God
alone. (An additional second part of the sura follows, which again takes up the
theme of the vigil that is evoked in the oath series.)
In addition to this characteristic of providing an image or structural matrix for
the wider sura text, the inner dynamic of the oath series has been highlighted.30
It results from the accumulation of parallel syntactical elements, which form a
rhythmic buildup, and then shapes the hearers’ expectations, through the amass-
ing of image elements, into a resolution of the images into explicit proclamations.
It is no accident that it is this type of expressive sura introduction from which the
characteristic initial image of later suras finally developed: the writing, al-​kitāb.
The “writing” or the “scripture” is thus the only relic from among a complex en-
semble of the manifold accessories of revelation originally comprising complex
cosmic, vegetative, topographic, and cultic-​social elements.
5.2.3.2  Eschatological Scenes and Processes
While oath clusters allude to eschatological events only in the case of the fāʿilāt-​
series, and there only indirectly, this eschatological reference is the rule in an-
other type of early Meccan sura introductions: the idhā-​phrase clusters, that is,
the array of “if (one day)” phrases: it forms the first verse cluster of an ensemble
that consists in total of three parts, comprising an “eschatological scenario,” an
“eschatological process,” and a “double image” or “diptych.”31 Eschatological
prophecies are introduced as a rule by short, linked rows of idhā  .  .  .  (“if one
day . . .”) followed by subject and predicate, which thematize the events of the
Final Day, that is, the loosing of the cosmos and the waking of the dead (e.g., in
Q 99:1–​3, Q 84:1–​5, and Q 77:8–​11). They form an “eschatological scenario” that
is continued by an “eschatological process,” the display of human behavior on the
Final Day. In some cases, the idhā sentences are not limited to natural or cosmic
phenomena but include also preparations for the scenario of judgment, such as
the erection of the throne, the blowing of the trumpets, and the opening of the
books, as in Q 81:1–​14:32

idhā l-​shamsu kuwwirat

wa-​idhā l-​nujūmu nkadarat
wa-​idhā l-​jibālu suyyirat
wa-​idhā l-​ʿishāru ʿuṭṭilat
wa-​idhā l-​wuḥūshu ḥushirat
wa-​idhā l-​biḥāru sujjirat

30.  Neuwirth, “Images and Metaphors,” 31–​32.

31.  On the eschatological elements, see in detail Neuwirth, Studien zur Komposition, 190–​193; Robinson,
Discovering the Qur’an, 105–​106.
32. Neuwirth, Studien zur Komposition, 221.
 Sura Structures and Chronology  175

wa-​idhā l-​nufūsu zuwwijat

wa-​idhā l-​mawʾūdatu suʾilat
bi-​ayyi dhanbin qutilat
wa-​idhā l-​ṣuḥufu nushshirat
wa-​idhā l-​samāʾu kushiṭat
wa-​idhā l-​jaḥīmu suʿʿirat
wa-​idhā l-​jannatu uzlifat
ʿalimat nafsun mā aḥḍarat

When the sun is rolled up

and the stars cease to shine
when the mountains are made to move
when the pregnant camels are left alone
and wild animals are herded
when the seas overflow
when souls are put in pairs
and the hidden is asked
for what sin she was murdered
when scrolls are unfolded
and the sky is removed
when hellfire is kindled
and the garden is brought near,
then a soul will know what it accomplished.

The two-​part sura is filled out with two exactly equal parts of eschatology and
polemic, respectively. The first part (verses 1–​14) is made up of a single idhā
cluster with following pronouncements. The cluster, consisting of twelve snap-
shot images, is unfolded in pairs. The first pair thematizes catastrophic cosmic
changes of sun and stars (verses 1–​2). What follows is a pronouncement about
the earth, followed by its correlate, the sea (verses 3 and 6, which follow later due
to a displacement of the verse). A further pair (verses 4–​5) focuses on scenes of
the Bedouin lifeworld, which is presented as a “topsy-​turvy world”: following the
convincing interpretation of Nicolai Sinai, the pregnant camels, which are partic-
ularly valuable as livestock, are left unattended, and therefore come into danger,
while wild isolated animals, which otherwise move on their own, are grouped
into herds. This is followed by a depiction of humankind (verses 7–​9), whose
souls are re united with their bodies; in this restoration of mankind, carefully
kept secrets come to light, as in the case of the guiltlessly murdered and buried
newborn girl, who is introduced as an interrogator (verses 8–​9)33—​this too is
clearly a Bedouin reference. It is only here that the preparation for the judgment

33.  Waʾd, “burying alive,” was practiced in impoverished Bedouin societies to dispose of unwanted female
progeny.
176  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

begins, with the unrolling of the register of deeds (verse 10) and the raising of
the curtain: the sky is “taken away,” to clear the stage for the judgment (verse 11).
Finally, the two places in which the blessed and the damned will make their stay
are prepared or “brought near” (verses 12 and 13).
Following this highly dramatic idhā cluster, which is formed through such
strong parallelisms and which is unique due to the featuring of animals not men-
tioned elsewhere in eschatological scenarios, the pronouncement is performed,
limited to just one verse, consummating the significant pathos that has accumu-
lated from the long preceding sequence. It is all the more emphatic because it
yokes its word order chiastically to that of the preceding verses. While in the oath
series the verb stood at the end and formed the rhyme, it now stands at the begin-
ning and thus carries the stress of the verse; in this way, the thought of wisdom
or insight obtains special emphasis:  ʿalimat nafsun mā aḥḍarat, “a soul knows
what it has accomplished” (verse 14). The cluster offers an impressive rhythmic
buildup to the final pronouncement, which consists in the laying open of the
knowledge of man about his earthly conduct. Beneath this, as a subtext, we can
make out a polemical confrontation with the Bedouin world known from heroic
poetry, which is inserted through the negative image of the buried girl.
In place of idhā we can also find yawma, “on the day when” (e.g., in Q 101:4–​5,
Q 79:6–​7). The idhā/​yawma clusters are followed formally by a sentence of the
type “then only [occurs],” the so-​called eschatological process, which imagines
the psychic condition (Q 81:14) and behavior of man experiencing the apoca-
lyptic situation and illuminates the division of mankind into groups of blessed
and damned. Here, in place of a description, can also occur an exclamation of
woe (Q 52:9–​12) or an address to the damned (Q 52:13–​16).
5.2.3.3  Double Images, “Diptychs”
The concluding descriptions of the hereafter that then follow bring into the pic-
ture the blessed who are granted paradise after the judgment and those who are
damned to punishment in hell.34 These elements are clearly divided into two cor-
responding parts. Introduced by stereotyped formulas such as fa-​ammā . . . fa-​,
“as for the (x), the (x)  are”; wa-​ammā  .  .  .  fa-​, “but as for the (y), the (y)  are”
(Q 101:6–​7; 8–​9, Q 92:5–​7; 8–​10) or wujūhun yawmaʾidhin X.  .  . wujūhin
yawmaʾidhin Y. . . “Some faces on that day are X, other faces that day are Y” (Q
80:38–​39; 40–​42), they contrast the situation of the blessed in the gardens of par-
adise with that of the damned in hellfire. It is striking that both utopian images
are heavily laden with metaphors, and together they form a double image, the
parts of which show either exactly equal verses or proportional verse numbers to
each other—​so, for example, in the cited example: Q 92:4–​7 and 8–​10 together
with 11–​13. As such, they recall the contrasting images of the two scenes of the

34.  Cf. chap. 7, 257–263, and chap. 12, 441–​444, where a further example is discussed.
 Sura Structures and Chronology  177

hereafter in early Christian iconography, and could be described as a kind of

diptych. Not rarely, these diptychs include recollections of the earthly behavior
of men. In these cases flashbacks follow that provide a justification for the ver-
dict, but which occasionally may turn into direct attacks on the opponents of
the proclaimer. They serve for the most part to enumerate vices that are to be
avoided (cf. the “vice catalogue,” e.g., in Q 75:31–​33, Q 83:29–​33) and virtues to
be imitated (cf. the “virtue catalogue,” e.g., in Q 51:16–​19). Such descriptions of
the lot of the judged in the hereafter and the virtue and vice catalogues may also
occur unconnected to the double images. As an example of a double image with
a flashback to the earthly behavior of the judged and a kind of vice catalogue, we
present Q 69:19–​24, 25–​32, 33–​37:

fa-​ammā man ūtiya kitābahu bi-​yamīnih

fa-​yaqūlu hāʾumu qraʾ kitābiyah
innī ẓanantu innī mulāqin ḥisābīyah
fa-​huwa fī ʿīshatin rāḍīyah
fī jannatin ʿāliyah
quṭūfuhā dānīyah
kulū wa-​shrabū hanīʾan
bi-​mā aslaftum fī l-​ayyāmi l-​khālīyah
wa-​ammā man ūtiya kitābahu bi-​shimālih
fa-​yaqūlu yā laytanī lam ūta kitābiyah
wa-​lam adri mā ḥisābiyah
yā laytahā kānati l-​qāḍiyah
mā aghnā ʿannī mālīyah
halaka ʿannī sulṭānīyah
khudhūhu fa-​ghullūh
thumma l-​jaḥīma ṣallūh
thumma fī silsilatin dharʿuhā sabʿūna dhirāʿan fa-​slukūh
innahu kāna lā yuʾminu bi-​llāhi l-​ʿaẓīm
wa-​lā yaḥuḍḍu ʿalā ṭaʿāmi l-​miskīn
fa-​laysa lahu l-​yawma hāhunā ḥamīm
wa-​lā ṭaʿāmun illā min ghislīn
lā yaʾkulūhu illā l-​khāṭiʾūn

He who is handed his register in his right hand will say:

“Here it is! Take my register and read it to me.
I thought I was to meet my reckoning.”
He shall have a life of contentment
in a lofty garden
whose pickings are within reach.
“Eat and drink in good health,
because of your former deeds in days gone by.”
178  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

And he who is handed his register in his left hand will say:

“I wish I had not been handed my register,
nor known my reckoning!
If only my death had been final! My wealth does not help;
My power has collapsed around me.”
Seize him and shackle him,
then scorch him in hell,
then lash him in chains, seventy arms in length.
He did not believe in God, the most powerful,
and did not encourage the feeding of the poor!
So today here he has no friend
and no food but the dirty water of hell,
which only sinners drink.

Sura 69 begins with the announcement of a punishment, which is first exemplified

by the fates of the destroyed peoples (verses 1–​12). The second part of the sura
(verses 13–​37) is filled out eschatologically. The apocalyptic event is announced
by a trumpet blast (verse 13); shakings of earth and mountains follow (verses
14–​16). The splitting of the heavens (verse 16) opens the stage for the entrance
of angels, who carry the throne of the divine judge, and the entrance of men who
themselves will be judged. The assignment of the judged among the blessed or
the damned (verses 19–​37) is shown through the handing over of their register of
deeds (kitāb, verse 19, 25), from which they take away their “accounting” (ḥisāb,
verse 20, 25). The concluding double image of the judged first inserts the fate of
the blessed (verses 19–​24), to whom is granted the stay in a garden with ample
fruits, accompanied by welcoming and appreciative speeches. The negative part
of the double image (verses 25–​32) depicts the punishment that is readied for
the thoughtless, who are not prepared for the judgment: torture and hellfire. This
part is expanded into an exhortation to the guards of hell and a flashback, so that
the description of the damned occupies the doubled space of that of the blessed.
The different treatments of the judged contrasted in this double image—​the
pleasantries of the blessed (gardens, rich meals, friendly speech) set against the
excessive torment of the damned (chaining and penalty by fire, and finally nau-
seating meals) presuppose familiarity with earlier, more detailed descriptions.
In this double image, belonging already to the end of the early Meccan period,
we see a contrast above all of the inner attitudes of the blessed ones, who have
directed their lives toward God’s judgment, with that of the damned, whose dis-
obedience to divine authority is connected to their neglect of social duties—​this
results in the end in satisfaction for one and regret for the other.

5.2.4  Narratives: Lessons from History

Early Meccan suras often refer back to abandoned sites that were apparently occu-
pied in the past by prospering societies, whose downfall, manifest in the collapse
 Sura Structures and Chronology  179

of buildings and irrigation systems, is identified not as due to natural catastro-

phes but as punishment for the unbelief of the occupants and the rejection of
the divine messengers sent to them (see for example Q 91:11–​15, Q 85:4–​8, Q
51:24–​46). The places that remain behind in a demolished state, which in part
appear as already familiar to the hearers, are presented as collective monuments,
lieux de mémoire, illustrating an order willed by God, according to which human
misbehavior attracts divine punishment and eventually also annihilation. Josef
Horovitz, who investigated the Qur’anic stories according to historical, narra-
tive, and linguistic criteria,35 speaks aptly of “punishment legends.” Here, we can
make an elementary distinction between stories that are filled out with narrative
details (in suras 105, 91, 79, 68, and 51) and mere evocations of stories presumed
already familiar (in suras 85, 89, 69, 51, 53, and 73). Suras 89, 69, 51, and 53
present examples of the minimal form of the “list.” It should be emphasized that
longer narratives, often introduced with formulas such as hal atāka ḥadīth . . . ,
“has the news reached you of . . . ,” are also assumed to be familiar, or at least sug-
gested to be so. In these narratives, what occurs is less a communication than a
re-​presentation. Q 89:6–​14 offers a narrative sequence:

a-​lam tara kayfa faʿala rabbuka bi-​ʿĀd

Irama dhāti l-​ʿimād
allatī lam yukhlaq mithluhā fī l-​bilād
wa-​Thamūda lladhīna jābū l-​ṣakhra bi-​l-​wād
wa-​Firʿawna dhī l-​awtād
alladhīna ṭaghaw fī l-​bilād
fa-​aktharū fīhā l-​fasād
fa-​ṣabba ʿalayhim rabbuka sawṭa ʿadhāb
inna rabbaka la-​bi-​l-​mirṣād

Have you not seen how your Lord dealt with ʿĀd,

with Iram of the pillars,
who had no equal in the land
and with Thamud, who hewed into the rock in the valley,
and with Pharaoh the lord of the poles,
who were defiant in the land
and wrought so much havoc.
Your Lord poured out a flood of punishment over them.
Truly, your Lord is lurking!

The recollection of the punishment legends is preceded by an oath on liturgi-

cally relevant times (verses 1–​5), to which this narrative follows immediately, in
the position of an oath pronouncement. It develops—​in continuation of the idea
of the “relevant times” from the oath series—​the idea of the fatefully decisive

35. Horovitz, Koranische Untersuchungen,  1–​77.

180  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

time. Earlier societies, in full possession of the material signs of earthly greatness,
did not recognize their decisive chance, their kairos, and fell to a divine verdict
of punishment. Verses 6–​14 bring together, under the theme of divine evalua-
tion, the fates of three ancient peoples presented as defiant and destructive, as the
formal introduction already announces (verse 6): a-​lam tara kayfa faʿala rabbuka
bi-​X, “Have you not seen, how your Lord has dealt with X?” The retribution that
overtakes them is pronounced in a metaphor: fa-​ṣabba ʿalayhim rabbuka sawṭa
ʿadhāb, “for your Lord poured out a flood of punishment over them” (verse 13).
The addressed hearers (verses 17–​20), standing in an equally decisive time, must
keep in mind not to miss the assignment that is set to them.
It is striking that it is through the Qur’anic stories drawn from history, no
less than the enumeration of great divine deeds in creation, that the value of
“signs,” ayāt, is measured. Equally to such enumerations, the stories point to his
omnipotence, which also includes the power to awaken the dead. The narra-
tives are thus involved, either explicitly or implicitly, in an argument about the
theological point in dispute among the hearers: of the resurrection. This kind
of embedding of the narratives into an argument, which later becomes fre-
quent, in the early Meccan suras is not yet linked explicitly to the term “signs.”36
Instead, what occurs are introductory formulas of warning such as “Have you
not seen. . . ,” which prod the listener to think about the testimony of his eyes
or his memory.
It should be emphasized that all the major narratives occurring in the early
Meccan period are structured into halves, so that two equal main parts are
yielded: in sura 79 six to six verses, in sura 51 seven to seven, and in sura 68 nine
to nine. Apparently, the intended function here is as mnemotechnic aids for the
reciter.

5.2.5 Hymnic
A distinction should be made between “pure hymns,” that is, texts in which God
is praised for His own sake out of man’s feeling of dependency and gratitude,
and those paraenetic texts in which the praise and admiration of God’s omnipo-
tence and deeds primarily offers a threat against the high-​handed, or a “sign” and
warning to men of understanding.37
One might regard sura 106 as the oldest nucleus of a pure Qur’anic hymn; the
two similar sura beginnings Q 87:1–​5 and 96:1–​5 then appear as its direct exten-
sion. In both texts, the understanding of the liturgical word granted by God to
man is expressed already as qurʾān. Q 87:1–​8:

36.  For discussion of the punishment legends, see chap. 3, 131–​135.

37.  See Neuwirth, Studien zur Komposition, 192–​195; Robinson, Discovering the Qur’an, 109–​110; Baumstark,
“Gebetstypus.”
 Sura Structures and Chronology  181

sabbiḥi sma rabbika l-​ʿalā

alladhī khalaqa fa-​sawwā
wa-​lladhī qaddara fa-​hadā
wa-​lladhī akhraja l-​marʿā
fa-​jaʿalahu ghuthāʾan aḥwā
sa-​nuqriʾuka fa-​lā-​tansā
illā mā shāʾa llāhu
innahu yaʿlamu l-​jahra wa-​mā yakhfā
wa-​nuyassiruka li-​l-​yusrā

Glorify the name of your Lord, the highest,

who creates and forms
who measures and guides
who produces the pastures
and makes them dark chaff.
We will have you read, and you will not forget
except what God wants
He knows what is in the open and what concealed.
We shall ease your way toward ease.

The sura begins with a call to the praise of God (verse 1), which then leads
into a hymn (verses 2–​5) composed of three parallel predicates introduced by
alladhī, “who.” God is praised as the Creator, who forms man, measures his up-
keep, and guides him rightly. But God’s life-​giving attention, his bringing forth
of spring pastures, provides no safety, for he lets the life of nature be erased
again in the sequence of the seasons and thus, as one can adduce from ancient
Arabic poetry, repeatedly shakes the society of the nomadic tribes brought to-
gether by the flourishing of nature in the winter and spring. God is also the
lord of time, the cyclical natural sequence of which does not follow fate—​as in
ancient Arabic poetry—​but rather God’s will. The hymnic enumeration of the
divine bounties thus ends in a remembrance of loss that is familiar from the
poetry, but which has now been detached from its pessimistic thrust, in that it
is divinely willed. After this accumulation of titles of power, the divine voice
turns, as if to authorize the hymn, and promises communication to the pro-
claimer, that is, further divine communication: with verses 6–​8, the hymn turns
suddenly into a address of God to the reciter, to whom help in memorizing
the received speech is ensured and salvation in the hereafter is promised. The
promised safeguarding against forgetting (verse 6) underlines the preservation
of integrity demanded for the transmission of the text. The partial taking back
of divine assurance, added later in the form of a formula of exception, is per-
haps based on an experience of the unsustainability of this project experienced
in the intervening time.
182  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

On the other hand, those hymns that have a polemical function, the “polem-
ical ayāt,” are already discernible from their formal introductions. They begin, for
example, with an emphatic prompting, fa-​l-​yanẓuri l-​insānu ilā . . . , “Man should
look to . . .” (Q 86: 5, Q 80:24), or more frequently with rhetorical questions such
as a-​fa-​lā yanẓurūna, “Do they not see?” (Q 88:17), a-​lam najʿal, “Have we not
designed?” (Q 78:6, Q 77:25), or a-​yaḥsabu l-​insān, “Does man think perhaps”
(Q 75:27). In one instance, the rhetorical question even precedes a formula of
damning: qutila l-​insānu mā akfarah “Damned be man, how unthankful he is!”
(Q 80:17).

5.2.6  Encouragement to the Proclaimer and Polemic

As speeches of consolation, we can name above all the complete suras 94 and
93.38 Two further verse groups console specifically about attacks from the unbe-
lievers: Q 68:1–​7, in which the end of the verse group is shored up with a dox-
ology, and Q 70:5–​7, which is held together by shared rhyme.
The calls that exhort the proclaimer to worship, recitation, and praise of God
are located most frequently at sura endings and beginnings, such as in Q 52:48–​
49, exhortation to patience in Q 53:62, 56:74, 69:52, 73:1–​4, 74:7, 87:1, 96:1–​3,
and 96:19; calls to proclamation in Q 51:55 and 52:29; calls to praise of God in Q
84:24, 87:9, 88:21, and 93:11.
Exhortations to patience, also already integrated into polemical pronounce-
ments, are frequent, as in Q 51:54, 52:48, 68:8–​9, 68:10, 68:48–​50, 73:10, 74:7,
and 86:17.
Some polemical elements carry clear formal markers. Pronouncements of woe
according to the formula waylun li-​ . . . alladhī . . . , “Woe to . . . , who. . . ,” occur
for example in Q 107:4–​7 and in 83:1–​3, where a threat of the Final Day follows.
In Q 83:10 and Q 52:11, waylun has the function of the direct introduction of
eschatological verse groups, waylun yawmaʾidhin li-​l-​mukadhdhibīn/​kādhibīn,
“Woe on that day to the liars.” In Q 51:60, fa-​waylun introduces the closing verse.
As damning formulas, we find in Q 80:17 qutila, “Be damned,” and in Q 111:1
tabbat yadā, “May the hands wither.” In the last case, what follows is a mockery of
the attacked that is closely derived from poetic models and concerns punishment
with hellfire (lahab, “flame”) (Q 111:1–​5):

tabbat yadā Abī Lahabin wa-​tabb

mā aghnā ʿanhu māluhu wa-​mā kasab
sa-​yaṣlā nāran dhāta lahab
wa-​mraʾtuhu ḥammālata l-​ḥaṭab
fī jīdihā ḥablun min masad

38. Neuwirth, Studien zur Komposition, 196, 200–​201. Cf. also Robinson, Discovering the Qur’an, 109–​110,  122.
 Sura Structures and Chronology  183

Withered should be the hands of Abū Lahab! And he himself!

Of no use to him will be his possessions and what he has gained.
He will burn in a fire that flames high!
And his wife—​carrier of firewood!—​
Around her neck is a braid of palm fibers.

As August Fischer already recognized in 1937,39 the sura represents an early

Qur’anic example of ancient Arabic invective, hijāʾ. While other Qur’anic invec-
tives aim at groups of opponents, in this sura the attack aims at an individual op-
ponent, who is prominent enough to be harmed by the threatened loss of his legal
capacity—​the right hand is required for swearing. Though his identity remains
unrevealed in the Qur’an, it must be a man who, along with his wife, is of noble
origin, for the social downgrading of his wife that we meet in the text and which
is not located only in the eschatological future but rather, as is suggested by the
direct address, in the present imagination of the speaker indicates a privileged
position for the couple. The reversal of the image of the neck of the woman hung
with jewels, celebrated equally in ancient Arabic poetry and Hellenistic iconog-
raphy alike, by the materially worthless and socially stigmatizing mark of a slave
woman represents an attack on the private life of the couple.
Threatening speeches are recognizable through characteristic phrasings. Either
attention is drawn to the disapproved by a-​raʾayta lladhī, “Have you seen the one
who” (Q 107:1–​3, 96:9–​18, 53:33–​37), or God announces that he himself will take
over their punishment: dharnī, “Leave to me” (Q 74:11–​17, 73:10–​18). The evil
are warned of, fa-​lā tuṭiʿi l-​mukadhdhibīn, “So do not obey the liars” (Q 69:8),
or fa-​tawalla ʿanhum “So turn from them” (Q 51:54). Accusations are simply
observed (for example in Q 105:1–​2: “Do you see not, how your Lord . . .? Has he
not . . . your cunning?), or more often strengthened with emphatic exclamations
such as kallā, “no!” and bal “nay rather” (Q 89:17–​20, 87:16–​17, 82:9, 75:20–​21).
The defense of the Qur’an performance against those who despise it repre-
sents a special case of polemic. These parts most often form the conclusion to
a sura and show the following characteristic opening phrases:  fa-​mā lahum lā
yuʾminūn, “What is with them that they do not believe?” (Q 84:20–​23), fa-​mā
li-​lladhīna kafarū qibalaka muhṭiʿīn, “What is with the unbelievers, that they
stretch their neck to you?” (Q 70:36–​44), fa-​mā lahum ʿani l-​tadhkirati muʿriḍīn,
“What is with them that they turn away from the reminder? (Q 74:49–​55), fa-​
ayna tadhhabūn, “Where are you going?” (Q 81:26–​28), a-​bi-​hādhā l-​ḥadīthi
antum taʿjabūn, “Are you amazed by this communication?” (Q 53:59–​61).
As positive counterparts to this, we find confirmations of the character of the
revelation of the Qur’an, which are formulated more freely. The announcements

39.  See Fischer, Wert der vorhandenen Koran-​Übersetzungen. On hijāʾ in general, see van Gelder, The Bad and
the Ugly.
184  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

of revelation—​to be interpreted, with Nicolai Sinai, as its own category—​explain

the origin, authority, and function of the Qur’anic proclamation. They frequently
show a “free-​floating” pronominal reference to the Qur’an: in huwa illā dhikrun
li-​l-​ʿālamīn, “It is nothing but a reminder to mankind” (Q 81:25–​28; cf. 81:19–​21,
80:11–​16, and 51:23, 53:4).

5.2.7  Initiating Questions

A particular characteristic of Qur’anic argumentation is the employment of
an “iniating question.” Such questions phrased as wa-​mā adrāka mā X, “What
makes you know what is X?”—​posed after mentioning a newly introduced con-
cept or image X that is generally unfamiliar—​serve to emphatically stress the
novelty of the concept by means of a delay of the progression of discourse. What
follows then for the most part is not a concise explanation, but rather a contextu-
alization of the questioned word within eschatology. With the three exceptions of
Q 86:2–​3, 90:12–​16, and 97:2–​4, all the initiating questions refer to eschatology.
Two initiating questions are found in the short sura 101 (verses 1–​3, 4–​11):40

al-​qāriʿah
mā l-​qāriʿah
wa-​mā adrāka mā l-​qāriʿah
yawma yakūnu l-​nāsu ka-​l-​farāshi l-​mabthūth
wa-​takūnu l-​jibālu ka-​l-​ʿihni l-​manfūsh
fa-​ammā man thaqulat mawāzīnuh
fa-​huwa fī ʿīshatin rāḍiyah
wa-​ammā man khaffat mawāzīnuh
fa-​ummuhu hāwiyah
wa-​mā adrāka mā hiyah
nārun ḥāmiyah

The knocker
What is the knocker?
What makes you know what is the knocker?
On a day when mankind will be like scattering moths
when the mountains will be like ruffled wool,
then he whose scales are heavy
will have a full life.
But he whose scales are light
his mother is the pit.
Do you know what that is?
Burning fire.

40.  On this, see Sells, “Sound and Meaning.”

 Sura Structures and Chronology  185

With the repetition of the onomatopoetic al-​qāriʿa three times in rhyme position,
the catastrophe, which announces itself through knocking, is summoned. The
first “initiating question,”41 about its nature (verses 2–​3), remains unanswered,
but it awakens the expectation of a particularly relevant communication. An es-
chatological scenario is presented as an explanation (verses 4–​5: two conditional
phrases), drawing the apocalyptic tableau of a cosmos that is coming loose. The
“knocker” is thus to be understood as a heralding of this event. The catastrophic
event is demonstrated on the one hand by the disintegrating structure of human
society and on the other hand by the collapse of landscapes that had seemed
stable. Both similes not only shrink men to the measure of insects and turn
mountains to formless masses but draw drastic images of a world turned upside-​
down: both the firmness of mountains and the aloofness of man in family groups
are topoi of ancient Arabic poetry and figure in early Meccan suras as signs of the
power of divine creation. The eschatological scenario leads into a scene of judg-
ment (verses 7–​9), represented by the twice-​named symbol of the scales, which is
given special highlighting through its position in rhyme, made possible only by
a break of the rhyme scheme. After this, the just and the damned are submitted
to opposing evaluations: while the just receive the unambiguous prophecy of a
fulfilled life, the fate of the damned is at first kept hidden in fog by a threatening
and enigmatic metaphor, until, after a second initiating question increasing the
tension (verses 10–​11), it is unveiled as hellfire. This second initiating question
again first brings the procession of ideas to a halt by means of an especially im-
portant and yet ambiguous statement, in order to draw the hearers’ attention. Its
answer, as usual, is not an actual clarification of matters but rather a picturing of
the consequences of the situation that was evoked. 42

5.2.8  Later Additions

Additions to the early Meccan texts,43 which originate in later periods, can have
various functions and assume different forms. A frequent type is the mitigation
of a verdict, a formal addition of the form illā X, “except X,” or “but otherwise
for X” (Q 103:3, 95:6, and 84:25: illā lladhīna āmanū wa-​ʿamilū l-​ṣāliḥāti lahum
ajrun ghayru mamnūn, “except for those who believe and do good deeds, for
them is unstinted reward”). Behind the exemptions seem to stand the attempts of

41. Neuwirth, Studien zur Komposition, 232.

42.  Verse 9, ummuhu hāwiya (literally: “his mother is given over to the fall,” so that hāwiya is to be under-
stood as an adjective), can also be understood as a euphemistic paraphrase, meaning doom. Similarly, the meta-
phorical meaning of umm could possibly be “home, haven,” so that hāwiya would then represent a neologism. The
double meaning is probably intended. For the translation, which can only express one meaning, the more logically
smooth rendition, “haven,” is preferable. The unfamiliar appellative hāwiya is understood by Torrey, “Three Difficult
Passages,” as an Arabization of the Hebr. howa, “doom” (Is 47:11, Eze 7:26). The wording, however, appears rather
as a Qur’anic ad-​hoc creation, a neologism.
43.  See Neuwirth, Studien zur Komposition, 201–​203, and now Sinai, Studien zur frühen Koraninterpretation,
153–​160.
186  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

the hearers to be explicitly excepted from the assignation to negative categories,

which is a clear index of the repeated recitation of early Meccan texts in later
phases of communal formation. On the other hand, a sura that sounds all too
threatening can be made more bearable through conciliatory additions. An ex-
ample is Q 70:1–​7:44

saʾala sāʾilun bi-​ʿadhābin wāqiʿ

li-​l-​kāfirīna laysa lahu dāfiʿ
mina llāhi dhī l-​maʿārij
taʿruju l-​malāʾikatu wa-​l-​rūḥu ilayhi
fī yawmin kāna miqdāruhu khamsīna alfa sanah
fa-​ṣbir ṣabran jamīlan
innahum yarawnahu baʿīdā
wa-​tarāhu  qarībā

A questioner questioned the imminent punishment

—​nothing can keep it from the unbelievers—​
from God the Lord of the ladders
to whom the angels and the spirit ascend
in a day that spans fifty thousand years.
So have patience for the time being!
They see it in the distance
but we see it quite near.

The sura begins with an actual question, about the point in time of the arrival
of the threatened punishment (cf. Q 77:7; 69:15, 52:7–​8, 51:5–​6), which is then
dismissed with the mere mention of its inevitability. The punishment is imposed
by God, the “Lord of the ladders.” If one understands this predication, which
occurs only once in the Qur’an, in agreement with the threatening context (verses
5–​7), then one would have to think of maʿārij as the ladders knotted from fraying
ropes in the Christian image tradition, across which those awakened from death
go over the abyss into heaven, so that only the good are safe from falling into
the abyss—​a conception which is also reflected in the traditional Islamic ṣirāṭ
image of a rope ladder stretched across an abyss, which occurs in later literature.45
Without the addition of verse 4, the introductory part is a threat of judgment that
seamlessly leads into an eschatological scenario (verses 8–​18). The threatening
tone is upheld in the rest of the sura, in which only a catalogue of virtues (verses

44.  A detailed interpretation is offered in Sinai, Studien zur frühen Koraninterpretation, 154–​156.
45.  It is worth noting that both interpretations of the stepladder have found impressive iconographical mani-
festations: the slender stepladder, which gives passage to those awakened on doomsday and reaching to the redemp-
tive “other side,” is used as a means of threat both in Byzantine iconography and in later Islamic folklore (ṣirāṭ). As
against that, Jacob’s ladder, which is not explicitly mentioned in the Qur’an, symbolizes the connection between
heaven and earth. It lives forth as an allegory for Mary in Byzantine iconography.
 Sura Structures and Chronology  187

23–​35) temporarily strikes a conciliatory tone.46 It may have been that this dark
mood was considered difficult to bear, and in any case it was supplemented with
verse 4, which, with its extra length and citing of a number, clearly breaks the
frame, and which replaces the image of the “testing ladder” with the conciliatory
scenario. The insertion of the climbing up and down of angels, a later associa-
tion, and the “spirit” al-​rūḥ, causes the reinterpretation of the third verse from
a threat of eschatological punishment into a proof of divine favor, in a similar
formulation as the equally ambivalent laylat al-​qadr in Q 97:4. The expansion in
form to a two-​part verse belongs to the middle Meccan period, in which verses
of this length are frequent and where an entire sura (Q 37) is largely devoted to
the angels. An encouragement to the Prophet closes the first part of sura 70. The
exhortation to be patient that closes the first part (verses 5–​7) flows into a po-
larizing statement, which makes the belief in the final day, “the punishment,” a
criterion for the distinction between a “we” binding the speaker and community
and a “they” of the “others.”

5.3  The Linguistic Form of the Suras

5.3.1  Formal-​Structural Elements: Rhyme

One of the mediums of presentation that most strongly characterizes the lin-
guistic register of the early Qur’an is the aural correspondence between discourse
elements that exists between the ends of individual units of speech.47 In Western
Arabic studies, this is usually designated as “rhyme,” although Islamic Qur’an
studies reserves the term “rhyme,” qāfiya, for poetry and for the Qur’an speaks
simply of a “divider,” fāṣila. In fact, Qur’anic rhyme follows its own formal rules
that are independent from poetry. On the other hand, as Theodor Nöldeke al-
ready stressed,48 the Qur’anic rhyme is not to be simply equated with the prose
rhyme of sajʿ, rhymed prose, in that the Qur’an, unlike sajʿ prose, does not
“rhyme” only identical consonants but also merely related and later even essen-
tially different consonants. The evaluation of rhyme as exclusively ornamental,
which, since Nöldeke, has long held sway, has obscured the fact that in a literary
genre in which the rhyme changes, rhyme can be applied functionally as a me-
dium of composition. In fact, in the Qur’an, the change of rhyme is not arbitrary,
nor does it principally point to a secondary composition. A detailed description
and classification of Qur’anic rhyme, presented in 1981, makes possible a secure
evaluation of the rhyme structures in the Qur’an texts.49

46. Neuwirth, Studien zur Komposition, 213.

47.  See in detail in Neuwirth, Studien zur Komposition, 67–​115.
48. Nöldeke, GdQ, 1:37.
49.  See the tables on the rhyme structure of the Meccan suras in Neuwirth, Studien zur Komposition, from 90.
188  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

As the means of rhyme change is applied more frequently and consistently in

the early Meccan time than later, and often serves to produce particular rhetor-
ical effects, it is worthwhile to illustrate the range of rhyme changes in the early
Meccan suras through the example of Q 80:33–​42:

Eschatological scenery (cosmic catastrophe):

fa-​idhā jāʾati l-​ṣākhkhah
Eschatological scenery (with reference to mankind):
yawma yafirru l-​marʾu min akīh
wa-​ummihi wa-​abīh
wa-​ṣāḥibatihi wa-​banīh
Eschatological process:
li-​kulli mriʾin minhum yawmaʾidhin shaʾ nun yughnīh
Double image—​the good:
wujūhun yawmaʾidhin musfirah
ḍāḥikatun mustabshirah
Double image—​the evil:
wa-​wujūhun yawmaʾidhin ʿalayhā ghabarah
tarhaquhā qatarah
ulāʾika humu l-​kafaratu l-​fajarah

But when the Scream comes to pass,

that will be a day when a man flees from his brother,
from his mother and his father,
from his wife and his children:
each one of them that day will have something to preoccupy him.
Some faces that day shall be radiant
laughing, full of cheer;
and some faces that day shall be covered with dust,
laid with gloom.
These are the blasphemers, the dissolute.

The semantic structure is depicted in sound by rhyme bundles:

33 eschatological scenery (cosmic catastrophe: isolated rhyme) āCCah50

34–​36 scenery (with reference to men) 3(C)Cīh
37 eschatological process 3(C)Cīh
38–​39 double image—​the good 3CCirah
40–​42 double image—​the evil 3Carah

The closing part of the sura presented here begins with an eschatological scene
(verse 33), which first names the appearance of the catastrophe that will deafen

50.  C = consonant, 3 = any short vowel (a/​i/​u).

 Sura Structures and Chronology  189

the ears, presented in a single verse in isolated rhyme, which possesses onomat-
opoeic force through its vowel form (long ā), supported by an intensified mor-
phological form (doubled kh). What follows is a presentation of the catastrophic
relations of the Day of Judgment, confirmed by the alienation of man from his
closest genealogical relatives (verses 34–​37), held together by an end-​stressed
rhyme in a shrill -​īh. It pictures an overturned world, in which man flees from his
closest kin. The scene is continued by a double image (verses 38–​42), in which
human beings are represented by their expressions, which are either joyful or
saddened. The double image is held together by the slightly transferred ante-
penultimate rhyme, in which the happiness of the good is reflected in a rhyme
form with light i, while a dark a in the same position correlates to the gloomily
described expressions of the bad.
The composition of sense units supported by rhyme belongs among the
Qur’anic innovations in relation to poetic language—​it is something never
attempted in ancient Arabic poetry, which is held together throughout by
monorhyme. The sonic marking of semantic breaks supported by rhyme can
be treated as characteristic for the early Meccan suras, even if not all breaks in
thought are underlined with a change in rhyme. That phonetic elements are
also exploited for the composition in other respects is stressed above all by Neal
Robinson and Michael Sells.51

5.3.2  Structural and Formal Elements: Verse Structures

In view of the intermediary position of the Qur’an between poetry and prose, we
should treat the suras on the one hand as sequences of verses and on the other
hand as sequences of sentences; and to define the respective relations between
these two elements in the frame of the individual suras, and in the frame of the
respective stages of development. The Qur’an verse is of course not a constant
quantity. Verses containing units smaller than a sentence occur alongside verses
that extend over a long sequence of sentences. They also do not share rhythm or
meter. What is shared by them all is only the end rhyme, even if the character
of the rhyme changes markedly in the Meccan period. Occasional doubts about
the originality of these verses are based on confusion of verse divisions and verse
numbering. The division of verses is marked by rhyme position and should have
already come to bear on the recitation by the proclaimer and his community. The
particular marking of these rhymes in Qur’an manuscripts and their numbering
as against that were first developed and recorded in the course of transmission.52
The recording of verse numbers in the text was introduced by Western schol-
arship only later to easy references to text units in the written codex. There is

51.  See Robinson, Discovering the Qur’an, 167–​176; Sells, “A Literary Approach to the Hymnic Surahs”; cf. also
chap. 12, 441–​444.
52.  On the age of this prosody, see Spitaler, Verszählung,  1–​2.
190  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

a decisive difference in the status of “verse division” in the originally intended

form of the suras and that in the prose books of the Old and New Testaments,
which only later, in their Western tradition, that a different type of division and
numbering was laid over the text like an external net.
The Arabic philological tradition rightly distinguishes between the Qur’an
verse, with its special term, āya, pl. āyāt, literally: “sign (of God’s power)”; the
single verse of poetry, bayt; and the qarīnat al-​sajʿ, the speech unit of the rhymed
prose of ancient Arabic seers and soothsayers. While the Qur’an verse of the early
Meccan suras still reflects its origin from ancient Arabic sajʿ, rhymed prose, that
of the middle Meccan period shows a increasing tendency to establish a new, in-
dependent form, for which Arabic literature offers no analogue. The expression
“rhymed prose” for the Qur’an is not felicitous, since the early parts are not prose,
and in the later parts rhyme is only one of several important formal criteria.
Verses in the early Meccan suras display various structures. The minimal
verse size is a single syntactic element, or several syntactic elements, which still
do not form a full sentence, as for example dhawātā afnān, “with fruit pods”
(Q 55:48), or ka-​amthāli l-​luʾluʾi l-​maknūn, “like hidden pearls” (Q 56:23). As
a rule, the verse contains a phrase or a sentence and is accounted then as an in-
dependent verse, such as fa-​ṣabba ʿalayhim rabbuhum sawṭa l-​ʿadhāb, “So your
Lord poured down on them a flood of punishment” (Q 89:13). What follows as
the next longest are two-​part verses, consisting of two complete sentences, such
as fa-​aqīmū l-​wazna bi-​l-​qisṭi wa-​lā tukhsirū l-​mizān, “So carry out the weighing
rightly and do not cheat with the weight” (Q 55:9). These short structures, in
which a rhyme is still clearly audible as an end signal, become rarer already in the
middle Meccan period.

5.4  Defining Criteria of Chronology

5.4.1  Authorization Strategies

Nöldeke’s chronology, his “sequences of development,” was based in the first
place on formal criteria such as verse structures, sentence structures, and verse
lengths, but also on semantic reference points, with a view above all to the re-
ligious knowledge current among the proclaimer and his hearers, which is
assumed to have increased in extent and precision over time. These criteria must
be re-​checked, however, in view of the frequently raised accusation of circularity,
and must be supplemented.53 As has been shown, in those text types described
as early Meccan—​such as the hymn, the oath cluster, and others—​formal charac-
teristics established for the early suras such as relative verse length, correspond
to the semantic ones. In contrast, suras of the middle and late Meccan periods

53.  See Sinai, Studien zur frühen Koraninterpretation,  59–​96.

 Sura Structures and Chronology  191

display semantically and formally different elements. Yet, additional criteria for
chronological classification are demanded.
These can be deduced, for example, from the situation of the hearers reflected
in the text. Who really were the first hearers of the early suras? The Islamic tra-
dition, which imagines the pre-​Islamic epoch as a time of “ignorance,” jāhilīya,
presents them as mostly pagan, and therefore biblically illiterate, while admit-
ting the existence of some individuals close to Christianity or otherwise imbued
with religious knowledge, as well as some learned Jews. Certainly, the observance
of the Kaaba rites, which seems to have persisted until the cult reform of the
Prophet and which can be deduced from the early suras, points to an audience
that was not monotheist in the strict sense, not at least in terms of liturgical prac-
tice. But the proportion of Syriac-​Aramaic loan words, and above all the echoes
of monastic ideas in the Qur’an,54 evince a familiarity not only of the proclaimer
but also of the nascent community with biblical and post-​biblical traditions.55 In
our view, those present at the Qur’anic performance, generally recorded as pas-
sive and uninvolved hearers, are to be understood—​at least in part—​as identical
with the Qur’anic community taking shape. Their presence in the text can there-
fore be counted as an important index for the Sitz im Leben of a given sura, for
its situation of proclamation. Are hearers presumed to be present in the text and
eventually addressed directly, as it seems to be reflected in the suras recognized
as early? Or are they rather to be imagined as absent, as later texts would suggest?
Does the community manifest its presence through the insistence on defined
positions, for example, by opposition to accept the harsh Qur’anic judgments
against “men” in general, al-​insān? Q 103:1–​3 offers an example:

wa-​l-​ʿaṣr
inna l-​insāna la-​fī khusr
illā lladhīna āmanū wa-​ʿamilū l-​ṣāliḥāti
wa-​tawāṣaw bi-​l-​ḥaqqi wa-​tawāṣaw bi-​l-​ṣabr

By the late afternoon.

Truly, man is at a loss
Except those who believe and do good
and call each other to truth and patience.56

54. See Baumstark, “Gebetstypus.” Although the hypotheses of Lüling, Urkoran, und Luxenberg, Syro-​
aramäische Lesart, which suppose a Christian origin of Qur’anic texts, are methodologically and historically un-
founded, they do bring awareness to the often underestimated dimension of Christian cultural presence in the
urban centers of the peninsula. However, pace Luxenberg, Christian knowledge was already prevalent and did not
need to be mediated by the Qur’an.
55.  Crone, “The Religion of the Qur’anic Pagans,” identifies the Meccan enemies of the proclaimer, who in
the Qur’an—​albeit only in the middle Meccan period—​figure as mushrikūn, as “pagan monotheists.” See Hawting,
The Idea of Idolatry. The differentiation between pagans and believing listeners, influenced by the Bible, needs to be
explored further; cf. chap. 6, 203–208.
56.  Cf. Q 95:4–​6.
192  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

In such later additions of exceptions to the rule, something of the “canonical

process” is reflected, stretching over the entire Qur’anic genesis: older communi-
cations are not cast to the side as closed, but rather undergo “further rewritings”
clad in a new recitation, through revision and expansion, even if, in the case of
the proclamation, this remains oral.
Further indices for textual development are provided by the increasingly dif-
ferentiated authorization strategies of the texts. While at the beginning verbal
authorizations are chosen and Qur’an texts are “legitimized” in their tran-
scendent origin by their rhetorical reference to authoritative speech acts of ear-
lier mantic speakers, as for example the oaths that were previously employed by
seers, kuhhān, and hymnic formulas already current from the monastic tradition,
at a later stage the self-​reference of God in the form of “I” and “we” discourse
becomes the standard from of self-​authorization of a text. This new ubiquity of
God as focus of a scriptural religion is reflected also in the later oath references.
With the differentiation of the cult, which toward the end of the early Meccan pe-
riod no longer revolves centrally around the rites of a sanctuary,57 the references
at the start of suras to holy sites and liturgically relevant times,58 which occurred
in the early oath clusters, fade into the background, giving way in the following
period to the introductory mentions of scripture, kitāb.

5.5  Middle and Late Meccan Suras

According to Nöldeke, the middle Meccan suras are Q 15, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23,
25, 26, 27, 36, 37, 38, 43, 44, 50, 54, 67, 71, 72, and 76; the late Meccan suras are Q
6, 7, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 34, 35, 39, 40, 41, 42, 45, and 46. Both
stocks of texts are treated together summarily in what follows.

5.5.1  New Sura Structures

In contrast to the early Meccan suras, the claim to validity of the later texts is
unambiguously grounded from the beginning in an authority external to the
text. This new referentiality can be deduced most clearly from the changed func-
tion of the Qur’anic narrative and from a new prominence in the recitations of
“(excerpts from the heavenly) scripture,” al-​kitāb. The turn toward this new self-​
understanding of the collective of hearers as a community authorized by scrip-
ture can be deduced from the middle Meccan sura 15, which for the first time
shows the form of a communal prayer service, in which a reading from a written
text, introduced as such, stands as the central, crucial part.59 Also, in the same
text, we find confirmation of the existence of a communal prayer, the Fātiḥa. The

57.  Rubin, “Morning and Evening Prayers.”

58.  Neuwirth, “Images and Metaphors,” 18–​28 (for pagination see above)
59.  Cf. chap. 6 and 7.
 Sura Structures and Chronology  193

reproductions of biblical stories within suras now take on a liturgical function,

marking the divine confirmation of God’s work in history. In view of the growing
interest of the community in the biblical inheritance as a part of their developing
biblical-​monotheistic identity, it is no wonder that the bulk of the middle and late
Meccan suras, which have now developed into long prose texts, seem to reflect a
monotheistic prayer service, beginning with an introductory appellatory section,
that is, a hymnic, apologetic, polemical, or paraenetic introitus, and close with a
section in a related genre, most frequently containing an affirmation of the char-
acter of revelation of the Qur’an. These framing sections have been compared
with the supplication litanies of the church, that is, introductory and concluding
responsories recited by a presbyter or deacon and responded to by the commu-
nity.60 The center of the monotheistic prayer service, as against that, and similarly
of the fully developed sura of the middle and late Meccan period is made up of
biblical recollections; in the case of the prayer service, this is a biblical reading; in
the case of the sura, it is a story from the biblical narrative stock. With recourse
to a concept coined by Jan Assmann,61 one can describe the change in orientation
of the community as a transition “from a ritual to a textual coherence.”

5.5.2  New Authorizations: Recited Excerpts from

the Heavenly Writing (Kitāb)
By the later Meccan suras, the oath clusters employed earlier as authorization
have given way to mentions of the “scripture” By far the majority of the later
Meccan suras begin with an emphatic evocation of the scripture, often preluded
by an individual letter name from the Arabic alphabet or, more frequently, a
combination of several letter names such as nūn or kāf, ṣād, hāʾ, ʿayn, mīm, etc.
In these enunciations of letter names, the interpretation and function of which
is disputed in both Islamic tradition and Western research,62 we should most
likely see an evocation of the “heavenly alphabet,” the minimal units of the tran-
scendent writing. This interpretation would also clarify why they are never used
for early Meccan but only appear in the later suras. This incipit employing an
introductory mention of writing, and referring back to al-​kitāb, seems to indi-
cate a new cultic function of the recited text, which is no longer conceived as an
intermediate communication of a divine message through the proclaimer to the
community, but instead is perceived concretely as a performance from the heav-
enly script thought to be preexistent and only realizable through recitation.

60.  See Neuwirth, “Sūrat al-​Fātiḥa”; cf. chap. 6, 215–​217.

61.  See Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis; Assmann, “Kanon und Zensur.”
62. See the attempts at explanation by Hans Bauer, “Anordnung der Suren”; Goosens, “Ursprung und
Bedeutung”; Jeffery, “The Mysterious Letters”; Bellamy, “The Mysterious Letters”; Massey, “Letters of the Qur’an”;
Massey, “Mysterious Letters.”
194  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

In the middle and late Meccan suras, furthermore, a new spatial framing of
the message can be noted. The texts, which exhibit numerous biblical stories,
expand the field of vision of the hearers, who are transferred in their imagina-
tion from their local environment into a far-​off landscape, the Holy Land, which
is familiar as the stage of the history of the spiritual forebears of the commu-
nity, the Israelites. The introduction of the direction of prayer, the qibla, toward
Jerusalem, should be viewed as an eloquent testimony of this general change in
spatial orientation.63 It was introduced at a phase of development in which a pal-
pable expansion of the horizon among the nascent community was setting in,
relating to both time and space, through the new focus on the biblical heritage.
One could speak of the Jerusalem qibla as the gestural expression of a genuine
experience of having reached new spiritual horizons. Two fundamental novelties
created a new self-​understanding of the community: the newly achieved conver-
gence of the Qur’anic proclamation with the scriptures of the two other mono-
theistic religions, and the simultaneous adoption of the topographia sacra of the
earlier religions. The community was now to be among the receivers and bearers
of scripture and to take part in the recollection of salvation history as it was con-
veyed through the medium of scripture. Through the gesture itself, the direction
of prayer toward Jerusalem indicates this new connection between the Qur’anic
community and the older religions. It is not surprising that the Qur’anic refer-
ences to the Meccan sanctuary and its rites as safeguards of social coherence—​
references that occurred several times in the introductory parts of the Meccan
suras—​are now replaced by stereotyped evocations of the scripture, al-​kitāb. The
scripture now counts as the most significant shared spiritual possession, a spir-
itual space that supersedes the symbolic power of real space.

5.5.3  Reduction of Rhyme and New Verse Structures

The great majority of verses of the later periods include several phrases or peri-
ods. With respect to their length, verses in the late Meccan period would cor-
respond to whole verse groups of the early Meccan period. The increasingly
complex thought structures in these discursive texts require more complex hy-
potactic constructions in place of the parataxis that dominated early on, so that
analysis has to respect a complex internal structuring of the verses (through par-
allelism, antitheses, coordination and subordination of clauses). In the case of
these complex suras, the colometric approach, based on the “colon,” the breath
unit, as a basic overarching category for the description of verses proves ap-
propriate.64 It is evident that in these text a rhyming verse ending no longer is
sufficient on its own as a means of structuring, since the respective preceding

63.  See Neuwirth, “Erste Qibla”; Neuwirth, “The Spiritual Meaning of Jerusalem.”
64.  A colometric analysis was undertaken by the author in Studien zur Komposition. For this approach in ge-
neral, cf. Norden, Die antike Kunstprosa; as well as Lausberg, Rhetorik. 65. Cf. also chap. 13, 472–​477.
 Sura Structures and Chronology  195

rhyme can no longer be recalled after the long and complex statements that has
followed it. Indeed, the verses that simply end in the now frequent sounding
-​ūn/​-​īn can no longer to be understood simply as “rhyme verses.” Rather, what
makes the correspondence between the late verses is the entire end colon, that
is, the entire final breath unit, which is at most a formula, or at least a sen-
tence standing isolated from its verse context. This sentence, which concludes
the verse and in many cases does not take part semantically in the main line of
the statement, offers an interpretive addition to the pronouncement, or presents
metatextually the spiritual world as looming behind the earthly one, frequently
referring to God’s omnipotence as a source for all earthly events. A  “closing
clausula” has thus taken the place of rhyme.65 The examples in the Qur’an are
innumerable; an clausula that comments on the pronouncement preceding it
within a verse is: mā khalqukum wa-​lā baʿthukum illā ka-​nafsin wāḥidatin inna
llāha l-​samīʿu l-​baṣīr, “The creation and the awakening of you all is as that of a
single being; God is the hearing, the seeing” (Q 31:28). The argument for the re-
ality of the Final Day, proffered from an inner-​worldly perspective, is strength-
ened and imbued with greater authority by reference to the transcendent God
watching over mankind.
An often repeated objection to Qur’anic form, which has—​particularly in the
circles of historically oriented scholars—​raised doubts about the actual shared or-
igin of the short poetic texts and the more prosaic long ones, is the lack of general
stylistic coherence. Certainly, the verse structures and the amplitude of their cola,
that is, the breath units united into one verse, vary over the periods of develop-
ment, often even within single suras, while the sequences of themes for their part
offer a turbulent picture. However, on the basis of thematic criteria, supported by
the control of the syntactic and morphological connections existing between the
verses, the middle and late Meccan suras can be explained as holding to firm com-
positional schemes, which in the middle Meccan period are frequently confirmed
by changes of rhyme at the joints of the composition. That the short early Meccan
suras are not yet based on similarly schematic plans is easily understandable. Yet
from the earliest point onward there is a binding principle at work, which becomes
dominant for the later compositions: to construct the suras out of clearly propor-
tioned building elements. Already in the suras of the early Meccan period, one
can frequently find small units formed symmetrically in relation to each other,
while other verse groups also occur that stand in contrast to one another in a 1:2
proportion. In the middle and late Meccan period, it is a common phenomenon
for there to be proportions between at least two of the three main parts and be-
tween verse groups determined by content. These proportions between building
elements, typical for the character of the Meccan suras, have not been sufficiently

65.  Cf. chap. 13, 472–477.

196  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

clearly recognized up to now.66 They could not be recognized, because the neces-
sary precondition for their identification, the critical checking over of the tradi-
tional verse divisions, had not been carried out, while the checking of the verse
endings, for its part, must be based on study of rhyme and verse structures. This
work has now been completed for the Meccan texts.

5.6  Medinan Suras

5.6.1  Overview of the Medinan Developments

5.6.1.1  Oratory Suras
The Medinan suras are Q 3–​5, 8–​9, 22, 24, 33, 47–​49, 57–​59, 60–​61, 63, 66, 98,
and 110. They can be grouped roughly into short, frequently monothematic “or-
atory suras” (sura 22, 24, 33, 47, 48, 49, and 57–​66) on the one hand and “long
suras” (suras 2–​5, 8, and 9) on the other. An important development impacting
the understanding of scripture that was achieved in Medina is the new relation-
ship between the heavenly scripture and proclamation: while in Mecca, qurʾān,
performance conditioned by situation, and kitāb, excerpt from the heavenly scrip-
ture, were kept clearly distinct from one another, the two become difficult to dis-
tinguish in Medina. Now, while texts about often ephemeral communal affairs are
recorded in performances of “(excerpts from the heavenly) writing,” the recita-
tion of the proclaimer becomes wholly identical with the excerpts of the kitāb, the
heavenly scripture. The fact that Qur’anic community has achieved its entrance
into salvation history is reflected in new texts that involve an address to the com-
munity, the members of which are directly approached with formulas such as yā
ayyuhā l-​nās, “O people!” At the same time, the Prophet takes on a new aura in
these suras. Designated as al-​nabī, the proclaimer is no longer a mere mediator
of the message but now enters into the text itself. He is personally addressed by
God with the formula yā ayyuhā l-​nabī, “O Prophet!”67 (Q 33:22); he becomes an
actor who works synergetically with the divine personage; and is thus mentioned
in the combination Allāhu wa-​rasūluhu, “God and his Prophet” (Q 33:22). This
development reaches its culmination in sura 33, with the establishment of the
proclaimer as an intermediary figure: inna llāha wa-​malāʾikatuhu yuṣallūna ʿalā
l-​nabīyi yā ayyuhā lladhīna āmanū ṣallū ʿalayhi wa-​sallimū taslīma, “Truly God
and his angels pray for the Prophet, O believers, pray for him and wish him well”
(Q 33:56). But the verse could also perhaps be read declaratively:  “O believers,
say about him‚ ‘God bless him and give him peace,’ ” in which case the formula of

66.  The valuable observations on individual suras in Müller, “Die Propheten in ihrer ursprünglichen Form,”
were not yet sufficiently proven, and so were not widely received.
67.  See Bobzin, “The ‘Seal of the Prophets.’ ”
 Sura Structures and Chronology  197

blessings that later became obligatory would have already been institutionalized
at the time of the Prophet.
The Medinan suras have not yet been investigated as to their structure, so here
only a rough overview of their forms and liturgical implications can be given.
What is new is a type of sura—​following quite distinct formal rules—​in which
the historical memory so extensively avoided in the late Meccan suras is further
put to flight, now in favor of oratorical prophet speech. A  group of suras that
has been brought together to form a small partial corpus (22, 24, 33, 47, 48, 49,
57–​66), perhaps already before the redaction, consists of an address to the com-
munity, the members of which are addressed directly. These suras, which in some
cases (59, 61, 62, 64) are introduced by hymnic introductory formulas reminis-
cent of the Psalms, such as sabbaḥa li-​llāhi mā fī l-​samawāti wa-​l-​arḍi, “All that
is in heaven and on earth shall praise God” (Q 57:1), can only be understood
from their composition as address. For the most part they deal with an isolated
theme, often a point of political-​social controversy, or eventually an issue having
to do with the privileges and terms of respect reserved for the household of the
Prophet. The person of the proclaimer is now no longer a mere mediator of the
message, but rather works synergetically with the divine person.
The suras of this type mark a new transformation of form: they are structur-
ally homogenous, devoid of the variety of “classical” composition elements used
in the beginning of the older suras, such as hymns, catalogues of virtues, and
confirmations of revelation, or the classical contents of the middle section, such
as historical reminiscence or historical reflection and concluding topics such as
revelation polemic or confirmation of revelation. In contrast, their structure is
seemingly quite simple: a rather stereotyped hymnic introduction is followed im-
mediately by the exposition of the subject of the speech, in the style of the rhyme-​
clausula speech. The “oratory sura” is only rarely artfully constructed. The sura
has now become an address styled by simple cultic devices.

5.6.2  Long Suras
With the long suras, we are no longer dealing with units meant for perfor-
mance. In this sura type, with the authorization as suras of text masses that
have grown purely through accumulation, the development arrives at a new
stage: the majority of the long suras (Q 2–​5, 8, 9)68 dispense with any overall
composition; they no longer attest to transparent composition schemes. Apart
from their conventional introduction, they function rather as catchalls for

68.  Examples of certain secondarily merged long suras are suras 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, and 9. The fact that it is worthwhile
to search for underlying structures in these suras was demonstrated by Zahniser, “Guidance and Exhortation.” In
order to contextualize the results, there must be a search for a communal usage, a Sitz im Leben, for the presupposed
intentional long form. This step is not possible for researchers who proceed simply from Muhammad’s “authorship”;
see, e.g., Schmitz, Sure 2; Cuypers, The Banquet.
198  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

isolated verse groups related to classical topoi, now supplemented by quite

specific statements, such as calls to battle and historical reminiscences. The
collection of the individual elements into the transmitted long suras is difficult
to date. A compilation of the long suras as we have them only in the course
of the redaction in some cases cannot to be excluded, but they could just as
well have been compiled before the redaction. Some of these long suras might
simply have been scattered “stores” of verse groups long held to be suited for
further expansion, which however in Medina were no longer considered for a
reworking to achieve the shape of the conventional compositions. In this pe-
riod, the orientation toward scripture was no longer warranted primarily by
the memory shared with the Israelites, the Banū Isrāʾīl, but rather was bound
up with the activity of the Prophet himself. The current form recited in liturgy,
therefore, is no longer the complex sura with the salvation historical memory
at its center, but rather the “oratory sura.” It is not to be rejected outright,
however, that a formal intention also lies behind the long suras. If what has
been demonstrated with high probability for sura 369 should turn out to be ap-
plicable also to other long suras, then these texts should best be compared to
entire biblical books.
The community’s shift of interest from largely cultic concerns to religio-​
political and social interests is reflected in new formulas of authorization.
Although directives—​mostly affecting the cult but also ethical rules such as the
Ten Commandments, Q 17:23–​39—​are occasionally given already in Mecca,
these directives take on a new form in Medina. In one case, a Medinan in-
struction lightens a stricter Meccan one:  in place of the instruction to hold
vigils lasting long times of night, which was directed to the proclaimer in the
early Meccan sura 73 and expressed in short sajʿ verses (1–​3), a legislation to
the people follows in Medina, presented in prose, which contains a lightening
of the collective obligation for vigils, in the extension of the sura, verse 20. But
as a rule we encounter directives whose obligatoriness is underlined through a
reference to the transcendent source, such as kutiba ʿalaykum, “It has been pre-​
written for you” (Q 2:183–​187), or farīḍatan mina llāhi, “as an obligation laid
down by God” (Q 9:60).
A further new element of Medinan suras is the reports about events occurring
contemporaneously, whether these are events experienced by the community or
events staged by them, such as the battle of Badr, 2/​624 (Q 3:123); the battle of
Uḥud, 3/​625 (Q 3:155–​174); the expulsion of the Banū Naḍīr, 3/​625 (Q 59: 2–​5);
the siege of Khaybar, 7/​628 (Q 48:15); the expedition to Tabūk, 9/​630 (Q 9:29–​
35); or the later so-​called farewell sermon of the Prophet, 10/​631 (Q 5:1–​3). Since

69.  Zahniser, “The Word of God and the Apostleship of Isa”; cf. also Neuwirth, “Mary and Jesus.”
 Sura Structures and Chronology  199

these reports no longer display a prominent literary form, it is not surprising

that, in contrast to the situation in Judaism or Christianity, where biblical stories
are crystallized to form a kind of mythical drama, no “grand narrative” arose on
the basis of the Qur’an. A meta-​historical overall picture of the genesis of Islam
was first constructed only later, through the inclusion of a mass of non-​canonical
traditions, through the Sira.
 6

The Liturgical Qur’an
ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF CULT AT THE TIME
OF THE PROCLAMATION

6.1  The Ancient Arabian Preconditions

The worship of God reflected in the Qur’an1 in its peculiar relation to pre-​Islamic
Arabian religiosity, which is most frequently described as henotheism, is a cen-
tral theme of traditional overview presentations on the emergence of Islam.2
These treatments generally describe the transition to monotheism as a civilizing
step of progress away from the earlier pagan period, at times even as a historically
predetermined development. Islamic tradition adapts a similar view. It combines
a strongly negative evaluation of pre-​Islamic cultic practices with a rigorous dis-
qualification of the pre-​Islamic period as a whole, considering it a “time of bar-
barism” or a “time of ignorance,” jāhilīya, a period that gave way, with theological
necessity, to the more illuminated epoch of Islam.3 But why not turn the tables
and perceive the pre-​Islamic past as a time of flourishing? Such a perspective
would be justified by literary history:  from the perspective of the polycultural
classes of the Umayyad and Abbasid periods, the jāhilīya represented an epoch
of spiritual freedom and limitless creativity, displaying exemplary character and
great educational worth for the new educated elites.4 This “secular” perception
of pre-​Islam inspired the intense activities of collection and editing carried out
by philologists, genealogists, and connoisseurs of poetry, who not only compiled
collections of highly artistically developed poetry but also supplied an extensive
mass of narrative literature providing plots and dialogues full of brilliant ele-
ments. The tribal past of the Arabs, despite its Islamic condemnation, is far better
documented than that of other ethnicities, even if this evidence largely still awaits
assessment. The pre-​Islamic Arabian Peninsula is just now being discovered as an
object of Late Antiquity research.5

1.  This chapter is an extended and heavily revised version of the essay “Vom Rezitationstext über die Liturgie
zum Kanon.”
2. Watt, Muhammad at Mecca; Paret, Mohammed und der Koran; Bobzin, Muhammad; Cook, Der Koran.
3.  Cf. chap. 3, 119–​125.
4.  Drory, “The Abbasid Construction.”
5.  Montgomery, “The Empty Ḥijāz.”

201
202  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

Western researchers who share in the valorization of pre-​Islamic literature

often do not accept the claims of the “underdevelopment” of the pre-​Islamic pe-
riod that are made in the Islamic tradition. Yet they assume—​not without teleo-
logical reasoning—​a kind of decadence in the pagan religion, which seemed to
herald a predetermined breakthrough toward monotheism. This conception of
decadence was rejected by Ludwig Ammann in his revolutionary 2004 mono-
graph Die Geburt des Islam (The birth of Islam). For him, ancient Arabian pa-
ganism, with its adherence to tribally binding rites, was in no way vanishing
at the time of Islam’s genesis. Rather, if one broadens one’s view from rites to
other forms of collective self-​expression, then paganism’s vitality becomes clearly
recognizable:  this anthropocentric pagan culture does not solve the problem
of coping with contingency through cult alone, but does so equally through a
kind of division of labor between ritual, practiced religion and a kind of poetry
distant from the cultic realm but aware of the problems of the time. Thus, rites
serve to cope with acute situations of emergency, while poetry poses decisive
life-​philosophical questions, solving them for its audience through the formula-
tion of specific sequences of thoughts that are exemplified time and again within
the moment of poetry performance. Going beyond Ammann’s claims, one can
see here a substitute liturgical function of poetic performance, in which the au-
dience shores up its own central values and goals by listening to a familiar se-
quence of evocations of prototypical scenes.6 Andras Hamori has brought these
observations, also touched upon by Renate Jacobi7 and Gottfried Müller,8 to a
point:  “Already in the sixth century, before the coming of Islam, these poems,
rather than myths or religious rituals, served as the vehicle for the conception
that sorted out the emotionally incoherent facts of life and death, and by the
sorting set them at the bearable remove of contemplation. Qaṣīda poets spoke in
affirmation of a model they shared; their poetry tended to become a shared expe-
rience, all the more as the affirmation was through the replay of prototypal events
which the model so successfully charted.”9
Ammann, who integrates the poetry into the religious thought of pre-​Islam,
attempts to illuminate the development of cult reflected in the Qur’an in light
of the pre-​Islamic religious situation, which in his view formed a basis to which
“foreign” concepts were then added only secondarily. In his own, distinctly so-
ciological, phrasing, he clarifies that his “reconstruction of the Meccan phase of
the revelation . . . assumes that the sources of meaning (available to the Meccans)
served as points of reference for searches after new meaning, which could lead

6.  Cf. chap. 12, 444–​447.

7. Jacobi, Studien zur Poetik der altarabischen Qaside.
8. Müller, Ich bin Labid.
9. Hamori, The Art of Medieval Arabic Literature, 22.
 The Liturgical Qur’an  203

to the further development of accepted meanings and the adoption of foreign

options of sense.”10
Crucial here is the “endogenous dynamic,”11 that is, the processes of change
that results from within the ancient Arabic situation itself. For Ammann, then,
the development in worldview occurs first and primarily in the consciousness
of the Prophet Muhammad, who is considered as the main actor, a person
whom he sees, similarly to Jacqueline Chabbi,12 as deeply rooted in the tribally
organized world of the pagan Meccans, and who in his view was individually
motivated to no small degree by his peculiar biographical conditions, to ques-
tion the religious routines of his society. Unlike the Islamic tradition, however,
which assigns Muhammad a comparably unique role as a religious individual,13
Ammann (although closely clinging to the Prophet’s vita) describes the career of
the Prophet as in no way historically pre-​determined, but rather as an unforesee-
able breakthrough.
In the following, some of Ammann’s observations will be submitted to a
“Qur’anic cross-​check,” so that, inter alia, a more strictly defined liturgical devel-
opment will come into focus, while the ḥajj and the social interactions connected
to it will be sidelined.14 Indeed, in the first instance, the Qur’an is a liturgical text
and at the same time a document of its own reception and of the formation of a
community. Its self-​referential approach to its own performance throws light on
the identity construction of the community that occurred simultaneously with
the genesis of the Qur’an. The following presentation is more narrowly limited
than Ammann’s, but must diverge from it, since the Qur’an itself allows no con-
clusions about the personal development of the proclaimer, who must therefore
recede into the background.
Such a systematic interrogation of the Qur’an in relation to the development
of cult was already attempted in 1980 by Fazlur Rahman,15 who also drew, how-
ever, from the Sira, and therefore, like Ammann, foregrounds the person of
the Prophet as a lone actor. This focus is problematic, since the Qur’anic text
indicates a much more complex scenario; it is filled with actors who are already
familiar with those sense directives that Ammann treats as “foreign,” namely,

10. Ammann, Die Geburt des Islam, 35.

11. Ammann, Die Geburt des Islam, 89, sets his observation into a wider context: “The cultural frame of the
Arabian Peninsula can be seen as a dynamic balance between the Bedouin and peasant-​urban forms of life. Our
admittedly speculative thesis is that this also relates to poetry and religion, as complementary references of orien-
tation. If we concede a diachronic sense to the discourse of a “Heldenersatzreligion” (poetry serving as a substitute
for religion) and “Ersatzgedicht der Frommen” (the Qur’an serving as a substitute of the poem for the pious), then
we may state that Bedouinization favors the deconstruction of cult, i.e., secularization, while settlement favors the
building up of cult, i.e., desecularization.
12. Chabbi, Le Seigneur des Tribus.
13.  See Khalidi, Images of Muhammad.
14.  See Hawting, The Development of Islamic Ritual.
15. Rahman, Major Themes in the Qurʾān. Marshall, God, Muhammad and the Unbelievers, examines the
shifting perception of unbelievers solely on the basis of the Qur’an; see 18–​19.
204  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

those produced by the encounter with Jews and Christians. In other words, the
exchange with bearers of “foreign” traditions that triggered such revolutionary
developments for Ammann is already underway in the Qur’an, but not as a con-
versation with outsiders—​rather, this exchange takes place among pluriculturally
educated hearers. Certainly the Qur’anic message became sharper over time and
adopted increasingly complex arguments, but if we follow the text, we see that
this does not occur at a stage in which the proclaimer “comes to consciousness,
perhaps through comparison with Christian and Jewish Arabs, of the rift be-
tween theory and praxis, between the imposition of formulas and one’s own acts;
and the routine, as soon as it falls victim to reflection, appears as meaningless or
not sufficiently full of meaning.”16 Following the Qur’an, we must reckon with a
greater number of people in Mecca already possessing a strongly distinct Jewish/​
Christian religious identity, who were also not untouched by ancient Arabic po-
etry. It will be argued here that these “preformed” hearers have to be assumed
as already involved in the formation of the message, at least on a preparatory
level, even if their development into a community first gets underway through
the charismatic appearance of the proclaimer and the early recitations, for which
he alone is responsible.17

6.1.1  “Precarious Monotheism”

Ammann describes pre-​Islamic religion quite conventionally as henotheism—​
that is, “a form of situational and therefore short-​term monotheism,”18 in which
a high god, elevated from the world and concerned with primordial but not daily
interests, holds sway above a greater pantheon. Patricia Crone,19 on the other
hand, would see the “unbelievers”—​whom she would identify for the whole
Qur’an as mushrikūn, or “associators”20—​as “pagan monotheists,” who scarcely
distinguish themselves from the believers. She convincingly locates the Qur’anic
image of the mushrikūn within late antique religious history, and identifies the
Qur’anic unbelievers as representatives of a kind of worship of God known from
the Greco-​Roman context, in which a highest god, acknowledged as such, is

16. Ammann, Die Geburt des Islam, 36.

17.  The biography of the Prophet condenses to a minimum the monotheistically educated contemporaries of
the Prophet, in order to exalt the proclaimer and transform him into a figure that inevitably unleashed revolutionary
developments through his Prophetic gift.
18. Ammann, Die Geburt des Islam, 26–​27: “A worshipper or a group of worshippers turns in a state of emer-
gency principally to one single deity—​he asks, hopes for, and expects everything from him; the mentioning of other
Gods is thus excluded.”
19.  Crone, “Religion of the Qur’anic Pagans.”
20.  The word mushrikūn only becomes terminological in the late Meccan period; at first sharīk and shurakāʾ
occur as commercial metaphors for the act of assuming partners, as in Q 68:41 (end of the early Meccan period).
Shirk is only documented five times in total, each time in a late Meccan context. In order to avoid anachronism, a
study of the repudiators of the Qur’anic message would have to first discuss the earliest mentioned form of Meccan
polytheists, namely, “the deniers,” al-​mukadhdhibūn. Hawting’s interpretation in The Idea of Idolatry, which assumes
a later compilation of the Qur’an, is problematic in that it dismisses the chronological data.
 The Liturgical Qur’an  205

evoked in some situations directly, but as a rule only through instances of media-
tion: “There can, of course, be no doubt that the widespread identification of local
and foreign deities (a process formerly known as syncretism) and the increasing
prominence of the One testify to a radical transformation of paganism. But to
pagan monotheists, the one and the many coexisted instead of competing. The
input of Biblically derived monotheism was required in order for the many to
be seen as illegitimate.”21 But what is the benefit of this terminological correc-
tion by Crone, put forward as a plea for a new classification of the mushrikūn?
What are the differences, with respect to the direct worship of God or that carried
out through intermediaries, between the “two monotheisms,” that of the deniers,
mukadhdhibūn, later mushrikūn, and that of the proclaimer and his community?
Are these differences in fact insignificant in substance, a mere shibboleth be-
tween the adherents of different cult practices?

6.1.2  “Firmly Fixed” Monotheism?

In order to make these differences perceptible, Crone’s plea for a contextualiza-
tion of the mushrikun within Late Antiquity should be extended to those who
would become the “pure monotheists,” the proclaimer’s hearers. For it is they
who first perceive the mushrikun as such, who first construe them in a polemical
way. This construct shows an interesting development: the polemical application
of expressions using the root sh-​r-​k, which is clearly a commercial metaphor,
begins at the end of the early Meccan period, as the community increasingly
orients itself toward written religious traditions. Sharīk, “partner,” and mushrik,
“one who takes a partner,” refer here, and very often later, to the “partners” of the
criticized group itself: the mushrikūn are those who attract “partners,” shurakāʾ,
in their “business with God.” The perspective is thus not directed toward God,
but rather toward the unbelievers themselves: am lahum shurakāʾu fa-​l-​yaʾtū bi-​
shurakāʾihim, “Or if they have partners, let them bring their partners!” (Q 68:41).
At the same time, the partners are associated with a nearness to God: am lahum
ilāhun ghairu llāhi, subḥāna llāhi ʿammā yushrikūn, “Or do they have a God
other than God—​he is exalted above that to which they ascribe partners!” (Q
52:43). The theologically explosive perception that is documented here for the
first time, that the opponents not only have partners but also ascribe this to God,
becomes virulent in a later period: wa-​yawma yaqūlu nādū shurakāʾiya lladhīna
zaʿamtum, “On the day when he said to them: ‘Call my partners here, whose ex-
istence you have claimed’ ” (Q 18:52, also Q 16:29, Q 28:62, 74).22 Josef Horovitz

21.  Crone, “Religion of the Qur’anic Pagans,” 181–​182.

22. Horovitz, Koranische Untersuchungen, 61, states: “This variance could be based on the fact that Muhammad
intentionally employs sharīk playfully, or that he was confronted by the existing term mushrik and was unsure of its
explanation. . . . Perhaps Muhammad took this significance already from South Arabian usage. On the other hand,
the Arabic term recalls Jewish shittef in the special significance of ‘associating something/​someone to God,’ as in
[BT] Sukka 45b: ha meshattef shem shamayyim we-​dabhar aḥer neʿeqar min ha-​ʿolam.”
206  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

considers it possible that we should see here a conscious playing on both reg-
isters of meaning, and points to a similar usage of a commercial metaphor in
a South Arabian inscription and in the Babylonian Talmud: “Whoever associ-
ates (meshattef) something else with the God of heaven, is excluded from the
coming world” (bSuk 45b). The key term “associator,” which is first introduced
in Hebrew, takes on an ironical coloring in the Qur’an through the association of
a “company” between men and God, into which they have now contracted part-
ners. In other places, however, the notion is taken more seriously theologically.
The two usages of mushrik/​shirk are intertwined, and the thought of an eternal
punishment for “God associators” is difficult to imagine without the already ex-
isting rabbinic discourse about the “part played in the future world,” which we
see expressed in the Talmudic parallels. The adoption of this meaning of shirk as
“God association,” which begins in the middle-​late Meccan period, fits well with
the tendency in this phase to authorize Qur’anic statements through precedents
in the written religions.
The dependents of the proclaimer are not simply monotheists on the Jewish
or Christian model, but rather become such in the course of their engagement
with their nearby and more distant milieu. What distinguishes them—​according
to the Qur’anic evidence—​from the “deniers” and later “associators” is their ori-
entation toward writing. Their worship is toward a God manifesting himself in
writing, to whom one can draw near through liturgy—​a concept of God that is
quite obviously foreign to the “deniers.” The successive formation of a polemical
designation for the opponents is an exemplary case of this process of gradually
occurring self-​construction of the believers.
We should thus assume heuristically that we have before us in the hearers
of the proclaimer in Mecca persons who already possess a religious formation,
who, through their cultural “hybridity,” their nearness to several traditions,
show themselves to be products of Late Antiquity. Several earlier critical pre-
sentations have instead viewed these “preformed hearers and speech partners”
as informants,23 that is, preferred to see them as actors indifferent to the process
of communal formation, from whom the proclaimer has extracted knowledge
in order to then pass this information on to his listeners in the form of revela-
tions: a short-​circuited interpretation of the diversity of traditions reflected in the
Qur’an. If one really assumed, as is frequent in traditional Qur’an research, that
the proclaimer turned to Jews and Christians present in the city in order to widen
his biblical knowledge and that these figures were prepared to teach him, a gro-
tesque picture would emerge:24 one would then have to imagine the proclaimer

23. Nöldeke, “Hatte Muhammad christliche Lehrer?”; Lammens, Fatima; Goitein, “Mohammad’s Chief
Teachers,” and recently especially Gilliot, “Les ‘informateurs’ ”; Gilliot, “Informants”; Gilliot, “Zur Herkunft”; Gilliot,
“Authorship of the Qur’an.”
24. Rahman, Major Themes in the Qurʾān.
 The Liturgical Qur’an  207

as a constant seeker of information, and assume that the community forming

around him took no active role in the development of new collective identity
documented in the Qur’an.
But such an acquisition of traditions obtained by a single individual within
the “pagan horizon” is unlikely, particularly because the Qur’an from the start
assumes important theological aspects to be familiar or at least immediately
comprehensible. Already the oldest suras reflect the awareness, shared between
the proclaimer and a growing number of the hearers, that binding divine mes-
sages have occurred previously, in proximity to the new performance, and with
shared transcendent sources, so that this new text is no longer subject to human
intervention and already guaranteed referentially through the commandment
“You must add nothing and take nothing away.” Even if this text is not recognized
from the beginning as a scripture in its own right, nevertheless it is recognized
early as an oral communication from a transcendent script, as a scripture reading
(qurʾān).
From around the middle Meccan period, the original heavenly writing, recog-
nized as the source of earthly manifestations of scripture, moves into the center
of the community’s interest. Here, a similar development can be seen for the
Qur’anic community as that which Jan Assmann has described for the passing of
entire cultures from illiteracy to the use of writing.25 In the case of this commu-
nity, no new introduction of technical means of writing took place—​this would
already have been familiar to some hearers, while others remained without it;
rather, what came about was consciousness of the crucial meaning of a heav-
enly and all-​inclusive script, which opened a new view of the world and, above
all, opened the space of cultural memory. It is not that one learned to write, but
rather that one realized that God writes. He conveys knowledge that reaches the
audience orally but is authorized through writing. Even if this development does
not coincide exactly with what Assmann meant by the passing from memory
culture to writing culture, still we find reflections of some of his most important
conclusions in the Qur’an. Assmann proceeds from the assumption that “at the
stage of pure memory culture, cultural memory coincides extensively with what
circulates within the group of sense. It is only with writing in the strict sense that
there is the possibility of self-​sufficiency and greater complication of this outer
level of communication. Only now does a form of memory take shape that goes
beyond the horizon of the sense communicated and transmitted in a previous age
and exceeds the region of communication, just as the individual memory exceeds
that of consciousness.”26 Assmann speaks here of a “society’s passing from ritual
coherence to textual coherence.”

25. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, 87ff. The purely technical procedure of the recording of texts, which
Nagel, Medinensische Einschübe, 113–​127, assigns to the late Meccan period, is not adequate as an explanation of
the new, scripturally referential paradigm.
26. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis,  22–​23.
208  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

In the emerging community, one can indeed see a gradually achieved “textual
coherence.” Alongside the newly discovered central concept of the writing activity
of God or his scribes, we can note also the codifying activity undertaken by certain
individuals in the community—​if one assumes, quite plausibly on the basis of the
text itself, that the writing down of the suras had begun already in the middle Meccan
time, during the so-​called Raḥmān period,27 that is, when the name al-​Raḥmān
becomes frequent.28 These assumptions are based generally on the mere frequency
and prominence of the term kitāb, “writing,” in texts of this period; but the Qur’anic
use of writing is not fully captured by these mentions of writing, where it is per-
ceived only in the sense of a mnemotechnical aid—​yet researchers like Richard Bell,
and more recently Tilman Nagel, have drawn far-​reaching conclusions from this.29
What we see here is a complex process: in the case of this particular transition to
written culture, codification does not replace memorization and oral performance,
but rather the performance texts live on in a cultic frame through the medium of a
living recital, while further texts are subjected to the same mode of performance. In
terms of the arena of performance, no substantial transformation takes place. What
is gained, rather, is a new consciousness of participation in a scripture, together with
the perception of proximity to typological precursors, a consciousness that, with its
discovery of a new time-​space framework derived from the salvific historical past,
effects a change in the text’s rhythm and its linguistic and literary forms. As will be
shown, the genesis of the Qur’an deserves a revision with regard to this new aspect.
It now appears as a gradual transformation of a community of listeners, changing
from a group held together by shared rites and short recitations, that is, ritual coher-
ence, to a new community entrusted with scripture and applying the technology of
writing to preserve the portion of scripture that has been given to them, that is, tex-
tual coherence. This transformation shows its results most significantly in the con-
text in which Qur’an recitation took place as living recital, that is, in cult. Given the
impossibility of tracing the early development of cult through non-​Qur’anic sources,
we must rely on the text of the Qur’an alone for its reconstruction.

6.2  Cult and Canon in Islam

In view of the unparalleled rapidity with which the emergence of the Qur’anic
corpus took place and the swift subsequent appearance of an authoritative codifi-
cation (Gregor Schoeler speaks rightly here of the “publishing” of the Qur’an),30 a
second process that occurred in parallel to this might slip from view all too easily,

27.  Cf. chap. 8, 290–292.

28.  Cf. chap. 4, 141–​143.
29.  The assumption by Nagel, Medinensische Einschübe, of a systematic construction of a scripture for the
Qur’an, has been shown to be untenable by Madigan, The Qurʾān’s Self-​Image.
30.  Schoeler, “Schreiben und Veröffentlichen.” On the particular attempts at reconstruction of the textual his-
tory, cf. chap. 4.
 The Liturgical Qur’an  209

namely, the formation of a comprehensible living recitation, whose Sitz im Leben

is Islamic liturgy and obligatory worship, with its central prayer ritual of ṣalāh. It
should be stressed here that what took place is not merely the formation of two
modes of “publication” but also the development of two Qur’anic spheres of in-
fluence and affect—​which would later become separate institutions, in the forms
of teaching and cult. The orally recited Qur’an is an immediate cultic practice,
that is, a performance and a communication, not an objectifying textual study.
The question of the relation and interaction between writing and cult in the sev-
eral stages of development prior to the fixing in writing or institutionalization
has only been sporadically touched upon in scholarship.31 A history of Islamic
cult, on the model of the standard work for Judaism by Ismar Elbogen,32 has
never been produced and is hardly to be expected. Instead, we have only isolated
individual studies, which, despite the useful collection by Gerald R. Hawting,33
still offer no comprehensive picture.
In what follows, the Qur’anic text itself will be investigated for indications of
the interaction between scripture and ritual. In addition, we will seek to inves-
tigate the status of the cultic practices documented in the Qur’an. On the other
hand, the suras or sura parts, recognized as intended unities, are to be investi-
gated using genre criticism for their possible function as liturgical speech re-
alizable within a cultic frame.34 In view of the lack of basic preliminary work
on the Medinan suras and the prevailing uncertainties in their periodization,
our present examination will be cursory and will not go beyond a preliminary
sketch. Nevertheless, it is worthwhile to establish a method that responds to
John Wansbrough’s call for a form-​critical analysis of the Qur’an, but does not
renounce the attempt to evaluate the particular literary indications of a progress
achieved in the development of the cult.
The thesis that there was a concurrent and interrelated formation of ritual
and scriptural canon, which we suggest existed from the very beginning, is not
suggested by the static relationship between cult and canon that was ultimately
established in Islam. Namely, if one looks at the two complexes of “Qur’an” and
the “official, or obligatory, Islamic prayer service,” ṣalāh, from the perspective of
the functions assigned to them in the Sunna, and which remain valid in the re-
ligious life of Muslims, then one gets the impression of an interaction that was
quite intense in places but that on the whole is limited. Certainly, the prayer ser-
vice devotes a prominent position to the Qur’an: the daily prayer and the ending

31.  See especially Baumstark, “Gebetstypus”; Goitein, “Prayer in Islam”; Denny, “Islamic Ritual.”
32. Elbogen, Der jüdische Gottesdienst. In the time since, both high religious festivals have received consider-
able sociological and religious-​historical attention; see Denny, “Islamic Ritual”; Roff, “Pilgrimage”; Nabhan, Das Fest
des Fastenbrechens; but the historical and phenomenological approach represented in Wellhausen, Reste; Goitein,
“The Muslim Month of Fasting”; and Wagtendonk, Fasting in the Koran, has not been exhausted.
33. Hawting, The Development of Islamic Ritual; the volume contains no analysis of a text applied in ritual.
34.  For the Meccan suras, see Neuwirth, Studien zur Komposition; there is still no systematic examination of
the Medinan texts.
210  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

part of the Friday prayer service include the recitation of short Qur’an passages
in several places, and the sermon makes recourse to individual verses; but the
prayer services are not centered on scriptural reading; rather, ritual concerns
are given priority. On the contrary, prayer services have always been scheduled
around preestablished times of day, and to that extent are cosmically oriented.
They call for strictly regulated ritual provisions35 and for most of their durations
require that prescribed physical positions are rigorously adhered to,36 which leave
no doubt in substance as to their ritual character. Even where recitation from the
Qur’an is obligatory, in the mostly short reading sections (qirāʾa) at the start of
the first and second prayer sequence, rakʿa, usually these are taken from only a
delineated, partial Qur’anic corpus. Since the Friday service adopts the prayer
ritual as its final part but does not allocate a place to an extensive Qur’an reading,
the situation there is similar. Thus, in official cult, the Qur’an is represented ei-
ther by short suras or sura excerpts; thus, its more extended forms are no longer
represented as liturgical units in official cult.
The structurally integral elements of the Qur’an have their liturgical place,
rather, in occasions of private piety, such as in the extensive recitations on the
individual days of Ramadan, when the Qur’an is divided up into thirty parts,
each to be read on a single day, and in the observance of important rites of pas-
sage such as circumcision, marriage, and the obsequies for the dead—​none of
which is recitation prescribed for in the Qur’an itself. Complete longer suras are
listened to in private houses and cemeteries, but not in obligatory prayer or the
Friday collective prayer services, which were the cultic frameworks that included
obligatory Qur’an reading from an early period.
That this state of affairs represents the endpoint of a process of development
will become apparent once we look at those complex suras, which, on the basis
of formal criteria, can be proven to have been intended by the proclaimer as
self-​contained units of recitation. They belong primarily to Theodor Nöldeke’s
middle and late Meccan periods,37 and thus for a long time proved formative for
the shape of the sura, until finally giving way to either a simple monothematic
structure or a long sura no longer displaying a clearly structured composition.
The structure of the complex middle and late Meccan suras—​characterized by
narrative passages framed by strongly formulaic appellatory or dialogic introduc-
tory and concluding passages—​seems to indicate that the entire text would have
been recited in a single public setting. But the public recitation of such a com-
plex text sequence in its entirety, which would have been the norm during the
Meccan period of the Prophet’s ministry, was no longer the prevailing practice

35.  On the primarily ritual nature of the Islamic prayer service, see Graham, “Islam in the Mirror of Ritual”;
Denny, “Islamic Ritual.”
36.  It is remarkable that the later “pillars of prayer,” arkān al-​ṣalāh, fixed in legal literature, more often than not
refer to postures, but not to verbal articulations by the person praying.
37.  On the structures of these suras, see Neuwirth, Studien zur Komposition, 238–​333. Cf. also chap. 5, 192–​196.
 The Liturgical Qur’an  211

in the Medinan period. As exceptions to this, we can name the tarāwīḥ evening
prayers during Ramadan, which in some traditions call for a complete recitation,
khatima, of the Qur’an, in which a thirtieth of the Qur’an, a juzʾ, is given a public
recitation on each day. This resembles the later “thirtieths” that also contain com-
plete suras.38
It hardly needs to be stressed that in this situation, which does not allow
for more extensive units of meaning, there are no prescribed pericopes for
Friday or holiday services that invite the presentation of theologically indispen-
sable passages from scripture. This state of affairs is significant. What formed
the backbone of cult in the other two religions—​the recollection of the foun-
dational events of salvific history condensed into a cycle of scriptural readings
throughout the year—​is missing in Islam. In Judaism, this scripturally aided
remembrance is intensified by accompanying prayer formulae and hymns that
together serve to conjure up the great drama of Israel’s history with God:  the
election of the Israelites as God’s chosen people, their exodus, their settling down
in the Promised Land, their exile, and the anticipation of the Messiah.39 In the
Christian tradition, the commemoration is celebrated in the reading of the scrip-
ture in the Eucharist, epitomizing the two great stages of Christ’s ministry and
his redemptive sacrifice.40 These forms of commemoration have no equivalent in
the Islamic cult.
A comparable commemoration does take place within Qur’an recitation,
which is most frequently embedded in the prayer ritual, where it is not episodes
from salvific history, however, but rather the original scene of Islamic religious
genesis itself, the onset of revelation through the Prophet Muhammad, that is
re-​enacted. This commemoration takes center stage, so to speak, in place of the
progress of salvific history, and equally small-​scale is its performance, which
cannot be bound to a liturgical course of the year. No Friday service recalls those
parts of inner-​Islamic sacred history that could be considered milestones in the
foundation of the new religion, such as Muhammad’s visions reflected in the
Qur’an; his dream journey to the Jerusalem temple, masjid al-​aqṣā; the hijra; his
shocking victory over the overpowering enemy in the battle of Badr; or the re-
form of the pilgrimage rites. We do not find service elements that recall explicitly
the individual phases of inner-​Islamic, let alone pre-​Islamic and mono-​theistic,
sacred historical memory. This development will become virulent only later; it is,
however, founded in the genesis of the Qur’an.

38.  This practice of the tarāwīh is not the standard everywhere. The author experienced it in the Mohammad
Al-​Amin Mosque in Beirut, but not in the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus or the Fatih Mosque in Istanbul.
39.  The perception of a sacred historical memory already institutionalized in cult is strongly attested in Zobel,
Das Jahr des Juden, 11–​12. Rosenzweig’s classic formulation from 1921 (Der Stern der Erlösung, 369), “What the Jew
possesses as an event in the annual turn of the seasons, the immediacy of all individuals to God in the complete
society of all to God, he no longer needs to acquire in the long passage of world history,” has been studied in its
cultural-​historical implications by Assmann, Politische Theologie, 112.
40.  On the early theology of Sunday, see Klinghardt, “Sabbat und Sonntag.”
212  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

Two remarkable particularities thus need to be explained: on the one hand the
complete lack of institutionalized recollections of salvific history41 through the
year, carried out in cult, that is, in Qur’an performance, and on the other hand
the relinquishment of the original type of sura whose structure had been that of
a complex liturgical unit that included a narration. Both particularities stand in
close relation to each other, as the following synopsis of textual and cultic devel-
opment will show.

6.3  Emergence of a Liturgy

In our summary of cultic and textual development, let us turn first to the oldest
suras, which do not yet introduce the central theme of salvific historical narra-
tive.42 We should investigate them for traces of a social frame for the recitation,
and pursue also the question of cultic orientations shared between the proclaimer
addressed as “you” and his hearers. Only with a rough conception of the imme-
diate shared cultic praxis of all those reached by the Qur’anic recitation can we
come to recognize the change that would divide the new identity of the “believ-
ers”43 from the ancient Arab identity. The early suras, and the debates carried
out in them, offer a viable path for this. For, proceeding from the fact that the
proclaimer addressed as “you” did not present his message in private missionary
work in a free sermon style, but rather presented it to his hearers in his culti-
cally styled “Qur’anic” speech, one must see the people addressed or mentioned
in the plural grammatical forms in the text as real persons from his environ-
ment, before whom or in whose surroundings the performance takes place. One
must also identify the forum of the public debates reflected in the suras with the
scene of their liturgical performance. The text is thus a supplementary writing
to the proclamation itself. If one draws conclusions without recourse to the Sira,
the Qur’anic scenario consists of the proclaimer (“thou”) alongside the hearers
addressed as “you.” In addition, there are absent adherents, “you,” or, more fre-
quently, opponents, “they.” The proclaimer enters as a messenger with a message
that has perhaps already been formed beforehand; that is, he enters into “a space
that is distended in time and space.”44 But he may also perform his message spon-
taneously. These two possibilities of text genesis are only clearly distinguishable
in cases where the recitation itself responds to accusations or behaviors of the
group imagined as present (“you” or “they”) or, meta-​textually, makes commen-
tary pronouncements about what has already been performed.

41.  Contrary to that, modern sermon handbooks for proclamation do follow the annual sequence of Fridays
but do not reflect the course of Islamic salvific history at all.
42.  With the exceptions of suras 51 and 79, the early Meccan texts do not contain Prophet narratives; the same
is true of the middle Meccan material, apart from suras 50, 67, 72, and 76.
43.  Āmana only becomes a term in middle Meccan usage, but from an early point the group around the pro-
claimer already identified itself through collective practices and convictions.
44.  Ehlich, “Text und sprachliches Handeln.”
 The Liturgical Qur’an  213

Are there recognizable insights and convictions shared by the speaker and
parts of the hearership that unite them into a community of identity? Following
roughly the process of Assmann, who coined the phrase “cultural memory” as an
abbreviation for the complex interaction of cultural identity and reference to the
past, we will first discuss the question of the significant space recognizable in the
suras. “Significantly, place plays the primary role in collective and cultural mne-
motechnics, the culture of memory. . . . Memory culture operates by the setting
of signs into natural space. Even, and especially, entire landscapes can serve as
the medium of cultural memory. They are then not so much accentuated through
signs and monuments, but rather elevated as a whole to the rank of a sign. . . . It
is a matter of topographical ‘texts’ of cultural memory, of a ‘mnemotope.’ ”45 Let
us now look to the Qur’an.

6.3.1  Mecca and Rites of the Shrine as Central Memory Figure

It is hardly surprising that Mecca and its sacred area, ḥaram, appear as the cen-
tral mnemotopes in the early Meccan suras.46 Mecca is frequently represented
among the places that recur in the thirty-​two typologically early suras. Outside
the two narrative historical recollections (suras 105 and 106) that commemorate
the repulsion through divine intervention of an aggressor from the shrine, that
is, from the ḥaram foundation given by God to the Quraysh,47 Mecca is evoked as
a symbolic site in the context of oaths introducing the suras, as the theater of the
theophany, whose only equivalent is Mount Sinai: twice Mecca occurs in this po-
sition in connection to the foundational site Sinai, indicated deictically as hādhā
l-​balad al-​amīn, “this secure city” (Q 95:3), or as al-​bayt al-​maʿmūr, “the house
of God visited [by pilgrims]” (Q 52:4). Mecca is thus not introduced through its
quotidian place names, but rather through a cultic circumlocution: as a settle-
ment attached to a sacred area and a pilgrimage site. A third time, again in an
oath context, a coded mention of Mecca is connected to the foundation of social
life as such, Q 90:1–​3.
At the same time, the ḥaram of Mecca must be presupposed quite concretely
as the theater of social interaction: above all, the site of the rites accomplished
there, although this is not made explicit in the Qur’an,48 and an explicit naming of
the Kaaba is entirely lacking. Cultic instructions to the speaker, such as fa-​ṣalli li-​
rabbika wa-​nḥar, “So pray to your Lord and sacrifice” (Q 108:2), designate those
cultic behaviors that have their natural place in the shrine in combination with
sacrifice, which Uri Rubin has documented for the surroundings of the Kaaba;
namely, these are the ṣalāh rites. Q 96:19 records the element of prostration,

45. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis,  59–​60.

46.  On the ritualistic functions of the holy site, see Rubin, “The Kaʿba.”
47.  See chap. 7, 244–247.
48.  The Islamic tradition is unanimous here; on the reconstruction of the cultic situation, particularly in refer-
ence to the area of the sanctuary reserved for sacrifice, see Rubin, “The Kaʿba.”
214  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

sajda, that belong to ṣalāh: fa-​sjud wa-​qtarib, “So throw yourself down and come
nearer.” In the same sura position, namely, at the end, we see elsewhere exhorta-
tions to the proclaimer to conduct another practice that is akin to prayer, the
cultic recitation:  wa-​ammā bi-​niʿmati rabbika fa-​ḥaddith, “The grace of your
Lord, proclaim it!” (Q 93:11), fa-​dhakkir innamā anta mudhakkir, “So remind,
for you are a reminder!” (Q 88:21), fa-​sabbiḥ bi-​smi rabbika l-​ʿaẓīm, “So praise
the name of your Lord, the powerful” (Q 56:96). In Q 52:48–​49 (wa-​sabbiḥ bi-​
ḥamdi rabbika ḥīna taqūm /​wa-​mina l-​layli fa-​sabbiḥhu wa-​idbāra l-​nujūm, So
give praise to your Lord, when you stand up [or: when you stand in prayer], /​and
of the night and by the decline of the stars”), there is even mention of an estab-
lished time for vigils: the nighttime until the fading of the stars.49 Here, it is best to
assume a ceremonial utterance in private space. Similar exhortations occur else-
where only at the beginnings of suras: iqra bi-​smi rabbika lladhī khalaq, “Recite in
the name of your Lord who created” (Q 96:1); sabbiḥi sma rabbika l-​aʿlā, “Praise
the name of your Lord, the High (Q 87:1); qum fa-​andhir /​ wa-​rabbaka fa-​kabbir,
“Rise up and warn /​and praise the loftiness of your Lord [or: say a ‘God is great’
over your Lord]” (Q 74:2–​3); qumi l-​layla illā qalīla /​ .  .  .  wa-​rattili l-​qurʾāna
tartīla, “Stand throughout the night, except for a short time /​ . . . and perform
the reading in clear recitation” (Q 73:2–​4). That the recitation that is required
here should be seen in close connection to the ṣalāh ritual is documented by the
short catalogue of virtues that calls for ṣalāh and hymnic recitation: qad aflaḥa
man tazakkā /​wa-​dhakara sma rabbihi fa-​ṣallā, “Prosperity to him who purifies
himself /​and praises the name of his Lord and prays” (Q 87:14–​15), and by the
fact that in the context of a Qur’an recitation (Q 53:59: a-​fa-​min hādhā l-​ḥadīthi
taʿjabūn, “Do you wonder at this speech?”), we find the statement fa-​sjudū li-​llāhi
wa-​ʿbudū, “Throw yourself down before God and pray to him” (Q 53:62). Clearly,
for the proclaimer and his dependents, the two belong together: performed or
heard recitation and ṣalāh rites. Since no indication is given of any scene apart
from Meccan cult, we are to imagine the old and new prayer service first in a
shared context, a thesis that is supported in traditional history by the (recon-
structed) notion that the prayer times were at first identical and the rites were
accomplished together.50

6.3.2  Critique of the Behavior of Cult Participants

What speaks in favor of this claim above all are the critiques of individual cult
participants. The critical references to cult behaviors become increasingly frequent
and more detailed, and they are set into a frame that unites the pagan Meccans
and the new cult participants, so that on the basis of the Qur’anic evidence we can

49. If ḥīna taqūmu is to be understood as a reference to a prayer ritual, then praise of God would be imposed
in this prayer and in this vigil.
50.  Rubin, “Morning and Evening Prayers.”
 The Liturgical Qur’an  215

assume the Kaaba rites to have been initially shared. We find objections to a lack of
seriousness, and to both ritual and ethical laxity: fa-​waylun li-​l-​muṣallīn /​alladhīna
hum ʿan ṣalātihim sāhūn /​alladhīna yurāʾūn /​ wa-​yamnaʿūna l-​māʿūn, “Woe to
those who pray /​who take their prayer lightly, /​who want to be seen /​and who
refuse to give help,” where the same people are condemned for ethical and ritual
laxity (Q 107:4–​7). Going further, there are condemnations also of the handicap-
ping of dependent persons in cult (a-​raʾayta lladhī yanhā /​ʿabdan idhā ṣallā, “What
do you think of he who hinders /​a servant when he prays?” Q 96:9–​10), or even the
refusal of the ritual altogether: qālū lam naku mina l-​muṣallīn, “They say: we were
not among those who pray” (Q 74:43), and fa-​lā ṣaddaqa wa-​lā ṣallā, “He did not
recognize [the message] as true nor did he pray” (Q 75:31). Cultic omissions are
rebuked, in analogy to the ṣalāh context, and also in connection to a recitation per-
formance, alongside the omission of postures of humility: wa-​idhā qīla lahumu rkaʿū
lā yarkaʿūna /​ . . . fa-​bi-​ayyi ḥadīthin baʿdahu yuʾminūna, “If it is said to them: bow
on your knee, they do not bow. /​ . . . In what message after this would they believe?”
(Q 77:48–​50), or disrespectful laughter in place of being moved emotionally: a-​fa
min hādhā l-​ḥadīthi taʿjabūn /​ wa-​taḍḥakūna wa-​lā tabkūn /​  . . . fa-​sjudū li-​llāhi
wa-​ʿbudū, “Do you wonder at this speech /​and laugh rather than cry? /​ . . . Throw
yourself down before God and pray to him!” (Q 53:59–​62). The ṣalāh rite, which in
some of these cases appears to form part of the recitation of the proclaimer already
in the early period clearly consists of the physical gestures of humility that later
Islamic cult established as obligatory: sajda (Q 53:62), rakʿa (Q 77:48), and qiyām
(Q 73:2). But we learn nothing about which prayer texts are pronounced here. It is
important that the prayer rites mentioned in the Qur’an, Q 107:4 and Q 108:2, are
nowhere distinguished unambiguously from the ancient Arab ones; it is clearly the
inherited form, with the elements rakʿa, sajda, and qiyām, that is to be conceived
as the frame for the recitations. Its exclusive mention at the beginning or end of the
sura may refer to an introductory or closing function of the rite within the liturgical
service developing in connection to the recitations.
If one takes into account that the proclaimer views his opponents as among
the cultically lax hearers, that he bemoans their lack of respect in regard to his
own liturgical contribution (the recitation), and that those who follow him in
their prayer are exposed to the mockery of these same opponents (Q 83:29), then
one can find here further evidence for an initially established cultic commu-
nity shared between the proclaimer and his Meccan compatriots in the shrine.
Shlomo Dov Goitein also presupposes an already existing pre-​Islamic prayer rite,
which the new community continues to follow—​without, however, observing the
“reform” of the cult initiated through the additional liturgical element of recita-
tion.51 This reform, which has not been noted in the research up to now, is an

51.  In a letter from February 18, 1962, Goitein wrote the following to Paret, who wanted to date verse Q 107:4ff.
to the Medinan period: “In reference to the ṣalāt of the Meccans, I believe that this expression familiar to Christians
216  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

important developmental step in both the Qur’an genesis and the formation of
the community.

6.3.3  The Ritually Determined Prayer Times and Their Reform

Particularly in those parts of suras that receive emphasis through oaths, we find
confirmation of the centrality of the rites as “memory figures,” mnemotopes, in
yet another sense, in relation to the medium of time. That is no surprise, since
““memory figures” must be actualized at a particular time. The contents of the
recollections are connected to time both through the attachment to primordial or
extraordinary events and through the periodic rhythm of references to memory.
The calendar of holidays, for example, reflects a collectively lived time.”52 The
daily sequence of times of day (structured by sacred times reserved for divine
service) is the microstructure corresponding to the macrostructural calendar of
holidays. Some of the times of the day that were later fixed for prayer occur quite
early, and indeed emphatically, in oath contexts, clearly carrying great weight for
the symbolic function of the oaths: ʿaṣr, “late afternoon” (Q 103:1); fajr, “sunrise”
(Q 89:1, 74:33, 52:48); and ḍuḥā, “bright day” (Q 93:1, 91:5).53 Oaths sworn by the
nightly vigil time, layl (Q 91:4, 92:1), are also linked to a liturgically relevant time.
Uri Rubin has been able to distill from the wealth of traditional materials the fact
that in ancient Arabic cult, a morning prayer (ḍuḥā) was current, while the after-
noon prayer (ʿaṣr) was perhaps introduced by the proclaimer himself in Mecca.
For all other prayer times, he can find no ancient Arabic evidence.54 Accordingly,
for the times mentioned in the oaths, at least apart from ḍuḥā and ʿaṣr (Q 103:1),
the adoption of an early Meccan praxis is probable. We also find an oath upon the
consecrated period of ten days, al-​ayyām al-​ʿašr, “the ten days” (Q 93:2), which
perhaps indicates the beginning of the ḥajj period.55 In this emphatic echo of li-
turgically relevant times, we see a possession of signs shared between proclaimer
and his hearers, which in part refer to cosmically determined times relevant to
the rites of the Kaaba.
What becomes usual in the more complex suras, the clear assignment of ritual
acts of divine service to particular sacred times, is already foreshadowed in the
early suras: in the closing verses of sura 52, we find the following call to hold off
on prayer at the break of day: fa-​sabbiḥ bi-​ḥamdi rabbika ḥīna taqūm /​wa-​mina
l-​layli fa-​sabbiḥhu wa-​idbāra l-​nujūm, “So praise your Lord, when you stand up

and Jews was already used for the superficial cult of the pagans. Muhammad was indignant that his countrymen did
not take their own cult seriously. At the beginning of his career, Muhammad himself believed in the numen of his
home city”; see Paret, Koran: Kommentar, 525. Cf. Goitein, Studies in Islamic History and Institutions, 88; Birkeland,
The Lord Guideth, 85.
52. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, 60; cf. Assmann, Das Fest und das Heilige.
53.  Rubin, “Morning and Evening Prayers.”
54. Ibid.
55.  See Wagtendonk, Fasting in the Koran.
 The Liturgical Qur’an  217

[or: when you stand in prayer], /​and at night, and at the fall of the stars” (verses
48–​49). Here a morning prayer and vigils seem to be called for, wherein the time
of morning prayer is to be identified with fajr, “sunrise,” rather than ḍuḥā “the
bright day.” According to Rubin, the fajr prayer replaces the pagan ḍuḥā prayer,
the latter of which had as its model the Jewish shaḥarit service. Accordingly, al-
ready in the early Meccan period, the community possesses two prayer times no
longer shared with the Meccans. Whether one should presuppose an orientation
to Jewish cult, as Rubin suggests, or rather one toward monastic worship—​also
responsible for the vigils referred to so intensely in the Qur’an (Q 73:1–​5, 20;
74:2)—​so that with fajr and ʿaṣr we have an adaptation of orthros and hesperinos
rather than shaḥarit and minḥa, we cannot here decide. What is important is that
the worship of the proclaimer grew out of liturgical practices of the Meccans and
first went its own way through gradual alteration of the prayer times.
If we revisit the early suras while bearing in mind their function as comple-
ments to the prayer rites, as we have sketched above, their ancient Arabian
elements no longer appear stylistically surprising. The technique of the oath in-
troduction, a continuation of the kāhin style of oration, or the stereotypical idhā
series56 of the eschatological sura beginnings, and indeed, the entire sajʿ ductus
with its short constituents, is based on the repetition of the same formal elements
in the same position; one can thus interpret them as a translation of the ritual
performance, which is equally reliant on repetition into linguistic expression. It
is in light of their close association with the Kaaba rites—​attested from the very
beginning—​that the unique form of the early suras must be understood. This as-
pect may equally provide an explanation for the fact that these suras, and these
suras alone, constitute a partial corpus reserved in a special way for the ṣalāh
ritual down to the present day.57

6.4  Cultic and Textual Development in the Middle

Meccan Period

6.4.1  Al-​Kitāb as Nucleus of Divine Self-​Communication

If one acknowledges the close relationship between the central memory figure
of the ḥaram rites and the particular form of the earliest suras, which seem to
integrate themselves smoothly into these rites, then one must assume a dif-
ferent frame of emergence for the longer and formally more complex structured
suras:  they must derive from a new state of the development of the cult. Our

56.  Cf. chap. 5, 174–​176, and Neuwirth, Studien zur Komposition, 188–​189.
57.  The “final thirtieth of the Qur’an,” juzʾ ammā, is taught first in traditional schools. Mastering this partial
Qur’anic corpus, which is mostly made up of early Meccan suras, is considered a sufficient requirement for the nec-
essary readings on ritual prayer; cf. Neuwirth, “Der Koran—​Mittelpunkt des Lebens.”
218  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

investigation then turns from the short suras to those compositions that take
narratives of the past as a new and central theme.
If one asks about this group, which, to simplify for our purpose, will be des-
ignated “history suras”—​which generally begin with a reference to their origin
from writing58—​what is the central memory figure that anchors them in time
and place and seeks also to trace the indications of circumstance and perfor-
mance framework of the suras, then quite a new picture emerges. In place of
the spatial and temporal references to rites at the emphatic sura beginnings and
the heightened sura endings, we find a direct mention of the writing (kitāb), or,
more rarely, of the recitation text (qurʾān).59 Only three of the complete twenty-​
two history suras begin without direct reference to writing. All six of the suras
of this type that still contain an opening oath evoke mentions of divine writing
rather than any reference to spatial and timely ritual.60 But in these suras, the
oaths themselves are quickly superseded by a solemn deictic introduction that
now becomes the rule, beginning demonstratively: “that is the writing” (dhālika
l-​kitāb),61 or else beginning with a nominal phrase consisting of a single word—​
“it is a writing” (kitābun).62 These introductions remain frequent until the end
of the Qur’an genesis. Remarkable also is the employment, which now becomes
frequent, of one or an ensemble of letters, which occur mostly in addition to an
evocation of writing, and are most likely to be understood as sacral correspon-
dents or “intonations.”63

6.4.2  Formation of Liturgies and Scriptural Pericopes

The recourse here to writing, since there was no corpus of written Qur’anic text
for the later Meccan suras to draw upon, most likely refers to an entity beyond
a concrete book. This entity may be taken to be the heavenly scripture that was

58.  “History suras” that lack an introduction with reference to scriptural elements are the suras 21, 23, 54; the
two suras that contain a doxology in nuce, suras 25 and 67, constitute an exception. In services in Jewish and Eastern
Christian worship, scriptural reading is also preceded by a doxology.
59. The relationship between them is controversial in scholarship. The stipulation made by Nagel, “Vom
Qur’an zur Schrift,” 165, seems to be strongly dominated by an idea of Muhammad as an author, whose individual
shift in consciousness is seen as responsible for the significant developments in the Qur’an: “Thus the development
of the concept of ‘writing’ in the Qur’an may show to us the stages of the routinization of the Prophetic experience
granted to Muhammad. In the end Islam shows itself to be a religion based on the legal provisions that go back to
the ‘scripture.’ ”
60.  The introductory oaths to suras in which “scripture” and the qurʾān are found: Q 36:2, 50:1, qurʾān; Q 37:3,
dhikr, “exhortation”; Q 38:2, qurʾān dhū dhikr, “reading with the admonition”; Q 43:2, 44:2, kitāb.
61.  Deictic reference to “scripture,” dhālika l-​kitāb, “This is the scripture,” or more often: tilka āyātu l-​kitāb,
“These are the signs of scripture,” introduce suras 2, 10, 12, 13, 15 26, 27, 28, and 31.
62.  The introductory verses refer to the scripture by means of monopartite nominal sentence, Q 7, 11, 14,
kitābun; similarly suras 32, 39, 40, 41, 54, and 46: tanzīl l-​kitāb, “[this is] a sending down of the scripture”; sura
19: dhikru raḥmati rabbika, “[this is] a reminder of your lord’s compassion”; and sura 24: sūratun anzalnāhā, “[this
is] a sura, which was sent down to us.” However, one can also read these verses as appellatory: “A scripture!” and
so forth.
63.  But cf. the explanation attempt that goes in another direction in Paret, Der Koran.
 The Liturgical Qur’an  219

made available for recitation, qurʾān, and remembrance, dhikr (Q 19:2.51), from
which texts are now “sent down” in spurts.64 According to the middle and later
Meccan suras, to receive the “writing” is a distinction that had already been
bestowed on earlier messengers; yet the proclaimer does not have knowledge of
these texts from books, but rather from oral communications. What unites the
various receivers of writing is not the vouchsafed identity of the respective cor-
pora that emerge and whose identity would scarcely be possible to check across
the language barriers, but rather the consciousness concomitant to the high val-
uing of the symbol of writing, that there exists in the transcendental realm one
comprehensive, integral text that only requires that it be sent down, proclaimed,
and arranged into suitable form for divine service, and subsequently subjected to
exegesis to make it accessible to mankind. The fact that the text in its entirety was
not at the disposal of the proclaimer but was only conveyed to him as fragmen-
tary recollections does not contradict this. In this “excerpting” of writing into the
Arabic language, which is occurring here for the first time, we can see a process
analogous to the pericopizing of entire works, which was a common practice
among Jews and Christians.
Such a narrative pericope from the heavenly writing stands—​ in close
analogy to the Jewish and Christian service,65 where the central element is a
reading from the Torah or Gospel—​in the center of the cultic sura recitals per-
formed in Mecca. Surrounding this scriptural reading, the dhikr, which consists
above all of recollections of history, we find hymnic, polemic, and revelation-​
confirmatory elements, so that a structure emerges for the entire recital that can
be understood as a reprise of a Jewish or Christian liturgy. It is remarkable that
different Prophet histories and individual biblical figures are expressly identi-
fied as “recorded in the writing,” while other Qur’anic topoi, such as polemic,
are presented without reference to writing, but rather in commentary form, as
in, “If they say . . . , then say . . . ” “Divine origin” is thus not to be taken in this
phase as wholly synonymous with “excerpt from the heavenly writing.” Even if
eventually the Qur’an—​as its name qurʾān (a loanword from Syriac, qeryānā,
“lectionary, pericope, reading”) already seems to suggest—​will become, after
the death of the proclaimer, its own pericope book for the extraction of texts for
cultic recital by Muslims, during the proclamation itself the individual recital
texts are constituted heterogeneously, namely, out of a narrative excerpts from
the heavenly writing, to which are added verse groups of various liturgical and
discursive genres as framing elements.

64.  For a discussion of scriptural evocations, see Madigan, The Qurʾān’s Self-​Image.
65.  Both Jews and Eastern Christians know of pericope books, apart from their biblical codices: tiqqun soferim
and evangelistarion, which present decontextualized daily liturgical reading portions for practical, oral usage.
220  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

6.4.3  Easing of Forms and New Mnemotechnic Supports

The recourse to “writing” indicates an expansion of consciousness that can hardly
be overestimated: First, the sacred topography that was confined up to that point
to Mecca is widened to include the homeland of earlier messengers, so that the
Holy Land comes forth as a particularly blessed region.66 Second, the temporal
setting of the message has been extended into the distant periods of salvific his-
tory, and, what is more, the speaker’s entrance among the group of those who
received messages from a writing that is only ever released in spurts, above all
the Israelites, was to transform the new community into a people of God related
to them. In the end, this entails nothing less than the adoption of the memory of
the Israelites as their own memory,67 the crossing over into the Israelites’ tradi-
tion and thus a necessary distancing from the Meccan identity that was preserved
above all by rites. It is remarkable that this new orientation is also expressed ges-
turally in the prayer service, namely, in the adoption of a direction of prayer that
is no longer locally determined but rather suggested by sacred history. The new
theological quality of this adoption of a prayer direction, involving not only ritual
but also an act of memory, has not yet been perceived sharply enough.

6.4.4  Gestural Orientation in “Textual Space”: The Direction

of Prayer toward Jerusalem
The alignment toward Jerusalem—​in place of the cosmic orientation to the east
that was current up to this point68—​makes gesturally manifest, so to speak, the
profound change that took place in the early community in the middle Meccan
period, and which we have attempted to discuss in analogy to the transition
from a ritual to a textual coherence developed by Jan Assmann.69 After the early
phase, in which the new proclamation still stands in the frame and context of the
Kaaba rites, we observe in the Qur’anic community a kind of conversion process,
namely, the change from an ancient Arabian orientation based on oral ances-
tral traditions to a biblical one based on writing. The biblical stories that were
previously evoked at most in short allusions now come to the foreground in the
middle Meccan period. The protagonists of the early historical narratives are at
first equally figures from the Arabian Peninsula and biblical figures, but over time
the Arabian figures become less prominent than the biblical figures, and the Holy
Land itself enters the scene in place of the local Arabian one. The biblical sacred-​
historical past that replaces their own historical memory now forms a “text
world” in competition with reality, approached in prayer through the physical

66.  On evocations of the Holy Land in the Qur’an in detail, see Neuwirth, “The Spiritual Meaning of Jerusalem
in Islam”; cf. also chap. 8, 287–​289.
67.  Cf. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis,  40–​42.
68.  Or to the front of the Kaaba, as Rubin assumes, “Kaʿba,” 319–​320.
69.  Assmann and Assmann, “Nachwort,” 272. Cf. chap. 8, 285–​287.
 The Liturgical Qur’an  221

gesture of facing the prayer direction and in cultic recitation—​both practices that
are already familiar in the surrounding monotheistic traditions.
One example among many for this new orientation is offered by the history
of the Jerusalem temple, which is told in Q 17:4–​7;70 following the suras 106, 95,
90, and 52, there is no more reference to the Meccan sanctuary, with the one ex-
ception of a short evocation in Q 29:67: a-​wa-​lam yaraw annā jaʿalnā ḥaraman
āminan wa-​yutakhaṭṭafu l-​nāsu min ḥawlihim, “Do they not see that we have
set up a secure sanctuary, while the people around them are robbed?” The only
middle Meccan exception is the reference to al-​masjid al-​ḥarām, the “holy place
of worship,” in Q 17:1, which serves however to place Mecca into a tense relation
to Jerusalem. The verse71 speaks of a night rapture of the proclaimer from the “sa-
cred” to the “far[thest] place of worship,” al-​masjid al-​aqṣā:

subḥāna lladhī asrā bi-​ʿabdihi laylan mina l-​masjidi l-​ḥarāmi ilā l-​masjidi
l-​aqṣā alladhī bāraknā ḥawlahu li-​nuriyahu min āyātinā innahu huwa
l-​samīʿu l-​baṣīr

Praised be He who led his servant out at night from the sacred place of
worship to the far[thest] place of worship, around which we have blessed,
in order to show him our signs—​He is the hearing, the seeing.

This verse reflects the replacement in the middle Meccan period of the local sanc-
tuary orientation toward the Israelite sanctuary in Jerusalem, a step that goes much
further than a mere change of ritual praxis. The change in emphasis marks a new
phase in the development of worship, which is manifest in new forms. The suras no
longer show poetic speech in the tradition of ancient Arabic sajʿ, but rather develop
as biblical “readings” narrative texts that are framed by dialogic (hymnic, polem-
ical, or apologetic) elements. The suras not only break the frame of a verbal sup-
plement to a given ritual but also show themselves liturgically and stylistically to
have outgrown their old frames: in their structure, they are reprises of older forms
of worship, and, in their diction, they clearly make reference to Jewish-​Christian
formal language.72 At the same time, the technique of the narrative section requires
the length of individual verses to be expanded, in order to differentiate the various
narrative levels through hypotaxis and more complex sentence formations. What
emerges is the pluripartite Qur’an verse containing more than two cola, which is
no longer easy to memorize, especially as its monotone conclusion at the end of
the final clause offers very little help for memory. From this period on, it seems
that the codification of the new compositions has been taken care of. The more

70.  Neuwirth, “Erste Qibla.”

71.  Q 17:1 is discussed in chap. 8, 287–​289. Cf. also, on its relevance as proof of the Prophet’s succession to
Moses, chap. 11, 408–​412.
72.  Baumstark, “Gebetstypus.”
222  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

complex structure of the verses, in which rhyme no longer offers mnemotechnic

help, almost requires this step. In the Qur’an, then, we do not find an “invention
of writing”—​what we can observe, rather, in the reorientation to the kitāb (the
“writing”) is a transition toward a technique of memory through writing. This tech-
nique, which is bound up with the transcendent original image of writing, now
becomes a kind of exterior storage that flanks memorization.

6.4.5  The Clausula

As the stereotypically formed final clause now replaces the end-​verse rhyme, this
entails not only a stylistic and mnemotechnical change of form but also a change
in the intended function of the Qur’an text.73 With the new form—​prose dis-
course consisting of interspersed recollections of God, evaluations, and admoni-
tions of behavior—​we see the creation of an effective stylistic medium for the
sacral encoding of discourse, as well as a remarkably flexible theological means
of binding inner-​worldly affairs to the transcendent God. The verse-​end clausulas
are not simply end markers of a complex semantic-​syntactic verbal unit; they are
also, and above all, paraenetic pronouncements about what is presented in the
main text, meta-​textual reminders of the source of the discourse, God himself, or
at least his admonitions and valuations. Q 12:23 offers an example:

wa-​rāwadathu llati huwa fī baytihā ʿan nafsihi wa-​ghallaqati l-​abwāba

wa-​qālat hayta laka qāla maʿādha llāhi innahu rabbī aḥsana mathwāya
innahu lā yufliḥu l-​ẓālimūn

She coveted him, the one in whose house he [Joseph] was, she locked the
doors and called: “Come here.” He said: “God forbid, He is my Lord, who
has made my stay beautiful.” Sinners do not prosper.

The clause “Sinners do not prosper,” a negative evocation of the benediction qad
aflaḥa man tazakkā, “Blessed be he who purifies himself ” (Q 97:14),74 introduces
a new, transcendent, reference and turns the speech of Joseph from the inner-​
worldly connection—​a trick of his Lord would be an act of ungratefulness—​
toward the transcendent. Not only Joseph’s speech but the entire report of the
verse is commented upon: following the norms established by God, what awaits
the violator is loss, despite any external gain.
Thus, already in the middle Meccan period, numerous pronouncements make
a direct or indirect appellatory point by means of the self-​descriptive clausula,
which opens up a theological discourse that transcends the level of the report.
Qur’anic salvific history itself is here turned to cultic address and takes on an
appellatory character.

73.  Cf., for more detail on the form and function of the clausulas, chap. 5, 195–​196; on its text-​strategic efficacy
for theological messages, cf. chap. 13, 472–477.
74.  Similar calls for blessing are found in Q 91:9 and Q 23:1.
 The Liturgical Qur’an  223

It is notable that the texts, at least in the middle Meccan period, use devices
beyond the clausula to facilitate their own memorization, often through mne-
motechnical assistance, by employing fixed proportions between individual parts
of suras.75 This seems to indicate also that the longer texts were entrusted to a
circle of individuals capable of cultic recitation. For the use of these individuals,
who would have been active also in the absence of the proclaimer, the symmet-
rical proportions would have offered a welcome mnemotechnic aid. The oral tra-
dition remains the primary form of the text’s preservation, as we can see from the
scriptless reading out within ṣalāh, which is maintained down to today.76

6.4.6  A New Temporal and Spatial Situation

As has been shown, this change of form coincides with the community’s move
away from the former times of day determined for ritual. In fact, in the history
suras, cultic directions appear for the observance of the morning and evening
times, but no longer as symbolically loaded oath objects, however, and rather to
signal recommended prayer times. That is easily understandable, since these rul-
ings are innovations: in place of the familiar prayer time of ḍuḥā, shared with the
Meccans, is the time of fajr:77 wa-​sabbiḥ bi-​ḥamdi rabbika qabla ṭulūʿi l-​shamsi
wa-​qabla ghurūbihā, “Give praise to your Lord before the rise of the sun and be-
fore it goes down” (Q 50:39). We find mention of these same two prayer times
also in Q 11:114 (wa-​aqimi l-​ṣalāta ṭarafayi l-​nahāri wa-​zulafan mina l-​layli,
“Hold the prayer at the two ends of the day and across a phase of night),78 where
in addition a vigil is also intended. Q 17:78–​79 speaks of an evening prayer (ʿaṣr)
and of a recitation at the time of fajr, attesting to the fact that rites and recitation
were already combined in the middle Meccan period. In addition to this, a vigil
is also further recommended (Q 17:78–​79):

aqimi l-​ṣalāta li-​dulūki shamsi ilā ghasaqi l-​layli wa-​qurʾāna l-​fajri inna
qurʾāna l-​fajri kāna mashhūdā
wa-​mina l-​layli fa-​tahajjad bihi nāfilatan laka ʿasā an yabʿathaka rabbuka
maqāman maḥmūdā

Perform the prayer when the sun declines, until the night darkens. And
the recitation of the sundown, truly, this recitation will be witnessed!
And stay awake at night amid the recitation, as an additional service, so
that perhaps your Lord will raise you up to an honorable place.

75.  See the scheme of composition in Neuwirth, Studien zur Komposition.

76. Cf. Graham, “Islam in the Mirror of Ritual”; Graham, Beyond the Written Word; Kellermann, “Die
‘Mündlichkeit’ des Koran.”
77.  The fact that this prayer was already evoked in the early Meccan period indicates that it existed early on
alongside the ḍuḥā prayer, which it would later come to replace.
78.  Rubin, “Morning and evening Prayers,” 121–​122.
224  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

We see that the only prayer preserved from the early Meccan period is the ʿaṣr
prayer, which, like the fajr prayer, was not a pre-​Islamic Meccan rite according to
Uri Rubin’s research. Although one should assume for these prayers that a reci-
tation practice was integrated into the rites, it is in no way certain that these also
included the new, longer suras; rather, one can imagine the continued use of the
short suras for these rites.
In favor of their persisting role in cult, we can state on the one hand the ob-
servation that many early Meccan suras undergo a reworking in this period and
are adapted to a new situation, in which the hearers desire to find their image
affirmed in the cultic texts. They seek now, for example, to be excepted from the
“reprimand of mankind” as ambivalent creatures that is so often pronounced in
the early Meccan period (as for example wa-​l-​ʿaṣr /​inna l-​insāna la-​fī khusr, “By
the late afternoon! Truly, man is at a loss,” Q 103:1–​2), so that additions are now
made to the recitation through formulas such as illā lladhīna āmanū wa-​ʿamilū l-​
ṣāliḥāti wa-​tawāṣaw bi-​l-​ḥaqqi wa-​tawāṣaw bi-​l-​ṣabr, “except those /​who believe
and do good deeds and are inspired toward truth and patience” (Q 102:3). But
above all, the later suras themselves have taken on so much complexity that they
can no longer be imagined as “verbal accompaniments” to a rite, but seem rather
to require their own separate performance frame.
A further centrally important innovation occurs at this point: the middle Meccan
sura 15 confirms the existence of a newly introduced prayer formula, the Fātiḥa,
Q 1:1–​7,79 in which the “we” form—​which, in contrast to the “thou” style of the
other suras, exhibits a reversal of the relation between speaker and receiver—​
presupposes the real existence of an ensemble of worshipers, a new cult society.
The Fātiḥa can be dated approximately, and belongs to the Raḥmān period.80

bi-​smi llāhi l-​raḥmāni l-​raḥīm

al-​ḥamdu li-​llāhi rabbi l-​ʿālamīn
al-​raḥmāni l-​raḥīm
māliki yawmi l-​dīn
iyāka naʿbudu wa-​iyāka nastaʿīn
ihdinā l-​ṣirāṭa l-​mustaqīm
ṣirāṭa lladhīna anʿamta ʿalayhim
ghayri l-​maghḍūbi ʿalayhim wa-​lā l-​ḍāllīn

In the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful.

Praise be to God, the Lord of the worlds,
the compassionate, the merciful,
the king of the day of judgment.

79.  See Neuwirth and Neuwirth, “Sūrat al-​Fātiḥa.”

80.  Cf. chap. 4, 142–144.
 The Liturgical Qur’an  225

It is you we serve, you we call on for help.

Lead us to the right way,
the way of those you have shown grace to,
not those toward whom you are angry
and not those who go astray

The Fātiḥa, because of its constant use both within and outside of worship serv-
ices, has been compared with the Christian Our Father,81 with which it shares
some structural characteristics (invocation, universal then individual pleading,
evocation of positive and negative forms of divine intervention). But at the same
time, it also resembles the Christian introductory to the prayer service, the
Introitus—​with which it shares an initial position, “opening” the Islamic prayer.82
Without being able to decide between these two functions, it should be noted
that in the Fātiḥa, which is also acknowledged as an addition within the Qur’an
(Q 15:87), we now find a text that supplements the available elements of the ser-
vice (the rites and scriptural recitation),83 adding a crucial element, namely, the
communal prayer. With the new availability of this, a distinct cult is already cre-
ated in nuce, going beyond recitation supported by rites.
In view of the prayer times that are no longer shared with the pagan
Meccans, it is questionable whether this extended prayer service still occurred
by the Kaaba. The Qur’anic text gives no indication of its location. What sug-
gests the increasing exclusiveness of an audience already won over by the mes-
sage is the observation that we no longer find dramatic scenes involving the
opponents as protagonists. Rather, the increasingly polemic passages in these
later suras often refer to disputes already past or simulate arguments still to
come;84 that is, they follow the scheme “If they say, then say” (qul). In view of
the simultaneous exhortations to recitation and prayer85 that now become firm
elements of the sura conclusions, recitation seems to have continued to form
part of the prayer rite. Yet we need to assume that the longer sura readings
should have obtained additional frameworks of their own.

6.5  Cultic and Textual Development in the Late

Meccan Period

To sketch the development of the further Meccan suras, which are similarly
complex but of a stronger polemical character and which widely dispense with

81.  Winkler, “Fatiha und Vaterunser.”

82.  See Neuwirth and Neuwirth, “Sūrat al-​Fātiḥa.”
83.  See Neuwirth, “Referentiality and Textuality.”
84. Radscheit, Die Koranische Herausforderung, thus concludes in favor of the subsequent construction of such
scenarios. However, his hypothesis presupposes an authorial origin of the Qur’an, and thus does not consider argu-
ments based on the interactions between proclaimer and hearers that are reflected in the text.
85.  See the analysis of suras in Neuwirth, Studien zur Komposition.
226  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

narrative86 would require preliminary analytical work giving specific treatment

to the structures of argument, far beyond of the scope of the present study. In
lieu of this, an attempt will be undertaken on the basis of a single sura to gain
some insight about the liturgical Sitz im Leben and hearership of the late Meccan
suras. Sura 29, “The Spider,” Al-​ʿAnkabūt, which is addressed indirectly to its
hearers (a-​ḥasiba l-​nāsu . . . ?, “Do the people perhaps believe . . . ?,” verse 2), con-
fronts central communal problems from the very beginning: a crisis is underway,
which resulted from disappointment about the half-​heartedness of some people
initially counted among the believers, who then became apostates (verse 10).
The entire beginning part (verses 1–​13) gives the impression of an experience
of fitna, a divine testing (fatannā, verse 2), in which creed alone does not count,
but rather the “hearts of men” will be tested (verse 10). The crisis is aggravated
by the fact that under the difficult conditions of the conflict with the unbelievers
(verse 12, alladhīna kafarū, verse 48, al-​mubṭilūn), a new quality of loyalty is re-
quired, which, in the case of differing religious orientation within families, even
displaces the authority of parents (verse 8), so that the necessity of honoring one’s
parents, which had already been preached in the Decalogue (Q 17:23), must now
be rewritten. In this situation of rigorous self-​restriction, we find the first intro-
duction of the image of jihād, athlon,87 that is, inner struggle (verse 8, and again
finally verse 69). What is striking is the nearly complete relinquishment of direct
address to those present, which is only lifted in the case of the controversial ex-
hortation to possibly show one’s parents disobedience (verse 8).
Despite this introduction, which clearly displays the form of a speech, the sura
goes on in a conventional way. In the usual position of the sura’s middle part, the
Prophets Noah (verses 14–​15), Abraham (16–​27), and Lot (29–​35) are recalled,
introduced simply through the formula la-​qad arsalnā . . . , “We have sent down
already . . . ,” so that Abraham’s sermon against idolatry, including the deriva-
tion of God’s power to resurrect from his power of creation, carries over topoi
from the sermon of the proclaimer in remarkable ways. Then follow reminis-
cences of the fates of the peninsular Arabian peoples Madyan (verse 36–​37) and
Thamud (verse 38), and finally those of other stubborn unbelievers (verse 39),
whose punishments are recalled in a litany-​like catalogue (verse 39). In all this,
what is striking is a new, paraenetic point of emphasis: instead of creating ten-
sion by pursuing the narratives to their climax, their paraenetic points (such as
Lot’s wife having to stay behind as punishment) are unveiled from the beginning.
The series of narratives is concluded by a parable (mathal), introduced explicitly
as such, whose educational value is highlighted again at the end (verse 43): the

86.  For the sequences of themes in the late Meccan suras 6, 10, 13, 16, 28, 30, 32, 35, 39, 41, 42, 45, and 46, see
the analysis in Neuwirth, Studien zur Komposition, 290–​313.
87.  The conception of jihād, as struggle in application of the affairs of God, precedes the idea of violent jihād.
A monastic Christian ideal (athlon) may be reflected here, such as is present in 1 Tim 2:5.
 The Liturgical Qur’an  227

construction of “auxiliary deities” is just as incapable of carrying a load as the

web of the spider (verses 41–​43). Apart from this parable, placed emphatically at
the conclusion of the historical recollections, nothing is new in this part of the
sura—​the narrative section can for that reason be explained best as the fulfill-
ment of already established expectations of the hearers, who anticipate finding
in the center of the performance salvific historical recollections—​just as is the
custom in Jewish and Christian services where readings from biblical history
occupy the center.
The announcement of the final part (verse 44)  is, on the other hand, litur-
gically striking, amounting to an emphatic signal that is almost an exclama-
tion:  khalaqa llāhu l-​samawāti wa-​l-​arḍa bi-​l-​ḥaqqi inna fī dhālika la-​āyatan
li-​l-​muʾminīn, “God created the heaven and earth in truth, and in that is a sign
for the believers.” The verse is not linked semantically to what follows and serves
with its great cosmic reference solely to signal a new beginning, whereby atten-
tion will be aroused. In this function, it recalls above all the hymnal formula with
which the community in the synagogue accompanies the relocating of the Torah
scroll in the shrine: hodo ʿal ereẓ we-​shamayim, “His majesty is over the earth
and the heavens.” Without considering a direct derivation, the parallel shows the
rhetorical efficiency that a cosmic reference can have for the introduction of a
new part of a prayer service. As in the majority of the Meccan suras, the final
part begins with a consolation of the Prophet confirming the transcendent origin
of the message (verses 46–​49). The concluding polemic in the “they” form aims
at apparently absent opponents, who would concede to God creation (verse 61),
preservation (verse 62), and even occasional rescue from danger (verse 65), but
do not grant worship to him alone, although their privileged social situation as
neighbors of the Meccan sanctuary (verse 67) should be a clear sign to them. The
conclusion entails an exhortation to jihād, to militant, if at this stage still nonvio-
lent, commitment in the cause of God.
That the Qur’anic ecclesia militans that is reflected here stands in close relation
to its Christian interlocutor is evident, not only from the recognized necessity
to conduct disputes with the “people of scripture” in a conciliatory way (verse
46: wa-​lā tujādilū ahla l-​kitābi illā bi-​llatī hiya aḥsan, “Do not dispute with the
peoples of the scripture, except in a friendly way”). It follows that disputes are
already underway. The community recognizes the scriptural revelations of the
others, some of whom are perhaps even present among the hearers: fa-​lladhīna
ataynāhumu l-​kitāba yuʾminūna bihi wa-​min hāʾulāʾi man yuʾminu bihi, “Those
to whom we have given the writing, believe in it, and also among those here
[some] believe in it” (verse 47). The community recognizes the God of all of them
as one and insists at the same time on the genuineness of the revelation to the pro-
claimer. The argument seems to be carried out constructively; the turning toward
the Christians is clearly no momentary event. Rather, a number of references to
the New Testament point to an already existing exchange, an appropriation of
228  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

the forms of Christian forbearance of adversities. Most striking are the references
to the carefree “birds among the heavens” (Mt 6:26), which recur in the Qur’an
generalized to “animals” (verse 60), and to the “apartments in the house of the
Lord,” which become the apartments of paradise (verse 58), and finally the pre-
dictions from Mt 16:28, Mk 9:1, and Lk 9:27 that some contemporaries will “not
taste death, before they have experienced the lordship of God on the earth”—​a
prediction that is reformulated in the Qur’an into the universal statement that
“every soul will taste death” (verse 57).
Although in its rhetoric and its unfolding of numerous arguments the sura is
clearly an address, it is not a direct confrontation with the fickle or the unbelievers;
it no longer presupposes a scenario occupied by hearers of different provenance, but
rather comments from an elevated position on a public addressed neutrally as “you,”
while maintaining a concern about their belief and nonbelief and the kinds of beha-
vior required by them. Despite these evocative traces of a sermon, the sura is none-
theless oriented toward liturgy: it still follows the three-​part scheme known since the
middle Meccan period, which reflects the reading of scripture in the middle, and in
which the confirmation of revelation in the closing part is announced to the hear-
ers through a clear signal. Although formally a dialogue—​interrupted only a single
time (verse 8)—​between God and proclaimer, the sura itself recalls a collective ex-
perience: already in the rhetorical question at the beginning, a-​ḥasiba l-​nās, “do the
people believe,” reminds one of earlier introductory formulas for the expression of
disapproval of a false view, a-​yaḥsabu l-​insān, “does man believe” (Q 75:3.36, 90:5, 7,
104:3). Even if the text avoids direct approach to the hearers or addressees, there is
still a clear connection between speaker and hearers given through inner-​Qur’anic
textual references. The sura thus reflects a liturgical reading before a hearership al-
ready familiar with the Qur’anic discourse, which now begins to open itself up to the
“people of the scripture,” while renouncing ever more harshly the non-​monotheistic
unbelievers.
While sura 29 still preserves the old tripartite structure with historical rec-
ollections in the middle part, the majority of the late Meccan suras (eleven of
twenty suras)88—​which are structurally no longer clearly tripartite—​no longer
entail any narratives. Their place has been taken by the historical reflections or
the yet more clearly paraenetically oriented parables, amthāl, a classical mono-
theistic textual type—​indeed, a topos of the sermon. But the late Meccan suras
remain polythematic. The step toward a monothematic sermon, which is yet to
come in Medina, does not occur in Mecca.
Cult, insofar as it concerns the praise of God embedded in a prayer context,
seems to have expanded: not only are the two morning and evening prayer times
confirmed, but a midday prayer, ẓuhr, and a late evening prayer, ʿishāʾ, are also

88.  Lacking a narrative are the suras 13, 16, 28, 30, 32, 35, 39, 40, 41, 42, and 45; those with narratives are suras
6, 7, 10, 11, 14, 29, 31, 34, and 46. See Neuwirth, Studien zur Komposition, 290–​313.
 The Liturgical Qur’an  229

emerging: fa-​subḥāna llāhi ḥīna tumsūna wa-​ḥīna tusbiḥūn /​wa-​lahu l-​ḥamdu fī

l-​samawāti wa-​l-​arḍi wa-​ʿashīyan wa-​ḥīna tuẓhirūn, “Praised be God when you
come in the evening and in the morning, to him is due praise in the heaven and
earth, in the late evening and when you come in the midday” (Q 30:17–​18).89
The recitation is also now preceded by a formula for the avoidance of mischief,
aʿūdhu bi-​llāh mina l-​shayṭāni l-​rajīm, “I take refuge with God from the cursed
Satan”: fa-​idhā qaraʾta l-​qurʾāna fa-​staʿidh bi-​llāhi mina l-​shayṭāni l-​rajīm, “If you
recite, then utter the formulas: I take refuge with God from the cursed Satan” (Q
16:98).

6.6  Cultic and Textual Development in Medina

6.6.1  New Sura Types and Their Sitz im Leben

Medinan suras can be roughly grouped into the short, frequently monothematic
“oratory suras” (22, 24, 33, 47, 48, 49, 57–​66) and the long suras (2–​5, 8, and
9). As a development important for the understanding of scripture, we find in
Medina a new relation to the heavenly scripture and the proclamation: while in
Mecca qurʾān, situationally conditioned performance, and kitāb, excerpt from
the heavenly writing, were held clearly separate from each other, the two become
difficult to distinguish in Medina. We now find texts about occasional, ephem-
eral communal matters within the performances of “excerpts from the heavenly
scripture”; thus, the qurʾān, the recitation of the proclaimer, becomes identical
with the excerpts from the kitāb, the heavenly scripture. In tune with the Qur’anic
community’s entrance into salvific history that is thus attested, we find new
texts, consisting of an address to the community, whose members are directly
addressed in formulas such as yā ayyuhā l-​nās, “O people.” At the same time,
the Prophet appears with a new aura in these suras, which in some cases (suras
59, 61, 62, 64) are introduced by stereotyped hymnal introductory formulas that
evoke the Psalms. Designated as al-​nabī, he is no longer the mere mediator of
the message but has now moved to stand beside the text. Only now does he bear
the name “Muḥammad” (Q 3:144, 33:40, 47:2, 48:29), which should be under-
stood as an honorific title, “the Praised.” He is addressed directly by God by the
formula yā ayyuhā l-​nabī, “You Prophet,”90 and becomes an actor who works in
synergy with the divine personage and is mentioned in the combination Allāhu
wa-​rasūluhu, “God and his messenger.”
Closely linked to the proclaimer, a number of locations now appear, called
masājid, especially the masjid al-​ḥarām in Mecca. The entire cult is now organized

89.  Hawting, “Introduction,” xvii, discusses the finally established three daily prayers; in contrast see Horovitz,
“Terminologie des islamischen Kultus.”
90.  See Bobzin, “The ‘Seal of the Prophets.’ ”
230  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

around this old center,91 which is perceived explicitly as the original place of the
rites.92 The rites of the pilgrimage are accorded late recognition as a legacy of the
masjid al-​ḥarām, which now, as a result of a longstanding Meccan tradition rec-
ognizing Abraham as its founder,93 is recognized also as the natural foundation of
the new religion, which in its other aspects, however, is much more indebted to
the legacy of Moses.94 It is notable that the change of the direction of prayer, qibla,
in Medina, just like its initial introduction,95 once again displays an element of
the particular consideration accorded to the psychic situation of the proclaimer
and, implicitly, of the community.96
The suras of this period mark a new transformation of form: they are struc-
turally homogenous and dispense with the multiplicity of “classical” composi-
tional elements of the older suras (e.g., the characteristic beginning and closing
elements of hymn, catalogue of virtues, and revelation introduction; the clas-
sical middle sections with historical recollection or discussion; and the closing
revelation polemic and confirmation). The new oratory suras display a com-
paratively simple structure:  a mostly stereotyped hymnic introduction is fol-
lowed immediately by the exposition of the subject, in the form of a speech
showing end rhyme. The “oratory sura” is only rarely carried out artfully; it has
become a ritually stylized address, a new form achieved through comparably
simple means.
The emergence of a sura type without a distinctive composition indicates a
shift in emphasis toward the end of the development. There seems no longer to
be expectations of firmly structured liturgies. Polythematic compositions, with
their attendant complex discourses often discharged on different generic levels,
are replaced by a simple form. The sura has now approximated itself to the genre
of the sermon. The proclaimer has come to feature beside the text as a represen-
tative charged with socially and politically relevant duties, and addressed person-
ally with the title yā ayyuhā l-​nabī, “You Prophet!” The similarity to the form of
address later familiar in the Friday sermon is not accidental: it is at this period

91.  With the single exception of Q 17:1, all Qur’anic references to al-​masjid al-​ḥarām are Medinan and there-
fore occur in the context of debates surrounding the rights of the Prophet and his community: Q 2:144, 150 qibla
shift; Q 2:191 declaration of war; Q 2:217 remembrance of the expulsion of the faithful from the Kaaba cult; Q 5:2
invocation to respect the Meccan cult symbols; Q 8:34 indictment of the expulsion of the faithful from the Kaaba
cult; Q 9:7 pact with the umrat al-​qaḍāʾ; Q 9:19 assessment of the siqāya and ʿimāra duties; Q 9:28 expulsion of the
faithful; Q 22:25, Q 44:25 judgment of the expulsion of the faithful from the Kaaba; once, in Q 5:96–​98, pilgrimage
regulations are discussed.
92. The qibla shift from Jerusalem to Mecca becomes binding with Q 2:144–​150.
93.  See Rubin, “Hanifiyya and Ka’ba”; cf. Sinai, Studien zur frühen Koraninterpretation, 135–​160.
94.  See Goitein, “Prayer in Islam.” A  clear testament to Moses’s function as a prototype of Muhammad is
traditionally offered by the establishment of the Jerusalem qibla in sura 17; see Neuwirth, “Erste Qibla,” where
Muhammad and Moses are compared several times.
95. The connection between the first establishment of qibla and the night journey of the proclaimer to
Jerusalem is also established in the traditional exegesis; cf. the evidence in Duri, “Jerusalem in the Early Islamic
Period.”
96.  Cf. chap. 9, 334–337.
 The Liturgical Qur’an  231

that the Friday service was first institutionalized.97 The Qur’anic mention of its
establishment occurs in the context of a defense of the proclaimer as an Arabian
prophet, a “messenger from within your midst,” Q 62:1–​5, who is contrasted ex-
pressly with those Jews who possess the Torah but do not understand it. As it is in
the context of this confrontation that a day of gathering, jumʿa, is introduced, it
might be concluded—​though without explicit evidence—​that the intention here
is to establish an opposing model to Shabbat.98
It is noteworthy that native “proto-​Islamic” history is touched upon, but never
unfolded narratively.99 This prefigures a momentous development: not only the
renunciation of general monotheistic historical memory but also the relinquish-
ing of the community’s “proto-​Islamic” historical memory as a backbone of the
prayer service. The person of the proclaimer himself stands increasingly as the
focal point. The generally highly formulaic introductions of these suras may in-
dicate their recitation at the beginning of a longer ceremony, which, given the
absence of conventional sura endings at this stage, may have most likely been
concluded with a following prayer ritual.
With the second Medinan sura type, the “long sura,” the discrepancy between
the textual unit sura and the pericope designed for recitation within a cultic
frame, which had occasionally already arisen with the longer late Meccan texts,
becomes the rule. Given their length, the long suras as such could no longer serve
a cultic function. But since even the shorter Medinan suras, being for the most
part monothematic, no longer fit the older complex model, the expectation of
the hearers for a complex prayer service presenting salvific historical memory
in the form of a narrative from the biblical traditions as its centerpiece, seems
to have faded away. It is no surprise, then, that the Islamic prayer service in its
ultimately fixed form includes no performance of complete suras, but only short
pieces inserted into the rites.

6.6.2  Medinan Additions

We find an important index of the continued recitation of older suras during
Muhammad’s ministry in Medina in those texts that can be identified as addi-
tions to Meccan suras.100 They serve precisely to actualize the older texts that

97.  See Q 62:9; see also Goitein, “Friday Worship,” Becker, “Zur Geschichte des islamischen Kultus.”
98.  See Goitein, “Friday Worship.” A  non-​canonical reading of jumuʿa (Q 62:9) makes the chronological
framework of the new day of worship explicit: the Aramaic borrowed word, ʿarūbā, “eve,” points to a day of prepa-
ration for Shabbat, apparently concretely to a Friday market, see ibid.
99.  An example of the few verses that reflect the fateful event of victory at Badr is Q 8:41–​44; see Wagtendonk,
Fasting in the Qur’an. Here, an event is interpreted mythically in detail, point by point, but is still not condensed
into a mythical story. The verses clearly aim at the evocation of a memory presumed to be living among the hearers.
100.  Hence what is intended here is not the Medinan additions accounted for in the tradition, which Nagel,
Medinensische Einschübe, collected and discussed, but whose criteria for identification still need to be checked. This
has more to do rather with verses that stand out for formal and text-​logical reasons, thus indicating a Medinan in-
teraction scenario.
232  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

were still in use, but that required concretizing or modification in light of new
communal developments. This became a means, for example, for the expression
of the increasingly demanding life circumstances of some members of the com-
munity, who as tradespeople or fighters could no longer dedicate themselves to
protracted vigils. Q 73:1–​4, with its exhortation valid within the early Meccan
period, yā ayyuhā l-​muzzammil /​qumi l-​layla illā qalīlā /​nisfahu awi nquṣ minhu
qalīlā /​aw zid ʿalayhi wa-​rattili l-​qurʾāna tartīlā, “You, wrapped one, /​stand
through the night /​half the night or somewhat less /​or somewhat more /​and
perform the reading in clear recitation,” is thus extended by a Medinan closing
verse, mentioning the groups to be exempted explicitly, which lightens the strict
command for them: fa-​qraʾū mā tayassara minhu, “So recite what comes easy to
you from him/​it” (Q 73:20). Similar lightenings are attached also to the cultic
instructions concerning the Ramadan fast, which was first issued in Medina: Q
2:187 cancels the obligation of sexual abstinence for the nights of Ramadan im-
plied in Q 2:185.
But the additions also reflect interactions across the borders of the community,
to which the recitation responds. In the early Medinan period, a new group of
hearers appears on the stage, if not in reality, then at least virtually: the Medinan
Jews. Jews appear as believers (Q 2:62, 5:69, 22:17), or in other places they are
confronted with the requirement of accepting the new message (Q 4:162). In
some Qur’anic texts, they belong to the “peoples of the writing” (Q 3:113–​114)
and obtain assurances of a doubled reward in view of their belief in their own re-
vealed writings and the Qur’an (Q 28:52–​54).101 But the full significance of their
presence only becomes clear by means of a Qur’anic strategy that seems to pre-
suppose Jewish hearers: older Qur’anic texts are extensively reworked, and thus
adapted to the expectations of a more complex Medinan listenership. Textual
analyses show that some biblical narratives that were already formulated in Mecca
were subjected to a revision in Medina, and thus gained theological dimensions
that clearly relate to Jewish biblical exegesis.102 In the case of the story of the
Golden Calf,103 which is told in the Meccan period in Q 20:84–​99, and again in
Q 7:142–​156, the additions, which appear clearly as such through their stylistic
form, make distinct reference to a contemporary Jewish exegetical reading of
the Exodus text.104 Divine wrath—​which is not a theme in Mecca, where human
repentance brings about immediate forgiveness—​now enters the community’s
horizon of knowledge, most probably as a result of disputes with Jewish scholars.
A new theological reflection is required, which disputes the image of God pre-
dominant in the rabbinic tradition from Exodus 34:6–​7, the so-​called thirteen

101.  Rubin, “Jews and Judaism”; Rubin, Between Bible and Qur’an.
102.  Neuwirth, “Meccan Texts”; cf. chap. 9, 318–​324.
103.  See Hawting, “Tawwābūn.”
104.  Neuwirth, “Meccan Texts.”
 The Liturgical Qur’an  233

attributes, which plays a central role in the atonement ritual of the day of re-
pentance (Yom Kippur). The extensive “correction” of the understanding of the
previously narrated Moses story may be a tribute to Jewish hearers, who in the
early Medinan period are clearly assumed to be among the proclaimer’s audience.
Examples such as the development of the story of the Golden Calf can illumi-
nate the debates that would have played out between the Jews and the new com-
munity. Both groups set out to become competing exegetical trustees of the same
heritage and thus into rival interpretative communities. Medinan additions, as
such, were conceded early on to exist by the Islamic tradition,105 but have still
not been submitted to systematic study as to their implications for the Qur’anic
process of communication. Observations on the different Qur’anic readings of
the story of the Golden Calf suggest the successive development of a discourse of
guilt and atonement, which over time came to involve the new community and
the Medinan Jews, before these became the target of serious Qur’anic polemic.
That such interpretive “corrections” of stories or faith positions that were ini-
tially presented without religious political implications, but which were required
by the new situation of dialogue, became commonplace in Medina is attested by
the intake of Jewish creeds in the Qur’anic horizon. In the short sura 112, we even
witness an offer of consensus to the Jewish hearers, while the Nicene Christian
confession of divine sonhood is rigorously paraphrased in the sense of a negative
theology, so that a clear negation is offered to the Christians.106 The new forms of
the community’s religious credos that emerge, above all the creed formulated in
sura 112, may have arisen out of the debates with Jewish interlocutors, just as the
Fātiḥa was due to inner-​community reflection over Christian forms of worship
circulating within the area.107
This kind of emergence of cultic forms from the negotiation of Jewish tra-
ditions, which is typical for the Medinan context, is reflected in a particularly
strikingly mode in the shaping of the two high feasts that were institutionalized
during the Medinan period. The Ramadan month of fasting, typologically a re-
pentance festival, clearly developed out of the nucleus of the ʿAshūrāʾ fast, an ad-
aptation of the rites of the Jewish day of atonement, Yom Kippur.108 Shlomo Dov
Goitein succeeded in finding clear traces of the Yom Kippur liturgy, above all the
repentance litany, in Q 2:186, a verse that forms part of the Ramadan legislations
of Q 2:183–​187. But what is striking above all is a close connection to the role of
Moses in salvific history, reflected in the etiology of Ramadan, which is founded
on the reception of the furqān, “the deliverance /​delivering decision” (Q 2:184).
Just as Moses received the scripture and the deliverance, furqān (Q 2:52), so these

105. Nagel, Medinensische Einschübe, 113–​127.

106.  Cf. chap. 13, 477–480.
107.  Neuwirth, “Sūrat al-​Fātiḥa.”
108.  Goitein, “The Muslim Month of Fasting”; cf. also chap. 9, 410–415.
234  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

two distinctions are also granted to the Prophet, who not only received the scrip-
ture, the Qur’an, but also like Moses was able to deliver his community thanks
to divine intervention from the greatest danger—​namely, in the battle of Badr,
which is evoked in Q 8:42–​43. These distinctions are remembered in Ramadan.
While the Ramadan month of fasting, which is marked strongly by liturgy,
is linked in no small measure to older liturgical models such as the repentance
liturgy cited by Goitein,109 the pilgrimage festival, although closely related typo-
logically to the Jewish pilgrimage for the Feast of Tabernacles (ḥag ha-​sukkot),
presents itself rather as a reform of ancient Arabian rites. In the case of the pil-
grimage, which had already taken shape in pre-​Islamic times, and which seems
to be a pure festival of the change of seasons,110 a salvific historical interpre-
tation was provided. It focuses on the person of Abraham, which in the local
tradition was already linked to the Meccan sanctuary, and refers the duty of
the pilgrimage—​Q 22:27–​29—​back to him. At the same time, it is he who in a
prayer—​Q 2:127–​129—​predicts the appearance of a Prophet of writing, and thus
the emergence of verbal worship at the Kaaba. The Abraham connection works
in two ways:  on the one hand, it is directed against the Jews’ claim of special
godliness in recognition of the piety of Abraham—​Abraham’s demand for the
privileges for his descendants, Q 2:124, is decided negatively—​and, on the other,
it establishes an opposing tradition, which claims that the first son of Abraham,
Ismail, the forefather of the Arabs, participated synergetically, in place of the bib-
lical Isaac, in the founding of the sanctuary by Abraham.111

6.6.3 Summary
With the appearance of the long sura, there arose for the first time a discrep-
ancy between the textual unit of the sura and its oral performance in a ritual
setting:  the long suras as such are too long to serve a cultic function within a
single service. For the ritual part of the prayer service, short suras or verse groups
are required; in the service part, the sermon-​like “oratory suras” proved more
suitable for the liturgically framed communications. Thus, the need for a com-
plex form of verbal service involving polythematic compositions such as were
common in Mecca was no longer present. In addition, the short Meccan suras,
which continued to be recited, fulfilled an important liturgical purpose. Whether
because sufficient structured performance texts already existed by that time or
because formal emphases other than the liturgical became more important, in
the Medinan sura types we no longer see the response to an expectation of a
complex prayer service developed around salvific historical memory at its center.

109. Ibid.
110. Wellhausen, Reste.
111.  Cf. chap. 11, 394–395. On the foundation of the holy site, see especially Witztum, “The Foundations of the
House”; Sinai, Studien zur frühen Koraninterpretation.
 The Liturgical Qur’an  235

New forms, which no longer constitute a literary genre, such as citations of leg-
islation, which are unfamiliar in terms of their genre and structure, replace the
old compositions. This turn toward simpler forms initiates the path toward the
erosion of the literarily through-​composed sura. Once individual texts could be
excerpted from the long suras without particularly violent intervention, it was
only a short step to the pericopizing of the Qur’an, which would later become
common in Islamic worship: the excerpting of texts for recitation from the longer
suras based solely on considerations of the desired content or extent. Whether
or not this praxis goes back to the time of the Prophet’s ministry, in any case the
Qur’an contains, in the “compromise form” of the long sura, the formula for the
dissolution of its own compositions.

6.7  From Qur’an to Islamic Cult

The simplicity of Islamic cult in its finally fixed form, the fact that both the
daily ṣalāh and the Friday service focus on the ritual rather than verbal ex-
pression of the worshipper, has challenged scholars time and again. Shlomo
Dov Goitein112 attempted to explain this, above all, assuming that this format
served the needs of an audience that took shape in Medina after the wars of
conquest, which had scarcely any previous religious formation. A simple ritual
would have met the needs of this new audience. The new believers required a
simple cult. Eugen Mittwoch113 and Carl Heinrich Becker,114 who both investi-
gated the structure of the Friday service, also considered the conditions after
the first wave of conquest to have been decisive in its formation. Becker rec-
ognized clear reflections of a Christian liturgy in the Friday service, while
Mittwoch finds Jewish liturgical reflections instead. The Friday service, it is
true, can only be explained in the details of its final form by its encounter with
the cultic forms of the two older religions. But if we follow the evidence of the
Qur’an itself, both substantial elements, the sermon on the one hand and the
ṣalāh at the close of the ceremony on the other, already stem from an intrinsi-
cally Qur’anic (in the case of the ṣalāh even pre-​Qur’anic) development. Thus,
the decisive question remains unanswered: Why is the final form of the verbal
service in Islam comparably plain—​why is it not closer to the Jewish-​Christian
structure, that is, a typologically more diversified form of worship?
The development sketched earlier makes the whole problem appear much
more complex. After all, what was described is a move from simpler to more
complex forms, from a cult determined by ritual in the beginning to one deter-
mined by verbal service in later Mecca, which in the end becomes once more

112.  Goitein, “Friday Worship.”

113.  Goitein, “Friday Worship.”
114.  Becker, “Zur Geschichte des islamischen Kultus.”
236  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

simplified, still in the lifetime of the Prophet, resulting in a combination of ritual

and a sermon-​like oration.
Let us once more recapitulate the hypotheses presented here regarding the
development of canon and ritual: The pre-​Islamic ṣalāh rites at the Kaaba were
adopted as the framework for the liturgical recitation of the Qur’an, which con-
stituted the initial stage of a verbal service. The new practice was dignified and
legitimized through its performance in a particular, revered space and at specific
times of day that were considered to be auspicious. The early suras verbally imi-
tate, so to speak, the basic pattern of the rites, translating the fast and rhythmical
repetition of gestures into verbal linguistic forms, repetitive rhymed prose. But
the practice of a shared cult of the pagan Meccans and the nascent community
did not last long; the believers soon relinquished the customary prayer times,
and thus oriented themselves more closely to biblical models. Formally, the rec-
itation texts developed beyond their ritual frames, constituting, from the middle
Meccan period, text ensembles that clearly recall in structure the monotheistic
prayer services. The consciousness of participating in a “scripture” into which
the stream of relevant tradition merged, opened their eyes to history, and fur-
thermore allowed them to assimilate as their own the memory of the followers of
the two older religions, who were already living in a scriptural culture. This new
orientation manifested itself in the new genre of the “history sura,” which can be
understood as a reflection of the Jewish and Christian verbal service, in which
the salvific history of the Banū Isrāʾīl, and especially the leadership of Moses,
plays an essential role. History, or, in the late Meccan suras that do not contain
narratives, the interpretation of history, is clearly the backbone of these suras,
which were composed of paraenetic exhortation and narrative with a view to
being recited. The “scripture,” as the emblem of the transcendent God and with it
the consciousness of a stream of tradition that had incorporated the individual’s
experience of a divine power exerted in history, which now finds its first expres-
sion and pronouncement in Arabic, asserts a new conception of time. This con-
cept of time is no longer cyclical and predetermined, but rather linear and open
to human intervention. Perception expanded not only into times past but into
the faraway space of the other recipients of scripture, whose ritual center was
even adopted as the qibla. Thus Jerusalem took the place of Mecca, which for the
community had evolved into a space of inner exile.
Later, the more the proclaimer came to occupy a position of authority along-
side the text with the aura of a divinely authorized dignitary, and the more the
community approached the models of the older faith communities, the more
urgent it became to interpret the present through sermon-​like paraenesis. In
Medina, the resetting of the ritual center adopted from the “other” religions by
the community’s own inherited local sanctuary and the readopting of the pil-
grimage that is so significant from pre-​Islamic ritual practices indicate the ero-
sion of the erstwhile significance of the memory inherited from the Banū Isrāʾīl.
 The Liturgical Qur’an  237

All these developments are linked to the change in orientation from a verbal
service in the Jewish and Christian vein to more ritual forms of service. The em-
phasis on Abraham’s founding of the rites endowed the emerging community
with additional weight as against the piety of the Banū Isrāʾīl and their Jewish
and Christian heirs, which had been considered in Mecca as exemplary and had
found expression in the complex “history suras.” But not only their particular fig-
ures of memory that had become ambivalent through the real history of events
but equally the community’s own experiences were henceforth denied narrative
exposition. The emerging “scripture” indeed undergoes a completion, and the
collation of even isolated groups of verses was taken care of in the long suras.
However, the last phase of Qur’anic genesis was not exploited to mythologize
past experience of achievement; its purpose was not to fix historical recollection,
but rather to interpret the present through oral proclamation and to provide re-
assurance of divine guidance in the future. The two tenets are pursued and docu-
mented by the oratory suras.
The short ṣalāh suras, closely connected to the rites, have accompanied the
entire process (some, like Q 78:20, even undergo Medinan expansions); they
thus shaped the post-​Qur’anic notion of the pericope, the text selection suited
for prayer consisting of a short verse group that was easy to memorize. As for the
notion of the sura, which for the proclaimer of the Qur’an had been a significant
organizing factor for the composition of recitation units intended as such, little
remains beyond its relevance for Qur’anic philology, as a historically inherited
textual demarcation, without notable practical consequences for the reception.
If we find the suras, in spite of all this, appearing in the final text canon as
distinct units marked by the basmala, this fact does not reflect the practice con-
temporary to the final redaction, of the liberal use of the Qur’an as a book of peri-
copes. On the contrary, it directly acknowledges the claim to canonicity raised by
the transmitted shape of the Qur’an that had evolved long before. It is true that a
continuous text oriented transparently according to the history of creation and
the development of the monotheist faith did not evolve—​after all it was not a the-
ological school that determined the conclusion of textual growth and its defini-
tive ordering, but rather external circumstances. However, while the textual stock
extant at the time of the final redaction was arranged into a corpus according
to external, even mechanical criteria, it is impossible to overlook the signs of
an elementary care employed to create a consummate scripture:  the Qur’an is
opened by a “proem”—​the Fātiḥa, a text that does not belong to the genre of the
sura—​and is concluded by a kind of colophon, with the apotropaic gestures of the
two last suras, 113 and 114. The actual corpus thus begins115 with the evocation

115.  The fact that the first and final two suras were taken up in the Koran is thanks to the redaction based on
the Uthmanic textual material alson, as the suras lack in the reports about the pre-​canonical codex of Ibn Masʿūd;
see Jeffery, Materials, pg. 23. Cf. ch. 3, pg. 109–113.
238  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

of writing followed by a short Islamic catechism: alif lām mīm dhālika l-​kitābu lā

rayba fīhi hudan li-​l-​muttaqīn, “Alif lam mim. That is the scripture—​no doubt is
in it—​a right guidance for the God-​fearing” (Q 2:1–​2), and ends with a text that,
like its liturgical model, the Shemaʿ Yisraʾel,116 has compressed the confession
of God’s unity—​both as a statement and as an emphatic motto—​into the most
urgent formula possible: qul huwa llāhu aḥad, “Say: he is God, one!” (Q 112:1).
The question, raised by Ludwig Ammann, about the exogenous or endoge-
nous dynamic in the formation of cult is answered differently in our survey of
the Qur’an than in his work: the development of cult is surely not to be explained
through the pagan and the pre-​Islamic alone, even if one gives due consideration
to the “taking over of foreign forms.” The sura structure, which for some time
reflected the shape of Jewish/​Christian service and which was gradually formed
in accordance with these services, should have been due to a living experience
of such services, not to mere hearsay about them. One should therefore assume
already for the Meccan periods the presence of a hearership that was formed
in monotheism. For them, we should presuppose that the Lord’s Prayer or the
service Introitus, the Christian equivalents to the Fātiḥa, was certainly already a
part of their religious formation, as was the wording of the Jewish credo Shemaʿ
Yisraʾel, which is audible in sura 112, familiar to the Medinan hearers. The oscil-
lation between different forms of service, at first determined by ancient Arabic
rites, then the dominant three-​part monotheistic worship of the suras of the
middle and late Meccan period, and finally the refocusing on ritual in Medina,
where the ritually determined performance of the ḥajj is reestablished—​all this
does not indicate a development initiated by “foreign patterns of meaning” but
rather a continuous negotiation of forms of worship within the community itself,
which joined interlocutors of diverse provenance and orientation, to construct a
shared identity.

116.  On the text cf. chap. 13, 477–480.

 7

Stages of Communal Formation in

the Early Meccan Period

7.1  Communal Engagements with Local

Traditions: Successively Pursued Discourses

If one assumes that the Qur’an is a document of a communal formation, and that
it thus exhibits important phases of inner-​communal debate, then one should
seek to understand the proclamation as it developed through the sequence of
theological, ethical, liturgical, and other discourses that engaged the early com-
munity. But how can this sequence be determined? Attempts at a diachronic
reading of the Qur’an up to now have been based on the Sira,1 which sketches a
broad panorama of the proclamation, without however including the communal
engagement with older religious cultures into its scope. As a rule, however, the
Qur’an was assumed to be a closed scripture, so that researchers limited them-
selves to surveying anthologically documentary evidence on individual themes,2
without asking questions of development. It is true, even in the present attempt to
read the Qur’an diachronically and without exegetical backing, as a communica-
tion process against the background of the traditions preceding it, that one enters
into necessary compromises. Indeed, the chronology that is chosen as a starting
point, which has been worked out in critical research, relies for its most basic
data (e.g., the time spans of the proclamation, the two milieus of communal for-
mation, the hijra) on the Sira tradition, it thus remains hypothetical to some de-
gree.3 But the probability of this chronology itself, and of the theses derived from
it, is bolstered fundamentally once investigations into the individual discourses
can substantiate a clear sequence, or indeed an irreversible development.4
In relation to this sequence of discourses, the early Meccan development can
be divided heuristically into a number of phases, which will be given in overview.
In the foreground initially stand ideas such as consolation of the Prophet and the

1.  Cf. Watt, Muhammad at Mecca; Watt, Muhammad in Medina; Paret, Mohammed und der Koran; Cragg, The
Event of the Qurʾān.
2.  Cf. Rahman, Major Themes; Jomier, Bible and the Koran; Jomier, Great Themes. Exceptions are Robinson,
Discovering the Qurʾān, and Marshall, God, Muhammad and the Unbelievers.
3.  The sura sequence constructed by Nöldeke, on the basis of preliminary work by Weil, is based on a critical
examination of the Islamic exegetical tradition, see Nöldeke, GdQ, 1:58–​234; cf. chap. 5, 163–168.
4.  See now the theoretical reflections on the possibilities for reconstructing the chronology in Sinai, Studien
zur frühen Koraninterpretation,  59–​74.

239
240  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

divine promise of loyalty, “assurance of providence,” formulated in texts that rely

to a large degree on psalmic models. But in the same early Meccan period, other
texts already reflect the prophetic vocation of the proclaimer, which imposes on
him the special office of warning of the Final Judgment, bringing to the fore the
prospect of a “withdrawal of providence,” the apocalyptical loosing of the cosmos
and the judgment in the hereafter. These short early Meccan texts standing in
proximity to each other operate with similar formal means. Orienting them-
selves primarily to the needs of the individual pious man embodied in the ex-
emplary figure of the proclaimer, they quickly become the liturgical inventory
of the community members at large, who continuously recall the texts already
extant in their own ceremonies of recitation.5 Thus, for this early phase, the two
discourses of “consolation”/​“assurance of providence” and “prophetic warning
of the judgment,” can be seen as the lowest common denominators of the com-
munal debates. Both discourses make use of topoi: in the consolation, these often
refer back to the Psalms, while in the case of the warning of judgment they evoke
Christian-​monastic sermon topics,6 reformulating these in an innovative way.
They construct new image complexes, which not only bring together exclusively
biblical or post-​biblical traditions but also integrate the local social experience
transmitted in the indigenous ancient Arab society. This applies especially to the
descriptions of the hereafter—​thus for example, a central Bedouin virtue, exces-
sive generosity with hospitality at its center, is subverted into the counter-​image
of the entertainment of the damned, introduced by cynical toasts with nause-
ating meals in hell.7 Also, the reflections over the “peoples gone by,” al-​umam
al-​khāliya, which since John Wansbrough have been adduced as evidence for the
presence of older monotheistic topoi in the Qur’an,8 are not merely biblical remi-
niscences in the Qur’an, but rather display a reinterpretation of a motif treated in
ancient Arabic poetry, which ultimately gives form to the Late Antique ubi sunt
complaint against transitoriness.9
A third discourse revolves around a particular creation theology, the interpre-
tation of creation as a sign system of God. The praise of creation is indeed already
a topos of the Psalms, but in the Qur’an it is repurposed into an argument in
the debate about God’s omnipotence and power to resurrect. The early Meccan
suras develop an elaborate new, epistemically oriented interpretation of creation,
to which the later suras will refer time and again. One could certainly cite fur-
ther relevant themes in the early Meccan suras, for example, the “reversal” of the
conception of time from a cyclical to a linear, eschatologically directed time—​a

5.  This persistent continuation of use can be deduced from the later inserted expansions of many early suras;
cf. chap. 6, 231–233.
6. Andrae, Person Muhammads; Andrae, Ursprung; Andrae, Mohammad.
7.  Cf. chap. 5, 176–178.
8. Wansbrough, Quranic Studies,  21–​27.
9.  Becker, “Ubi sunt qui ante nos in mundo fuere.”
 Communal Formation in the Early Meccan Period  241

debate that was carried out not for its own sake but rather as a part of the greater
discourse about judgment. The attempt undertaken here to pursue discourses
following each other in sequence intentionally restricts itself only to the most
apparent developments.
To ground this method of the definition of dominant discourses, which devel-
oped their own concomitant formal structures, one can refer to a new practice in
biblical scholarship, which speaks in this context of “rhetorolects”: “With the help
of three literary genres, biographical-​historical gospels, letters, and apocalyptics,”
the New Testament scholar Vernon K. Robbins writes, “the Christians of the first
century wove six socio-​rhetorical discourse forms, wisdom miracles, prophetics,
sufferings of death, apocalypse, and creation, into a discourse form capable of con-
nection, which would become canonical for the Christians of the Mediterranean
world. . . . In the socio-​rhetorical model, every particular discourse represents a
“rhetorolect,” which constitutes itself through particular topoi, discourse figures,
and formulas.”10 If one adapts this model to the Qur’an, then it is the discourses
we have cited—​consolation and assurance of providence, warning of the judg-
ment, and reflection on the signs of God in creation and scripture, followed by
additional discourses in the middle and late Meccan time—​which would each
form a rhetorolect. As in the model of biblical scholarship, here too it is the rec-
ognition of the topoi, discourse figures, and formulas bound up with the dis-
course that makes it possible to explore the epistemic potential of the respective
rhetorolects/​discourses. But in contrast to this example, in which the rhetorolects
stand next to each other as elements of a corpus composed in writing, in the di-
achronic investigation of the Qur’an we are dealing with the development of the
individual discourses out of the ones that precede them.

7.2  Psalmic Piety

7.2.1 Consolation
The thesis that the Qur’anic development can be understood as a sequence of
differing theological, ethical, liturgical, and other discourses that captivated the
proclaimer and community should be slightly modified for the beginning phase.
The early Meccan suras do not make much reference to communal issues and,
viewed formally, are in the earliest phase dialogues between God and an exem-
plary pious man11—​addressed directly in second-​person informal address, very
much in the style of individual psalms, where the complaint of the godlessness
of the opponents and the divine consolation experienced by the psalmist stand
at the center. The suras 93, 94, and 108 have been rightfully designated “suras of

10.  Robbins, Newby, “Prolegomenon,” 31.

11.  On attempts to identify the oldest suras, see primarily Birkeland, The Lord Guideth; see also the review in
Paret, “Leitgedanken.” See also now critically Sinai, “Qur’an as Process.”
242  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

consolation.”12 Characteristic for the text strategies applied in this phase is sura
93, al-​ḍuḥā, “the Bright Day”:

wa-​l-​ḍuḥā
wa-​l-​layli idhā  sajā

mā waddaʿaka rabbuka wa-​mā qalā

wa-​la-​l-​ākhiratu khayrun laka mina l-​ūlā
wa-​la-​sawfa yuʿṭīka rabbuka fa-​tarḍā

a-​lam yajidka yatīman fa-​awā

wa-​wajadaka ḍāllan fa-​hadā
wa-​wajadaka ʿāʾilan fa-​aghnā

fa-​ammā l-​yatīma fa-​lā  taqhar

wa-​ammā l-​sāʾila fa-​lā tanḥar
wa-​ammā bi-​niʿmati rabbika fa-​ḥaddith

By the bright day.
By the night when it settles.

Your Lord has not abandoned or disdained you.

The last will be better for you than the first.
Your Lord will give to you, and you will be content.

Did he not find you an orphan and shelter you?

Did he not find you going astray and guide you?
Did he not find you in need and enrich you?

The orphan you must not aggrieve,

the beggar you must not revile,
and the grace of your Lord, proclaim it!

The short text does not stand alone typologically. It follows the typical scheme
for the consolation suras (suras 93, 94, and 108):13 experience of divine worship
(missing in suras 94 and 108), followed by recollection of a lack, culminating in
a promise of fulfillment or a summoning to divine services.14 The time al-​ḍuḥā
mentioned at the start, “the bright day,” is not to be understood purely chrono-
metrically, but rather represents time employed liturgically. For with the initial
evocation of the daylight, we find an evocation of a time of day at which, ac-
cording to Uri Rubin, prayers were made,15 both in pagan cultic practice and
during the early phases of the communal development—​a type of worship to

12.  Sinai, “Qur’an as Process,” 428.

13.  Cf. chap. 5, 180–182.
14.  On these suras: Neuwirth, “Images and Metaphors.”
15.  Rubin, “Morning and Evening Prayers.”
 Communal Formation in the Early Meccan Period  243

which the sura stands in close relation in content, awakening through recitation
(fa-​haddith!) the remembrance of received consolation, and thus constituting an
expression of thanks. The night which comes to an end with the onset of light is
mentioned as a second phase of time, it was perhaps spent in vigils (see Q 73:1–​4,
and cf. Q 92:1–​2, 91:1.4, 89:1.4, 81:17–​18, 74:33–​34). The psalter refers also to
such times as relevant to worship, such as Ps 119:55 (“I have remembered thy
name at night”), Ps 119:62 (“At midnight I rise to praise you”) and Ps 119:147
(“Already at dawn I rise and call”). A resonance in sura 93 of the experience of
prayer exercises is suggested by the pronouncement following the oaths (verses
3–​5), through which a new consciousness is reached. An apparently tormenting
apprehension has been dissipated: “Your Lord has neither abandoned nor dis-
dained you.” This too is a psalmic topos: “For he has not disdained and loathed
to have mercy on the poor” (Ps 22:25). Consolatory expectations are raised: “The
last will be better than the first for you,” and these expectations culminate in
the hoped-​for condition of spiritual fulfillment: “Your Lord will give to you, so
that you are satisfied”—​a thought that has its parallel in the Psalms, although
without eschatological connotation: “He will give to you what your heart wishes”
(Ps 20:5).
What is more, the subject of the paraenetic remembrance in verses 6–​8 is an
earlier achieved passage from a state of lacking to one of fulfillment. The bene-
factions thus received obligate one to engage in corresponding behavior toward
others. Harris Birkeland has attempted to place the sura biographically into the
vita of the proclaimer.16 His position—​presented as in agreement with the Islamic
tradition17—​is certainly not to be dismissed out of hand, but his detailed identi-
fication of the individual pronouncements of the sura with concrete biographical
stages of the proclaimer—​an orphan’s fate, liberation from low social standing
through rich marriage, and so on—​carries the danger of narrowing the signif-
icance of the text. For the recalled life situations of lack and the consoling dec-
laration of the persisting nearness of God also recall verses from the Psalms,18
a text corpus whose importance as a model is reflected throughout the entire
sura. For example, one can compare to Q 93:9–​1 a Psalm of thanks (Psalm 9), the
fourteenth verse of which even contains the thought figure of the obligation of
“further telling” about the received benefaction: “Lord, be gracious to me, see my
misery, lift me up out of the torrent of death, so that I may tell of all your glorious
deeds” (Ps 9:14). The psalmically stamped Qur’an text not only aims to convince
through the voice of the speaker but also promises validity as a liturgical text for
other pious men.

16. Birkeland, The Lord Guideth, 37.

17.  Raven, “Sira and the Qur’an.”
18.  Rippin, “Desiring the Face of God,” also assumes a topos here, but he does not contextualize his assess-
ment within the Qur’anic proclamation, assuming rather a later compilation of the Qur’an that doesn’t undergo any
development.
244  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

The closing verse, taking up the task of drawing the consequences of the per-
sonally experienced right guidance—​just as verse 9, on the orphans, illustrates
consequences out of verse 6.  Verse 10, on the poor, which illustrates the con-
sequences from verse 8, shows the way in which divine right guidance (hudan,
verse 7) will be given to others: through recitation: wa-​ammā bi-​niʿmati rabbika
fa-​ḥaddith, “And the grace of your Lord, proclaim it!” Thus, the circle closes. The
summons to liturgical recitation at the close refers back again to the experience of
night and morning worship that was evoked at the start, with the vigils and ḍuḥā
prayer. To accept the point that a real-​life situation of the proclaimer is depicted
here does not exclude consideration of the psalmic text referentiality. The sura
integrates important psalmic topoi of the worship of God but is also an expres-
sion of a wholly new experience that, as near as it comes to that of the psalmist,
also creates its own distinct kind of assurance out of eschatological expectations
(verse 4).
It is interesting that this text, with its social references to a context shared with
the pagan Meccans, also draws on local rhetorical strategies. In order to authorize
his already markedly monotheistic pronouncements about the nearness of the
personal God, the proclaimer makes use of ancient pagan Arabic stylistic means
for the production of authority: he employs formally the oath series character-
istic of the ancient Arabian seer,19 of which the first object, the morning prayer
time, appeals to the cultic practices of the community, including present pagan
hearers. Without this introduction, the text could appear to be a personal inner
monologue of a pious man or of the proclaimer, but through the oath it obtains a
cultic coding that creates a virtual connection to other participants in cult.

7.2.2  Assurance of Providence

Alongside these individual addresses stand some that are already collective. They
appear above all in two complete suras, 105 and 106, which, like the consolation
suras, still primarily have the character of an exhortative appeal, and thus do
not yet set out to invalidate the objections of opponents that will later become
so striking, and that first emerge from the threat of the Final Judgment that is
tied up with the Prophetic calling of the proclaimer. Gottfried Müller has re-
cently pointed to the relevance of these suras for the developmental history of
the text, claiming that the message of divine caretaking must proceed necessarily
the message of the judgment: “To stipulate the point of departure in the thought
of the threat of judgment would be problematic in that God, who shows himself
inimical in the threat, must first have manifested himself as caring. Before God
retreats, he must have been there, to be experienced in his presence; he must have
been recognized in his initiatives that embrace mankind.”20 Müller connects this

19.  Cf. chap. 12, 437–440.

20.  Müller, “Die Barmherzigkeit Gottes,” 342.
 Communal Formation in the Early Meccan Period  245

divine assurance with an already existing covenant with God: “The initial point is
not the nothing of man before the being and totality of the Deity . . . , but rather
the covenant, in other words, the Qurashite federation, which understood itself
as a covenant with God, as ḥums, and which establishes the covenant communi-
cation with God in the form of an historical account. . . . The Qur’anic relation-
ship to God constitutes itself in the idea of election.”21 Suras 105 and 106 will be
briefly presented:

Sura 105, al-​fīl
a-​lam tara kayfa faʿala rabbuka bi-​aṣḥābi  l-​fīl
a-​lam yajʿal kaydahum fī taḍlīl
wa-​arsala ʿalayhim ṭayran abābīl
tarmīhim bi-​hijāratin min sijjīl
fa-​jaʿalahum ka-​ʿaṣfin maʾkūl

The Elephant
Do you not see what your Lord has done to the people of the elephant?
Did he not make their scheming into error,
and send upon them flocks of birds
and throw against them stones of burned clay
and turn them into eaten grass?

In the center of the sura is the annihilation of an aggressor who remains un-
named, in all his military power,22 introduced as testimony of the omnipotence
of the personal God worshiped by the proclaimer (rabbuka, “your Lord”). While
the wording of the text might indicate nothing more than an exemplary divine
punishment, a central event of local Meccan history is addressed here, which for
the hearers apparently does not need to be connected explicitly to Mecca. On
the basis of the numerous ancient poetic citations gathered by Josef Horowitz
that attest to the defeat of the Abyssinian army commander Abraha, it should be
assumed “that already in pre-​Islamic times in Mecca, the narrative of a train of
Abyssinians accompanied by an elephant was widespread, and the Islamic tradi-
tion rightly referred sura 105 back to this.”23 The short Qur’anic text thematizes
an event of great significance: Uri Rubin,24 who reconstructed the course of the
Abraha campaign from the traditional literature, was able to show how the defeat
that is evoked here, of Abraha, who had to retreat from Mecca empty-​handed,
was a turning point for the position of the Meccans on the peninsula, who due
to this event could first establish themselves as the protecting power of a cultic
center and dispense with the contracts with other tribes that had previously been

21.  Ibid., 342–​346.

22.  On the historical background, see Kister, “Campaign of Ḥulubān,” and Shahid, “People of the Elephant.”
23. Horovitz, Koranische Untersuchungen,  96–​98.
24.  Rubin, “Īlāf.”
246  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

vital for assuring their livelihood. This background restores the historical dimen-
sion to the modest evocation of the event.
Yet the event is not simply reported in the sura but receives a new interpreta-
tion: with the entrance of God (rabbuka, “your Lord”) into the role of the main
actor of the narrated story; the local tradition about the event is raised to an
incident of salvation history serving to prove the omnipotence of the one God
as the Lord of history. The closing verse works in a particularly expressive way,
through its contrast between the approaching aggressors with their majestic ele-
phant and the traces that finally remain from them, which are as void as chaff or
“eaten grass.”
The salvation historical incorporation of local tradition is made even more plau-
sible through the recourse to a psalmic topos:  also in Ps 37:1, the image of be-
coming null and void is depicted in the pastoral metaphor “Wither like the green of
the herb;” cf. also Ps 58:7, with its language of “withering like the grass on the road.”
With the appeal to the significance of the event, recognized by both the believers
and the other listeners, local history is reclaimed as part of salvation history.
This sura is followed by a further recollection of divine benefactions bestowed
on the home city of the proclaimer.

Sura 106, Quraysh

li-​īlāfi Quraysh
īlāfihim riḥlata l-​shitāʾi wa-​l-​ṣayf
fa-​l-​yaʿbadū rabba hādhā l-​bayt
alladhī aṭʿamahum min jūʿin
wa-​āmanahum min khawf

Because of the relief of the Quraysh,

their relief from the winter and summer caravan trains,
they should serve the Lord of this house
who guards them from hunger and protects them from fear.

This syntactically extraordinary sura beginning has provoked varying interpre-

tations, which can only now be settled due to the investigation of the historical
background by Uri Rubin.25 Īlāf (Allāh) is employed in some poetic instances26
as a verbal noun in the sense of “grant of security, protection of God,” and
thus divine relief (from worries and fears). In the sura, īlāf is to be under-
stood correspondingly,27 where “relief ” can indicate either caravan journeys

25.  Rubin, “Īlāf.” Rubin’s study established the claim, based on its own criteria, that sura 106 together with
the preceding sura should make up an integral text, yielding the translation for the beginning verses “So that the
Quraysh bring together their summer and winter caravans.”
26.  Kister, “Mecca,” 108.
27.  The text has long been interpreted in scholarship as a trade agreement between the Meccans and the sur-
rounding tribes, who arranged a winter expedition to Yemen, Abyssinia, and Iraq and a summer expedition to Syria;
thus Birkeland, The Lord Guideth, 123; Kister, “Mecca,” 121; alternatively, Crone, Meccan Trade.
 Communal Formation in the Early Meccan Period  247

that have become superfluous on account of the general recognition of the

sanctuary after the defeat of the Abyssinians or the new possibility to travel
unmolested. The following simple sequence of ideas is thus yielded: an instiga-
tion of liturgical practices is derived from the memory of having been granted
social privilege, further strengthened by two divine benefactions named in the
closing verse: material preservation, and the inviolability and therefore safety
of Mecca, guaranteed by the sacral aura of the sanctuary (cf. Q 95:3).28 The
sura, which culminates in an appeal to keep the cultic allegiance of the Meccans
(verse 3: “they should serve . . . ”), refers to what is familiar to the hearers: their
privilege, recognized across tribal boundaries, as residents of a sanctuary. But
what is evoked here is not familiar in its entirety; rather, a decisive new thought
is suggested:  the God worshiped in the Kaaba (“the Lord of this house”) is
brought together as one with the personal God of the proclaimer, who is also
the Lord of history. It is not new cultic services that are required in verse 3, but
rather the recognition of the power of the one God that extends into the social
life of the collective.
It is these very early suras, which derive the confidence in God’s providence
from history, that are most closely related to the history psalms. It is striking,
as will be demonstrated, that in later texts of the Qur’an, history is seen from a
wholly different perspective.

7.3  Excursus: Are the Early Meccan Suras Biographical

of the Prophet?

Gottfried Müller assigns the texts presented here to a “pre-​prophetic” phase.

They give the impression of “a history, which understands itself as a history in
rise, a leading out, a liberation, from a past history, out of which man draws his
hope and confidence.” In opposition to this stands the “actual Prophetic speech
of the proclaimer,” with which “the area of the told or tellable history is left be-
hind.”29 Müller, along with other researchers,30 sees this change accomplished
in sura 96, which is the first revelation according to tradition, and which is read
as a Prophet’s initiation. In order to be interpreted in this way, and Müller’s
reading here is no exception, the sura must be placed within the narrative frame
given by the Sira/​Prophetic biography, where Muhammad experiences a vision
in a cave on Mount Ḥirāʾ, in which he is exhorted to recite or “read” from a
writing unrolled before him. The scenario follows the model of the biblical calls
to prophethood (one can compare for example Is 6:6–​8 or Is 1:6–​9), where the

28.  This external perspective on Mecca as a place of privilege associated with prestige and respect is evinced
also in ancient Arabic verse by Müller, “Die Barmherzigkeit Gottes,” 346.
29.  Müller, “Die Barmherzigkeit Gottes,” 357.
30. Bobzin, Koran; Paret, Muhammed und der Koran.
248  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

“novice” first declares himself not to be capable to receive the call and is then
given the assignment again with greater emphasis until he accepts it.
But this “hagiographic” presentation in the Sira contradicts the unambiguous
statements of the Qur’an text. The notion that this scenario is reflected in the
beginning verses of sura 96 is to be entirely excluded on several grounds. That
sura 96 is constantly adduced as evidence of the calling to prophethood can be
explained linguistically—​from the etymological closeness between the designa-
tion of the message as qurʾān and the two imperatives that begin the sura, iqraʾ,
“read out!, call out!” But precisely this opening formula, with its exhortation to
cultic recitation, takes up a psalmic topos (cf. Ps 149:5 “Let them praise the name
of God,” cf. also the self-​exhortation to praise in Ps 9:3 “I shall sing, Most High,
your name”). Above all, the progress of the sura is incompatible with the inter-
pretation in the sense of a prophetic initiation. Nothing in the sura recalls pro-
phetic speech of the future. It belongs rather to the texts that give expression to
gratitude.
What is new here, however, is that the text does not deal with a personal liber-
ation (as in sura 93), or a salvific event affecting the collective (as in sura 105), but
rather with the reception of scripture: in that participation in the divine scripture
(verse 4) stands as the authority behind the act of the recitation, the sura docu-
ments a new position for the proclaimer: he, who on the basis of the previously
recited eschatological texts already has opponents among his hearers (verses
9–​14), can—​emboldened by the scriptural authorization of his proclamation—​
meet them with self-​consciousness. In light of the prophetical biographical inter-
pretation, which simply ignores the progression of the sura in verses 6–​19, it is of
value to look more closely at the sura:

Sura 96, al-​ʿalaq

iqraʾ bi-​smi rabbika lladhī khalaq
khalaqa l-​insāna min ʿalaq
iqraʾ wa-​rabbuka l-​akram
alladhī ʿallama bi-​l-​qalam
ʿallama l-​insāna mā lam yaʿlam
kallā inna l-​insāna la-​yatghā
an raʾāhu staghnā
inna ilā rabbika l-​rujʿā

a-​raʾayta lladhī yanhā
ʿabdan idhā ṣallā
a-​raʾayta in kāna ʿalā  l-​hudā
aw amara bi-​l-​taqwā
a-​raʾayta in kadhdhaba wa-​tawallā
a-​lam yaʿlam bi-​anna llāha yarā
 Communal Formation in the Early Meccan Period  249

kallā laʾin lam yantahi la-​nasfaʿan bi-​l-​nāṣiyah

nāṣiyatin kadhibatin khāṭiʾah
fal-​yadʿu nādiyah
sa-​nadʿu l-​zabāniya

kallā lā tuṭiʿhu wa-​sjud wa-​qtarib

The Clot
Recite, in the name of your Lord who created,
created man from a clot.

Recite, for your Lord is most bountiful

who taught with the pen,
taught man what he did not know.

And yet man is intemperate,

he thinks himself sufficient.
But to your Lord is the return.

What about the one who forbids

a worshipper as he prays?
Do you think he is guided right?
Does he command to piety?
Do you see he cries lies and turns away?
Does he not know that God is watching?

No!
If he does not stop, we will seize him by the forelock,
a lying, sinful forelock.
Let him summon his group,
We will summon the watchmen.

No! Do not obey him,

prostrate yourself, draw near!

The beginning part (verses 1–​5) starts with an exhortation to worship31 (as in
Q 87:1–​6), followed by a hymn in praise of God’s power of creation and his in-
itiation of mankind into the wisdom of revelation. The address “recite!” at the
opening of the hymn itself, like “praise!” (sabbiḥ) in sura 81, is to be under-
stood not as directed to an individual but universally, and corresponds in this
function to halleluyah, “God be praised,” which frequently occurs at the start of
Psalms, which is similarly imperative. The conception of divine communication
of wisdom as an act of generosity (“the generous,” verse 3) belongs in the context

31.  On the social parameters, see the attempt at reconstruction in chap. 6, 201–204.
250  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

of such psalmic exclamations as “I see the heaven, the work of your fingers, moon
and stars, which you fix: what is man, that you think of him, the son of man,
that you take him as yours?” (Ps 8:4–​5), although in the Psalms, communica-
tion of wisdom itself does not belong to what is granted by God. The hymn that
follows in the sura is composed in a particularly artful way. It stresses the two
central thoughts of creation and teaching, through the stylistically striking figure
of concatenation: verses 1–​2 take up the word khalaqa, “create,” in the prominent
rhyme and again in the beginning position of the ensuing verse, while verses 4–​5
put ʿallama, “teach,” into corresponding focus. The exhortation iqraʾ, “recite,” or
“read” from verse 1 is taken up again anaphorically in verse 3. Such artful figures,
which in the assumption of a text intended for silent reading would halt the pro-
cession of thought, presuppose the situation of a public reading.
It is not to be overlooked that the two divine benefactions taken as motiva-
tions for the recitation, creation and teaching, are set into a close relation by a
stylistic highlighting with identical stylistic means. Their shared naming at the
sura’s beginning—​as also in other early texts such as sura 95—​form part of an ar-
gument for a new understanding of time. Divine creation and teaching mark the
beginning of an eschatologically conceived, linear progression of time. Unlike
in the cyclical model, it is no longer the beginning and end of man’s lifetime
that compose the two end-​points of time’s progression, but rather the primor-
dial creation and the Final Judgment; time is now filled with eschatologically
oriented divine teachings, for which account will be rendered on the Final Day.
Man stands henceforth in an ethical responsibility. Even if the mentioning of
God’s scriptural wisdom, generously shared with mankind, stands in this text
in no unambiguous relation to the communicated message, it still vouches for
an association made by proclaimer and hearers already in early Meccan time,
between authorized wisdom and scripture,32 the participation in which entails
ethical obligations.
What follows in the second part (verses 6–​8) is a reprimand of man, whose
high pride stands in sharp contrast to his humble origins from a clump of clotted
blood (verse 2, ʿalaq). The reprimand also applies to the rejection of divine
teaching by man, who would see himself as “independent” of God’s generosity (Q
96:3 al-​akram). The denial of divine creation and teaching does not, however, free
him from his dependency, as the closing part demonstrates. With verses 9–​14,
the situation of prayer and perhaps also of recitation is made present: someone
present disturbs the worship of a weaker fellow worshipper. The scene, occurring
perhaps during the recitation, is commented upon at once: question is put ironi-
cally as to the ethical value of the authority of the apparently powerful opponent.
A threat closes the scene, through God’s comprehensive view into the event—​this

32.  Cf. Sinai, “Qurʾānic Self-​Referentiality”

 Communal Formation in the Early Meccan Period  251

too is a psalmic topos (cf., for the perception of God as seeing and hearing, Ps
94:9: “He who plants the ear, should he not hear, He who forms the eye, should
he not see?” or Ps 64:6: “They say: who sees us?”). The passage is characterized
stylistically by its challenging questions, taken up again anaphorically in verses 9,
11, and 13: a-​raʾayta . . . , “Have you seen . . . ?,” or: “What do you think of . . . ?”
Although invectives and hindrances in worship are also not infrequent in the
Psalms, here one can assume, in view of early Meccan treatments of the prayer
situation elsewhere (Q 108:2; 107:5–​6; 87:15; 75:31; 70:23, 34),33 an imitation of
lived reality, which then merges into a flash-​forward to the Final Day in the fol-
lowing threat of punishment (verses 15–​18). The threat appears first as a threat of
social exposure through bodily disgrace, and recalls the punishment of “haters”
that stands also at the end of the text in Ps 21;13: “Yes, you should seize them on
the shoulder, with your knitting you should bind them together to their faces.”;
but it shows itself in the course of the sura to be eschatological: the wanton one
is seized on the day of judgment by his forelock (as also in the later texts Q 55:41
and Q 11:56), apparently in order to be thrown into the fire. Sarcastically, he
is encouraged to call his comrades for help, who will then be opposed by the
“watchers,” who remain enigmatic and therefore all the more threatening. This
part of the sura is also directed to present hearers, and is therefore formed lin-
guistically in a particularly artful way: verses 15–​16 stress—​again through con-
catenation, that is, through the repetition of the rhyme word in the beginning
words of the following verse—​the forelocks standing in for the person of the
wanton one, symbolizing his social privilege, and by which his debasement is
then confirmed.
The you-​address (lā tuṭiʿhu, iqtarib, “do not obey him!,” “draw near!”) at the
sura’s end, Q 96:19, which refers back to the concrete scenario of the sura, may be
directed expressly to the proclaimer. In favor of this notion, that here we do not
have wholly text-​referential speech, but rather reference is made to lived reality,
we can cite the prayer situation introduced realistically in the sura. The final call,
an exhortation with following call to worship, takes up again the call to recitation
that stands at the sura’s beginning.
What now remains of the traditional linking of the sura with a prophetic in-
itiation? On the basis of the stringent thought sequence of the parts I  and II,
which build on each other, and their stylistic concatenation, we certainly cannot
assume a secondary compilation. One cannot simply sever the parts of the text
that follow on the call to recitation, and which do not thematize a mythic orig-
inal scene, but rather an everyday situation. The resumption in the second part of
the rhetorical figure of concatenation, which is characteristic of the first part, is
further evidence for the unity and coherence of the parts. The sura thus belongs

33.  Cf. chap. 6, 213–215.

252  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

to that type, which already reflects interactions between speakers and hearers—​it
thus cannot be the first instance of the proclamation. Here, as in other suras such
as Q 104, in the tradition and in the Western research that follows it, prophetic
biographical data have been derived from the Qur’anic text, which are then used
with a circular logic to interpret the Qur’an.

7.3.1   . . . or Are the Early Suras Universal Testimonies of Psalmic Piety?

The early suras show structures that initially recall religious poetry; they contain
meditations and self-​reflection that, if they were not dressed in the you-​form of
inspiration, could represent the inner monologue of an exemplary pious man.
In many cases, therefore, no certain judgment can be made about whether they
refer primarily to the psychic situation of the proclaimer, or are primarily text-​
referential. But, in terms of method, it is never justified to import life information
from the Sira into the sura text. We are on firm ground only where suras reflect
their own reception through hearers. Early Meccan suras—​already sura 96—​
become polyphonic texts, in which likeminded hearers as well as the proclaimer’s
opponents come to speak. Evocations of the hearers, which are too concrete to be
understood text-​referentially as biblical topoi, can be taken as depictions of the
historical scenario of proclamation.
But the Qur’anic references to the Psalms are so numerous34 that there can be
no doubt that the Psalms had an inceptive formal molding effect on the Qur’an.
As is known, the Psalms—​unlike what is to be supposed for the Qur’an—​are an
expression of a rural society. It would be difficult without the Psalms to explain
how images from farming (e.g., the fruit-​bearing tree as image of the righteous),
or from the vegetative cycle (the sprouting and then withering of grass as an
image of the temporality of mankind), which dominate in the Psalms, should
come to appear in the Qur’an. But in the Qur’an, the blessings of nature serve,
somewhat differently from in the Psalms, as exhortations to human gratitude.
Also, figures of thought such as the obligation to praise God derived from expe-
rienced benefactions, the merely putative power of man to hide his deeds before
the view of God, the ongoing divine testing of man, but also God’s showing him
the way, are characteristic for both text corpora. In both, there is much language
related to waking and praying at night, and of steadfast holding to the personally
recognized truth of divine power in the face of a majority of deniers/​liars. The
ambivalence of man, his susceptibility to hubris and self-​deception,35 are present
to the speakers of both text corpora. But above all, the psalmist and the pro-
claimer of the Qur’an are closely related in their emotional beholdenness to the
nearness of their personal God, his face turned toward them.

34.  First proven in Speyer, Die biblischen Erzählungen im Qoran, 447–​449.

35.  See Cragg, The Event of the Qur’ān, 95–​109.
 Communal Formation in the Early Meccan Period  253

The psalter as a partial corpus of the Bible appears recognizably and explic-
itly in the Qur’an from an early point. Already the middle Meccan sura 17:55
mentions a scripture belonging to David named zabūr (Q 17:55; Q 21:105; Q
4:163). The Psalms thus stand as their own scripture, in a strict sense, along-
side the Torah given to Moses (al-​tawrāh) and the Gospel connected to Jesus
(al-​injīl)—​without however being given status as an authoritative predecessor of
the new proclamation. For certain particular pronouncements, the Qur’anic text
appeals explicitly to the Psalms: wa-​la-​qad katabnā fī l-​zabūri min baʿdi l-​dhikri
anna l-​arḍa yarithuhā ʿibādiya l-​ṣāliḥūn, “We have written in the Psalms—​after
praise: our righteous servants shall inherit the earth” (Q 21:105). The wording
recalls Ps 37:29: ṣaddiqim yireshu areṣ, “the righteous shall inherit the earth.” But
the Psalms are present more as a liturgical typus than as a concrete text-​form, so
that for wide parts of the Qur’an text one can speak of a psalmic intertextuality.
This is not difficult to explain: a liturgical piety imprinted by the Psalms is to be
presumed as present within the Syrian church, which stretched into the region
of the Arabian peninsula,36 and particularly so in monastic circles, and it could
have even had formative effects on members of the Qur’anic community.37 Since
there is no evidence for Arabic translations of the Psalms in the pre-​Islamic pe-
riod,38 one must assume an oral, and ultimately also non-​Arabic tradition for
the communication of the Psalms to Arabic-​speaking recipients. The explanation
put forward in recent research of the designation “sura,” which had never been
adequately understood, as an “introductory psalm-​recitation” would fit well with
this intertextual presence of the Psalms in the early Qur’an:  according to this
thesis, sūra would be connected to the Syriac word shūrāyā “beginning,” which in
a liturgical context means, “the introduction of a reading by Psalm recitation.”39
Individual verse groups of the Psalms, which were in use in Christian services
as liturgical “between-​texts,” may have become known by this term in relation
of their function in worship, so that the early suras, similar to the Psalms, might
have appeared as Arabic equivalents to these sorts of text. An already established
Syriac liturgical concept would then have triggered the designation of a novel
Qur’anic conception.
It would be inadequate, however, to simply see in the early Qur’an a replica of
the Psalms. Although the earliest suras, still corresponding to a personal divine-​
human dialogue, are often praises or complaints similar to the Psalms, the escha-
tological expectation of the discourse gives a decisive new emphasis, whereby
Psalm references are recast in the form of arguments.40 Also, as comes out of the

36.  Toral-​Niehoff, “The ʿIbād in al-​Ḥīra.”

37.  Griffith, “Christians”; Griffith, “Christian Lore and the Arabic Qur’an.”
38.  Schippers, “Psalms.”
39. Brockelmann, Lexicon Syriacum, 488.
40.  See chap. 13, 466–468.
254  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

examples of suras 105 and 106, a significant role is played in the early proclama-
tion by the consciousness of the native sanctuary tradition, the significance of
Mecca, and the historical memories connected with Mecca, and the relevance
of ritual times. If these ideas also gradually fade into the background in the later
Meccan period, they still remain as references, and reappear at the end of the
development in Medina as a fundamental level of an increasingly complex per-
ception of the sacred.

7.4  The Prophetic Office of Warning of the Judgment

7.4.1  A New Image of History

Yet there is a serious divergence between the early suras and the liturgical lan-
guage characteristic of the Psalms:  the clearly divergent image of history. For,
although views back into history are frequent throughout the Qur’an, the per-
spective adopted toward this history, aside from the providential suras 105 and
106 on Mecca, is clearly pessimistic. A sequence of ancient peoples of the penin-
sula whose settlements now lie in ruins but still attest to their previous greatness,
have fallen prey to collective annihilation—​a divine punishment for their insub-
ordination against the messenger sent to them to proclaim the unity of God, a
punishment that they themselves have brought on themselves. But as much as
these narratives, with their stereotyped character, recall psalmic catalogues of
history, in which we find lists of God’s acts of retribution against various enemies
of the elected people, so strikingly do they lack the dimension of salvation that is
central to the Psalms. Although the warner comes from among them, the divine
infliction of the older peoples remains—​unlike for the enemies of Israel—​without
salvation historical impact on any especially privileged people; the hearers of the
proclamation are not “inheritors” of those saved in history. The emphasis of the
“punishment legends” is thus different from that of the history Psalms. While the
biblical references to history emphasize the saving acts of God in divine inter-
ventions that are proofs in themselves of his timeless loyalty and thus give rise
to trust in a salvific future under God’s covenant, the Qur’anic reports, insofar
as they do not occur within the providence discourse of Mecca, remain without
such promise. Certainly, they demonstrate divine justice, which punishes the sac-
rilege of rejecting the faith in one God with destruction. In that they also stress
the survival of God’s servants, they can also obtain implicitly a promise of loyalty
from God, but they stand primarily to demonstrate divine power:  the earthly
punishment is above all an anticipation of the punishment awaiting all sacrilege
at the Final Judgment.
In addition to their prominent tone of thanks and recurring praise of God in
hymns and exhortations to praise, the early suras have yet another side: the threat
of an inner-​worldly catastrophe and of the Final Judgment. One could designate
 Communal Formation in the Early Meccan Period  255

this double manifestation of divine working in rabbinic language God’s middat

ha-​raḥamim and middat ha-​din.41 Gottfried Müller sees here the decisive turn in
the early Meccan development: the

opposition of two literary forms—​the narrative report taken from one’s

own history, and the Prophetic proclamation transcending this history—​
is highly relevant. It affects . . . above all the experience of God Himself,
who in the former has the trustworthiness of the originator of the peo-
ple’s and tribe’s history, and in the latter unfolds the threat of death and
thus  .  .  .  calls for a quite different kind of creed, the creed of one God,
whose power and working can be deciphered . . . only once this threat has
been realized. A creed that not only implies a partial improvement, but
leads the way to an actual conversion.42

The question that arises in view of the approximately equal part played in Mecca
by hymnic and eschatological suras, which of these two came first, thanks or the
fear of the Final Day,43 was answered by Harris Birkeland in favor of thanks, but
this has met with little response in research. With Tor Andrae,44 one can explain
both the two basic contrasting attitudes in the suras equally by reference to the
monastic piety of the time, where both fear of punishment and praise of God
are central liturgical themes. Nonetheless, that Birkeland has named an impor-
tant development in the genesis of the Qur’an by setting the consolation suras
first becomes clear by way of Müller’s thesis of the substantial novelty of what is
given with the Prophetic speech. It is noteworthy that the two sura types are dif-
ferentiated in a strikingly clear way: the positive “praise suras” extensively apply
linguistic devices from monotheistic liturgical language that had long ago been
introduced, attested by a wealth of Syriac loan words that were apparently already
current in Arabic, while the depictions of the cosmic catastrophe draw not only
lexically but above all stylistically and structurally on the ancient Arabic models
of seers and soothsayers. Somewhat different is the dispersal of such coinages
in the depictions of paradise and hell, already both well-​known from monastic
piety. Here, in the descriptions of paradise, we find Syriac-​Christian conceptions
alongside the predominant ancient Arabic features, while in descriptions of hell
almost exclusively ancient Arabic images are employed.45

7.4.2  The Loosing of the Cosmos and the Trial of Mankind

It is in connection to the announcements of the judgment that the most rhythmi-
cally turbulent and phonetically striking suras take shape. Here, as nowhere else,

41.  Grötzinger, “Middat ha-​din.”

42.  Müller, “Die Barmherzigkeit Gottes,” 358.
43. Birkeland, The Lord Guideth.
44. Andrae, Mohammad.
45.  See chap 3, 125–127, and chap. 5, 176–181.
256  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

we find series of parallel conditional sentences (protasis) introduced with idhā/​

yawma “if once /​on the day when,” arranged one after another, so that a massive
tension is built up that is released only with the main clause, the apodosis, which
closes the series. The semantic tension corresponds to the syntactic tension: only
after the protasis has presented the loosing of the cosmos, mostly in a movement
from above to below, can the apodosis introduce the turn that is so fateful for
mankind, either consoling or utterly destroying: The scenario then splits into two
contrasting parallel scenes, in which the blessed and the damned are exhibited in
two diametrically opposite situations, presented against each other in a “double
image.”46 An example is sura 84:1–​6, 7–​15, 16–​25.

Sura 84, al-​inshiqāq

idhā l-​samāʾu nshaqqat

wa-​adhinat li-​rabbihā wa-​ḥuqqat
wa-​idhā l-​arḍu muddat
wa-​alqat mā fīhā wa-​takhallat
wa-​adhinat li-​rabbihā wa-​ḥuqqat
yā ayyuhā l-​insānu innaka kādiḥun ilā rabbika kadḥan fa-​mulāqīh

fa-​ammā man ūtiya kitābahu bi-​yamīnih

fa-​sawfa yuḥāsabu ḥisāban yasīrā
wa-​yanqalibu ilā ahlihi masrūrā
wa-​ammā man ūtiya kitābahu warāʾa ẓahrih

fa-​sawfa yadʿū thubūrā

wa-​yaṣlā saʿīrā
innahu kāna fī ahlihi masrūrā
innahu ẓanna an lan yaḥūrā
balā inna rabbahu kāna bihi baṣīrā

fa-​lā uqsimu bi-​l-​shafaq

wa-​l-​layli wa-​mā  wasaq
wa-​l-​qamari idhā  ttasaq
la-​tarkabanna ṭabaqan ʿan ṭabaq
fa-​mā lahum lā yuʾminūn
wa-​idhā quriʾa ʿalayhimu l-​qurʾānu lā yasjudūn
bali lladhīna kafarū yukadhdhibūn
wa-​llāhu aʿlamu bi-​mā yūʿūn
fa-​bashshirhum bi-​ʿadhābin alīm
illā lladhīna āmanū wa-​ʿamilū l-​ṣāliḥāti
lahum ajrun ghayru mamnūn

46.  Cf. the discussion of structural idiosyncrasies in chap. 5, 176–179.

 Communal Formation in the Early Meccan Period  257

The Splitting

I
When the sky is split,
and heeds to its Lord and is fit.
When the earth is distended,
and heaves and leaves what is in it,
and heeds to its Lord and is fit:
Man!
You press to your Lord struggling and will meet him.

He who is given his record in his right hand

he will be given an account that is light
and go to his people in joy.

He who is given his record behind his back

he will call out for doom
but be scorched by the blaze.

He was joyful with his people,

he thought he would never return.
But his Lord indeed could see.

No, I swear by the dusk!

By the night when it fills!
By the moon when it is full!
You will rise stage upon stage.
Why do they not believe,
and when the recitation is recited do not bow?
Those who do not believe cry lies.
God knows better what they gather,
so give them news of a terrible punishment
except those who believe and do good,
they have a reward unstinted.

An eschatological scenario of five verses, introduced by idhā, “when, once,”

occurring twice, opens the sura, describing the changes in heaven and earth,
respectively. The heavens break open, the earth is leveled, and the human life-
world is extinguished (verses 1–​5). Both heaven and earth are personified and
involved in mythical actions—​the heavens flee and subject themselves to God,
while the earth empties itself like a woman giving birth, in order to subject it-
self similarly to God. In place of the elsewhere frequent description of the reac-
tion of mankind to the dissolving of the cosmos (“the eschatological process”),47

47.  For the demarcations and configurations of the individual thematic sections, cf. chap. 5, 174–180.
258  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

an address follows with a consoling tone to man, to whom the long-​sought en-
counter with his Lord is announced (verse 6). As the following double image
(verses 7–​15) shows, this takes place on the Day of Judgment. The judgment
scene itself is skipped over, and the immediately ensuing double image shows
first the blessed, then the damned after their judgment has been carried out, the
outcome of which is recognizable in the mode they receive their accounting. The
ancient Near Eastern conception, frequently adduced in early Meccan time, that
the divine scribes record the deeds of men,48 is reified here in the form of con-
crete writings or books handed to the judged. In place of the elsewhere frequent
assignment, ultimately oriented to scenes such as Mt 25:41ff, of the judged into
people of the right and people of the left, it is now the concrete right or left hand
into which the reckoning is handed. The beatific wage of the pious and the woes
of the wicked are here indicated only through the joy of the pious (verse 9) and
the distress of the frivolous (verse 11). As is frequent in the early suras, the two
parts of the double image are equally proportioned. Verses 10–​15 stand in a 1:2
relation to verses 7–​9, the negative image being expanded through a flashback
explaining the error of the condemned. Their downfall is due to their careless
way of life and their frivolous disregarding of the message of judgment, without
social accusations being made against them beyond the rejection of the central
statement of belief of the proclaimer.
The second part (verses 16–​25) begins with a threat, emphatically introduced
by two oaths upon the phases of the night, which evoke a development that re-
mains enigmatic and undefined (verses 16–​18),49 followed in verse 19 by an
equally undefined exclamation of threat directed to the listeners who are imag-
ined to be present. In a speech in which the opponents are now imagined as
absent (verses 20–​22), a rhetorical question follows about the reason for the den-
igration of the recitation and the slander against the proclamation. The closing
threat of punishment (verses 23–​24), dressed in an assurance encouraging the
proclaimer of the omniscience of God, is done at the direction of God himself.
With the last verse (verse 25), easy to recognize by its syntax as a later addition, a
further assurance of freedom from punishment is pronounced for the believers,
who at this later phase apparently must have already been confirmed as a com-
munity standing in God’s favor.50 The sura—​without the addition—​is propor-
tioned: 6:9:9, and is thus well suited mnemotechnically for the use of worshipers
in the early, ritually oriented community.

48.  See Jeffery, The Qurʾān as Scripture.

49.  See Neuwirth, “ Images and Metaphor”; cf. also Kandil, “Schwüre in den Mekkanischen Suren.”
50.  For the additions, cf. chap. 5, 185–187.
 Communal Formation in the Early Meccan Period  259

7.4.3  The Banquet in the Hereafter

The central element of Prophetic discourse about the future, eschatological fore-
sight, is more complex. Alongside the “eschatological scene,” the presentation of
the successive collapse of the cosmic structures it includes the “eschatological
process,” the reaction of the humans to this event, as well as the judgment itself,
where, in the image of measurement or weighing, the deeds of mankind recorded
in a register book are examined. Scales and accounting books are the visual
images of this process of reckoning. After this, the judged are led forward to their
retribution in the hereafter, in a place indicated only vaguely, given no particular
location in the familiar cosmos, neither the heavens nor an inferno underground.
The “places” of the judged present themselves rather through depictions of par-
ticular social interactions. It is striking that their two manifestations, the humil-
iating punishment and the honoring reward, are both framed through the image
of the banquet. The two images belong closely together; they are similarly struc-
tured and often set in relation to one another through identical or proportional
dimensions, so that the notion of the double image or diptych, commonly used
for Christian iconographical representations of paradise and hell, easily comes to
mind. Among the numerous examples, we present the eschatological part of sura
78,51 Q 78:17–​20, 21–​26, 27–​30, 31–​36:

inna yawma l-​faṣli kāna mīqātā

yawma yunfakhu fī l-​ṣūri fa-​taʾtūnā afwājā
wa-​futiḥati l-​samāʾu fa-​kānat abwābā
wa-​suyyirati l-​jibālu fa-​kānat  sarābā

inna jahannama kānat mirṣādā

li-​l-​ṭāghīna maʾābā
lābithīna fīhā aḥqābā
lā yadhūqūna fīhā bardan wa-​lā sharābā
illā ḥamīman wa-​ghassāqā
jazaʾan wifāqā

innahum kānū lā yarjūna ḥisābā

wa-​kadhdhabū bi-​āyātina kidhdhābā
wa-​kulla shayʾin aḥsaynāhu kitābā
fa-​dhūqu fa-​lan nazīdakum illā ʿadhābā

inna li-​l-​muttaqīna  mafāzā

ḥadāʾiqa wa-​aʿnābā
wa-​kawāʿiba atrābā

51.  The beginning portion of the sura is discussed in chap. 13, 466–470. On further double versions, cf. chap. 5,
176–179.
260  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

wa-​kaʾsan dihāqā
lā yasmaʿūna fīhā laghwan wa-​lā kidhdhābā
jazāʾan min rabbika ʿatāʾan ḥisābā

The day of separation will be a date appointed,

a day when the trumpet will be blown, and you will come forth in droves,
when heaven will be opened and become apertures,
when mountains will be leveled and become a mirage.

Hell lies in wait

final destination for transgressors
staying there for eons.
They taste there no coolness or drink,
only boiling water and filth.
A worthy payment.

They expected no reckoning,

cried lies upon lies at our signs.
We reckoned everything in a writing.
Taste!—​we will give you nothing more but torment.

For the pious there is a place of retreat,

gardens and vines,
beautiful companions,
a cup overflowing.
In it they hear no idle talk or lies.
A reward from your lord, a gift that is due.

In the two-​part sura,52 an image is first drawn of creation in paradisiacal dimen-

sions, as a protected world offering security. But this very assurance shows itself
in the second part of the sura to be deceptive: the security promised crumbles to
dust in view of the power of God before the inner eye of the hearer. The escha-
tological part (verses 17–​36) begins with a ringing confirmation of the irrevers-
ibility of the date of judgment, and then brings the horn of judgment itself into
the picture, drawing a scene of judgment that evokes a theater piece (verses 18–​
20): the “curtain of the heavens” rises, and the actor, that is, the addressee himself,
enters the stage. The scene proceeds in a detailed double image (verses 21–​36),
which recapitulates the earthly behavior of the damned in flashbacks. Indeed, the
triumph of the punishing God over the unbelievers who doubted the Final Day
proceeds further, it goes beyond the withdrawal of earthly safety and the leading
into hell: in their evaluation, presented in fast-​forward, the judged are confronted
in a cynical way with a “world turned upside down,” a hell (jahannam) in which

52.  See Neuwirth, Studien zur Komposition, 217.

 Communal Formation in the Early Meccan Period  261

hospitality is perverted into torture, and entertainment into the serving of revolt-
ing dishes, without an end to their stay in sight. The malevolent address with
dhūqū, “taste,” stresses the travesty: the host is “generous,” even in the excessive-
ness of his entertainment, staging the meal as social interaction. But the host has
changed this into its perverse opposite, a scenario of the denial of life’s essen-
tials: “You taste no cool drink!” (verse 24); excrement and hot water is forced on
the guests—​a perverted image of the excessive hospitality of the ancient Arab
hero and the negative image of the true divine hospitality in paradise.
The punishment hits them due to their earthly failure to take the message of
judgment seriously. The following expansion of the diptych of the damned into
a catalogue of vices (verses 27–​30), concluded by a cynical closing imperative
(dhūqū), corresponds to the equally cynical commentary on the fate of the liars
in the hereafter in verses 22 and 26. The granting to the good contrasts with the
emotionally charged speech about the bad; to them, aside from paradisiacal sen-
sory pleasure, is also promised “peace from chatter and lies” (verse 35), that is,
freedom from the chief nuisance in the experience of the proclaimer. As retribu-
tion, they are offered not only the “full cup” known from the Psalms (Ps 23:5, kosi
rewayah), but also young beautiful companions—​wholly in agreement with the
conceptions of the hereafter among certain early Christian authors.53 With this
image, the sura could have been concluded.
Attached to this text, however, is a further scene, which is linked syntactically
to the closing scene of the original text structure, and is thus conceived of as a
continuation, Q 78:37–​40:

rabbi l-​samāwāti wa-​l-​arḍi wa-​mā baynahumā

al-​raḥmāni lā yamlikūna minhu khiṭābā
yawma yaqūmu l-​rūḥu wa-​l-​malāʾikatu ṣaffan
lā yatakallamūna illā man adhina lahu al-​raḥmānu
wa-​qāla  ṣawābā
dhalika l-​yawmu l-​ḥaqqu
fa-​man shāʾa ttakhadha ilā rabbihi maʾābā
inna andharnākum ʿadhāban qarīban
yawma yanẓuru l-​marʾu mā qaddamat yadāhu
wa-​yaqūlu l-​kāfiru yā laytani kuntu turābā

Lord of the heavens and earth, and what is between them,

the merciful, they cannot address Him.
On the day when the spirit and the angels stand in rows
they will not speak, except one permitted by the
merciful, who speaks rightly.
That is the day of the truth

53.  On Irenaeus of Lyon, see for examples McDannell and Lang, Heaven.
262  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

and who wishes can take refuge with the Lord

We have warned you of a nearing punishment,
a day when man will see what his hands put forth,
when the blasphemer will cry, “I wish I were dust.”

The heavenly court with the angels does not belong to the paradise scene that has
just been presented, but rather refers back again to the preparation of judgment.
The presentation of the court, added in the middle Meccan Raḥmān period,54
reflects a strictly hierarchical order, in which only restricted freedom of speech
exists, so that not even the angels are permitted to perform their intercessions. In
view of this overwhelming and exclusivist manifestation of the court, the despair
of the sinner, who wishes death for himself, is all the more comprehensible. The
addition, discernible from its verse structure, is not (as is elsewhere frequent) a
consoling-​softening one, but further adds alterity to the scenario of the hereafter.
The Qur’anic paradise has been treated in a seminal study by Josef Horovitz,55
in which he attempts to show, by way of numerous poetic parallels, that the heav-
enly banquet refers back to actual experiences, or at least to frequent experiences
drawn from ancient Arabian banquets: “In the early period he [the proclaimer]
was intoxicated by luxurious scenes to which he himself may have been an eye-
witness in wine taverns, or which were familiar to him from the descriptions of
the poets, whose setting he now moves to the abode of the blessed.”56 But Horovitz
does not derive this paradise exclusively from ancient Arabic precedents: “The
traits from which the image is composed are of quite different origins; Jewish-​
Christian reminiscences mix with presentations of pagan goings-​on. And even
this national Arab element shows itself to be thoroughly marked by foreign im-
pact; already the many foreign words in the descriptions of the heavenly ban-
quets recall the high degree to which the material culture of the environment in
which Muhammad lived was indebted to the surrounding lands.”57 But Horovitz’s
naming of possible precedents does not sufficiently describe the intertextuality
here. The Qur’anic paradise stands in a yet more complex connection; certainly, it
corresponds to psalmic ideal conceptions (“You set before me a table in the view
of my enemies, you anoint my head with oil and give to me fully,” Ps 23:5), just as
it corresponds to images of the hereafter in Christian penitential sermons.58 But it
is above all a picture drawn in opposition to the situation of crisis always present
in ancient Arabic poetry.59 One can see in the Qur’anic descriptions of paradise a
radical reversal of the existential experience of loss that is expressed in the nasīb,
the first part of the qaṣīda. The emptying of the world of aesthetic form, of social

54.  Cf. chap. 5, 192–195, and chap. 8, 282–285.

55.  Horovitz, “Das Koranische Paradies,” 1–​16.
56.  Ibid,  15–​16.
57. Ibid.
58. Andrae, Mohammad.
59.  Cf. chap. 3, 128–131, and chap. 12, 444–447.
 Communal Formation in the Early Meccan Period  263

interaction, and sensory pleasure that is bemoaned there, its barrenness of ma-
terial culture, is countered in the Qur’anic paradise by a promise of restitution.
The ancient Arab poet, who before the entrance of the Prophet, was the
speaker of his society in the introductory section of his poem bemoans the
nearly washed away traces, the aṭlāl, of earlier settlements in a now desolate
place. Nature presents itself to him as bleak and repellent; it offers no answer
to his question of ubi sunt,60 of the whereabouts of those whose social life once
animated that space. The scenario is a dumb mirror of his own transience. All
culture, all human achievements, fall prey to time or become overgrown,61 as it
were, by cyclically renewing nature: the only testimony to the living spaces and
the social order of the former inhabitants of the place are weathered traces of
habitation—​a loss that reflects itself also personally and individually: the former
relation of the poet to his beloved is broken, and conviviality, joy in life, and re-
fined ways of interaction in a materially luxurious habitat, which is especially
bound up with the world of women, all this has vanished since the fragrant cara-
vans of the women have departed, their image being effaced and turned—​as the
poet Labīd expresses it—​“into a mirage.” But just as the traces of human culture
are transitory in the poet’s perception, so are the phenomena of nature eternal. In
the words of the poet Labīd:

balinā wa-​mā tablā l-​nujūmu l-​ṭawāliʿu /​

wa-​tabqā l-​jibālu baʿdanā wa-​l-​maṣāniʿu62

We pass away, but the rising stars do not.

Fortresses and mountains remain when we are gone.

Time can do nothing to nature; it is intransitory, khālid, or it renews itself time-

lessly in a cyclical way. Mankind on the other hand is eaten away by time, which is
personalized as al-​dahr, “fate.”63 This perception of the overwhelming of man and
his culture by nature is countered by the Qur’an. God himself takes over the role
of fate and frees man from his transience, redefining the time of man. Time now
extends from the creation of the primordial world and the simultaneous creation
of the power of understanding /​clear speech, bayān, (Q 55:4) in man, down to
the end of the world, when, after the loosing of the cosmic structures on the Final
Day, man must redeem the original pledge of divine instruction. Time extends
even beyond that. For after the judgment, an infinite eternity begins, which the
Qur’an dresses in the spatial conception of paradise. Not in sura 78 but indeed
in a sequence of other suras, among which sura 55 is especially striking,64 what is

60.  On this philosophical motif popular in Late Antiquity, cf. Becker, “Ubi sunt qui ante nos in mundo fuere.”
61.  See S. Stetkevych, The Mute Immortals Speak,  8–​54.
62. Ibid.
63.  See Georges Tamer, Gott und Zeit, 99–​102.
64.  Cf. chap. 3, 123–125.
264  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

given to man is not only the biblical promise of eternally lush and fruit-​bearing
nature but also of material luxury: “green pillows on fine carpets,” “upholstery
covered in brocades,” and above all the presence of beautiful young women—​all
objects of nostalgic longing for the ancient Arabic poet who in reality was con-
fronted with the desolate condition of his space and the ruins of a lost civiliza-
tion. Paradise is a space in which man is no longer delivered to nature but finally
retrieves that which is bemoaned as lost: the former cultural “dressing,” that is,
aesthetic culture, again bound up with the presence of women, and even courtly
luxury in the eternal banquet of the hereafter.
The presence of women does not need to be attributed exclusively, as Horovitz
assumes, to the association with poetic banquet scenes. The question of the pres-
ence or absence of sexuality in the hereafter was a major topic and long contro-
versial in patristic literature. Voices for the continuation of worldly intercourse
stand alongside voices pleading for a purely spiritual hereafter.65 The inversion
of the nasīb scenario through the admission of eroticism in paradise thus cor-
responds to a conception also disputed elsewhere in Late Antiquity, that of a
sensually fulfilled afterlife. It is important to note that nature, which in the nasīb
is threatening and defies the questioning of man, is thus retooled as a backdrop
of a banquet. Nature is immortalized on its seasonal apex of pleasantness in
springtime and allowed to remain blooming and fruit-​bearing forever. Culture,
social communication, and refined lifestyle are salvaged from the transitory to
the eternal; the previously ambivalent eternal nature is tamed; it is raised to a
new status: to serve as the luxurious life-​giving backdrop of eternal feasting. The
Qur’anic paradise is a counter-​world, based on both ancient Arabian and biblical
conceptions.

7.5  Reflection on the Signs of Scripture and

the Signs of Creation

7.5.1  A Qur’anic Theology of Signs

Gottfried Müller had identified a radical innovation in the Prophetic speech of
the proclaimer about the future, which brought about a “new tradition, a tradi-
tion of significant ‘signs.’ ”66 Such a sign theology can in fact be demonstrated.
A striking trait already of the Meccan suras is the close relation between a “nat-
ural theology” and a particular theory of knowledge—​based at once on language
and insight. The closeness to the discourse of later biblical wisdom literature,
such as Ecclesiastes or the Wisdom of Solomon, comes to mind, texts in which

65.  See McDannell and Lang, Heaven, 47–​68, who contrast the doctrine of Irenaeus of Lyon (ca. 135–​202) on
the sensual pleasures of paradise to those of the ascetic Augustine (354–​430).
66.  Müller, “Die Barmherzigkeit Gottes.”
 Communal Formation in the Early Meccan Period  265

the order underlying all affairs of the world is demonstrated in both nature and in
examples from salvation history.67 This relation is most evident in those Qur’anic
mentions of creation that take the form of series or clusters of individual details
of creation, often introduced explicitly as “signs”; “āyāt of creation.” As is already
suggested by the etymology of the Arabic word āya (pl. āyāt; Syriac āthā, “miracle
signs, written signs, letters”),68 the creation āyāt signify something beyond them-
selves constituting with their inherent reference function, a Qur’anic textual type
of its own.69 They serve hermeneutically to prove the presence and omnipotence
of God. But the designation of the Qur’anic passages naming the phenomena of
creation as āyāt is not derived from the early suras, but is rather extrapolated
from later texts such as the late Meccan citation wa-​fī khalqikum . . . āyātun /​wa-​
fī khtilāfi l-​layli wa-​l-​nahāri . . . āyātun . . . , “In your creation . . . are signs /​and
in the change of day and night . . . are signs” (Q 45:3–​4). The early texts rather put
forward arguments with the same train of thought but without naming the con-
cept āya, as in fa-​jaʿala minhu l-​zawjayni l-​dhakara wa-​l-​untha /​ a-​laysa dhālika
bi-​qādirin ʿalā an yuḥyiya l-​mawtā, “He made them as two sexes, the male and
female /​is he not able to revive the dead?” (Q 75:39–​40). The designation āya it-
self is not yet frequent in the early Meccan period, occurring only ten times, and
referring in those instances to obvious “signs,” that is, phenomena that engender
wonderment, such as destroyed settlements of earlier peoples (Q 51:37, 54:14),
an eclipse of the moon (Q 54:2), or even esoteric signs given to the Prophet (Q
79:20, 53:18). Only once do we find a sign of creation marked as āya: wa-​fī l-​arḍi
āyātun li-​l-​mūqinīn, “Upon the earth are signs for the convinced” (Q 51:20).

7.5.2  Core Concepts of the Qur’anic Creation Discourse

7.5.2.1  Sign—​āya
Nevertheless, already in the early Meccan period, there is a pronounced sensi-
bility for the sign character of the communicated message itself, the āyāt that are
“recited”: idhā tutlā ʿalayhi āyātunā qāla asāṭīru l-​awwalīn, “When our signs are
recited to him, he says: fables of the ancients” (Q 83:13; cf. also Q 90:19, 78:28,
74:16, 54:42). Āya is thus used from the beginning in the two meanings of a tex-
tual sign (Greek stoicheion or logos) and a sensory, physical sign (Greek semeion).
Thus, the designation āya is in no way confined to creation-​specific textual units;
but is used in general to mean a shorter textual unit of the Qur’an not defined
in extent.70 Thus, from the outset, a deictic-​paraenetic function is acknowledged
for the recitation texts. It is striking that the identification of the two types of

67. Kugel, The Bible as It Was.

68.  The word also occurs in ancient Arabic poetry with the meaning “way marking,” cf. Imru’ al-​Qais, 65:1; see
Ahlwardt, The Divans, 160. In its concise meaning, which also occurs in Christian Arabic poetry (see Dmitriev, “An
Early Christian Arabic Account,” 355–​366), it can only be explained as a loan word.
69. Neuwirth, Studien zur Komposition, 180, 195–​196.
70.  Neuwirth, “Verse(s).”
266  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

āyāt as equally “readable” signs manifesting themselves on the one hand in the
recited text and in the other hand in creation itself, making it an “understandable
text,” remains implicit in the early suras—​with the only exception of Q 51:20.
Apparently, it had not yet developed into a reflexively perceived object of the-
ology, as it was to be formulated exemplarily, for example, in the already cited
verses Q 45:3–​6. But in view of the argumentative evidence and the explicit iden-
tification of creation and signs in Q 51:20, one can already assume an epistemic
implication of the Qur’anic descriptions of creation for the early suras.
It is worthwhile to recall briefly the biblical precedents: the Hebrew Bible stages
signs very dramatically. Moses receives God’s writing signs, the tablets, which are
written by God himself (Dtn 4:13), or at least dictated by God (Ex 34:28). Micha
Brumlik has thus noted that “the Hebrew Bible in one of its crucial statements,
namely in Ex 3:14, has God indicate his name as ‘I will be that which I will be.’ In
addition, God states . . . in Ex 33:23–​38 that living men cannot catch sight of what
he is. . . . The . . . God who eludes any perception of his, whose . . . presence cannot
be represented in the image—​i.e., in a pictogram or hieroglyph—​because of its
abstract processionality, could only be made known in the frame of a writing that
depicts spoken language”71—​an image of God that, as Brumlik formulates, per-
haps “is based on writing, or more precisely, is even based on the combinatorics
of the alphabet.” A nearness of God’s self-​manifestation to the signs of writing/​
revelation has survived in the Qur’an, even if the form of the letters was not at
first of interest and the two “writings” of God were at first perceived separately,
until the word āya finally became a homonym for both and the letter names ac-
quired a highly visible position at the start of suras.

7.5.3  The Conjunction Khalq—​Qurʾān, Creation—​Recital

This epistemic implication of the Qur’anic “creation signs” has been pointed out
often in the research.72 But a phenomenon closely bound up with the epistemic
dimension, yet going beyond it, has been widely neglected: the connection made
frequently and explicitly in the Qur’an between the creation of man and his fit-
ting out for divine instruction, and thus his faculty to acquire knowledge in face
of the divine works.73 Consequently, only the trajectory reaching from the estab-
lishment of creation down to its loosing at the end of times was perceived,74 not
however the equally existing trajectory stretching from the primordial instruc-
tion of man to his rendering of the pledge of knowledge. It is not to be overlooked

71. Brumlik, Schrift, Wort und Ikone, 17.

72.  Petersen, “Creation,” 429; Graham, “The Winds”; Dmitriev, “An Early Christian Arabic Account,” 252–​256;
Schimmel, Die Zeichen Gottes, 272–​275.
73.  Cf. chap. 3, 119–121.
74.  Petersen, “Creation,” 479–​480, even claims a cyclical concept, without noting the double reference to cre-
ation and instruction . This double trajectory of tension was first demonstrated for the structure of suras beginning
with an oath; see Neuwirth, “ Images and Metaphors “
 Communal Formation in the Early Meccan Period  267

that a number of early suras in prominent citations, mostly at the beginning, a

double-​naming: mention the primordial creation, preceded by a naming of di-
vine revelation or instruction of men. The evocation of divine teaching can also
occur indirectly, such as through the mention of a site of revelation considered
emblematic, such as Mount Sinai. What is not immediately evident in its theo-
logical implication due to mere juxtaposition becomes clearly recognizable once
reference to divine communication or teaching is replaced or expanded by the
mention of human language or capacity for reason,75 as in Q 55:1–​4, al-​raḥmān
/​ ʿallama l-​qurʾān /​khalaqa l-​insān /​ʿallamahu l-​bayān, “the merciful. /​He
taught the qurʾān /​he created man /​he taught him clear understanding [or: clear
speech].” That this double naming is no accident is clear from its function in the
field of tension that exists between protology and eschatology. Both initial set-
tings, primordial creation and teaching, correspond to a double final position,
related in the same text: the loosing of creation on the Final Day and the call to
the redemption of the token of learning in the ensuing judgment. If one looks for
what is innovative in Qur’anic thought, it is worth referring to this double trajec-
tory in creation theology.
7.5.3.1  Judgment—​dīn
The idea of theodicy is already central in the early suras. What is assessed and
requited in the judgment, dīn, is at first generally named as “good” and “bad,”
khayr and sharr (Q 99:7–​8).76 Since the negative element here appears calculable,
almost measurable, it does not yet touch on the problem of “evil.”77 It often refers
concretely to the fulfillment or neglect of social duties (Q 69:34), as emerges
from the numerous flashbacks to the social practice of the sinners. But just as
often, we find language related to the failure to “read” the divine signs in creation
(Q 75:31) or to the disregard of the textual signs communicated in the reading
(Q 75:33, 68:15.45). What is central here is thus not only compensatory justice
toward men but also the staging of God’s sovereignty expressed in his office of
judge (Q 95:8)—​an office that is invested with all the paraphernalia of ancient
Near Eastern rulership and juridical dignity. Thus, we find the symbol of the
scales, already prominent in the biblical context (Q 101:6–​8), and also the throne
of the judge (Q 1:4, 81:20, 85:15). This grandly staged office of judge has an exten-
sion in his hospitality, expressed through exuberant generosity toward the pious,
and in his equally excessive abuse—​his inverted hospitality toward the evildoers
in the afterlife utopias of paradise and hell.
Despite this predominance of the divine actor, the Qur’anic dīn is not part of
an apocalypse. It is not the end of an eon that stands imminent in the worldview

75.  This goes unnoticed in Heemskerk, “Speech.”

76.  On the ethical terms, see Izutsu, Ethical Terms.
77.  Schmidt-​Biggemann, “Vorwort,” 9: “Evil is not the simple negation of good—​the negation itself would be
too easily predictable: evil in even when personified displays the fascination of utter unpredictability.”
268  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

of the early Meccan suras, but rather God’s call for accountability. We find no
predictions of battles of the end times, as in the apocalypses of the Jews and
Christians, but only divine intervention, no taking to account of peoples, but
rather of the individual man. The Qur’an sketches an eschatology in which the
emphasis is on the extension of this world into the next. This new worldview,
which is developed in the early suras, on closer inspection turns out to be cen-
tered on creation: paradise as the idealized projection of the world and hell as its
perverted reflection play central roles. What is at stake is not only the commu-
nication of the imagined closeness of the end of time (Q 78:40, 70:7) but equally
the establishment of a new linear progress of the world, which stretches from a
double beginning in creation and instruction to a double ending, in the loosing
of creation and the rendering of the pledge on judgment day. It is above all this
newly established field of tension that distinguishes the Qur’anic eschatological
view of the future from an apocalyptic imagination. It is a field of tension in
which man can establish a meaningful life, shielded from the terror that strikes
entire peoples that we find in the extremely violent apocalyptic scenes that char-
acterize especially the Revelation of John. It is not a question of which side of
power the individual is on, but rather of how he conducts himself individually.
Thus, paradise—​which occupies a broader space in the Qur’an than hell—​is
by no means the place of return from the earthly exile which had been initiated
by the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, as one might expect in analogy to
Christian conceptions. The earthly manifestation of creation is no accursed site
of suffering and punishment, but rather shows itself to be clearly and essentially
related to paradise.78 In this, it also distinguishes itself clearly from nature as re-
flected in the worldview of the pre-​Islamic poet, for whom the environment is
not immediately accessible, but which rather must be retrieved through heroic
deployment.79 The “world” is distinguished from the paradise of the afterlife less
by its faultiness than by its contingency, its security that is revocable at any time,
which it preserves for man only for a time; compare the early Meccan texts Q
104:3 and 90:5. Creation in the Qur’an is not primarily a reality but above all a
“text” that carries in itself divine teachings. Thus, it should be no surprise that the
Qur’anic descriptions of creation are primarily oriented not toward actual nature
but rather equally to “literature,” that they are not primarily reality-​referential but
rather equally text-​referential.80
Josef van Ess has outlined the impact of the Qur’anic perception of creation
on later Islamic theology:

78.  On the depiction of the human habitat, see sura 78; cf. chap. 13, 466–468.
79. Müller, Ich bin Labid; cf. Neuwirth, “Geography.”
80.  Cf. the discussion of the description of creation in suras 78 and 55 in Neuwirth, “Psalmen.”
 Communal Formation in the Early Meccan Period  269

In relation to inanimate creation, God’s absolute disposal is ob-

vious. . . . Indeed, the world has its order, but it is not the ordering of a
cosmos. The order for him who sets it, namely God, is not binding. . . . In
the Muslim view, God does not speak through nature but rather from be-
yond it. It is—​one might say—​theologically absent, it is not a power that
man could give himself over to; it has no emotional value. ‘Mother na-
ture’ cannot be translated into Arabic: the Muslim is not a protector of na-
ture. . . . The idea that the wastes, the mountains, the forests, are creation,
and therefore might have meaning in themselves, does not occur; creation
has its sense either in relation to man, in that he draws benefit from it and
thanks God for it, or in relation to God, in that his power is manifest in
it. God and man are the coordinates of the theological system. Tertium
non datur. The Islamic theologians do not proceed from cosmogony as
did the Greeks or, in a certain sense, even the medieval scholastics; they
do not seek the first principle of nature, they write no commentaries on
Genesis.81

One could hold that the Qur’anic creation theology already prefigures this de-
velopment, but we must not overlook the expressions of joy inherent in the
God-​given inhabitability of the world that is evident in many verses, as in Q
78:6–​16.
7.5.3.2  Name—​ism
Among the insignia of power of the creator belongs his sublime name, ism.
Already three times in the early Meccan period, “the name” is set in an imme-
diate context to creation: God’s name, as that of the creator, becomes the object
of praise: sabbiḥi sma rabbika l-​aʿlā lladhī khalaqa fa-​sawwā, “Praise the name of
your Lord, the exalted, who created and formed” (Q 87:1–​2); iqraʾ bi-​smi rabbika
lladhī khalaq, “Recite in the name of your Lord, who created” (Q 96:1); tabāraka
smu rabbika dhī l-​jalāli wa-​l-​ikrām, “Praised be the name of your Lord, in majesty
and magnanimity” (Q 55:78).82 As in biblical usage, we also find the “face,” wajh,
of God in place of his name: kullu man ʿalayhā fān wa-​yabqā wajhu rabbika dhū
l-​jalāli wa-​ikrām, “Everything upon it is ephemeral, but the face of your Lord full
of majesty and generosity remains” (Q 55:26).83
To read here a simple circumlocution of the naming of God in consideration
of his transcendence, a hedging against anthropomorphic conceptions of God, is
inadequate, in that the hymnic predications of God in the early suras anticipate
the later nominal coinages such as al-​khāliq, “the creator.” These—​conceptualized

81.  Van Ess, “Islam,” 124–​126.

82.  Likewise, mentions of the name of God without reference to creation come up in the exhortations to praise
in Q 56:74, 73:8, 87:15.
83.  Cf. the early Meccan verses Q 92:20 and 76:9.
270  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

as God’s “beautiful names,” al-​asmāʾ al-​ḥusnā—​will become an emphatically pre-

sented topic in the Qur’an. The unpronounceable name of God, we might say,
has become a name that is pronounceable in many forms, to be summoned in
different situations. This becomes most evident in the Medinan sura 59, where
verses 23–​24 strongly remind of the so-​called thirteen attributes, shelosh ʿesre
ha-​middot,84 in a verse from Exodus, which for its part became decisive for the
Jewish theology of names, Ex 34:6–​7:

The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abun-
dant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving in-
iquity and transgression and sin, Who will by no means clear the guilty;
visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the chil-
dren’s children, unto the third and fourth generation.

In the Qur’an, a less ambivalent image of God is drawn, in the Medinan verses
Q 59:22–​24:85

huwa llāhu lladhī lā ilāha illā huwa

ʿālimu l-​ghaybi wa-​l-​shahādati,
huwa l-​raḥmānu l-​raḥīm
huwa llāhu lladhī lā ilāha illā huwa
l-​maliku l-​quddūsu l-​salāmu l-​muʾminu
l-​muhayminu l-​ʿazīzu l-​jabbāru l-​mutakabbir—​
subḥāna llāhi ʿammā yushrikūn
huwa llāhu l-​khāliqu l-​bāriʾu l-​muṣawwiru
lahu l-​asmāʾu l-​husnā

He is God, there is no God but He.

Knower of the unseen and the seen, the merciful, the compassionate.
He is God, there is no God but He,
the king, the holy, the peaceful, the faithful,
the preserver, the almighty, the overwhelming, the sublime.
Exalted be God beyond what they associate.
He is God, the creator, originator, the giver of forms,
His are the most beautiful names.

One can see in the term “beautiful names,” and the decidedly positive predica-
tions of God, an answer to the ambivalent biblical combination of names prom-
ising grace or punishment in Ex 34:6–​7, even if the concept of “beautiful names”
occurs already in the middle Meccan period, before the encounter with learned

84.  Cf. chap. 9, 318–​322.

85.  For a Qur’anic rereading of the verse Ex 34:6–​7 in the Qur’an, see chap. 9, 322–324.
 Communal Formation in the Early Meccan Period  271

Jews that is presupposed in Medina, in Q 20:8 and 17:110, both times in the
context of a controversy triggered by the introduction of the name al-​Raḥmān,
and in Q 7:180. Indeed, the name of God is already strikingly frequent in the
Qur’an in Meccan times. Although the Qur’anic name theology has not yet been
set into relation with the Jewish and Syriac-​Christian name theologies that devel-
oped before it,86 it is already quite apparent that in the Qur’an the highest value
is assigned to the power that emanates from the name of God. According to the
Medinan verse Q 2:31, God teaches Adam all names, which also must imply
the name of God. And not only does the Qur’anic text itself deal in the middle
Meccan period with the distinction between the empowered names of God and
the names, empty of authority, merely coined by man, as in Q 53:23: in hiya illā
asmāʾu sammaytumūhā antum wa-​abāʾukum, “They [the three ancient Arabian
goddesses] are only names that you coined, you and your fathers.” Above all, it
must not be overlooked that from at least the middle Meccan period, the units of
recitation, the suras themselves, take on the introduction bi-​smi llāhi l-​raḥmāni l-​
raḥīm, “In the name of God the compassionate the merciful,” a formula that gives
primacy to the notion of God’s ability to be named and evoked by man at the be-
ginning of all further utterance. The name of God, his verbal self-​manifestation,
thus appears as a linguistic means of bridging the distance from his creation and
his transcendence.

7.5.4  Recognizing, Knowing for Certain, Looking, Seeing versus Lying

without Belief, Telling Lies: ʿIlm And Kufr
The human capacity and readiness for the knowledge to be derived from crea-
tion is expressed at first in positive terms, ʿalimat nafsun, “then a soul recognizes”
(Q 82:5), āyātun li-​l-​mūqinīn, “signs for them who are sure in their know-
ledge” (Q 51:20), or in the form of an exhortation, fa-​l-​yanẓur, “man should
then look” (Q 88:17; cf. a-​lam najʿal lahu ʿaynayn, “have we not made him two
eyes?” Q 90:8).87 Franz Rosenthal assumes that behind the Qur’anic expression
ʿilm al-​yaqīn, “certain knowledge” (Q 102:5), is the Christian theological term
he gnosis tes aletheas (Syriac idaʿtha de-​shrārā, “the knowledge of the truth”),
an observation that requires support through further citations.88 But the idea
of the readiness for knowledge is expressed far more frequently in a negative
way. The denial of the signs (kadhdhaba),89 or the lack of recognition (kafara)

86.  Some of the ideas developed later in Sufism are very close to the Jewish ones: Schimmel, Die Zeichen Gottes,
279, points out, “The fact that Ibn Arabi ‘beheld’ in his vision the letter h, because h is the last and most essential
letter in the name Allāh, which refers to his huwiyya, his ipseity.” Manifestations of God in letters were already
common in earlier Jewish mysticism of Late Antiquity; see Scholem, “Der Name Gottes.”
87.  In contrast, the root ʿ-​q-​l does not occur in early Meccan texts; on the significance of ʿ-​q-​l in the Qur’an,
see Kermani, “Verstand.”
88. Rosenthal, Knowledge Triumphant,  22–​28.
89.  Kadhdhaba in the early Meccan period, often refers to judgment, in addition to signs of earlier messages
as well as creation (as in Q 79:21 fa-​arāhu l-​āyāta l-​kubrā /​ fa-​kadhdhaba, “He showed him the greatest signs. But
272  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

in face of them, is among the accusations raised most frequently in the early
suras. Both are explicitly linked with āyāt as the key hermeneutical object (kaf-
ara bi-​āyātinā, “He was not insightful in view of our signs,” Q 90:19; kadhdhaba
bi-​āyātinā, “He denied our signs,” Q 78:28; cf. also kallā innahu kāna li-​āyātinā
ʿanīdā, “Indeed no! he was defiant against our signs,” Q 74:16). The refusal to
read the āyāt—​whether they pertain to creation or are of a textual nature—​is
occasionally bound up with an opposite demand raised by the unbelievers for
an unambiguous “scripture,” kitāb, or “outspread pages,” ṣuḥuf munashshara, (Q
74:52), while the early Qur’anic texts in this phase do not yet present themselves
as kitāb, but rather as tadhkira, “reminder,” in reference to a heavenly textual or
earthy “readable” writing of creation.
This connection of kafara, “to be unbelieving,” to the hermeneutical discourse
surrounding the āyāt invites a rethinking of Toshihiko Izutsu’s classification90 of
the concept of kufr and its derivatives among the ethical conceptualizations of the
Qur’an. Izutsu understands kafara in the sense of kāfir niʿma “to be ungrateful,”
in agreement with the meaning that would prevail later in dogmatics. According
to him, it is thus above all an ethical fault that underlies the Qur’anic concept of
unbelief. This deduction is problematic, since the Qur’anic verb kafara should
be derived from kufr—​a loan word from Syriac, which already denotes “unbe-
lief.”91 The verb is firmly established already in this abstract terminological sense
in early suras,92 behind which there may be assumed a faded etymological signif-
icance of “to cover.”93
But the theological technical term is by no means adopted with all its connota-
tions from Christian usage, since Christian matters of belief are not of direct con-
cern in the early Qur’an. What, then, are the objects of “unbelief ” in the Qur’an?
As the early usage of kafara shows,94 a concrete object is already envisaged: in the
two earliest citations, it is the āyāt that are referred to as the object of kufr, either
explicitly or implicitly: wa-​lladhīna kafarū bi-​āyātinā hum aṣḥāb al-​mashʾāma,
“Those who are unbelieving of our signs are the people of the left hand”

he denied them”; cf. also Q 78:28); particularly relevant for this context is the refrain waylun yawmaʾidhin li-​l-​
mukadhdhibīn, “Woe to the deniers!” in a creation āyāt series, Q 77:24–​28.
90. Izutsu, Ethico-​Religious Concepts. This interpretation is criticized by Ghassan Masri, (personal communi-
cation), whose call to focus on the epistemic dimension of the Qur’anic kufr concept is taken up here.
91. Jeffery, Foreign Vocabulary. Nonetheless, the discovery of such a “loan word” does not suffice. Griffith,
“Christian Lore and the Arabic Qurʾān,” 115–​116, classifies such “borrowed words” as calques. “Syrianisms are
words or sentences in the Arabic language of the Qur’an, which evoke a Syriac expression that lies behind them.
They are thus ‘calques’ or ‘loan translations’ from Syriac into Arabic. . . . What is Syriac in the Qur’an is no longer
Syriac, but in the best case is a ‘Syrianism’ in Qur’anic Arabic. . . . The Qur’an, which marks out a new hermeneutic
horizon, integrates every originally Syriac element in its Arabic diction in the frame of significance that this lan-
guage has constructed.”
92.  See verses, such as Q 73:17, 51:60, 68:51, 70:36, 84:22, 85:19, 70:2, 74:10, 86:17, 80:42, and 83:34.
93.  This pre-​terminological meaning is common to the Semitic languages, but is already “overlaid” in Syrian
and Hebrew with theological signification.
94.  The verb occurs seven times in early Meccan texts, six times in the participle form.
 Communal Formation in the Early Meccan Period  273

(Q 90:19), qutila l-​insānu mā akfarah /​min ayyi shay’in khalaqah, “Cursed be

man, how unbelieving he is! /​From what material has he been created?” (Q 80:17–​
18). In the other citations where the meaning “to show unbelief ” is expressed by
kafara, there is no reference to a concrete object of the unbelief, but here too we
can assume an analogous unbelief in regard to the signs of creation or texts. The
denial of opinions of belief is also expressed by the verb kadhdhaba, where along-
side the reference to āyāt (kadhdhaba bi-​āyātinā, “He declared our signs as lies,”
Q 78:20) we also find language related to the denial of the judgment. In any case,
following these observations, we should rethink the exclusive assignment of the
Qur’anic kufr idea to an ethical conceptualization. The parallelism of the usage
of kafara and kadhdhaba and the twice-​occurring explicit connection of kafara
with āyāt give the concept an unmistakable epistemic dimension.
7.5.4.1  Homonymy: Āya, “Miracle Signs”/​“Written Signs”
One can speak then of a close linkage—​becoming more explicit over time—​of divine
“creation” (khalq) and divine “communication” or “teaching” (qurʾān, taʿlīm), man-
ifest in the simultaneous equipping of man with physis (khalq) and logos (qurʾān or
taʿlīm), and in the structure inherent in creation (khalq) that is recognizable through
reason (bayān) due to its immanent comprehensibility. A field of tension emerges,
occupied by the divine creator; creation, which itself shows a hermeneutically effec-
tive structure; and man, endowed with ability for reason and speech, who through
the application of his faculty of understanding/​language is able to “learn” (ʿalima in
Q 82:5) and to “recognize” (ayqana in Q 51:20) creation as God’s manifestation. In
contrast to the denial of these signs or communications, we find expressions of “rec-
ognition” or giving thanks (shakara in Q 56:70).95
The gifts given to man in language and reason thus converge. This Qur’anic
interpretation of the human faculty of knowledge, which is not equally ap-
parent in the two older scriptures, can most plausibly be explained through
reference to Neoplatonic philosophy whose integration into theological dis-
cussions had already been achieved by Syriac thinkers. Adam H. Becker points
to a widely attested tradition according to which God used letters in order to
create the world. He ultimately deduces this from the polysemy of the Greek
word stoicheion, which can mean both “element” and “letter.” This equivocity
becomes productive in Syriac theology. Thus, the plural of the Syriac word for
“sign,” āthwāthā, which may stand behind Arabic āyāt, is derived from the
singular āthūthā, which itself means both: “element” and “letter sign.” but is
also related to the more broadly connoted singular āthā, which means “sign”
or “miracle sign,” and above all reproduces the Greek semeion, for example, in
the Syriac translation of the New Testament (Peshitta), where it indicates the

95.  See Rosenthal, Knowledge Triumphant,  19–​28.

274  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

signs that Jesus worked (Jo 2:11–​18).96 This same equivocity is constitutive for
the Qur’an.

7.5.5  Late Antique Backgrounds

After this short survey it is useful to turn back once more to the Late Antique
preconditions of the Qur’anic creation theology. Letters, signs, and names are
equally introduced in the Late Antique Sefer Yesira97 as an integral part, or even
as instruments, of creation, they play a somewhat less prominent role in the
Qur’an: “signs” are homonyms for details of both text and creation; the “name” is
thoroughly de-​semiotized through the fanning out of the one unpronounceable
name into the plural asmāʾ al-​ḥusnā; from the middle Meccan period, letters
occur no longer as signs but as the signified itself, while also signifying beyond
themselves through their transcendent reference,98 they finally, in the late Meccan
period come to occupy the opening positions of suras. The Qur’an stands closer
to Syriac-​Christian theology than it does to Jewish mysticism.
Here, the observations of Adam Becker on the Syriac theory of creation de-
serve attention: “The focus on what we say about something in a discussion of
how we ‘comprehend’ and ‘investigate’ it seems to derive from the Neoplatonic
practice of drawing an explicit connection between words, things, and concepts.
Neoplatonic texts regularly conflate these three very different ontological modes.
In the prolegomenon to his commentary on the Categories, Ammonius explains
that commentators in the past have disagreed as to whether the Categories treats
words (phonai), things (pragmata), or concepts (noemata). He resolves this dis-
pute by suggesting that all the three positions are correct in part.”99 About the
Syriac theology that arises from this ambiguity, Becker writes, “Stemming from
ambiguities in the use of the Greek logos, the relation between words for ‘speech’
and ‘reason’ in Syriac would have contributed to his confusion:  meltā means
‘word,’ ‘speech,’ or ‘reason.’ ”100 This can also be applied to Qur’anic Arabic: āyāt,
considered linguistically, are texts (passages of the Qur’an); considered seman-
tically, they are details of creation; and if considered theologically, they are
ultimately signs received in creation that, if “read,” yield a distinct textual under-
standing in parallel to revelation.

96. Becker, Fear of God, 131, explicitly emphasizes the relationship to Sefer Yesirah; cf. to a related Greek trea-
tise, cf. Bandt, “Vom Mysterium.” The remarkable double meaning of āya in the Qur’an, in the sense of text sections
of undefined extent, and of visible signs, exhibits the same ambiguity. Peters, “Creation,” 174, adopts the internal
Qur’anic marking of individual verses as āya, but this meaning is most likely post-​Qur’anic.
97.  See now Herrmann, Sefer Jezira.
98.  The problem of the so-​called ciphers, ḥurūf muqaṭṭaʿa, is still unexplained; the presumption that isolated
appearance of letters at the beginning of individual suras involve the invocation of letter names seems to be the most
plausible; cf. chap. 5, 193–194.
99. Becker, Fear of God, 134–​135.
100. Ibid.
 Communal Formation in the Early Meccan Period  275

Here, Becker attributes a central significance to the Syriac theologian Ephrem

(306–​373), according to whose theology God nears men through language and
reveals himself to them through nature. While the Neoplatonists, through whose
mediation the Syriac theologians received Aristotle, treated language as a ne-
cessity conditioned by human corporality, Becker stresses that for the Syrians,
language became a means for the solution of the problem of God’s radical tran-
scendence:  “Ephrem of Nisibis, the great Syriac poet of the fourth century,
emphasized in particular that God is unknowable in his essence. According to
Ephraem, God bridges the ontological and epistemic distance between himself
and his creation through the various acts of self-​revelation. Two of these . . . are
the differing symbols which he has scattered over all of creation, and his self-​
dressing in a garment of names. Ephraem founded an entire theology of names,
through which God ‘attracts’ to himself human language in order to be know-
able.”101 This statement could be applied without adaptation to the Qur’an—​thus
a synopsis of Ephrem’s theology in relation to the Qur’an, and a detailed compar-
ison between them is an urgent desideratum.

101. Ibid.
 8

Stages of Communal Formation in the

Middle and Late Meccan Periods

If the early Meccan suras already show a nearness to the prayer praxis
of the two more ancient religions1 and trace paths in sign theology that were al-
ready traveled by Syriac theologians, it should be no surprise that the discourses
that developed soon afterward also developed in close contact to biblical and
post-​biblical traditions, even to the degree of constituting a counter-​history to
the inherited ancestral tradition of the community. One can see this step, ac-
complished in the middle Meccan phase, as the entrance of the community
into the “successors of the Israelites,” their self-​identification as a new people of
God standing in the Mosaic tradition and claiming participation in monothe-
istic salvific history. The key element of this sacred history is the conception of
divine self-​communication through “scripture,” having both earthly and heav-
enly manifestations, and which can be either codified or oral. The central idea
of God’s mercy, which in the middle Meccan period is recorded in the name of
God “al-​Raḥmān,” “the compassionate,” which becomes frequent in this period,2
refers not least to this self-​communication through writing, perceived by the pro-
claimer as an act of generosity (Q 96:3–​4):

iqraʾ wa-​rabbuka l-​akram

alladhī ʿallama bi-​l-​qalam
ʿallama l-​insāna mā lam yaʿlam

Recite, your Lord is the most generous

who taught you with the pen,
taught man what he did not know.

1.  Rubin, “Morning and Evening Prayers,” brings together the evening prayer Ṣalāt al-​ʿAsr, as delineated by
the pagan Meccans, with the Jewish Minḥa prayer; and Ṣalāt al-​Fajr, the sunrise prayer, with Shaḥarit. Likewise,
this could also be reminiscent of the Christian equivalents, Orthros and Hesperinos; cf. Horovitz, “Terminologie
des islamischen Kultus.”
2.  Although the name al-​Raḥmān already comprises an established designation for God in South Arabian (see
Robin, “Himyar et Israel”), a continued influence of the sense of “mercy” should be assumed for the Qur’anic usage.

277
278  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

The new consciousness is reflected in one sense semantically and theologically,

through the new focus on biblical prophet narratives and their contextualization
within the communal reality in agreement with a newly emerging worldview. But
the new consciousness shows itself equally through a “liturgical reform,” so that
what emerges is a new sura form that depicts structurally a monotheistic service
revolving around the reading out of biblical stories: this three-​part composition
takes shape in the middle Meccan period.3 In the late Meccan period, this three-​
part formal schema with narrative at its center is maintained in some instances,
but in other cases is replaced by a form that is more thoroughly discursive. The
sura then moves beyond this increasingly loose portrayal of a prayer service and
takes on elements of the Late Antique homily, employing traditional paraenetic
forms such as the allegorical story or parable.4 This textual genre, made wide-
spread by the Gospels, becomes representative of the late Meccan suras and
serves as the medium for the critique of several Christian traditions that are the-
ologically problematic for the community; above all, it enables a new, narratively
dense dressing for thoughts that could only be represented previously through
abstract argumentation.
In addition to the three discourses already traced for the early Meccan
suras—​consolation and assurance of providence on the one hand and prophetic
warning of the judgment and sign theology on the other—​some discourses that
appeared later must also be investigated. In the center of the middle Meccan
development stands the self-​construction of the community as a new people
of God, through recourse to biblical and post-​biblical traditions and, bound
up with this, liturgical innovation in the development of a structured prayer
service. That this progress in communal formation brings with it an exegetical
process of exclusion and the replacement of central earlier traditions, that is, a
demythologizing and new myth foundation, becomes particularly clear in sura
19, “Mary,” in which the complex Christian traditions about Mary and Jesus are
negotiated anew. As a third middle Meccan discourse, we can name the anti-​
pagan polemic in disputes over concrete objects of belief, which can also be
demonstrated in sura 19. In the late Meccan period, when the standard form of
the tripartite sura gives way to a looser structure better suited to sermonizing,
a fourth discourse emerges in the development of new homiletic instruments,
above all the parable or simile. This “emblem of prophethood,” still little noticed
in Western research, becomes an important medium for the authorization of the
message in the later parts of the Qur’an.

3.  See chap. 5, 192–193.

4.  On homiletics, see Berger, “Antike Rhetorik”; cf. 498–​501.
 Communal Formation in the Middle and Late Meccan Periods  279

8.1  From Real World to Text World: The New

People of God

8.1.1  The Election of the Community in Preexistence

A goal of the Qur’anic proclamation since the entrance of the proclaimer into the
role of Prophet is the warning (andhara, “to warn,” Q 19:97) of the judgment, the
reminding (dhikr, Q 81:27) of God’s power and working in nature and history;
his medium is the recitation, the reading (qurʾān, Q 75:17–​18), which is the ap-
proach to the one God through liturgy. Already in the early period, the praxis of
prayer is an important act that establishes identity;5 indeed, it is only through the
achievement of an elementary prayer service going beyond the ritually embed-
ded short recitations that the community first enters into a new phase in the for-
mation of cult, and at the same time a new stage of self-​reflection. A turn toward
this state emerges strikingly in the middle Meccan sura 15, where individual ele-
ments of the prayer service are given explicitly by name. In the same sura, the
community also receives the confirmation of its election in preexistence, and is
explicitly addressed as the receivers of sacred-​historical messages. A connection
to the older monotheistic groups, who have already made the earlier Israelite sa-
cred history their own and now go further down the path of the Israelite people
of God, is thus announced. Sura 15, which can be considered the locus classicus
for this turn, will be presented in short here.6
The tripartite sura7 is one of the earliest to feature a biblical story in its middle
part. The beginning section (verses 1–​48) begins with a “sacral intonation,” the
naming of three letter names alif lām mīm,8 followed by the confirmation that
what is to be recited is an excerpt, namely, “an ensemble of signs from the heav-
enly writing,” āyāt al-​kitāb, and at the same time “a clear reading,” qurʾān mubīn.
The transcendent storage and the pronouncement in the word in the here and
now are two complementary mediums of the “writing.” A polemical conjecture,
rubbamā yawuddu lladhīna kafarū law kānū muslimīn, “Perhaps the unbelievers
would like to be ones who submit” (verse 2), opens into an exhortation to the
proclaimer to leave them to their superficial and sensually oriented life (verse
3). Then follows a polemical confrontation with the opponents about the origin
of the message, wherein their obstinate refusal in face of the earlier divine acts
of annihilation is indicted as particularly frivolous: they express doubt about the
transcendent source of inspiration of the proclaimer and challenge him to bring
forth the angel that he claims as the bringer of the message (verses 5–​9). A con-
solation of the proclaimer follows:  prophets are always mocked, God himself

5.  Cf. chap. 6, 208–212.

6.  A detailed analysis and interpretation of the sura is offered in Neuwirth, “Referentiality and Textuality.”
7. Neuwirth, Studien zur Komposition, 264.
8.  On this structural element, see chap. 5, 193–194.
280  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

puts this attitude in the hearts of the unbelievers, and even miracle signs will not
remove unbelief from the world (verses 10–​15).
Then, as counterpart to the polemic, a hymnic verse group follows (verses 16–​
18), which adduces visible signs. God is praised in the form of first-​person plural
predicates, first as the creator of the heavens, which not only are “ornamented”
toward visual perception but are also protected against demons who attempt to
overhear the divine wisdom9—​an implicit argument against the demonic source
of inspiration alleged for the proclaimer (verse 6). The following praise of the lux-
urious outfitting of the earth (verses 19–​25) delivers a further argument for God’s
power, which is also capable of waking the dead.
The narrative that then follows (verses 26–​48) could already be considered
part of the narrative second section, but it also continues the ideas of creation
from the beginning section, now broadened to the primordial creation of men
and demons, and continues to treat the demons, whose disempowerment is now
exemplified in the central figure of Iblīs/​Diabolos.10 This episode, which will be
taken up time and again subsequently in the Qur’an, is here expanded into a sce-
nario of the election of the community occurring already in preexistence. The in-
troductory verses of the narrative wa-​la-​qad khalaqnā l-​insāna min ṣalṣālin min
ḥamāʾin masnūn /​ wa-​l-​jānna khalaqnāhu min qablu min nāri l-​samūm, “Truly,
we created man from a clump of moist clay /​and the demons we created earlier
from flaming fire” (verses 26–​27) cite almost verbatim a statement on creation
from the early Meccan sura 55, where it is repeated almost fifty times in a refrain
calling demons and men to their debt of gratitude.11 In sura 15, the statement
acquires a new function: it names the potential of conflict that inheres in God’s
treatment of Satan, which now unfolds in relation to the earthly fate of man. For
Iblīs, who is counted among the demons/​jinns because of the more sublime ma-
terial of fire from which he is created, is superior to man, who is created out of
clay, yet man is preferred by God. Upon being commanded to fall down before
the first man alongside the angels, which are also reckoned among the jinn, Iblīs
refuses, offering the plausible argument of his preferable origin: qāla lam akun
li-​asjuda li-​basharin khalaqtahu min ṣalṣālin min ḥamāʾin masnūn, “He said:  I
will not prostrate before a mortal, whom you have created from a clump of moist
clay!” (verse 33). He is expelled from the garden, but then assumes a task that is
fundamental for Qur’anic theodicy, that of testing man through acts of tempta-
tion, la-​uzayyinanna lahum fī l-​arḍi wa-​la-​ughawwiyannahum ajmaʿīn, “I will
beguile them with beauty on the earth, and lead them all astray” (verse 39).

9.  On this mythical concept, cf. Hawting, “Eavesdropping.”

10.  Iblīs, from the Greek, diabolos, is identified in later suras with Satan, al-​shayṭān; see Neuwirth, “Qur’ān,
Crisis and Memory.”
11.  Neuwirth, “Psalmen”; cf. also chap. 3, 127–131.
 Communal Formation in the Middle and Late Meccan Periods  281

The function fulfilled by Iblīs of the examiner that stands by God’s side, or
of “prosecutor” of the creatures, which is familiar not only from the book of
Job but also from an extensive ancient Near Eastern literature, is not a negative
“demonic” role, but rather the role of assistant in support of divine justice. The
corresponding figure in Job has been called “trickster,” one “who attempts to in-
tervene in creation and do something other than that which the creator God
does.”12 Indeed, Iblīs is conciliatory, and even allows an exception from his target
group: illā ʿibādaka minhumu l-​mukhlaṣīn, “but not your true servants” (verse
40). The agreement of God shows that Iblīs does not yet figure as absolute evil,
as he will in the later Qur’an, but rather still oscillates in his value: qāla hādhā
ṣirātun ʿalayya mustaqīm /​inna ʿibādī laysa laka ʿalayhim sulṭānun illā mani
ttabaʿka mina l-​ghāwīn, “He said:  that is for me a straight road! You have no
power over my servants, except for over those who are beguiled and follow you”
(verses 41–​42). God’s servants—​that is, as one sees in due course, the Qur’anic
community—​are thus excepted from the temptation by Iblīs.
The narrative, which opens with an announcement of judgment, is the first of
seven Adam-​Iblīs stories told in the Qur’an.13 Above all, this is the first sura in
which the term ʿibādī, “my servants,” is introduced in the sense of “my commu-
nity.” That the “servants” protected from Iblīs are identical with the new commu-
nity is shown by their lowly social position, which is depicted as a consequence
of their earthly good deeds in resistance to Satanic temptations—​a reversal of the
worldly canon of values, which now makes the underprivileged social position of
the community a sensible sign of their religious privilege.
Not only is this community elected already in preexistence, it is also the pre-
sent receiver of divine blessings, namely, communications from the heavenly
writing performed by the proclaimer. Two such biblical narratives now appear
in the adjoining second part (verses 49–​84), the “reading section” of the prayer
service that is reflected in the sura. Namely, the term “my servants” has just been
introduced (in verses 40 and 42), and these “servants” then become the address-
ees of a reading: nabbiʾ ʿibādī annī anā l-​ghafūru l-​raḥīm /​ wa-​anna ʿadhābī huwa
l-​ʿadhābu l-​alīm /​ wa-​nabbiʾhum ʿan ḍayfi Ibrāhīm, “Announce to my servants
that I am the forgiving, the merciful /​that my punishment is the painful punish-
ment /​and tell them about the guests of Abraham” (verses 49–​51). What follows
is the first narratively unfolded biblical story in the Qur’an. It reports the meeting
of Abraham with the messengers of God near Mamre (verses 52–​60), and pro-
ceeds to the announcement of a son to the aged Abraham as evidence for God’s
“mercy,” raḥma, and then turns to the adjoined (verses 61–​74) narrated destruc-
tion of the inhabitants of Sodom as evidence of his punishing justice, ʿadhāb.14

12.  Colpe, “Aus der Geschichte des Teufels,” 70–​75.

13.  Neuwirth, “Qurān, Crisis and Memory.”
14.  On the development of the Qur’anic story of Abraham, see now Sinai, Studien zur frühen Koraninterpratation,
57–​149.
282  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

The still-​palpable traces of the catastrophe of Sodom give rise to the association
of other peoples of the Arabian Peninsula, namely, aṣḥāb al-​ayka15 and aṣḥāb al-​
ḥijr (verses 78–​84), whose cities have also been destroyed.
The third part (verses 85–​99), like the first one, is directed in appellation to the
proclaimer. It begins with an emphatic self-​affirmation of the creator, which, here
and in other suras, signals a new dramatic act of the prayer-​service drama16: ma-​
mā khalaqnā l-​samawāti wa-​l-​arḍa wa-​mā baynahumā illā bi l-​ḥaqqi, “We have
not created the heaven and earth and what is between them except in truth”
(verse 85).
It is among the subsequent exhortations, advice on conduct, and consolations
to the proclaimer that close the sura that we also find the verse that, uniquely
in the Qur’an, confirms the new existence of a text corpus available in addition
to the Qur’an, namely, the Fātiḥa:  innā ataynāka sabʿan mina l-​mathānī wa-​l-​
qurʾāna l-​ʿaẓīm, “Truly we have given you seven [verses] for repeating, and the
glorious reading” (verse 87).

8.2  From Mecca to Jerusalem: New Liturgical Forms

8.2.1  The Fātiḥa
The traditional critical arguments in favor of the identification of sabʿan mina
l-​mathānī, the “seven for repetition,” or literally “seven repeated,” with the Fātiḥa,
do not need to be rehearsed in detail here.17 That only this could be intended
comes out clearly from the chronological position and from the form of the sura
in which the mentioning of the Fātiḥa is embedded. If it were in fact true, as
the majority of the critical researchers assume in opposition to the unanimous
Islamic tradition, that the “seven mathānī” indicate seven repeated legends of
punishment,18 then one must essentially give sura 15 a later date, since in the
early Meccan period seven such legends were not yet available. Furthermore, the
reference to only seven such Qur’anic narratives, which would then be quite un-
motivated, would scarcely justify such a triumphal mentioning of the mathānī as
a text corpus in addition to the Qur’an (wa-​l-​qurʾān). But the decisive observation
here is that the Fātiḥa itself, of which the individual elements are “cited” in several
middle Meccan suras, are evoked frequently, namely, with no fewer than seven
mentions, so that we can assume a very close connection between the two texts.19
This means that the self-​perception of being a community distinguished through

15.  The name can now be geographically located; see Puin, “Leuke Kome.”
16.  On this introductory topos, cf. the parallels in Neuwirth, Studien zur Komposition, 264–​266, and chap. 2,
80–​89, as well as chap. 6, 227.
17.  Neuwirth, “Sūrat al-​Fātiḥa”; cf. also Sperl, “The Literary Form of Prayer.”
18.  On the punishment legend hypothesis, see Rubin, “Prophets and Prophethood”; Horovitz, Koranische
Untersuchungen; Paret, Mohammed und der Koran.
19.  See a list of evocations of the Fātiḥa in sura 15, in Neuwirth, Studien zur Komposition, 340f
 Communal Formation in the Middle and Late Meccan Periods  283

divine election and possessing recited excerpts from the heavenly book is bound
up with the new consciousness of having another important liturgical text avail-
able in addition to the Qur’an recitation. A communal self-​consciousness belongs
together with a viable structure of prayer service. With the Fātiḥa, we now find an
element that, unlike the recitation of the suras, grants a voice to the community
itself. One can see here something corresponding to the Christian Our Father20
or, even more so, a re-​forming of what stands in at the start of the Christian ser-
vice as the Introitus; Q 1:1–​7:21
bi-​smi llāhi l-​raḥmāni l-​raḥīm
al-​ḥamdu li-​llāhi rabbi l-​ʿālimīn
al-​raḥmāni l-​raḥīm
māliki yawmi l-​dīn
īyāka naʿbudu w-​īyāka nastaʿīn
ihdinā l-​ṣirāṭa l-​mustaqīm
ṣirāṭa lladhīna anʿamta ʿalayhim
ghayri l-​maghḍūbi ʿalayhim
wa-​lā l-​ḍāllīn

In the name of God, the compassionate the merciful.

Praise be to God, lord of the worlds,
the compassionate the merciful,
the king of the day of judgment.
You we serve and You we call on for help.
Lead us to the straight road,
the road of those You have shown grace to,
not that of those you show anger to
and not that of those who go astray.

That the Fātiḥa, although clearly an oral prayer text, has been seen in research
up to now as a part of the Qur’an, as one of the revelations/​proclamations, and
not as a parallel text that was affixed to the codex redactionally as a kind of proo-
emium, can be explained by the dominant view of the Qur’an as a fixed written
text and not a liturgical performance text that relies on further complementary
texts. Indeed, the early Islamic tradition itself attests to the fact that the Fātiḥa
does not belong to the corpus of suras, in that it discusses controversially its con-
nection with the bismillah, the invocation formula bi-​smi llāhi l-​raḥmāni l-​raḥīm,
“in the name of God the compassionate merciful.”22 In the dominant text form of
the Kufic tradition,23 the bismillah—​uniquely in the Qur’an—​is not an opening

20.  Winkler, “Fatiha und Vaterunser.”

21.  Neuwirth, “Sūrat al-​Fātiḥa.”
22.  Neuwirth, “Sūrat al-​Fātiḥa,” 348.
23.  Cf. chap. 4, 149–155.
284  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

credit, but rather a first verse of the sura. This is how one arrives to the number
seven—​given in sura 15—​for the mathānī, the “repetition verses,” and at the same
time one can confirm that the basmala was indeed recited with the sura in cultic
practice. In the case of the Fātiḥa, the text tradition of the Qur’an and the cultic
tradition transmitted in the schools of law diverge.24
A perspective founded in the history of liturgy is adopted by Anton Baumstark,
who, in the context of his attempt to classify the Qur’anic formulas of divine wor-
ship typologically, succeeds in reconstructing a monotheistic “genealogy” for the
Fātiḥa as a central prayer formula. According to Baumstark, in formulation and
structure it resembles an ancient Christian worship, the so-​called doxology of
the Greek daily prayer, which corresponds to the Gloria in Excelsis of the Latin
mass—​which, like the Fātiḥa, is a central part of the daily observed liturgy, but
not of the scripture.25 Functionally though, there is a closer parallel to Jewish-​
Christian service openings. As has been shown,26 in cultic practice the Fātiḥa is
even today not bound up with the bismillah in certain rites. The beginning of
the prayer ritual would then be—​in agreement with other service-​introductory
formulas—​al-​ḥamdu li-​llāhi rabbi l-​ʿālamīn. Transferred in the Qur’an into a
universal-​monotheistic diction, this corresponds to the doxology with which,
for example, the Chrysostom and Basil liturgies begin: “Praised be the kingdom
of the Father and the Son and Holy Spirit, now and always for all eternity.” In
both liturgies, the Qur’anic and the Byzantine, we have before us a hymnal in-
cipit, which in the Fātiḥa is continued by two multipartite predications (verses 2
and 3). In the Greek liturgy, it fills a complex sentence, which together with the
immediately following antiphonic kyrie eleison, “Lord, have mercy,” includes all
elements that are expressed in the first part of the Fātiḥa: the praise, “praised be,”
al-​ḥamd; the reference to the rulership over the present and eternity, “now and
always for eternity,” rabbi l-​ʿālamīn27 (verse 2); the idea of mercy, “have mercy,”
al-​raḥmān al-​raḥīm (verse 3); and finally the eschatological “kingdom of the fa-
ther,” mālik yawm al-​dīn (verse 4). Similar parallels can be detected in the second
part of the Fātiḥa, to the litany of supplication connected to the hymn, so that the
assumption can be maintained that the Fātiḥa stands as a service introduction in
the tradition of older service beginnings, alongside the hypothesis represented
by Winkler28 and Goitein,29 that the Fātiḥa is an Islamic Our Father. It may have
fulfilled both functions from the beginning, that of Introitus and that of com-
munal prayer.

24.  See Spitaler, Verszählung, 31; on the problematic see Neuwirth, “Sūrat al-​Fātiḥa,” 335.
25.  Baumstark, “Gebetstypus im Koran,” 242–​248.
26.  Neuwirth, “Sūrat al-​Fātiḥa.”
27.  While “Lord of the worlds” is understood in a few cases in the Qur’an as “Lord of the inhabitants of the
worlds,” it is analogous to the concept of “Lord of the world and eternity” familiar to the older traditions.
28.  Winkler, “Fatiha und Vaterunser.”
29.  Goitein, “Prayer in Islam.”
 Communal Formation in the Middle and Late Meccan Periods  285

8.2.2  “Scriptural Reading” as Center of the Middle Meccan Sura

Contemporary to the introduction of the Fātiḥa as communal prayer, the suras
show from the middle Meccan period an almost stereotyped three-​part struc-
ture of appellatory beginning part, narrative middle part, and appellatory closing
part,30 a structure that also underlies the Christian prayer service, where prayer
and prayer litany precede a scriptural reading standing in the center, to which
dialogic parts, further prayer litanies and credo formulas, follow. The sura itself
seems in this period to reproduce such a multipart service.31 This progress in the
prayer form, the outdoing of the previous cult dominated by rites, is thus due to
two new characteristics, the new structure of the sura and the availability of a
mandatory extra-​Qur’anic text, the Fātiḥa. It coincides with the self-​perception
of the community as an elected people of God.
It is striking that narratives in the late Meccan suras are often referred to ex-
pressly as elements of the scripture, al-​kitāb. This writing is conceived as un-
changing and comprehensive, and it preserves a stock of knowledge codified
by heavenly scribes (Q 80:11–​16)32—​perhaps a Qur’anic adaptation of the idea,
dominant in the book of Jubilees, a Jewish apocryphal writing from the second
century bce, of the heavenly register,33 an idea already common in ancient Near
Eastern writings. The narrative communications from the heavenly scripture are
at first distinguished from less universal elements such as, for example, debates
over ephemeral matters of the community. The ceremonial function of the bibli-
cally inspired narrative is underlined by introductory formulas such as wa-​dhkur
fī l-​kitāb . . . , “mention in [the excerpt of] the writing . . . ” (Q 19:16). In a later
phase, in Medina, as the particular form of the message communicated to the
community is already itself treated as constituting scripture, that is, as the matters
of the community are recognized as part of sacred history, entire suras figure as
manifestations of the kitāb.34
By far the majority of the later Meccan suras begin with an emphatic evocation
of the scripture, often introduced through an “intonation,” the naming of an iso-
lated letter of the alphabet or a combination of letters.35 These evoke the heavenly
“writing source,” a reference that was not yet required in the early suras. This in-
cipit seems to indicate a newly achieved cultic function of the recited text, which
is no longer conceived as the immediate communication of divine messages to

30. Neuwirth, Studien zur Komposition, 264–​266.

31.  This thesis still requires systematic verification based on liturgical-​historical considerations. But it seems to
be heuristically useful to set into relief the linking of the development of cult and that of the text corpus.
32.  Cf. chap. 4, 77–79.
33. Jeffery, Qur’an as Scripture.
34.  Sinai, “Qur’anic Self-​Referentiality.”
35.  The so-​called isolated letters, ḥurūf muqaṭṭaʿa, are not to be understood here as editorial additions, but
rather as a means of expression already introduced by the proclaimer. Their origin and meaning are unresolved; cf.
chap. 5, 193–194.
286  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

the community, but rather as a performance of the holy writing that is thought to
be preexistent and only capable of being realized in performance.

8.2.3  Orientation to Jerusalem, Center of Israelite Sacred History

The middle Meccan suras attest to a new spatial framework for the message. These
texts, which contain numerous biblical stories, show an expansion of the histor-
ical horizon of the hearers, who are carried beyond their local environment into
the distant landscape of the Holy Land, al-​arḍ allatī bāraknā fīhā, “the land that
we have blessed” (Q 21:71), which is familiar as a setting for the history of the
“spiritual forebearers” of the community, the Israelites. The introduction of the di-
rection of prayer, qibla, toward Jerusalem is an eloquent testimony of this general
change in spatial orientation. The process that culminates in this new ritual ori-
entation can be roughly made plausible through use of the categories of ritual and
textual coherence, which were introduced by Jan Assmann.36 The biblical stories,
which before appeared only in brief allusions, now enter the foreground in middle
Meccan times, so that the protagonists of the early historical narratives, figures
from the Arabian Peninsula, give way to biblical figures, and the Holy Land itself
enters as the backdrop in place of ancient Arabia. One example among many is the
story of the Israelite temple itself, which is told in Q 17:2–​8,37 while in middle and
late Meccan times there is hardly any more mention of the Meccan sanctuary. The
biblical sacred-​historical past, which is set in place of the inherited indigenous his-
torical memory, now forms a “text world” in competition with reality, which can
be approached in prayer through the physical gesture of the direction of prayer.
The measure of application of this first direction of prayer is not attested in the
Qur’an, nor is the Islamic tradition unanimous on it,38 but it is generally presup-
posed to have held for the Meccan period in the most recent research. But above
all, the assumption of the prayer direction toward Jerusalem is clearly reflected
in a Qur’an verse (Q 17:1), which depicts a “night journey” of the Prophet to the
“far[thest] place of supplication,” al-​masjid al-​aqṣā:39

subḥāna lladhī asrā bi-​ʿabdihi laylan mina l-​masjidi l-​ḥarāmi ilā l-​masjidi
l-​aqṣā lladhī bāraknā ḥawlahu li-​nuriyahu min āyātinā innahu huwa l-​
samīʿu l-​baṣīr

Glory to him who carried his servant by night from the sacred masjid to the
furthest masjid, whose precincts we have blessed, to show him our signs. He
is the hearing, the seeing

36.  Cf. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, 87–​103; cf. chap. 6, 208–212.
37.  Neuwirth, “Erste Qibla—​fernstes Masjid?”
38.  Duri, “Jerusalem.”
39.  The verse is discussed in terms of the history of cult in chap. 6, 220–222; cf. the abrogation of Jerusalem as
the direction of prayer, chap. 9, 334–337.
 Communal Formation in the Middle and Late Meccan Periods  287

The enigmatic verse can only be understood in light of Qur’anic conventions of par-
aphrase (al-​masjid al-​ḥarām = Mecca; alladhī bāraknā ḥawlahu = the Holy Land).40
The term ʿabd, “servant (of God),” is not reserved exclusively for the proclaimer but,
in view of its origin here, must have been coined to describe him. The verb asrā,
“travel at night,” is mostly used in the Qur’an to indicate the exodus of Moses.41
A geographical name for the place of destination does not occur, but the reference to
the “far[thest] place of worship” is clearly comprehensible in view of the new focus
on biblical history, and the qualification “whose precincts we have blessed” refers
elsewhere in the Qur’an to the Holy Land. The “far[thest] place of worship” is thus
not only the name of the sanctuary but also an indication of its location in relation
to the Kaaba.
But what does this verse of the Qur’an have to do with the direction of prayer
toward Jerusalem? The verse, isolated from its narrative progress by its hymnic ref-
erence to the experience of the Prophet,42 speaks cryptically of a journey by the pro-
claimer who, at his place of destination, will see “signs” āyāt—​an evocation of earlier
visions reported in suras 53 and 81, which also culminate in the vision of signs.43 The
reference to Exodus that resonates with the verb asrā—​the nightly exodus of Moses
(Q 20:77, 26:52, 44:23),44 conceived as happening at night, is phrased analogously—​
indicates further the experience of a miraculous liberation. That the “exodus” of
the proclaimer in Q 17:1 is not accomplished physically but rather should be inter-
preted metaphorically, is yielded from the Qur’anic image of the Prophet, who is not
granted a facility for miracles. The most important thing conveyed by the verse is
the liberation experienced by the proclaimer, in analogy to Moses, through God’s
action, his “exodus” from a scene of compulsion and his participation in a particular
God-​man communication.
If one presupposes that the direction of prayer toward Jerusalem was already
introduced at the time of the proclamation of the verse, then one can under-
stand the journey as an imagined extension of the gestural assumption of the
direction toward Jerusalem. The Islamic tradition offers the interpretation of a
dream vision, which followed immediately after the nightly prayer.45 The vision
as a miraculous completion of the prayer would fit well with Jerusalem as place
of destination, which according to the Jewish tradition is the target of prayer par

40.  Neuwirth, “Spiritual Meaning of Jerusalem.” Attempts to identify a heavenly Jerusalem, as is undertaken by
Busse, “Jerusalem in Muhammad’s Night Journey,” are not convincing, as they do not take into account the direction
of prayer, and above all because a verse in the same sura (17:93) vehemently denies the possibility of a journey to
heaven for the proclaimer; see also now Rubin, “Muhammad’s Night Journey.”
41.  Asrā, “to set forth at night,” occurs twice in the Qur’an to describe Lot’s nocturnal flight: Q 11:81 and 15:65.
It describes the Exodus three times: Q 20:77, 26:52 and 44:23.
42.  A story of the Jewish Temple follows, without reference to the transfer of the servant of God mentioned here.
43.  There the Prophet is equally referred to in the third person singular. The Sira thus associated the visions
with the nocturnal journey. See van Ess, “Vision and Ascension.”
44.  Cf. chap. 11, 408–411.
45. Al-​ Ṭabarī, Jāmiʿ al-​Bayān, vol. 15, 3.
288  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

excellence. Since the Babylonian exile, the temple was considered not only the
center of the world but also the place where all prayers converge, in order to rise
toward God.46 The Jerusalem temple is defined from the beginning, according
to Solomon’s prayer of dedication (1  Kings 8:23–​53), as a collection point for
all prayers, even and especially from worshipers in exile; it could also, for that
reason, be the geographical orientation for prayer for the new believers attached
to biblical tradition. With this direction of prayer, the early community of the
proclaimer gives symbolic expression to their belonging to the biblical tradition.
At the same time, the orientation toward Jerusalem represents a clear turning
point against the privileging of Mecca that was stressed frequently in the early
Meccan period (Q 90:1, 95:3, 105, 106). While in the early suras only Mecca
receives mention by name (apart from Sinai), one finds in the later Meccan suras
up to the hijra scarcely any more reference to Mecca, aside from Q 17:1, where
Mecca is contextualized with the Jerusalem temple. Instead, the Promised Land
is introduced as the space in which the biblical prophets acted. Suras of this pe-
riod culminate in the often-​repeated appeal to follow examples going back deep
into the history of the “spiritual forefathers,” the Israelites. Jerusalem, represented
through its temple, is the center of the space delineated by the scripture of the
banū Isrāʾīl. All prayers gravitate toward the direction of Jerusalem as their nat-
ural directional goal.47

8.2.4  Ambivalences: Jerusalem and the Christian Symbolism

of Its Temple
Jerusalem was not unknown to the hearers of the Qur’an at this time. The sixth-​
century mosaic maps of Madaba,48 one of the representations of Jerusalem that is
chronologically closest to the Qur’an, shows the Christian city with the Anastasis
church at its center, while the area that the Qur’an often thematizes, namely, the
Temple Mount, is only represented by its eastern outer wall or its gate. The mon-
uments to which the Qur’an refers, the Solomonic temple or its successor, the
Herodian temple, no longer belong to the existing buildings of the city repre-
sented on the map. They are not only architecturally absent but already obsolete
in the Christian perception of Jerusalem, from which the pre-​Christian history
is excluded. But it is just these sites that are the object of the Qur’anic memory,
which is further acted out in the assumption of the direction of prayer to the
masjid al-​aqṣā.
Yet the Qur’an does refer to the inter-​ testamental, “original” Christian
Jerusalem, but not without taking up a critical position toward it. The Qur’an

46.  Cf. Wensinck, The Ideas of the Western Semites.

47.  Neuwirth, “Erste Qibla.”
48.  See Küchler, Jerusalem: Ein Handbuch, especially the chart, 1268–​1269.
 Communal Formation in the Middle and Late Meccan Periods  289

indeed locates several narratives known from the New Testament or the
Apocrypha in Jerusalem, where the Jerusalem temple is spoken of as a vaulted
building similar to a palace, miḥrāb, which perhaps could also be interpreted
as a partial area of the temple covered by a canopy, as is found on Byzantine
icons. Sura 19, “Mary,” discusses the priest Zachariah, who works in the temple
(miḥrāb) and prays there for the appearance of an heir49—​a prayer whose fulfill-
ment introduces a quite different history from the tradition of the Gospels. The
Qur’an—​and possibly also already an exegesis preceding it that was hostile to
allegory—​here not only “corrects” the report of Luke but equally negotiates the
early Christian interpretation, according to which inter-​testament figures such as
Zachariah mark the transition of the temple cult into a church cult. According
to the early Christian interpretation, the church, allegorically embodied as Mary,
“inherits” the temple, represented by its priest. The Christian (apocryphal) tra-
dition has Mary thus grow up under the care of Zachariah in the temple50—​a
symbolically significant detail, which the Qur’an (in sura 3, “The Family of
Amram”) adopts as a narrative element, but without the implicit interpretation
of the Christian tradition. In that the Qur’an accepts the childhood of Mary in the
temple but does not treat this allegorically as a sense paradigm for the church but
instead as merely a local narrative frame, it “corrects” the Christological reading
of the history of Mary; it “dulls” its symbols,51 which are reinterpreted in the
Qur’an into realities, details of an individual life of the saint Mary. The Qur’anic
story of the temple as miḥrāb thus sets itself against Christian traditions. Its
Christological symbolism, which has no place in the worldview of the commu-
nity, is eliminated from the Qur’anic image of Jerusalem, while central Christian
characters are de-​allegorized and retrieved in an event-​historical connection.52
As against that, what is spoken of in the report about the fate of the Jewish
temple, that is, the Solomonic and then Herodian temple, which is referred to
in 17:4–​7, is not a miḥrāb but rather a masjid, “place of worship.” This termi-
nological difference raises the question how closely these two traditions were
bound up with one another in the consciousness of the community, a question
that can scarcely be answered in view of the primarily paraenetic interest of the
two references to the temple. It remains worthy of note that in Q 17:1 it is the
manifestation of the temple as masjid, reflecting Israelite-​Jewish tradition, not
its conception as miḥrāb tied up with Christian sacred history, that is given pri-
mary place. It is the Jewish temple, al-​masjid al-​aqṣā, which for the community

49.  The figure is formed in the Qur’an with reference to Luke 1:5–​25; the miraculous birth of the son is not
connected with Zachariah’s encounter with the angel, but rather with his prayer.
50.  On the textual and iconographic traditions, see Marx, “Mariology in the Qur’an.”
51.  The Medinan sura 3 makes this clear: the priest Zacharias—​who in the liturgical tradition figures symboli-
cally as the last representative of the temple cult—​is entrusted with the care of adolescent Mary, who symbolizes the
church. This relationship, which illustrates the succession temple-​church in Christian tradition, is constricted in the
Qur’an to a simple guardian-​ward relationship.
52.  Cf. chap. 10, 354–356.
290  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

is clearly held as the center of the Holy Land, toward which the worshipper sup-
plicates and toward which also the proclaimer was transferred in his spiritually
achieved exodus, his “night journey.”53

8.3  Mythical Narrative, Biblical History, and Qur’anic

“Corrective”: Mary and Jesus

8.3.1  Sura 19—​A Raḥmān Sura

How are the biblical stories in the Qur’an, which take on such a central position
from the middle Meccan period, to be read? How do communal confrontations
enter into the narratives? Although the groundwork for the recognition of their
less narrative than exegetical reading was laid by the works of Heinrich Speyer
and Josef Horovitz, few detailed studies of specific stories in light of preceding
exegetical traditions have been undertaken, and even fewer place the respective
stories in the context of an inner-​Qur’anic development.54 This is true also for one
of the biblical-​Qur’anic stories that is most frequently discussed in the research
(Q 19:1–​40), the narrative of Mary and Jesus.55
It is initially striking that, notwithstanding the numerous Christian traditions
reflected in the Qur’an,56 the figure of Jesus himself is not very prominent in the
Qur’an. At his first appearance, he does not figure independently but rather as
an accompanying figure in a story about his mother, and remains closely bound
up to her. The Qur’anic Jesus, ʿĪsā, bears the matronymic Ibn Maryam, “son of
Mary,” obviously a polemically motivated “overwriting” of his Christian title “Son
of God,” and this already signals his exclusively inner-​worldly role in the Qur’an.
The story of his life is not told coherently, but individual reports are scattered
throughout the entire Qur’an,57 without crystalizing into a coherent vita, as for
example in the case of Moses.
The story of Mary in the Qur’an is extraordinary also in other respects. It
includes the announcement of her motherhood, her delivery of Jesus, and

53.  The Sira tradition on the development of the Prophet’s journey replaces al-​masjid al-​aqṣā with bayt al-​
maqdis, Hebrew bet ha-​miqdash, which is related to the Jerusalem temple. In the context of the direction of prayer,
the Sira speaks of al-​Shām, Syria, thus employing the purely geographical term. Qibla corresponds to the Jewish
kawwana, the direction and intention of prayer. The etymological reference of qibla to the “fore,” the holy site in
front of the person praying, evokes Psalms 16:8 shiwwiti YHWH le-​negdi tamid, “I have set the Lord always before
me,” which is used in places of prayer as an inscription pointing in the direction of Jerusalem.
54.  On the current state of scholarship, see chap. 1.
55.  On the image of Mary and Jesus in the Qur’an, see Robinson, “Jesus,” and Stowasser, “Mary”; cf. also
Parrinder, Jesus in the Qur’an; McAuliffe, “Chosen of all Women”; Schedl, Muhammad und Jesus; Zahniser, “The
Word of God”; Neuwirth, “Mary and Jesus”; Bauschke, Jesus im Koran; cf. also chap. 9, 324–332.
56.  Cf. Andrae, Ursprung, Griffith, “Christians and Christianity”; McAuliffe, Qur’ānic Christians; Busse, Die
theologischen Beziehungen; Robinson, Christ in Islam; Bauschke, Jesus im Koran; Suhrmann, “Early Islam”; and
Lawson, Crucifixion.
57.  Jesus (ʿĪsā) is named nineteen times in the Meccan suras; the only extensive discussion of his role is found
in suras 19 (verses 1–​33) and 43 (verses 47–​65); short reminiscences occur in Q 21:91, 23:50, and 42:13.
 Communal Formation in the Middle and Late Meccan Periods  291

later—​in a Medinan text—​even her own birth, and the particular emphasis is
always put on Mary’s dignity as mother of a prophet, while her ritual and sexual
purity are so central that no significant interaction with other (human) protago-
nists is attributed to her. This particular representation of the two figures opens
the question of their interpretation for the Qur’anic community.
Mary and Jesus occur for the first time in sura 19, Maryam, “Mary,” one of the
so-​called Raḥmān suras.58 These suras, which total seven,59 and which on formal
grounds should be assigned to the middle Meccan period, set in place of rabb,
“Lord,” which was frequent as the name of God up to that point, al-​Raḥmān,
“the merciful.” Later, al-​Raḥmān is in turn replaced by Allāh—​a development
the background of which has not yet been adequately explained,60 as the par-
tial corpus of the Raḥmān suras still awaits a full study. For sura 19, at least, a
close relationship emerges with a further Raḥmān sura that engages—​though
without narrative—​similar points of contention, above all the role of God as fa-
ther:  namely, sura 43, “The Splendor.” In the Meccan suras, this debate is not
yet carried out with Christians, but rather with pagan opponents.61 In that the
communal reception of sura 19 is recorded in the somewhat later sura 43, whose
readings in turn triggered latter additions to sura 19, the view of the two suras
together will shed some light on the detour-​rich process of the Qur’anic procla-
mation, and should attest to a continuously sharpening communal conscious-
ness around the social and theological potential for conflict embedded in biblical
stories.
8.3.1.1  Formation and Later Growth of Proclamation
In terms of structure, sura 19 presents an exceptional case, in that it begins
straight away with a “scripture reading” or biblical narrative, without an argu-
mentative introductory part and introduced only by the giving of theme dhikru
raḥmati rabbika ʿabdahu Zakarīya, “reading from the [or: a recollection of the]
compassion of your Lord to his servant Zachariah.” The first part (verses 1–​65) is
a narrative unfolding of the story of Zachariah and his late-​born son John (1–​15),
then the story of Mary and Jesus (16–​40), then finally a series of short reports
about further prophets (41–​65). A second section of the sura follows (66–​98), in

58.  See Nöldeke, GdQ, 1:121. The Fātiḥa is also among the Raḥmān suras, which in Q 15 is presupposed to
already be in cultic use. The name of God, al-​Raḥmān, remains present in the text through the use of the bismillah,
whose position as preceding the texts of all the suras should have been fixed already during the proclaimer’s procla-
mation. Additionally, the bismillah seems to point to an early adoption of writing as a mnemonic aid.
59.  These are the suras 19, 20, 21, 25, 36, 43, and 67, plus sura 1, al-​Fātiḥa.
60.  The solution proposed by Al-​Azmeh, “From Alexandria to Bagdad,” which—​following the model of Old
Testament source analysis—​ascribes the use of the various names of God to a conflation of traditions with different
names of God that were joined retroactively, is not convincing in view of the interrelations between the suras.
61.  Mary and Jesus receive central attention in the Medinan sura 3: “The House of Amram,” Āl Imrān, a text
that shows traces of an intensified theological exchange with Christians, but without taking a polemic position on
particular Christian dogmas; Buhl, “Zur Koranexegese.” These kinds of polemics occur in later reminiscences, espe-
cially often in sura 4, in contexts that are not embedded in narratives.
292  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

the place of the “sermon” that would be required by the prayer service structure
after the “reading”; with thirty-​two verses, it is exactly proportional to the narra-
tive section that is twice its length.62
The sura stands out for its poetical shape; its verses of middle length bear the
striking rhyme in -​īya or -​ayya,63 which does not appear elsewhere in the Qur’an,
and which in the sermon section, from Q 19:75 on, is lightened to a looser but
still marked rhyme scheme.64 The individual narratives are not simply sequenced
one after another but linked according to shared motifs, such as the parent-​child
relationship, which is treated three times (and reflected negatively once in the
polemic against the fatherhood of God), or shared patterns of behavior such as
the repeated muteness or silence of protagonists. The narrative/​reading part of
the sura owes its solemn tone not least to unfamiliar poetic formulations, as in
Zachariah’s description of himself, which, apart from a strikingly expressive met-
aphor,65 also takes up a poetic convention of syntax:66 innī wahana l-​ʿaẓmu minnī
wa-​shtaʿala l-​raʾsu shayban, “My bones have grown weak and my hair is white”
(Q 19:4). In addition, we find tropes such as paronomasia (tajnīs), as for example
in verses 23, 79, 83, and 84; parallelism (verses 15, 20, 30–​31, and 33); and a chi-
astic construction (verse 13)—​in sum, these are phenomena that indicate a rela-
tively early composition, as Nöldeke already assumed.67
This impression of a particularly artful composition is disrupted, however,
by a verse group (verses 34–​40) that follows immediately on the story of Mary.
It bears the simple rhyme of later suras, -​ūn/​-​īn, and introduces the name
of God Allāh in place of al-​R aḥmān. Even more striking is the over-​long68
and prosaic verse 58, which closes the narrative sequence and in its content
shows itself to be an insertion of a Mary story from Medina.69 These kinds of
expansions of the text are not mere additions or glosses to a text established
in writing, as they have been understood in previous research, but rather they
demonstrate the continuous liturgical usage of the sura, which made it neces-
sary to adapt the text to the newly achieved insight into the theological impli-
cations of what is narrated.

62. Neuwirth, Studien zur Komposition, 269; on the verse divisions, see ibid., 93.
63.  On Qur’anic rhyme, see Neuwirth, Studien zur Komposition, 65–​123, and chap. 5, 187–189.
64.  Nöldeke’s argument in GdQ, 1:130, for a later dating of this second part, grounded in this observation, is
not convincing.
65.  The formulation ishtaʿala l-​raʾsu shayban does not appear in a concordance of ancient Arabic poetry; cf.
Arazi and Masalha, Concordance.
66.  Analytic expressions like al-​ʿaẓmu minnī in place of the simple ʿaẓmī are characteristic of poetic Arabic;
see Bloch, Vers und Sprache.
67. Nöldeke, GdQ(2), 130.
68.  Instead of the usual two to five, this encompasses a whole of seven short units of speaking, so-​called cola.
(A colon normally refers to a simple phrase matching a unit of breath; on colometric analysis of the Qur’an, see
Neuwirth, Studien zur Komposition, 117ff.)
69.  The verse is also recognized by the Islamic tradition as a later addition; see Nagel, Medinensische Einschübe.
 Communal Formation in the Middle and Late Meccan Periods  293

8.3.1.2  Verses 1–​33—​A “Reading” about Zachariah and Mary

As in the Gospel of Luke (Lk 1:5–​25), two miraculous birth stories are set in par-
allel in sura 19: that of John, called Yaḥyā in the Qur’an, and that of Jesus, who
remains unnamed within the story. Sura 19 begins with a scene localized in the
Jerusalem temple: the priest Zachariah prays there for an heir, one to carry on
his office. His request is fulfilled, but the son, John, will not carry on his priestly
office, but rather will be a prophet like Zachariah himself. But what stands in
the center of the early Christian reading of the story of Zachariah and Mary
is not thematized in the Qur’an: the turn in church history. With this turn the
temple cult as such comes to a standstill, and the church appears as its successor,
which is symbolized in the allegorical exegesis by the person of Mary.70 It is onto
Mary as an image of the church that the inheritance of the temple is transferred;
this is an idea that pervades the Syriac liturgical tradition, but which remains
wholly excluded in the Qur’an, even if a number of traces remain to indicate it.
It is difficult to decide whether the Qur’anic presentation—​which differs both
from the thrust of the Gospel of Luke, which binds the two miraculous births
together in order to establish John in the image of the “precursor” of Christ, and
from the liturgical tradition, which employs Mary allegorically as heiress of the
temple cult—​corresponds to a “corrective” produced by the community itself,
or whether the story was already widespread in this anti-​typological and anti-​
allegorical reading. In any case, verses 1–​33 represent an independent new for-
mation; Q 19:1–​15:

Kaf hāʾ ʿayn ṣād

A recalling of your Lord’s mercy toward his servant Zachariah
When he called out to his Lord a secluded call.
He said: My Lord, my bones have grown soft, my head is aflame with white
And in calling to you Lord I have never been miserable.
I fear my kinsmen after me and my wife is barren.
So give me some kin from you, to be my heir and the heir of the house of
Jacob, and make him pleasing to you, my Lord.
O Zachariah, we give you news of a boy whose name is Yaḥyā, we have
never given this name before him.
He said: Lord, how can I have a boy when my wife is barren and I have
reached an age of impotence?
He said: So has your Lord spoken: It is easy for me, I created you, before
you were nothing.
He said: Lord, give me a sign.
He said: Your sign is that you will not speak to the people for three full
nights.

70.  On the Christian-​messianic traces in the Qur’anic story of Mary, see chap. 10, 365–368.
294  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

So he came out from the sanctuary to his people and signaled to them to
glorify God in the morning and evening.
John, take the scripture with strength,
we granted him sound judgment as a child
and tenderness from us, and purity, and he was pious,
Dutiful to his parents, not arrogant or disobedient.
Peace be upon him the day he was born, the day he dies, and the day he is
brought back to life.

Unlike in the report of the Gospel, the Qur’anic narrative does not bind both
stories to a single event. They are linked less as elements of the same divine plan
than through analogous motifs: the miraculous birth of a child and the tempo-
rary speechlessness of the father/​mother. John is gifted to the aged Zachariah
and his infertile wife, while Mary’s son is born without the participation of a
male partner. Both figures remain mute for a limited time. The priest Zachariah,
who works in the temple, miḥrāb,71 experiences the muteness imposed on him
for three days as a sign of God’s truthful intent to work the wonder promised
to him. He inspires others to speak:  his community should praise God in the
morning and evening (verse 11).72 Mary is also compelled to remain mute, in
order to guard against the consequences of her socially taboo delivery out of
wedlock. Her newborn child will speak in her place. Her muteness for its part
works a wonder. Both stories carry a similar miraculous outcome: in the story of
Zachariah, a voice speaks, perhaps from the angels, directly to the newborn John
and prophecies to him his future. In the case of Jesus, the corresponding words
are placed—​no less miraculously—​into the mouth of the infant itself in the first
person. Both the son of Zachariah and the son of Mary are destined to become
prophets. They will have access to the scripture (Q 19:12, 30), be gentle, and show
reverence for their parents (verses 14 and 32). Zachariah’s son is granted special
tenderness, ḥanān—​a play on words that seems to go back across linguistic bor-
ders to his original name, Yoḥanan (verse 13). Both are given the obligation to
give alms, zakāh (verses 12 and 31), and are honored with a formula of blessing
(eulogy) that is added to their name.
Notwithstanding these commonalities, Mary’s story is more complex than
that of Zachariah—​above all, because it clearly discards allegorical interpreta-
tions and reshapes mythical motifs. This appears already in the annunciation ep-
isode, Q 19:16–​21:

71.  The temple is called miḥrāb only in a Christian context (Q 19:11; 3:37, 39; 3:37). It appears elsewhere as
masjid (Q 17:1ff.).
72.  This praise of God occupies the place of the hymn, which according to Lk 1:67–​79 is spoken by Zacharias
himself and which is in ecclesiastical liturgy part of the morning praise of the Benedictus. It has its equivalent in
Luke’s Mary hymn, the Magnificat (Lk 1:46–​56), which is recited in the evening. The Qur’anic insistence on both
liturgical times “mornings and evenings” for the recitation of the praise of God may possibly reflect an already ex-
isting Christian tradition. On the history of both psalms, see Flusser, “The Magnificat.”
 Communal Formation in the Middle and Late Meccan Periods  295

And Mary in the writing, when she withdrew from her people to an
eastern place.
She took up a veil between her and them
and we sent to her our spirit, which appeared to her as a shapely man.
She said: I take refuge from you in the compassionate, if you are pious.
He said: I am a messenger from your Lord to give you a pure boy.
She said: How can I have a boy when no man has touched me, and I have not
been wanton?
He said: your Lord said this: it is easy for me. We will make him a sign for the
people and a mercy from us—​and it was a matter ordained.

When the divine spirit, rūḥ, comes near to her, Mary has already withdrawn from
her kin to an “eastern place,” makān sharqī (verse 16). What appears in the Qur’an
to be an arbitrary localization is the result of the de-​allegorizing of a Christian tradi-
tion, related to the symbolic interpretation of Mary as the temple. The closed eastern
gate of the temple, the closing of which was decreed by God himself according to Ez
44:1–​2, will only be opened by the Messiah according to Jewish and later Christian
tradition. The early church (Hieronymos, Ambrosius) rendered this prophecy to
Christ and thereby Mary as his virgin bearer: solus Christus clausas portas vulvae vir-
ginalis aperuit. Haec est porta orientalis clausa . . . ” “Christ alone opened the closed
doors of the virgin womb. That is, the locked eastern gate [of the temple].”73 In the
Qur’an, Mary is still connected with the eastern place, but, now detached from that
symbolism, it becomes rather a topographic detail, a station on her way to the wastes
in which she will give birth.
She hides herself from her kin,74 when the spirit comes near to her in the
form of a beautiful youth—​not an angel, as in Luke. Paying no heed to her
defenses, he reveals himself to be a divine messenger and unveils his assign-
ment, to give her a “pure boy.”75 There is no word at this phase of the narrative
about Mary’s divine election. At the startling announcement of a pregnancy, she
receives—​unlike in Luke—​no clarification, but the message is limited instead to
the mere reference to God’s omnipotence, which was already adduced to dispel
Zachariah’s doubt in verse 9. Only at the end of the story is the promise given
that the child will become a sign for mankind and an example of divine mercy.76

73.  See the testimonies from Ambrose and Jerome in Dettinger, “Beiträge,” 33. The allegory is primarily estab-
lished liturgically. On the allegorical dimension of the Mary figure and its Qur’anic traces, cf. chap. 9, 365–367, and
Marx, “Mariology in the Qur’an.”
74.  “She shielded herself with a veil /​with a curtain in front of her” could be a reminiscence of the Mary story
in the proto-​Gospel, where Mary weaves a curtain for the temple. In the Qur’an this detail was severed from the
symbolic temple tradition and transferred into a “pragmatic” narrative element.
75.  A textual variant transmitted by Warsh, li-​yahabaki, “so he may give you,” makes God himself instrumental
in the event.
76.  The episode is summed up again in a somewhat later text, which de-​personifies the spirit, portrayed as a
life-​giving power that induces Mary’s pregnancy: wa-​llatī aḥsanat farjahā fa-​naffakhnā fīhā min rūḥinā wa-​jaʿalnāhā
296  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

Mary’s otherworldly, liminal situation reaches its climax with the experience of
birth itself; Q 19:22–​33:

So she carried him and withdrew with him to a distant place. Pains of
labor came to her under the trunk of a palm.
She said: I wish I had died before this and was completely forgotten.
He called out from beneath her:  do not be sad. Your Lord has made a
brook to flow beneath you. Shake the trunk of the palm toward you
and it will drop soft fresh dates. Eat and drink and feel soothed, and
if you see any person, tell them: I have vowed to the compassionate a
fast, and will not speak a word today to any human being.
And she came to her people, carrying him.
They said: Mary, you have done a terrible thing!
Sister of Aaron, your father was not bad man, nor was your mother
wanton.
She pointed to him.
They said: How do we speak to a child in his cradle?
He said: I am God’s servant. He brought me the writing and made me a
Prophet, and made me blessed wherever I may be. He charged me with
prayer and almsgiving as long as I live, and to be dutiful to my mother.
And he did not make me arrogant and miserable. Peace be upon me
the day I was born, the day I die, and the day I am brought back to life!

Coordinates of time and space are lacking in the mythical story; the scene of the
birth is not Bethlehem during the Herodian census but a “secluded place,” makān
qaṣī. As labor overtakes her, she flees to the trunk of a palm.77 The tree shows it-
self immediately to be miraculous. A voice becomes audible from below—​that of
the child or an angel. It grants her courage, and a brook opens beneath her as the
tree gives fresh dates. She also becomes safe from persecution, since her son will
speak for her, while she herself withdraws from the conflict by a vow of silence.
The promise is fulfilled; the newborn gives himself as a prophet and—​avoiding
every claim to divinity—​acknowledges himself as servant of God. He attests,
like the angel to John/​Yaḥyā before him, only his particular divinely endowed
distinctions.
Here the story breaks off, without the religious-​historical dimension of the
event being treated. In the center stands the miracle worked by God’s omnipo-
tence, that is, his raḥma, mercy, which, as the etymology of the word raḥma from
raḥm, “womb,” already attests, has a natural affinity with the areas of life defined

wa-​bnahā āyatan li-​l-​ʿālamīn, “And she who safeguard her shame, we breathe our spirit into her and make her and
her son into a symbol for mankind (Q 21:91).
77.  The tree is introduced with a definite article, as it is apparently known to the listeners.
 Communal Formation in the Middle and Late Meccan Periods  297

as feminine. The story of Jesus in the Qur’an is embedded from the very begin-
ning in the story of his mother.

8.3.2  The Text as Conversation between Differing Traditions

While the report about Zachariah hews closely to Lk 1:8–​25 and 1:57–​80, the
story of Mary, who remains passive, stands essentially closer to the apocryphal
Protevangelium of Jacob.78 This text, of great influence in Late Antiquity, depicts
chiefly the image of Mary, whose identity as the daughter of Joachim and Anna,
two saints of the church, goes back to this writing. The image of Mary in the
proto-​gospel is clearly different from that of Luke. It knows no self-​conscious
fiat, “Let it be” (Lk 1:38), the assent of Mary treated as so important in the later
Mariology of the eastern churches. Also lacking is the Magnificat (Lk 1:46–​56),
Mary’s praising of the power of God that overwhelms all. What is stressed rather
is her ritual purity, later her virginity79—​she is held apart from mankind already
during her earliest childhood and then raised in the temple, which she only
leaves as an adolescent.
Also in the Qur’anic version of sura 19, Mary is more the medium of a divine
plan than its courageous protagonist. In this birth story, she seems to be transfig-
ured into a mythical personage, who is saved from death by a miraculous palm.
The episode, which is lacking in Luke and in the proto-​gospel, clearly recalls the
story of Hagar and Ismail from Genesis 21:9–​21, where an angel shows Hagar the
saving palm and well. But, as Suleiman Mourad has shown, the episode also has
a Christian parallel in a further apocryphal gospel, Pseudo-​Matthew,80 compiled
between the sixth and eighth centuries.81 This apocryphon sets the palm miracle
in connection to the flight of the holy family to Egypt. The context is conceivably
different: in Pseudo-​Matthew, it is an experience in which Joseph, Mary, and the
child, who at this time is capable of action, take part, while in the Qur’an it is
the delivery of a feminine figure isolated from all human interaction. Mourad
attempts, however, to produce a plausible connection, for which he must adduce
further ancient texts.
Mourad is able to show that the connection of the palm to the divine per-
sonage in the case of the Mary-​Jesus story is not unique. In Greek mythology,
the palm is connected to the cult of Apollo, and there is a sanctified palm at the
temple of Apollo at Delos. Its honoring goes back to the legend of Apollo’s birth,

78.  For a dating of the Gospel of James to around 160 ce, see Berger and Nord, Das Neue Testament, 1319–​
1333; Hock, The Infancy Gospels; Schneemelcher, Neutestamentliche Apokryphen, 277–​290.
79.  On the role of virginity, see Foskett, A Virgin Conceived. In the Qur’an, the centrality of her virginity is
demonstrated not only in sura 19 but also in the proclamation in Q 21:91, where Mary isn’t referred to by name but
rather by her honorific, wa-​llatī aḥṣanat farjahā, “she who safeguard her shame.” This predication evokes a liturgical
encomium of Mary in the celebratory liturgy of the Dormition of the Mother of God: fī mīlādiki ḥafiẓti l-​batūlīyata
wa-​ṣuntihā, “In childbirth, you protected your virginity and kept it.”
80. Schneemelcher, Neutestamentliche Apokryphen, 306–​308.
81.  Mourad, “From Hellenism,” 207.
298  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

according to which his mother, Leto, gave birth at the trunk of a palm tree. Leto,
fleeing from the wrathful Hera, took refuge on the secluded and rocky island of
Delos, where she gave birth to Apollo under a palm on the bank of the Inopus
River. Mourad, who traces the reception of the story through Greek and Latin
literature, arrives at the conclusion that

in any case, the palm tree story in Qur’an 19.22–​24 is an obvious rework-
ing of Leto’s labor in the Greek tradition. It is about a distressed pregnant
woman (Leto/​Mary) who seeks an isolated place (Delos/​a remote spot),
sits by the trunk (Greek: premnon, Arabic: jizʿ) of a palm tree next to a
river (Inopus/​stream), and delivers a holy child (Apollo/​Jesus). . . . The
alm tree story in Pseudo-​Matthew seems to be an obvious later rework-
ing of the version that found its way, in concise form, into the text of the
Qurʾān. It preserves the second element, namely the palm tree miracle,
but deletes the association of the birth-​place of Jesus with the palm tree.
The canonical gospels are almost silent about the circumstances of the
birth of Jesus. All that is known comes from Luke 2.1–​20, which mentions
nothing about Mary’s labor other than the following:  ‘While they were
there [in Bethlehem], the time came for her to deliver her child. And she
gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and
laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.’ It
is not unlikely, then, that some early Christians, ignorant of the Gospel of
Luke or unconvinced by it, circulated a story that was meant to describe
the circumstances of Mary’s labor and delivery. . . . A possible group might
be the Christian community of Najrān, in West Arabia, who used to wor-
ship a palm tree before converting to Christianity. Changing the Leto/​
Apollo palm tree story to fit Mary/​Jesus would have permitted them to
keep part of their belief, yet give it a Christian tone.82

Their connection of the palm story with Mary would then—​ according to
Mourad—​have as its model both the Qur’anic version and the apocryphal ver-
sion from Pseudo-​Matthew.
Whatever roads the transference may have taken (Mourad does not go beyond
hypotheses), according to Mourad the Qur’anic Mary carries traits of the presen-
tation in the Protevangelium of Jacob, and those of a local Arabian birth story.
The integration of the palm in this story harmonizes with the ancient Arabian
adoration of the tree as a symbol of feminine beauty.83
Despite her virgin birth, the Qur’anic Mary is therefore very distant from the
role she plays in the Christian tradition, where she is connected to historical sites

82.  Mourad, “From Hellenism,” 213. A recollection of Greek mythology can also be recognized in the Qur’anic
images of the virgins in Paradise; see Saleh, “The Etymological Fallacy.”
83.  See Rückert, Amrilkais, 23; Neuwirth, “Das Gedicht als besticktes Tuch,” 116.
 Communal Formation in the Middle and Late Meccan Periods  299

and events, and above all possesses an individual personality. And she is just
as distant from the early Christian allegorical tradition. The traces of her sym-
bolic connection to the temple, which resonate in her address as “sister of Aaron”
(verse 28) or her flight to an “Eastern place,” remain without function.84 Symbols
are reinterpreted into narrative elements—​a reduction that is balanced out by a
new form of myth creation, opening new dimensions of meaning. Thus, sura 19
is, at least to a greater degree than any other Qur’an text, bound up with feminine
associations.85 Already the name of God “Raḥmān,” which occurs in this sura six-
teen times, that is, more frequently than in any other sura, is derived from a root
that immediately denotes the female womb, raḥm. Correspondingly, two narra-
tives of the sura revolve around motherhood, and the most important one even
around a mother’s delivery. The word raḥma, “compassion,” another derivative
of the same root, is first introduced in sura 19, and occurs twice, in verses 2 and
21, and a third instance (verse 13) is paraphrased with ḥanān, “empathy, mercy.”
The sura orchestrates this femininely connoted virtue, while also putting forth an
aural-​etymological connection between the created sphere, occupied not least by
Mary presented as mother, and the transcendent sphere, where al-​Raḥmān, “the
compassionate,” holds sway.

8.3.3  The Unexpanded Sura: A Hagiographic Image of Jesus

The child Jesus, who speaks in Q 19:30 on behalf of his mother, names himself a
“servant of God,” ʿabd Allāh. The statement is not to be understood in the sense
of an anti-​Christological confirmation of his purely human nature, but rather
follows other self-​pronouncements that are transmitted by other Prophets (cf.
Dtn 5:34, Neh 10:29, Rev 15:3).86 The “scripture” (Q 19:30) granted to Jesus cor-
responds to the specific Qur’anic conception not of four gospels about Jesus but
rather a revelation given to him himself, which is treated as of equal rank to the
Torah and Qur’an.87 Jesus’s statements about the received blessing (verse 31) and
its proper benedictory formula (verse 33) recall Luke 11:27–​28.88 The mention of
the death of Jesus (Q 19:33) may ultimately, in view of the middle Meccan verse
group Q 43:59–​61 in which Jesus figures as “sign of the [final] hour,”89 count not

84.  On this de-​allegorizing tendency in the Qur’an, cf. also chap. 9, 365–368.
85.  A dissertation on the gender aspects of the story of Mary and the “gendered speech” used there was com-
pleted by Husn Abboud in 2008 at the University of Toronto (“The Qur’anic Story of Mary”). A translation of it into
Arabic is available: Abboud, Qissat al-​Saiyida Maryam fī al-​Qurʾān.
86. Busse, Die theologischen Beziehungen, 127.
87.  Griffith, “The Gospel in Arabic,” discusses in detail both of these perceptions of the Gospel, against the
backdrop of the still missing Arabic translation of the Gospels at the time of the Qur’an’s emergence; see also,
Griffith, “Gospel.”
88. Busse, Die theologischen Beziehungen, 128.
89.  Instead of the canonical Qur’anic reading, ʿilmun li-​l-​sāʿati, “knowledge about the hour,” Jesus’s qualifica-
tion should rather be read as ʿalamun li-​l-​sāʿati, “sign of the hour.” The non-​canonical interpretation is ascribed to
Ikrima; see Jeffery, Materials, 173.
300  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

as a historical event but an eschatological one. For, according to the Qur’anic

presentation (Q 4:157–​158), Jesus did not die on the cross but was instead raised
up to heaven.90 According to later Islamic hagiography, he will return at the end
of times and defeat the Antichrist, and only then will he die. This popular con-
ception, which is evoked in Q 43:61, can also be presupposed for sura 19. In its
essential part, the sura treats Jesus not as a figure acting in time but rather as an
icon of pure piety—​exceeded in this only by his mother.

8.4  Anti-​Pagan Polemic

8.4.1  Politicization of the Image of Jesus: Early Polemics

against Jesus as Son of God
It is surprising that in a later addition to the story of Mary and Jesus, Jesus is
bound up with theological doctrines. He no longer remains limited to the rank
of a servant of God, entrusted with the two essential imperatives of love of God
(symbolized through prayer [ṣalāh]) and love of man (symbolized through the
giving of alms [zakāh]), which were attributed to him in the original form of the
sura. In the commenting verse group Q 19:34–​40, he becomes a theologically
disputed figure with a firm motto (Q 19:36, taken over from Q 43:64), frequently
repeated in later suras, which remains connected to him also in Medina (Q 3:51,
5:117):  “God is my Lord and your Lord, serve him. That is the right way.” In
slightly modified form (in Q 21:92 and 23:52), this carries echoes of the first com-
mand of the Decalogue (Ex 20:2–​23),91 which is cited by Jesus at the end of the
temptation story (Mt 4:10): “You should worship God, your Lord, and him alone”
(Ex 20:3). This uncompromising confession of the unity of God excludes, ac-
cording to Qur’anic understanding, a father-​son relation between God and Jesus.
The verse group 19:34–​40, appended to the story, thus indicates a state of recep-
tion in which the recitation of the largely mythical Mary-​Jesus story was already
supported by discursive commentaries.

This is Jesus son of Mary: a statement of truth about which they dispute.
It is not for God to take a child—​Glory to Him! When he determines any
matter, he merely says “be,” and it is.
God is my Lord and your Lord, so serve Him,
This is a straight path.
But the sects fell into dispute among themselves. Woe to those who do not
believe in the spectacle of a terrifying day.
How well they shall hear, how well they shall see, on the day they come
before us! But the wicked today are plunged in manifest delusion.

90.  See Lawson, Crucifixion.

91. Busse, Die theologischen Beziehungen, 133.
 Communal Formation in the Middle and Late Meccan Periods  301

Warn them of the day of regret, when judgment is passed, they are
inattentive and do not believe
We will inherit the earth and what is upon it, and to us they will return.

Right at the beginning of the commentary, the child, unnamed up to that point,
is identified. In addition to his name, ʿĪsā, he bears the matronymic Ibn Maryam,
“son of Mary,”92 which is easily recognized as an overwriting of the Christian title
“son of God.” With this “official” introduction of the person of Jesus, the mythical
discourse is left behind and the figure obtains political relevance, which plays
a role in the social reality of the community. For Jesus son of Mary /​ʿĪsā ibn
Maryam is no longer only a sign of divine compassion (verse 21), but rather the
object of dispute (verse 34). He is followed by an opposing group, which clearly
assigns Jesus to a pantheon93—​an insinuation that is disputed by the argument
that God can create everything immediately through his word, and therefore
does not need to bear a child (verse 35). Jesus refers to himself—​in the slogan
taken over from Q 43:64—​as servant of God (Q 19:36). The person of Jesus is
not only an object of dispute in the present but was also this in the past, where a
schism came about after his death (verse 37). These statements about Jesus are not
yet polemics against Christian beliefs, but rather, as a comparison with sura 43
shows, they still stand in the context of the confrontation with pagan opponents.

8.4.2  Mutual Coinage of Two Texts: Suras 19 and 43

The two closely related suras, 19 and 43, both dealing with Jesus, clearly devel-
oped in dispute with each other. Sura 43 shows itself already as later than sura
19, through its new self-​authorization, its triumphal beginning94 that proclaims
the Arabic dressing of the message. A similar indication is made by the excerpt
of a citation from sura 19 in sura 43, the final verse of which (verse 89) transfers
Abraham’s reaction to his father’s idolatry from sura 19 (verse 47) verbatim to the
proclaimer. Both say to the idolaters, or the pagan opponents, “farewell,” salām.
But the most significant step forward that sura 43 shows in comparison to sura 19
is the new sovereign position that the proclaimer adopts against the insinuation
that God might have children. In sura 19 (verses 88–​91), he reacts while emo-
tionally overwhelmed to the shocking insinuation, Q 19:88–​91:

And yet they say: “The Merciful has taken to himself a son!”

You have uttered a thing most terrible
The heavens shake when you mention it,

92.  This association only appears once in the New Testament (Mk 6:3), whereas Jesus is elsewhere associated
only with Joseph (Lk 3:23, 4:22; Jo 1:45, 6:42). Both of Jesus’s genealogies go through Joseph (Mt 1;1–​17) or begin
with him (Lk 3:23–​38); cf. Bauschke, Jesus im Koran, 22.
93.  See verse 88. In Q 19:80, Ibn Masʿūd reads the collective wild instead of the individual walad; see Jeffery,
Materials, 59.
94.  See Wild, “An Arabic Recitation.”
302  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

The earth splits apart,

The mountains stagger and collapse,
When they ascribe a son to the Merciful.

But in sura 43, verse 81, he has gained the sovereign status of a superior dialogue
partner:

Say: If the merciful had a son, I would be the first of his worshippers.

In sura 43, the central theme is polemic against the worship of several divinities
occurring in various forms, whether in the form of adoption of feminine divini-
ties as angels (Q 43:15–​22) or in blind adherence to the ways of the father, which
Abraham refuses in exemplary fashion (Q 43:26–​28). In this context, we also see
Jesus’s status as child of God, a theme that the pagan opponents take up eagerly,
Q 43:57–​58:

And when the son of Mary is adduced as an example, behold, your people
are loud in protest, and say: What! Are our gods better, or is he? They ad-
duce his example only in order to argue. Indeed, they are a people fond
of dispute.

This does not refer to the Christological problematic but rather to the ranking of
Jesus among the pagan pantheon, in analogy to the “daughtership of God” that
is thematized in sura 53, which the pagan opponents themselves claim for their
goddesses. “Are our gods better, or is he?” (Q 43:58)—​with this challenging ques-
tion, the pagan Meccans signal their leveling of every special status of Jesus. In
the end, though, Jesus himself obtained the word in order to establish unity, yet
he himself set loose the disintegration of his community into sects (al-​aḥzāb); Q
43:63–​65:

When Jesus came with evident signs, he said: I come to you with wisdom,
and to make clear to you some of what you differ about. Be pious before
God and obey me. God is my Lord and your Lord, so worship him, for this
is the straight path.
But the sects among them fell into dispute—​woe to the wicked from the
torment of a painful day!

It is not only that sura 43 is based on the older sura 19—​in contrast, the polemical
addition in sura 19 is also due to the Jesus-​polemic from sura 43. Thus, Q 19:37 is
almost identical with Q 43:65; the immediately preceding statement of Jesus in Q
19:36 corresponds in turn almost precisely to Q 43:64. But above all, the discus-
sion in Q 43:57–​65 provides a situational grounding for the full naming of Jesus,
and thus makes the establishment of Jesus’s servanthood to God comprehensible
as a logical answer to an argument, while the corresponding information about
Jesus in sura 19 is introduced abruptly and stands in no logical context within
 Communal Formation in the Middle and Late Meccan Periods  303

the narrative. The verse group Q 43:57–​65 shows itself to be the model for the
stylistically isolated and argumentatively context-​free verse group Q 19:34–​40.
Their addition to sura 19 seems to have become necessary, after the later sura 43
uncovered the polemical potential that was linked to Jesus in confrontation with
the pagan Meccans. Every new recitation of the originally poetically told story
of Mary and Jesus was now exposed to challenging questions; defensive argu-
mentative strategies were required—​even if the unique poetic composition in the
Qur’an was broken up by these practical-​discursive insertions, and the “recita-
tion” lost some of its ceremonial quality.
Sura 19 in its unexpanded form shows hardly any interest in the nature of Jesus.
It does not revolve at all around Jesus, whose birth story says much less about him
than it does about his mother. It is first in sura 4395 that ʿĪsā ibn Maryam enters
the stage as a significant religious-​political figure, but still without Christological
symbolism, as an object of dispute among the pagan Meccans, who bring him
into the debate as a rival to their divinities, and the new community, who accept
no family of Gods. After he has become the object of dispute, he later enters into
a new religious-​political role in sura 19, in order to dispel any suspicion that
the son of Mary could be accepted by the community as the son of God.96 The
polemical verse group documents the disputes with pagan opponents that had
become a daily event in middle Meccan times, disputes no longer having to do
with simple belief and unbelief but with concrete points of contention. The new
situation required that potential for eventual conflict had to be treated in refer-
ences to sacred history, so that in some cases a disambiguating position had to be
taken up through “commentary.”
8.4.2.1  Further Prophet Stories
The polemical-​explanatory verse group Q 19:34–​40 interrupts a series of prophet
stories. One among them—​also about a father-​child relationship—​is closely
linked to the Zachariah-​Mary story, namely, the confrontation of Abraham
with his father (Q 19:41–​50). As an obedient son, Abraham dissuades his fa-
ther from idolatry but must become resigned to his choice and part with him
peacefully: qāla salāmun ʿalayka, “He said, farewell” (Q 19:47). Like Mary, who
left behind her kin, he renounces the genealogical bind, in order to enter into a
transcendent bond. The sequence of Prophet narratives proceeds with a story
about the close relation of Moses to God (verses 51–​53) and a brief mention
of Ismail (who does not appear here as Abraham’s son, verses 54–​55) and Idrīs
(verses 56–​57). The narrative part of the sura closes with an isolated direct speech

95.  It is only mentioned three more times in the Meccan suras, twice in the context of other messengers (Q
42:13, Abraham, Moses, and Jesus; Q 6:85, Zacharias, Jesus, and Elias). In Q 23:50, Jesus is figured with his mother
(ʿĪsā bnu Maryam wa-​ummuhu); all references are late Meccan.
96.  These findings are corroborated further through the contextualization of sura 19 with Q 43:16–​29; see
Neuwirth, “Imagining Mary—​Disputing Jesus.”
304  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

of the angels (verse 64), who confirm that they are entirely dependent on God’s
instructions—​an implicit rejection of their status as the daughters of God, which
was disputed in detail in some early suras.97 The closing verse of the first part of
the sura is an encouragement to the proclaimer to carry his service of God pa-
tiently forward.

8.4.3  A Later Discourse? The Prophetic Succession

But before this “end credit” to the narrative part, the narrative sequence is brought
together in a confirmation of the special status of the Prophet—​with a verse that
in turn attests to a later new reading of the sura, Q 19:58:

These are, of Prophets, the ones on whom God bestowed his blessings
from among the progeny of Adam, from those we carried with Noah,
from the progeny of Abraham and Israel, and from those whom we guided
and elected. When the verses of the merciful are recited to them, they fall
down in prostration and weep.

The idea that certain prophets form a group belonging together is wholly for-
eign to the context of sura 19. Not only do we lack the term “prophets”—​in the
plural nabīyūna, anbiyāʾ—​but the whole concept of a divine project of prophecy,
embodied in different figures legitimized by genealogy or election, stands outside
the horizon of Meccan prophetology. It first becomes relevant in Medina, where
it is closely connected to the depiction of the holy family or the House of Amram,
the Āl ʿImrān.
At the time of the proclamation of the unexpanded sura 19, the community
had no knowledge of the high value that accrued to the family of Mary and Jesus
as founders of the Christian tradition in the Medinan period, a ranking that, as
the relevant sura (sura 3), “House of Imran,” shows, was only rivaled by the found-
ers of the Abrahamic, that is, Jewish tradition.98 But after the Christians standing
in the tradition of Mary and Jesus are recognized as elected—​God elected among
men Adam and Noah, the House of Abraham, and the House of Amram (Āl
ʿImrān), Q 3:33—​they can no longer be missing from the list of the privileged and
had to be added into the early suras as well. The addition in Q 19:58, required by
the Medinan discourse of Prophetic succession, legitimizes the family of Mary,
who are no longer recognizable through genealogy but rather through her pure
preservation and chastity: “And such as those that we have rightly guided and
elected, if our signs are recited, they fall down in prostration and weep.” The
later raising of the Christians into the rank of the elected shows that the sura was

97.  The angels already played a role in a late Meccan addition to the early sura 53; her status is a matter of con-
troversy in Q 43:19, a text that is closely related to sura 19. They also appear in the Raḥmān sura 21 (verses 26–​29),
where they are presented as entirely subordinate to God. For further religious contexts for the angels and their
disputed responsibilities, see Schäfer, Rivalität.
98.  Neuwirth, “The House of Abraham.”
 Communal Formation in the Middle and Late Meccan Periods  305

interpreted in retrospect in terms of the history of the emergence of Christianity,

and must therefore have been adapted in its repeated recitation at Medina to the
newly achieved communal self-​positioning in view of the Christians.
8.4.3.1  The Polemic-​Paraenetic Sura Part—​“Sermon” and Conclusion
The final part of the sura (verses 66–​98) first argues against unbelief about the
Final Judgment (verses 66–​77) and complains of the lack of respect for the Qur’an
performance (verses 73–​74). It next addresses the fleeting value of wealth and
progeny (walad) and their worthlessness in face of the judgment (verses 75–​80).
The main thrust, however, is the assumption of divinities (āliha) in addition to
God (verses 81 and 87). It is in this context that the unbelievers are mentioned,
with the pronouncement ittakhadha l-​Raḥmān waladan, “The merciful took
on a child” (verse 77). This is not an evocation of the Christian dogma of Jesus
being the son of God, but rather, in view of the use of walad for progeny in ge-
neral, a polemic against the pagan pantheon, in which the highest God possessed
progeny. The saying could allude to the daughters of God, which were claimed by
the unbelievers (Q 53:19–​21).
The second part of the sura reverses the positive image of the parent-​child re-
lation that is central in the first part, in that it displays the blasphemous character
of the projection of such a relationship onto God. The short confirmation of rev-
elation, which concludes the sura, again shows the tension, so characteristic for
the sura, between muteness (verses 10 and 26) and speech (Q 19:3–​4 30.48.52)
that is “understandable” and “hearable”:

We made it easy on your tongue to give tidings to the pious, and to warn
a people who harbor malice. How many generations before you we have
destroyed! Do you perceive any one of them, or hear from them a sound?
(Q 19:97–​98)

8.5  New Homiletic Instruments: Morality Speeches

and Parables/​L ikenesses

8.5.1  An “Emblem of Prophethood”

In the late Meccan suras, we see a gradual transformation of the earlier suras,
which were structured on the model of a prayer service, into complex composi-
tions, in which the individual parts recall sermons. A means of presentation of
this homiletically marked sura part is the likeness/​parable. The Qur’anic moral
likenesses and narratives, of which many appear at first glance to be related to
Gospel texts, are, despite extensive collections of the materials,99 still largely
unresearched. Above all, their position in the Qur’an as a new hermeneutical

99.  See Lohmann, “Gleichnisse im Koran”; Sister, “Metaphers und Vergleiche”; Buhl, “Vergleichungen.”
306  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

element has not yet been illuminated. The Qur’anic designation mathal seems to
have become a technical term at a certain point, a term that named an exeget-
ical pragmatics, and perhaps also a reference to the parable speeches of the older
religions.100 It is this linking of the mathal to the development of the community
and the developing prophetic self-​understanding that still awaits description.
Illustrative stories, which are similar to a likeness or parable but not named as
mathal, occur already in one of the last early Meccan suras, and at numerous
points in middle Meccan suras. On the other hand, the parable narrative, in-
tended explicitly as mathal, develops first in the late Meccan period and remains
a striking characteristic of Qur’anic speech throughout the Medinan period.
The Qur’anic mathal, intended as such,101 could be termed an “emblem of
prophethood”—​to employ a term coined by John Wansbrough. Wansbrough,
who based his form-​critical studies on the observation that the Qur’an adopts
fundamental elements of biblical prophet speech, includes among the “emblems
of prophethood” the employment of great themes such as revelation, exile, and
promise,102 but the parable or likeness also deserves to be mentioned here, as
it is typical of both prophet speech and also, perhaps primarily, the speech of
wise men. Although the specific narrative-​paraenetic form of the parable or like-
ness occurs also in “profane” literary genres, including ancient Arabic poetry, its
striking presence in certain biblical books—​above all the “Solomonic corpus” of
wisdom (Song of Songs, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes)—​led it to become a distin-
guishing mark of biblical speech, which, as is known, was in later times set wholly
as an equal to prophetic speech. Thus, it is no wonder that the form of the par-
able among the hearers of Jesus inspired wonderment as prophetic speech: “Since
Jesus has accomplished this speech [the Sermon on the Mount in parables], the
people were shocked at his teaching, for he taught them as one who possessed
power [hos exousian ekhon], not like their book teachers” (Mt 7:28–​29).103 The
form of the parable was not therefore considered immediately equivalent to the
speech of the “exegetes,” but rather was considered a charismatic privilege, a
symbol of power of the prophets104—​despite the problem of it being not immedi-
ately comprehensible.
Parable discourse seems to have been perceived with more skepticism in
roughly contemporary Jewish circles. Haggai Ben-​Shammai indicates a low ap-
preciation of it, which rabbinic discussions considered “of low literary value” and

100.  An analysis of the biblical Hebrew text type, mashal, is offered in Haggai Ben-​Shammai, “Parable and
Simile.”
101.  For examples of unmarked parable speech, cf. chap. 10, 363–365.
102. Wansbrough, Quranic Studies,  53–​84.
103.  Cf. also Mt 13:10–​17: “The disciples came to him and asked, ‘why do you speak to people in parables?’ He
replied, ‘Because knowledge of the kingdom of heaven has been given to you; whoever does not have. . . . In them
is fulfilled the prophesy of Isaiah, who says: “You will be ever hearing but never understanding; you will be ever
seeing but never perceiving.” ’ ”
104.  This observation is thanks to an unpublished lecture by Michael Marx, given at Princeton in 2009.
 Communal Formation in the Middle and Late Meccan Periods  307

“obscure in expression.”105 He cites here the preface to the midrash collection

on the Song of Songs (Shir ha-​Shirim Rabba), which sought to justify the use of
parables not only in the Song of Songs but throughout the Solomonic corpus. The
frequent use of the disparaged parable is said in these writings to provide valu-
able service in the exploration of the deeper sense of the Torah. This valuation
is itself founded through parable or likeness: the use of parable is like the use of
a torch (by itself worthless), which even a king will use when he must use it to
search for a (valuable) lost pearl.106
But the parable is not only controversial in the rabbinic context. Also in the
case of the Qur’anic parable, the opponents of the proclaimer were struck by the
lowliness of the objects with which the parable operates—​an accusation that is
addressed apologetically in the Medinan verse 2:26:

God shies not from drawing a likeness even from an insect, or else an-
ything large or small. Those who believe know it is the truth from their
Lord. Those who disbelieve say: “What did God intend by this likeness?”
God thereby leads many astray, and guides many. But the dissolute alone
he leads astray.107

If this apology grants some room for an ambivalence toward mathal as a means
of persuasion, still it draws the triumphal claim of the positive usefulness of the
new strategy of mathal employed by the proclaimer—​regardless of the fact that
this strategy does not hit its mark with the unbelievers, Q 17:89:

In this reading we have elucidated to mankind every sort of likeness, but

most people will assent to nothing but unbelief.108

Though the consciousness of the hermeneutical achievement of the mathal on

the part of the community stood against its rejection by the unbelievers, the in-
troduction of this speech figure should be recognized as an important stage of the
Qur’anic rhetorical development.
8.5.1.1  The Posing of Questions from Biblical Scholarship
versus Qur’anic Questions
Older research, which treats the morality speeches and parables in the Qur’an
in isolation from their wider sura contexts, is marked strongly by Bible schol-
arship. Adolf Jülicher’s work Die Gleichnisreden Jesu (The parable speech of

105.  Ben-​Shammai, “Parable and Simile.”

106.  Ibid, 160.
107.  The same provocative question is posed in Q 74:31 by the unbelievers, a Medinan addition, which does
not relate to parable speech, but rather to a situation where the unbelievers assume an assertion they fail to under-
stand to be a scornful text type.
108.  Cf. also Q 30:58. “We have propounded for men in this Qur’an every kind of likeness: But if you bring to
them any sign, the unbelievers are sure to say, ‘You do nothing but speak vanities.’ ” Cf. Q 39:37.
308  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

Jesus)109, which appeared around the turn of the twentieth century, has proven
fundamental; in this work, the author pleaded for a veritative, “literal” interpre-
tation of the parables that were previously read so often allegorically. According
to Jülicher’s long-​influential interpretation, parables—​in opposition to allegory,
which addresses the “knowing”—​are directed to those who must still be illu-
minated, who are guided to recognize the familiar in what appears initially as
strange. Parable discourse juxtaposes an image part and an object part (which
often remains implicit), and these two are linked by a central thought (tertium
comparationis). Parable discourse serves to illustrate this thought within an apol-
ogetic or ethical message.
A renewed interest in parable, bringing Jülicher’s work to bear on the
Qur’an,110 was reflected first in Hartwig Hirschfeld’s study New Researches in the
Composition and Exegesis of the Qoran (1902),111 which emphasizes the rhetor-
ical and apologetic function of the parables.112 Further studies followed applying
the same approach,113 but even the most detailed study, by Theodor Lohmann
(1955),114 remains limited to the recognition of the parables’ mental statements.
Lohmann fails in his attempt to treat the respective tertium comparationis in the
often fragmentary Qur’anic mathal structures, just as he is misled in his expec-
tation to find immediate dependencies of the parables on Christian or Jewish
tradition.115
A newer approach is emerging, as biblical scholarship and research in parables
in recent decades has moved away from the earlier dichotomous distinction be-
tween veritative and allegorical speech, and thus put the focus on the “parable as
expanded metaphor.” Accordingly, Hannelies Koloska no longer merely sets the
biblical and the Qur’anic into historical relation, but rather focuses above all on
the formal language of the Qur’anic mathal.116 Instead of seeing in the parables
of the Qur’an the illustration of abstract ideas or concepts, she focuses on the
parables as narratives, “which in turn represent an event.”
Nevertheless, literary-​critical questions must be supplemented with histor-
ical ones. For as essential as knowledge of the methodologies of biblical studies
remains for Qur’an research, it is certainly not always sufficient to adequately

109. Jülicher, Gleichnisreden.
110.  An investigation of the Qur’anic mathal by Hannelies Koloska is in progress; an overview of her research
is offered in summary here.
111. Hirschfeld, New Researches, 83–​101.
112. Hirschfeld, New Researches, 83–​84, attempts to explain longer parables as historical occurrences, with the
help of commentary.
113. Buhl, “Vergleichungen”; Sister, “Metaphern und Vergleiche”; Speyer, Die biblischen Erzählungen im
Qoran, 426–​438.
114.  Lohmann, “Gleichnisreden Muhammeds.”
115.  Ibid., 285. Ben-​Shammai’s new study, “Parable and Simile,” goes a bit further, concentrating on the tafsīr
reception.
116.  Koloska’s still unpublished investigation employing form-​critical criteria arrives at a rough classification
into comparison, metaphor, parable, and allegory.
 Communal Formation in the Middle and Late Meccan Periods  309

describe Qur’anic phenomena. The Qur’an is not least an exegetical text, which
views traditions from neighboring cultures critically, and through negotiating
them adapts them to its new worldview. In view of this dynamism of the procla-
mation process, the old questions—​allegory or not? connection to the parables
of the Gospels?—​do not become obsolete but remain of significance. A purely
synchronic reading of the Qur’an would ignore the complexity of the Qur’anic
references—​the successively negotiated older traditions and the changing posi-
tion of the hearer toward these traditions. Such a reading would miss the fact that
Qur’anic engagements with the problems disputed in the milieu of the Qur’an
genesis are at the same time stages of communal formation. Self-​referential
Qur’anic mentions of the availability of parables, such as Q 17:98 and 30:58, in-
dicate the significance that the community itself attributed to this text type pre-
viously not known in Arabic in this formation. What function do parables fulfill
in the Qur’an?
8.5.1.2  Examples of Qur’anic Parable Speeches
The Qur’anic parable narratives that are named explicitly as amthāl, “likenesses,”
occur as a rule within biblical reminiscences. Although the textual type as such
could already carry Christian associations in view of its frequency in the Gospels,
the Qur’anic likenesses are in no way homogenous and do not necessarily refer
back to the New Testament.117 Some likenesses take up thematic references to
the Psalms, while structurally recalling the likenesses of the Gospels: Q 14:24–​27
evokes Psalm 1 but is expanded into a dichotomous statement:

Do you not see how God draws a likeness: a goodly word is like a goodly
tree; its roots are firm and its branches reach the sky.
It brings forth its nourishment at every turn, by its Lord’s leave.
And God draws likenesses for mankind, so perhaps they will reflect.
And the likeness of an evil word is like a bad tree uprooted from the
ground; it has no bed.
God gives strength to the faithful with speech unchanging in the present
life and the hereafter, and he leads the wicked astray. God does what
he wills.

The reference that spawns this image is clearly the tree simile from Psalms
1:3: “He will be like a tree, planted in water courses, that gives its fruit at the right
time and whose leaves do not wither.” In the Qur’an, however, it is not man but
rather the “good word” that rises like a tree and bears fruit. On the other hand,
the bad word is like a useless and unsteady tree. Although it is not said whose
word is meant here, the “good word” seems to be identical with the firm speech

117.  For Qur’anic recourses to parables in the Gospel, see Lohmann, “Gleichnisreden Mohammeds”; for fur-
ther references, see Wansbrough, Quranic Studies, 242.
310  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

of God, while the bad word brings with it the error-​inducing speech of seducers
of all kinds. The qualities of the tree made evident individually are no longer
transferable to the word but are more probably to be understood as “narrative
excess” of the expanded metaphor, increasing their suggestive power. The tertium
comparationis is firmness and vital power. That in the Qur’an it is not men but the
word that is spoken of as a tree—​an attribution that from a pragmatic viewpoint
is not very evident as an object part118—​is best explained by the Qur’anic restraint
toward the exaltation of man; the transference of the image to God’s word may be
thought of as a “corrective” of the psalmic elevation of man.
A further likeness from the same sura takes up an image from Psalms 1:4
(“The ungodly are not so, but like the chaff that the wind drives away”):

The works of those who do not believe, they are to be compared with ash,
blown by the wind on a stormy day.
They have no power over that which they have earned.

In the psalm, the opponents of the righteous are described, who in contrast to
the high and firm tree are like chaff lying on the ground. In the Qur’an, it is again
not men but rather abstract ideas that are employed as the “object part”: it is the
deeds of the unbelievers that the wind blows. In both texts, the construction of
the ash/​chaff comparison through the depiction of a stormy day strengthens the
intensity of the idea of the nullity of the wicked and the deeds of the unbelievers.
A narrative from the middle Meccan period (Q 36:13–​32) modifies a simile
from Mt 21:33–​44:

Strike for them the likeness of the people of the town, when messengers
arrived.
We had sent them two but they called them liars, so we backed them
with a third, and they said: we are messengers to you.

As in Matthew, here too a simile is related about the sending of prophets. While
in the Gospel a country scenario is chosen as backdrop, a vineyard, with sym-
bolic connotations already in a Christian context, whose workers are warned
by the owner of the vineyard through messengers to hand over the harvest, the
Qur’an speaks of a city to which messengers are sent. In both likenesses, the mes-
sengers are Prophets sent to mankind but rejected by them and threatened with
death or even killed. While in the Gospel, there is a gradual buildup—​first the
messengers fall victim to the attacks of the wine gardeners, then the son of the
owner himself—​in the Qur’an the event unfolds according to the model of the
punishment legends: the messengers are derided in a disputation, and it is not
they who are killed but rather an unknown person who hurries to help and gives

118.  Cf. Mt 12:33, in the context of speech, and cf. Lk 6:43.

 Communal Formation in the Middle and Late Meccan Periods  311

a sermon of warning. The two likenesses, with their similar outward plots, follow
clearly divergent directions. While the Gospel likeness focuses on the steadfast-
ness of God that leads to the sacrificing of his own son to prepare men for God’s
kingdom, and thus ends with the murder of the son of the vineyard owner by the
criminal wine farmer, in the Qur’anic parable there is only an allusion to mar-
tyrdom (Q 36:26), and even this relates only to an outsider who will be repaid for
his sacrifice. The Qur’anic story has “redirected” the narrative from the theologi-
cally decisive position of a Christ parable to a parable of the sending of prophets.
The victim sacrifice thus remains an interlude—​the Christological parable of the
Gospel is “de-​allegorized” and thus theologically softened.
In the same realm of images—​of power/​powerlessness—​are the comparison
and compared in the mathal of Q 16:76, which shows no reference to the Gospels,
but is rather derived from the Qur’anic confrontation between belief and unbelief
itself:

God strikes a likeness of two men: one is dumb, with no power over any-
thing, a burden to his guardian. Wherever he sends him, he brings back
nothing good. Is such like one who commands justice and is set upon a
straight path?

Here, the standard rhetorical question about the equality of a rightly guided
person and an unbeliever is formed into a likeness. The detailed depiction of the
object of comparison makes it possible to project the drastic situation of the pow-
erlessness of a deaf person, who exercises useless abilities, onto the unbeliever as
“deaf to the message,” enslaved by earthly life and doing only useless things. In
contrast to them stands the hearing and thus understanding of the rightly guided
one, who is himself empowered for right guidance. The rhetorical questions,
which elsewhere remain abstract, gain significantly in density and memorability
through the narrative depiction enabled by parable discourse.
Parable speeches in the Qur’an—​as far as they are marked expressly as
mathal—​in general do not allow for allegorical interpretations, but instead re-
shape bold metaphors and allegories of the predecessor traditions into simple
stories, so that one can speak of a “myth corrective”: as the examples presented
here show, the likenesses soften the “exalted” perceptions of man that are in-
compatible with the Qur’an (Q 14:24–​27), and implicitly decrease the strength
of Christologically laden older texts (Q 36:13). But other Qur’anic likenesses free
themselves entirely from the relation to predecessor texts and apply the technique
made available by this type of “narrativizing” of thought to an immediate world
of experience (Q 16:76). Unlike some parable speeches not marked as mathal,119
all of these likenesses remain in the realm of veritative speech.

119.  Cf. chap. 10, 360–365.

312  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

On the one hand, parable discourse seems to be a textual type specifically

suited to prophets—​one can think of the Ezekiel vision of the rotten bones, which
is controversial as to its status as parable discourse in Jewish exegesis;120 but on
the other hand, it appears, as the preface to the midrash on the Song of Songs
shows, to be the ideal medium of the wise man or, according to a later view, the
Prophet, for the exploration of the deeper sense of the scripture. In the Qur’an,
the text type of the likeness, which arises in the middle Meccan period and is
soon applied programmatically, is in one sense an element of mantic speech, in
that God himself strikes the likenesses. But at the same time, it is an object of
dispute and a means of persuasion among believers and unbelievers. Clearly, it
quickly wins the consensus of the community, as it develops into a characteristic
trait of the late Meccan suras, remaining at the same time a target of the mockery
of the unbelievers.
The Qur’anic likeness still awaits systematic research, in which the observa-
tions of Daniel Boyarin and David Stern on rabbinic parables will require careful
consideration.121

120.  Ben-​Shammai, “Parable and Simile,” 167–​169. Jesus’s listeners in Mt 7:28 also contrast his manifestly
Prophetic speech with that of the scribes; see above, 306–307.
121.  In accordance with Stern, Parables in Midrash, and Stern, “Rhetoric,” Boyarin explores a non-​allegorical
meaning of the parables in rabbinic literature; see Boyarin and Stern, “Exchange on the Mashal.”
 9

Stages of Communal Formation in Medina

9.1  The Turn of Exile

The decisive turn that was achieved by the proclaimer and community with the
hijra and the configuration of a political entity in Medina is reflected clearly in
the early establishment of the date of the hijra as the beginning of the Islamic cal-
endar. “Up until the migration to Medina, Muhammad and his dependents were
objects, even according to the Muslim view: victims, born of a historical context
that they wanted to alter but could not, they only become the subjects of defined
historical developments after the hijra, subjects who would set new standards for
their nearer and further surroundings that would ultimately take on world his-
torical dimensions.”1 The transition from activity that was above all kerygmatic
to activity that was also political and ultimately even military is described in de-
tail in the Sira,2 and is also reflected in the Qur’an text itself. But the event of the
hijra itself is only evoked vaguely in the Qur’an,3 and never reported concretely.
This silence about the hijra may be based on the fact that it was perceived as an
act of “turning away” (hijra) from their opponents,4 as a flight, enforced on the
adherents of the Prophet whose ambivalent and perhaps even humiliating cir-
cumstances in no way predicted its future aura of a world-​historical event para-
digmatic for later generations of believers. The hijra is not focused in the Qur’an
as a triumphant, history-​making event, as Patricia Crone has shown with clarity.5
What does appear in the Qur’an, however, is the new situation into which the com-
munity entered by way of this event: the Medinan interaction scenario stands out
clearly, through novel politically programmatic declarations6 and legally binding

1.  Noth, “Früher Islam,” 11–​12.

2.  See the analysis in Ammann, Die Geburt des Islam; Nagel, Medinensische Einschübe; Rahman, Major Themes;
Donner, Narratives of Islamic Origins; Donner, Expansion and the Islamic State.
3.  This occurs most distinctly in Q 9:40, where hijra is not mentioned but rather, in its place, idh akhrajahu
lladhīna kafarū, “when the unbelievers expelled him.”
4. This usage in the Qur’an is not yet terminological, but see the early Meccan instruction to the pro-
claimer: Q73:10: wa-​ṣbir ʿalā mā yaqūlūna wa-​hjurhum hujran jamīlan, “And be patient over what they say and
avoid them with gracious avoidance.”
5.  The gradual development of the concept of hijra occurs in post-​Qur’anic Islam, where it initially stands for
the divinely ordained flight of the Prophet and his earliest followers to Medina, and later for the “emigration” of
Muslim fighters to the garrison-​cities—​the Prophet’s emigration, thus standing as a model for militarily motivated
emigration; this is traced in Crone, “The First-​Century Concept of Hijra.”
6.  For example, Q 3:79 on the question of authority and Q 22:39–​30 on the justification of the struggle.

313
314  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

instructions7—​often underlined in their irrefutability by references to their tran-

scendent source, such as “It is (already) written for you,” kutiba ʿalaykum (Q 2:183),
or “as a duty imposed by God,” farīḍatan min llāhi (Q 9:60)—​from the Meccan
context, where comparably rigorous and specific rules were not yet necessary.
Even family relationships become regulated within the community for the
first time in Medina (Q 4:24–​25, 35, and 65:6). Here, Albrecht North stresses the

very concrete restrictions of traditional male dominance. This occurred,

decisively, above all in relation to financial regulations. Thus, the dowry
of the man became the possession of the woman after marriage, no longer
the possession of her family or, more precisely, of the male part of this
family. She could now obtain wealth through marriage and have disposal
over this—​with a fair division of property. Even if she possessed a lesser
share than her male guardians, she could still inherit from . . . her relatives
and her husband.  .  .  .  Also, divine revelations now governed the tradi-
tional forms of polygamy, clearly to the benefit of women of the Muslim
umma. What was intended was not to grant males surplus enjoyment of
sexual pleasures, but the enforcement of the man’s duty to provide, also
financially.8

Even if the equality before God promised to women (Q 33:35) is not fully re-
flected in the rules for practical interaction with them, nevertheless the rules for
divorce and for adequate provision represent an important step of reform.9 But
above all, we can point to an elevation in the accepted image of women. “This
entailed an essential ‘atmospheric’ change in the relation of the sexes to each
other . . . , so that man and woman become viewed in principle with absolute
parity in their quality as believers; a situation in which such a fundamental lev-
eling of the gap between the sexes could take place did not exist up until then,
and its creation can justifiably be called revolutionary.”10
The new situation of the proclaimer and his community in Medina is marked
by various conflicts with tribal, religious, and personal opponents, as the Qur’an
itself documents.11 Such engagements, which in a number of cases were carried
out violently (above all, the military actions against Mecca and further cities or
tribes of the peninsula) dominate the entire period of his ministry in Medina.
The interaction scenario also becomes more complex: Since also qasida poets,

7.  Likewise Q 2:186; on the institutionalization of fasting, cf. Goitein, “The Muslim Month of Fasting”; Q 4:11
and passim on inheritance; cf. Kimbler, “The Quranic Law of Inheritance”; Q 9:60 and passim on giving alms; cf.
Dutton, “Zakāt.”
8.  See Noth, “Früher Islam,” 51–​52.
9.  See Watt, Muhammad at Medina, 272–​289; cf. also the feminist discussion in Barlas, “Women’s Readings.”
10. Noth, “Früher Islam,” 51. The comparative contextualization of this reform alongside early Christian
reconsiderations of gender relations still awaits being done. See Boyarin, A Radical Jew.
11.  See Noth, “Früher Islam,” 52–​57.
 Stages of Communal Formation in Medina  315

who in the tribal society were responsible for the public representation of collec-
tively relevant incidents, now enter into the debates and incite a confrontation
between attackers and defenders of the new movement, for a while new public
speakers—​remaining however outside the Qur’an—​appear on the stage along-
side the proclaimer. These conflicts that break out between the proclaimer and
the poets are not always solved verbally but in some cases escalate to violence.
There are some texts extant by some of the poets involved in this, which—​unique
in view of the otherwise missing evidence on the immediate environment of the
proclaimer—​provide profane “para-​texts” that aid in the reconstruction of sev-
eral events that are merely alluded to in the Qur’an. In particular, four poets as
Agnes Imhof has shown are decisive in this: Labīd ibn Rabīʿa, Ḥassān ibn Thābit,
Kaʿb ibn Zuhayr, and Kaʿb ibn Mālik.12 These poets through their new images of
God and understandings of society, which are different from those of the ancient
poetry offer unique insights into the gradually developing religious changes in
the circles around the proclaimer.
In addition, there is another important new element within the Medinan
suras:  the reporting of contemporary events, above all military confrontations
in which the community becomes involved or that it has itself triggered, such as
the Battle of Badr, 2/​624 (Q 3:123; 8:41–​44), the Battle of Uḥud, 3/​625 (Q 3:155–​
174), the expulsion of the Banū Naḍīr, 3/​625 (Q 59:2–​5), the siege of Khaybar, 7/​
628 (Q 48:15), and the expedition to Tabūk, 9/​630 (Q 9:29–​35). However, these
reports are not narrative depictions of great historical moments, but rather are
dressed in isolated verse groups that stand in a wider paraenetic or polemical
context. Yet, in one unique case, a later recollection of an event of salvation, the
Battle of Badr, which evokes the precedent of the exodus of the Israelites,13 seems
to suggest that a consciousness of having experienced an event of salvation his-
torical dimension had arisen (Q 8:41–​44):

On the day of decision [yawma l-​furqāni], the day when the two hosts
met—​God is powerful over everything.
While you were on the nearer side [of the valley]
and they were on the farther side, with the riders beneath you.
Had you made an appointment,
you would surely have failed to keep the appointment.
But [this happened] so that God might bring about
a matter already decreed,
and so that those who were to perish would perish
after a clear proof [had been given]. God is the hearing, the knowing.

12. Imhof, Religiöser Wandel.

13.  Furqān, which is used in verse 41 to indicate “saving,” also designates the saving of Moses through the
Exodus; on the analogy to the Badr exodus see Marshall, God, Muhammad and the Unbelievers, 136–​138.
316  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

When God showed them to you in your sleep [fī manāmika] as few—​Had
he showed them as many,
you would have lost heart and you would have differed over the matter.
But God saved you. He knows what is hidden in the hearts.
When he showed them to you, as you met, few in your eyes,
and made you few in their eyes,
so that God brought about a matter already decided.
And all matters return to God.

This text, which enacts an important communal-​historical memory through

clear references to Exodus, indicates for the first time and uniquely a kind of
mythicization of history, which would be required for a salvation historical great
narrative: God himself has driven the struggling parties into the decisive con-
frontation through an illusive visual representation. Yet, although the “saving
decision,” furqān, which is described here as miraculous, belongs to the founda-
tion legend of the fasting month of Ramadan,14 this Qur’anic report assumes no
outstanding place in the sura.15 The purely occasional character of the recourse
to chronological history makes it amply clear that the historically relevant events
in Medina had not yet been brought together into a grand narrative comparable
to Jewish or Christian salvation history.

9.1.1  Formal Innovations

It is not only thematic innovations that characterize the Medinan texts, how-
ever; also, and above all, structural and text-​strategical innovations mark these
suras. Suras in Medina take on new literary structures; individual sura mod-
els such as the “oratory sura,” possessing particular structural characteristics,
now attest to the political role of the proclaimer.16 Above all, a new polyphony
develops in the suras, in that for the first time they now address a confession-
ally mixed public.17 The texts clearly show that the proclamation takes place, at
least temporarily, in the presence of Jewish hearers, as the argument enters into
“current” Jewish debates. This opens new thematic horizons and causes earlier
pronouncements to be submitted to a checking for discursive suitability in face
of the new expectations being raised by a pluricultural public, which now entails
also educated Jewish hearers. This challenge not only leads to the discovery of
problematic implications of earlier reported stories, but also triggers new reflec-
tions on the proclamation itself, not only on its relationship to earlier scriptures

14.  Cf. chap. 11, 417–418.

15.  The beginning of the account is not clearly signaled in the transmitted form of the text, but the account is
triggered by the associations of the military order.
16.  Cf. chap. 5, 196–198.
17.  A  reconstruction of the political field of forces, shaped also by the Jewish tribes, is offered in Lecker,
“Muhammad at Medina.”
 Stages of Communal Formation in Medina  317

but also on its very hermeneutic valence, that is, the question of its clearness or
ambiguity. The proclamation thus reaches a new level of self-​reflection. We also
see a new challenge emanating from an aspect of theology that had not yet been
a topic before: Christology. Without entering positively into the Qur’anic dis-
course, Christology becomes a spur to reflections on the ambiguity inherent in
revealed speech, even including acknowledgment of the possibility of paradox
in God’s word.18
The compositional stringency that seems to be maintained in some of the so-​
called long suras, which Michel Cuypers19 has attempted to show in a mono-
graph on sura 5, must still be checked. The hypothesis should not mislead us into
looking at the Medinan texts as having been already fixed in writing and freed
from any historical proclamation situation. Such an interpretation underplays the
inner-​Qur’anic shaping of the suras and reduces the complex proclaimer-​hearer
interaction to a monologue, or even a post-​Muhammad recording of thought fig-
ures culled from biblical books, especially Deuteronomy, and transferred to the
Qur’an. The situation of transmission is in fact much more complex. A reading
of the suras as a written fait accompli may seem at first view to be less hypothet-
ical than a diachronic reading, but such a reading in fact applies presuppositions
that neglect both the oral character of the Qur’anic text and its conversation with
contemporary traditions, thus obscuring the genesis of a religion reflected in the
Qur’an.
The perceived plurality of claimants to interpretive monopoly over “the (heav-
enly) scripture” in Medina also led to a new definition of one’s own placement
into salvation history. A “re-​conversion” takes place: departing from their loyalty
to the biblical Banū Isrāʾīl that had taken root in Mecca, the new community con-
structs its own, more strongly locally anchored salvation historical past, though
not without holding on to biblical paradigms. Above all, the state of exile, which
was earlier experienced spiritually rather than physically, is now restaged in pre-
sent reality; the center of exilic nostalgia, earlier on Jerusalem, is now transferred
to Mecca, which becomes the new crystallization point for ritual prayer. Likewise,
the actual necessity of struggle comes to be reflected in categories aligned with
biblical precedents—​involving a confrontation with the Christian phenomenon
of martyrdom, which was ubiquitously negotiated in Late Antiquity.
Without claiming to present all the relevant discourses that may have moved
the Medinan community, in what follows we will discuss five problem fields that
have been given little attention in research up to now. They manifest themselves in
the Medinan period for the first time, where they occupy so prominent a position
that their significance for the formation of the community is unmistakable: the

18.  Neuwirth, “Mary and Jesus.”

19. Cuypers, The Banquet, and Schmitz, Sure 2, examine a complete long sura as to the circumstances of its
composition as an intended unit; cf. Robinson, Discovering the Qur’ān, 196–​223, and Smith, “Structure.”
318  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

Jewish theologumenon of God’s wrath; the perception of a possible ambiguity

of the word of God, which is suggested by the paradoxes of Christology; the re-
flection on two central genealogies, the Abrahamic and the Aaronite, the latter
including the “Holy Family”; the construction of a new centrality for Mecca; and,
finally, the relation of the community of belief to struggle and martyrdom. A fur-
ther related discourse from this period, the universalizing of key texts and credo
formulas from rivaling religious groups, will be presented in ­chapter  13, “The
Rhetorical Qur’an.”

9.2  The Discovery of God’s Wrath

The self-​awareness of belonging among the bearers of a safeguarded tradition,

which was reached by the community of believers in Mecca, undergoes a stress
test when the “official” inheritors of those biblical traditions themselves appear
on the stage and raise their own claims to interpretive monopoly. The Qur’an
texts, which already in late Mecca had taken on increasingly polemical coloring
in the confrontation with pagan opponents, thus adopt an even sharper tone.
This becomes especially clear in the Medinan “extensions,” the “continuations of
narratives” and reworkings of Meccan discursive texts (the so-​called Medinan
additions), which give a new theological thrust to the texts already in circulation,
and in so doing often give them a new religious-​political point. This strategy of
“politicizing” the proclamation, which can best be explained through the situa-
tion of competition with the other religions, is one of the clearest indices for the
textual genesis out of debates with bearers of different traditions.
We can see an example of this in the story of the Golden Calf (Ex 32:15–​35),
which is first told in the Meccan sura 20, “Ṭaha,” with a purely edifying intent,
even suggesting the excusability of the major sin of idolatry. This story undergoes
an updating in Medina. It takes on a new interpretive point, which can no longer
be derived from the biblical predecessor text, but rather reflects the tone and even
part of the wording of the theological interpretation that the story of the Golden
Calf had taken on in Judaism already in the pre-​Talmudic period.20
The narrative of Moses as messenger of God and leader of his people was
told numerous times in the Meccan suras, yet without much attention being
paid to the episode of the Golden Calf. Only in two of these texts does the event
figure prominently. It first appears in the rather early middle Meccan sura 20,
a text that is almost entirely dedicated to the life of Moses,21 and again in the
late Meccan verses Q 7:142–​156. In both texts, Medinan additions are inserted

20.  See in detail Neuwirth, “Medinan Additions?” On the Jews of Medina, see Lecker, Muslims, Jews, and
Pagans; cf. also the older study Wensinck, Muhammad and the Jews of Medina.
21.  It is told in Q 79:15–​26 (early Meccan); 37:114–​122, 20:10–​99, 26:10–​67 (mid Meccan); 40:21–​55, 28:1–​46,
10:75–​93, and 7:103–​156 (late Meccan). With the exception of Q 7:103–​156 and 2:54ff., all the versions of the story
are discussed in Neuwirth, “Erzählen als kanonischer Prozess.”
 Stages of Communal Formation in Medina  319

to retrospectively endow the episode with a theological point that focuses on

God’s wrath.
In sura 20, the episode occupies the last part (verses 87–​99) of the life of Moses,
which is narrated in detail, and which, apart from an introductory passage (verses
1–​9), fills out the entire sura (verses 10–​99). The narration takes a particularly
empathetic approach to the Moses figure, stressing his intimate relationship with
God and dispensing with the reproaches for his occasional faults, which we find
in later texts, above all Q 26. The presentation remains purely narrative; the text
refrains from adopting any particular theological position. Not even the report
about the Golden Calf22 is allowed to darken the positive image. It is restricted
to the basic facts: the episode begins with the point that God himself tells Moses
that a divine trial has occurred that his people have failed to pass (verses 83–​85;
cf. Ex 32:7)—​a strikingly undramatic beginning for the historically momentous
story. In the unexpanded form of the sura, the story also dispenses with such mo-
mentous points as the giving of the tablets,23 the foundational event of the elec-
tion of the Israelites, after which the Israelites’ violation of the covenant with the
sin of idolatry comes as the scandalous counterpoint. Thus, in the unexpanded
sura, what is lacking is just what, from the Jewish perspective, forms—​in Daniel
Boyarin’s words—​one of the two “high points of the Heilsgeschichte.”24 The other
key point, the miraculous crossing of the Red Sea, is equally marginalized, being
only briefly summarized (verses 77–​79). Thus, those very events that are the trig-
gers of significant discussions in the rabbinic tradition are either marginalized or
wholly left out of the Qur’anic presentation of the sura before its expansion.
When Moses turns to his people after his encounter with God, he himself
becomes witness to their idolatry. The blame for this grievous sin, however, is not
placed on members of the community (even Aaron is exonerated as Moses’s rep-
resentative), but on a figure unknown in the biblical account, named al-​Sāmirī,25
who has apparently mixed among the Israelites as a stranger. The strategy to
downplay the enormity of the transgression by assigning blame to a “foreign”
actor recalls the later midrashic narratives of the story,26 which freely intro-
duce other figures in order to exculpate the Israelites. The stopgap figure, who
is named only by his gentilicium al-​Sāmirī,27 is accused of having seduced the
people, against the will of Aaron, into producing the idol. Moses thus turns his
anger on al-​Sāmirī, who, much like Iblīs, the seducer par excellence, is cursed and
expelled. The story that ends with the unexpected scenario of reconciliation in-
stead of divine retaliation, concludes with a praise of God’s uniqueness (verse 98).

22.  For exegetical explanations of some problematic details, see Hawting, “Calf of Gold.”
23.  Cf. Fishbane, Sacred Attunement; Heschel, Heavenly Torah.
24.  Boyarin, “The Eye in the Torah,” 534.
25. Horowitz, Koranische Untersuchungen, 114–​116.
26. Speyer, Die biblischen Erzählungen im Qoran, 327–​332.
27.  For an explanation, see ibid., 329–​330; Horowitz, Koranische Untersuchungen,  14–​16.
320  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

The story in sura 20, which as a whole is dedicated almost entirely to the Moses
cycle, can thus be classified as a hagiographic account, unrelated to any particular
theological discourse.
It should then be all the more surprising that theological reflections that are
in striking contradiction to the reconciliatory tendency enter into the story in
verses 80–​82. They are given in the form of an address, which is easily recogniz-
able by its particular rhetorical shape as a Medinan addition28 that interrupts the
narrative. This address warns the Israelites, Banū Isrāʾīl, to beware God’s wrath,
in a tone that is no longer empathetic but instead severe and threatening. The
addition is placed in the caesura between the very short account of the people’s
exodus (Q 20:77–​79)29 and the story of the Golden Calf (Q 20:83–​99). (The addi-
tional verse group Q 20:80–​82 is in italics):

And we revealed to Moses [saying], “set out at night with my servants and
strike for them a dry path in the sea, not fearing to be overtaken nor
dreading anything.”
Then Pharaoh pursued them with his troops and so they were over-
whelmed by the water.
Pharaoh thus led his people astray and did not guide them rightly.

80 “Children of Israel, we have delivered you from your enemy

and we made a covenant with you on the right side of the mount,
and sent down to you manna and quails.
81 Eat of the good things we have provided you with  [a]‌,
but do not be excessive in this,
so that my wrath will not descend upon you  [b]‌.
Those upon whom my wrath descends will be ruined  [c]‌.
82 I am indeed forgiving to him who repents,
does good deeds, and is rightly guided.”

In verses 80–​82, the event of the granting of the Torah, which was not yet re-
ported in the sura but which plays a crucial role in Jewish tradition, is added and
made into the basis of a warning, alongside the miraculous nourishment through
manna and quail. The verses shift the speech from the report into a direct ad-
dress, which provides an additional argument for the status of the verses as an

28.  On the Medinan additions, see Nagel, “Medinensische Einschübe.” His examination is limited to the doc-
umentation and interpretation of accounts offered in tradition, which however only cover a fraction of the actual
additions that have been identified by critical scholars since Nöldeke. The additions established here and in sura
7 are not presented in Nagel’s list of those parts of Meccan suras that are traditionally considered as Medinan
additions.
29.  This passage on what is from the Jewish perspective (see Boyarin, “The Eye in the Torah,” 534) the central
event, the crossing of the Red Sea, could have been added later as well, together with the direct address, to meet the
expectations of Jewish listeners looking to find reference to the main event of their salvation history. However—​
unlike for verses 80–​82—​there is no compelling reason to adopt the reading of this as a later addition.
 Stages of Communal Formation in Medina  321

addition. The formula yā banī Isrāʾīl, “Children of Israel!” cannot be an address to

the historical Israelites spoken by Moses, since this occurs nowhere in the Moses
stories; they are much more likely to form part of the sermon of the proclaimer
himself,30 in analogue to the contemporary Medinan verses Q 2:40, 47, and 122,
and thus to be aimed directly at the progeny of the Israelites, the Medinan Jews,
among the hearers. But reference to the historical Israelites is implausible above
all because of the content of the address itself. The warning to the addressees
“to exceed not,” which extends the immediately preceding exhortation to “eat
of the good things,” can best be understood as aimed at excessiveness in the re-
specting of dietary laws. Such an excess, which would lead to the segregation of
its followers from the larger community and thus to social polarization, would
be irrelevant for the historical Israelites, but becomes significant in the context of
a shared living situation among differing religious groups, as we find in Medina.
The content of the address to the Israelites as such thus already makes it probable
that, as in sura 2, contemporary Jewish hearers are being addressed.
There is also a theological argument that, above all, corroborates this interpre-
tation: the thematization of divine wrath. Although the addition evokes episodes
that were left out of the unextended original narrative and therefore required a
supplement (God’s covenant at Sinai and his providing the Israelites with divine
sustenance),31 the commentary does not just refer to the warning against excess
but also hints already at the worship of the idol, which will be reported immedi-
ately after. It culminates in a threat of divine wrath that is directly linked to the
guilt-​sin discourse around the worship of the Golden Calf, a wrath that can only
be avoided through repentance, belief, and good deeds. This is an idea that had
not been addressed in any Meccan texts up to that point.32

9.2.1  A Central Scriptural Verse: Its Jewish and Qur’anic Readings

The introduction of the idea of God’s wrath33 in the context of the adjoining
story of the Golden Calf is no accident. On closer inspection, verses 82b–​83
show themselves to be an allusion to a particularly momentous scriptural verse,
the locus classicus for the idea of guilt and atonement in the Jewish tradition

30.  While the Banū Isrāʾīl are mentioned multiple times in the Meccan suras, they are directly addressed only
in the Medinan period in Q 2:40, 47, 122 and 61:6. This never occurs in the voice of Moses; the conveyer of the
speech to them in Q 2:40, 47, and 122 is in fact the proclaimer himself, and those addressed are exhorted to recog-
nize the Qur’an. This means that in these contexts, it is not the historic Israelites but rather the Medinan Jews who
are addressed. As an exception, the late Medinan verse 61:6 could be mentioned in which the address does occur in
the historic past. Here, Jesus is the speaker, announcing the coming of the proclaimer.
31.  For the form of the Qur’anic summary report, it is most probably references such as Mekhilta de-​Rabbi
Ishmael and Sifre Devarim that should be considered (personal communication by Dirk Hartwig).
32.  Cf. with Boyd, “Sin and Grace.”
33.  Apart from Q 20:81b.c., the word occurs in Mecca only once again in the same sura (verse 86), where the
same formulation, (fa-​ /​an) yaḥilla ʿalaykum ghaḍab(ī/​un min rabbikum), “so that my wrath comes down on you
from me/​your Lord,” is used. This sentence again interrupts the otherwise factual account. It could in turn be a later
addition to emphasize the new idea of the wrath of God see Neuwirth, Medinan additions.
322  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

as such,34 which also belongs to the immediate context of the biblical story of
the Golden Calf, Ex 34:6–​7. God’s image as both wrathful and forgiving has its
most expressive form in the divine self-​description that is revealed to Moses
when, after the event of the Golden Calf, he is given the new set of tablets. It
displays what Jewish tradition has labeled the “thirteen attributes,” shelosh ʿesre
ha-​middot, of God, which all connect with (justified) wrath (middat ha-​din) and
mercy (middat ha-​raḥamim), and which have assumed a prominent position in
Jewish liturgy from an early period. Ex 34:6–​7:35
And the Lord passed by before him, and proclaimed:
YHWH, YHWH, a gracious and merciful God, forbearing and rich in
grace and fidelity, who preserves mercy for the thousands, forgives
guilt, wickedness, and sins, but does not allow one to go unpunished,
but who rather visits the guilt of the father unto the sons and descendants
down to the third and fourth generations.

The verse figures prominently also outside of the Bible, particularly in the liturgy
of the Jewish Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur. There, the relapse into idolatry is
recalled as the exemplary case of sin of the Israelites overall,36 through an “an-
thology” of Bible verses, among which Exodus 34:6–​7 is evoked several times.37
In view of the fame of these verses and their prominence in Talmudic discussions,
they can be presupposed to have been part of the knowledge store of the Jews of
Medina as well. At the very least, the Medinan Jews’ observance of the festival
day itself stands beyond question, as it provides the only convincing explanation
for the practice of fasting on the Day of Atonement that was also upheld at this
time by the Qur’anic community in Medina.38 One should therefore assume that
the two final verses of the Medinan addition (Q 20:81–​2) are an echo of this Bible
text, which is so central for the wrath discourse.39 Thus, a verse of scripture enters
the picture that seems most likely to have been brought into the conversation

34.  Cf. Lindqvist, “Sin at Sinai.”

35.  The significance of the thirteen attributes for the act of atonement is documented in the Babylonian
Talmud in Rosh ha-​Shana 17b: “ ‘It is written: and the Lord went past him and proclaimed.’ Rabbi Yohanan said: ‘If
this paragraph had not been written, it would be impossible to express it, since the text teaches us, that the Holy—​
blessed be he—​wraps himself, like a shammash who is reciting the prayers for a congregation, and in revealing the
right order of the prayers to Moses, he said to him: Whenever Israel sins, let them pray to me in your manner, then
I will forgive them’ ” (personal communication by Dirk Hartwig). On rabbinic theology, cf. Schechter, Aspects of
Rabbinic Theology, and Urbach, The Sages.
36.  See bT Sanhedrin 102a: “There is no calamity struck onto Israel, without it being connected to the sin of
the Golden Calf.”
37.  This observation is based on the contemporary structure of Yom Kippur liturgies documented in the tra-
ditional prayer books, makhzorim. The dating of liturgical textual forms in Judaism is difficult to determine (see
Elbogen, Der jüdische Gottesdienst), but the high significance of the verse already in rabbinic discussions suggests
a long tradition of liturgical use.
38.  Goitein, “The Muslim Month of Fasting.”
39.  Its position in the Qur’an not after but rather immediately before the story of the Golden Calf should not
be problematic in view of the later insertions that also elsewhere do not always follow their reference texts exactly.
 Stages of Communal Formation in Medina  323

theologically by the Medinan Jews. It is evoked this way in the Qur’an in order to
reach the actual “bearers” of the discourse of guilt and atonement “in their own
language.” A striking reinterpretation of the thirteen attributes has however taken
place in the Qur’anic version, which equally focuses on the notions of forgive-
ness (ghafur, “forgiving,” verse 82) and wrath (ghaḍab, “wrath,” verse 81 b and c).
Yet the biblical threat of a divine retaliation over generations is alleviated into a
punishment inflicted only on persistent transgressors—​a “theological corrective”
that corresponds to the image of God that had already achieved consensus in the
community: God is free of emotional affects, and even his wrath does not distract
from the power of the decisions he has already issued. Either transgressions of his
commandments will be atoned for through repentance, or the transgressors will
fall victim to eschatological damnation. Despite this softening, a threat prevails
in the additional verses: the wrath of God can only be met through remorse and
repentance (man tāba, “he who repents,” verse 82).
This interpretation of the text, in the sense of a wrath discourse introduced
retroactively into the story of Moses, is strengthened by a similar recourse to
the thirteen attributes, again through a Medinan addition, in a further telling
of the story of the Golden Calf in the late Meccan sura 7 (verse 142–​156).40 In
both cases, the addition of an idea drawn from an identifiable biblical text pos-
sessing additional weight through its liturgical and/​or discursive presence in the
Jewish tradition serves a religious-​political goal in the Qur’an. In sura 20, one
can speak of a “politicizing” of the sura, which had been religio-​politically neu-
tral in its original form. The reference to Ex 34:6–​7, a text that in the biblical
context directly follows the granting of the new set of tablets, is drawn into the
context of atonement for idolatry as it had been in the Jewish tradition, the Yom
Kippur liturgy. At the same time, it is connected pragmatically to an admoni-
tion to the contemporary Jews that is relevant for the community, namely, not
to follow too closely those legal instructions that would separate them from the
customs of their surroundings. A conversation with the inheritors of the Bible
text has begun, in which we can read a plea for integration—​a plea that is raised
in “their own language,” that is, with reference to texts and exegetical contexts of
their tradition.
A systematic reading of the Medinan additions to the Meccan suras tracing their
rabbinical and occasionally also Christian intertexts thus remains an important de-
sideratum. As the cases that have been detected so far already show, the Medinan
texts reveal a substantially new relationship to the preceding traditions, in that they
no longer employ older texts and traditions paraenetically, as was the practice in
Mecca, but rather now grant them a new discursive dimension: Medinan texts re-
flect the engagement with the theological positions of learned representatives of

40.  Neuwirth, “Oral Scriptures.”

324  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

the older religions, and thus reflect a conversation between religions. New actors
now enter the process of the communal formation of consensus and contribute to
it, deepening or modifying the earlier presentations of episodes from Jewish salva-
tion history that now require revision. The Qur’an, still dynamic in the course of
the proclamation, thus reveals itself as a polyphone text that often questions itself,
whose differing voices have not yet received nearly enough attention.

9.3  The Discovery of Ambiguity in the Divine Writing

9.3.1  Ambiguity of Scripture and Its Feminine Metaphors

Around the same early Medinan period, when the discussion of the Jewish guilt-​
atonement problem was introduced in the additions to suras 20 and 7, Christian
traditions also found new reflections in the proclamation. A particularly complex
case of this, Q 3:1–​64, is worth treatment at some length here.
Sura 3 offers a new reading, enriched by a number of details, of the story
of Mary and Jesus, which was already narrated in sura 19.41 Here too, as in the
revision of the Moses story, we observe a “politicizing” of the old story:  what
appears to be a further narrative development of the story of Mary already told
in Mecca is de facto a new religious-​political interpretation. To explore the situa-
tional meaning of the narrative, its setting in the life of the community, as well as
its role in the genesis of the Qur’an, we must look not only at the narrative (verses
33–​64) but also at its prologue (verses 1–​32). The prologue and the narrative that
follows it connect the two great themes of the sura: the question of the herme-
neutic valence of scripture as either clear or ambiguous, and the new perception
of religious legitimacy that is accessible outside of the Israelite patriarchal tradi-
tion. While the latter idea is thematized in the beginning verse of the narrative
(verse 33), the sura’s prologue is devoted to the former idea, the plurality and pos-
sible ambiguity of scriptural meanings, right from the beginning (verse 7). This
verse would later become the locus classicus for the uneven hermeneutic valence
of Qur’anic verses, and would also feature prominently in the debate about the
authority of interpretation (divine or human?). It is preceded by several verses
that are relevant for its interpretation (Q 3:1–​7):

Alif lam mim.
God, there is no God except him, the living, the lasting!
He sent the scripture down to you in truth,
confirming what came before it,
and sent down the Torah and the Gospel,42

41.  Neuwirth, “Imagining Mary—​Disputing Jesus”; cf. chap. 8, 294–296

42.  The Gospel, injīl, which is understood in the Qur’an as a single scripture and not a plurality of Gospels,
is mentioned twelve times, always in Medinan verses; aside from the verse at hand, it always appears in Qur’anic
 Stages of Communal Formation in Medina  325

before, as a guidance to mankind

and he sent down the saving decision [furqān].43
Those who do not believe in the signs of God,
they stand before an intense punishment.
God is almighty, vengeful.
Nothing is hidden from God on earth or in heaven.
It is he who forms you in the womb as he wills,
no God except him! He is the powerful, the wise.
It is he who sent down the scripture to you.
There are verses in it that are clear [muḥkam],
they are the mother of the scripture,
and others that are ambiguous [mutashābih].
Those in whose hearts is vacillation, they follow what is ambiguous
[mā tashābaha]
in striving to raise doubt [ibtighāʾa l-​fitna]
in striving to interpret it [ibtighāʾa taʾwīlihi].
But no one except God knows its interpretation.
Those strongly grounded in knowledge [al-​rāsikhūna fī l-​ʿilm] say:
“We believe in it, everything is from our Lord.”
But no one takes heed, except those who understand.

Verse 7 allows two basic interpretations,44 since the syntactical referent of the ex-
pression al-​rāsikhūna fī l-​ʿilmi, “those firmly grounded in knowledge,” in verse 7,
is open. If one reads it, as in our translation, as the beginning of a new sentence,
the prerogative of interpretation would be reserved for God; if one understands
it as part of the exception and reads “No one but God knows its interpretation,
and those firmly grounded in knowledge,” the approach to interpretation would
be open to both, God and the learned. Both readings are formally possible, and
have been treated differently among the Sunna and Shia.
But is this verse truly concerned centrally with the authority to practice in-
terpretation, as recent research oriented toward the reception history of the
Qur’an would have it? Or is it concerned rather with the nature of the revealed
texts themselves, whose problematics are here reflected anew? The verse is in no
way self-​explanatory within the Qur’an:  the concession of a hermeneutic am-
biguity in scripture45 should be surprising in view of the numerous previous

debates, and nowhere else in the introduction of a sura topic. Injīl is usually associated with tawrāh, the Torah. See
Griffith, “Gospel,” who does not seek, however, to fit the mentions of the Gospel into the Qur’anic discourse.
43.  For an explanation, see chap. 11, 417–418.
44.  See Gilliot, “Exegesis of the Qur’an, Classical,” 99–​100; cf. also McAuliffe, “Text and Textuality,” which
presents the inner-​Islamic exegetical position. On the hermeneutic implications of the verse, see Madigan, The
Qurʾān’s Self-​image, and—​in response—​Rubin’s review of Madigan, The Qurʾān’s Self-​image. Additionally, see Wild,
“Self-​Referentiality.”
45.  Cf. Kinberg, “Ambiguous”; Kinberg, “Muḥkamāt and Mutashābihāt.”
326  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

self-​declarations of the Qur’an as a clear (mubīn) scripture (cf. Q 12:1 and Q

26:2: tilka āyātu l-​kitābi l-​mubīn, “those are the signs of a clear scripture,” and
Q 43:2:  wa l-​kitābi l-​mubīn, “by the clear scripture!,” etc.). Why, then, should
there be verses that are ambiguous? The appearance of this category cannot be
explained through reference to the Meccan experience of the proclaimer and his
hearers; it remains unresolved as long as one approaches it in isolation from the
new discursive challenges in Medina.
In fact, older intertexts loom large in the verses: the perception that verses of
scripture have more than one meaning is not unheard of in the older religions. In
Jewish tradition, the identification of different meanings of scriptural text units
as “faces of the Torah” (panim shel ha-​tora) formed part of exegetical practice
since the Tannaitic period (ca. second century ce). That experiences with the
Jews stand in the background of sura 3 is suggested also by the word al-​tawrāh
in Q 3:3 to designate the scripture given to the Jews,46 whose indigenous Jewish
name appears here for the first time. The exegetical perception of scriptural texts
as being liable to more than one understanding, which was an everyday percep-
tion in Jewish interpretation, and which can be presupposed to have been known
to the Medinan Jews, thus seems to be reflected in the Qur’anic verses at hand:47
an innovation that can hardly be overestimated for the self-​understanding of the
community. What occurs here is an opening of scriptural discourse toward ex-
egesis that was not dared before, and which research has not yet examined in
terms of its emergence and its Sitz im Leben among the community.48
It is an opening that, as Q 3:7 shows, was accompanied by insight into an al-
ready existing praxis of interpretation, named taʾwīl,49 which equally points to
exegetical activity and professionalism. This concept could be a new discovery
in the Qur’anic discourse, although the word appears already, with less theoret-
ical foundation, in reference to the praxis of dream interpretation in the story of
Joseph, Q 12:36–​37 and 12:99–​101. According to its etymology, taʾwīl seems to

46.  It occurs five times in sura 3; in the other four places, it stands in an explicit polemic against the Banū
Isrāʾīl, targeting the Medinan Jews or the People of the Scripture, respectively. The introduction of the naming is
noticeable, since previous references were always to kitāb Mūsā, “The Scripture of Moses”; cf. Adang, “Tawrat.” The
naming echoes Jewish usage, since Christian Arabic gives prevalence to “the Law,” adopted from the Septuagint
translation, ho nomos, al-​nāmūs. The announcement of revelation in verse 3, with its reference to the internal Jewish
usage, implicitly raises the claim of the Qur’anic revelation standing on the same level with the proclamation to
the Jews.
47.  See especially bT Sanhedrin 34a and bT Shabbat 88b, as well as Numeri Rabba 18:2, on the “seventy faces of
the Torah” (personal communication by Dirk Hartwig). For the concrete rabbinic background, see Stern, “Midrash
and Indeterminacy”; cf. also Boyarin, “The Genealogy of Indeterminacy.”
48.  An early exegetical genre, which investigates the ambiguity of Qur’anic lexemes that emerged from their
different contexts, is labeled mutashābih al-​qurʾān, “ambiguous issues in the Qur’an,” or al-​wujūh wa l-​naẓāʾir, “the
faces (= Hebr. panim) and their equivalents.” The recognition of the fait accompli of ambiguity in versions of scrip-
ture, which is so prominent in the Jewish tradition, does not find its first reflection in the commentary, as Gilliot,
“Exegesis, Classical,” assumes, but rather is already reflected in the Qur’an.
49.  Taʾwīl is apparently a more complex practice of interpretation, to be distinguished from tafsīr; cf. Q 25:33,
from the Hebrew pesher, “literal interpretation.”
 Stages of Communal Formation in Medina  327

indicate a “reference back to the first,” or, in short, a deduction, and it is likely
that this form of interpretation was a technique practiced among Jewish schol-
ars. While in the case of taʾwīl an identification with a non-​Arabic technical
term is difficult, such an identification does suggest itself positively for the two
qualifications of verses introduced in Q 3:7 (muḥkam, “clear,” and mutashābih,
“ambiguous”). They may ultimately go back, albeit through intermediaries that
cannot be identified, to the Aristotelian antinomy of amphiboles, “ambiguous,”
and pithanos, “clear.”50 Here we see a group of new, hermeneutically relevant con-
cepts, whose appearance might be explained by the hypothesis of an exchange of
ideas between the community and the Jews of Medina, who had access to such
techniques.

9.3.2  The House of Abraham and the House of Amram

Such an explanation, which merely posits an exchange with the Medinan Jews,
is not sufficient, however, since it would isolate the prologue from the narrative
that stands at the sura’s center, which attests to the simultaneously increased pres-
ence of Christian elements in the early Medinan discourse of the community.
The narrative that stands in the center of the sura relates to the Christian foun-
dational myth: it focuses on the story of the mother of Mary, and of Mary as the
mother of Jesus. As the two women, together with Jesus, who appears in a later
part of the narrative, make up the Āl ʿImrān, the House of Amram,51 or the Holy
Family in Christian understanding, they form a counterpart to the Āl Ibrāhīm,
the House of Abraham. With these figures, the House of Abraham is countered
for the first time by a genealogical group of equal rank, which is equally elected
(Q 3:33–​34)52:

inna llāha ṣṭafā Ādama wa-​Nūḥan

wa-​Āla Ibrāhīma wa-​Āla ʿImrāna ʿalā l-​ʿālamīn.
dhurriyatan baʿḍuhā min baʿḍuhā min baʿḍin
wa-​llāhu samīʿun ʿalīm

God elected Adam, Noah,

the House of Abraham, and the House of Amram above all men.
A progeny one from another.
God is hearing, seeing.

50.  Cf. Bonitz, Index Aristotelicus.

51.  Cf. the explanation in chap. 10, 365–368.
52.  The term Āl Ibrāhīm, like Āl Imrān, is unique in this place and does not recur further in the Qur’an. Both
designations thus have been developed for this particular context, where they enter a dialectic relation. But while the
Abrahamites and their family story are well known from older proclamations, the Āl Imrān were only occasionally
evoked up to that point—​in sura 19, Mary and Jesus are mentioned without being labeled Āl Imrān.
328  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

The story of Mary and her mother, who remains nameless and who vows to conse-
crate her unborn child to the service in the temple, based on events that are related
in the Proto-​Gospel of Jacob, presents a counter-​model to the family history of
the Abrahamites. Not only are their most important actors women, but it is also
strikingly explicit in its gender-​specific physical detailing—​“in my womb,” Q 3:35;
“I have given birth,” Q 3:36; “a female one,” Q 3:36. After the birth of a daughter
rather than the expected son, the mother fulfills her vow to give her child over to
the temple all the same. She herself names the child Maryam, Mary, in the absence
of the father, who never appears in the story. Unlike the Protevangelium, no man
is involved in the story—​if for a moment we ignore the parallel story of Zachariah,
who plays no active role in the story of Mary. Even Jesus, Mary’s son, does not
counter this imbalance in what follows, since his modest appearance in public
and his refusal to exercise patriarchal authority (he does not give legislation, but
rather alleviates earlier laws) show him also to be a counter-​model to the Prophets
from the firmly established House of Abraham. We can thus see a characteriza-
tion being sketched of the House of Amram, the Christian Holy Family, that is
named explicitly in the introductory verse, setting them in contrast to the House
of Abraham, which receives equal mention. The striking emphasis on female ac-
tors and their conditions, especially the act of giving birth, has its reverse image
in the characteristics of the male protagonists of the stories about the House of
Abraham, which is based on the masculine genealogy of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob
or Israel, and Joseph and distinguishes itself through unconditioned faith in God,
readiness for sacrifice, pure belief in God’s unity (Abraham), and the communi-
cation and preservation of the Prophetic family inheritance (Joseph). This paral-
lelization, which occurs here for the first and only time in the Qur’an, setting the
House of Amram against the House of Abraham, makes the “Holy Family” into an
unmistakable competitor with the Jewish tradition. It is certainly not by accident
that they appear now, and for the only time, in competition with them.
Let us turn now back to the prologue, to the still-​open problem of the newly
awakened attention to the ambiguity of verses of scripture. The imagery of the
relevant verse, Q 3:7, strikes the reader as charged with gender associations: the
professionalism of the anonymous interpreters who are lambasted for their ob-
session with interpretation is depicted surprisingly with gender-​specific meta-
phors: they are condemned for their endeavor, literally their “desire” ibtighāʾ, to
awaken doubt, or more literally “discord” or “temptation,” fitna.53 While these

53. Although ibtighāʾ refers mostly to spiritual goals in the Qur’an, such as the face of God and his pleasing,
it can also refer to desire, Q 13:17. Considering the presence of the root, b-​gh-​y, in the term baghīʾ, “harlot,” in the
context of the story of Mary (Q 19:28), there could also be a sexual connotation here. Against the background of
the often-​spiritual goals of ibtighā in the Qur’an, its usage in the context of fitna appears to be especially subver-
sive. Fitna, “temptation, divine test” (the word also connotes “straying from the right path, struggle within the
community”), is usually a divine strategy in the Qur’an for testing peoples’ faith. One agent of fitna, although not
mentioned specifically in this connection in the Qur’an, is woman; cf. the Hadith mā taraktu baʿdī fitnatan asharra
 Stages of Communal Formation in Medina  329

ambiguous verses seem to trigger dealings with scripture that resemble dubious
sexual relationships, clear verses stand in a legitimate genealogical relationship
to the “mother of scripture,” umm al-​kitāb. Against this background, the beha-
vior of the unbelievers appears not only as hyper-​skeptical but also as “morally
suspect,” since they exploit the ambiguity of the text in search of fitna. In this
light, the qualification of the heavenly reference text as the mother of scripture,
umm al-​kitāb, deserves new attention, as it conflates two discourses. the mascu-
line, power-​informed discourse related to the vertically achieved “sending down”
(kitāb, tanzīl) on the one hand and the more submissive female discourse related
to maternal conception and reproduction, wad, on the other.54
The gendered image of the umm al-​kitāb, Q 3:7, is preluded by the preceding
verse’s reference to procreation, which anticipates the hermeneutical engagement
with the āyāt muḥkamāt and the āyāt mutashābihāt, Q 3:6:

huwa lladhī yuṣawwirukum fī l-​arḥāmi kayfa yashāʾu

lā ilāha illā huwa l-​ʿazīzu l-​ḥakīm

It is he who forms you in the wombs how he wishes.

No God except him, he is the powerful, the wise.

While this verse could be read outwardly as a pronouncement about God’s power
of creation and omniscience, it may also be read as a statement about giving birth
and motherhood. There is an implicit correspondence between the antagonism
of two kinds of scriptural verses and two stages of prenatal development, since
God creates the child in his mother’s womb, while its gender remains indeter-
minate. The unborn child remains “ambiguous,” mutashābih, until its birth; only
God knows its nature. Mary’s mother is unaware she is carrying a female child
and thus pledges her to the temple. It is a matter left to God, in which form what
is hidden will come to light—​both in motherhood and in the sending down of
scripture. It is striking that in both cases a feminine “temporary storage” is em-
ployed: the “mother’s womb” in sexual reproduction and the “mother text” in the
sending down, in revelation.
Since the process of revelation involves a—​positive—​female agent, the umm
al-​kitāb, for the sending down of the scripture, it is only logical that the aber-
rant interpretive acts of the skeptics should be presented in gendered categories

ʿalā l-​rijāli mina l-​nisāʾ, “I did not leave behind me a more harmful temptation for men than women”; see Wensinck,
Concordance, 5:63. The hadith is quoted in Saleh, “Woman,” 128.
54.  The image of the “mother of scripture” also seems to reflect earlier perceptions. It contains an echo of a
hermeneutic category familiar from rabbinic scholarship, according to which a safely transmitted reading of a Bible
text “has a mother” in the scripture itself: yesh em la-​miqra, while a reading that only survives in its consonantal
structure is a reading that has a mother in tradition, yesh em la-​masoret; see bT Sukka 6b and passim and the discus-
sion in Bacher, Die exegetische Terminologie, 1:119–​120. Horovitz, Koranische Untersuchungen, 65 rejects the Jewish
intertext—​unjustifiedly—​because it does not harmonize with the Meccan mentions of al-​kitāb. The Qur’anic reuse
of earlier-​coined concepts does not however follow strict rules in general.
330  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

as well that evoke feminine associations:  their desire (ibtighāʾ) for the distur-
bance of order, for fitna—​an expression that seems to evoke the feminine power
of temptation.55

9.3.3  The Theological Context of “Ambiguity”: Christology

Finally, let us turn back to the question of what might have been the trigger for
this new interest in the ambiguity of texts in the Qur’an. Although the terms
taʾwīl, mutashābih, and muḥkam point to professional exegetes in general, who
are most likely to be sought among the Medinan Jews and whose interpretations
may have irritated the community, Q 3:7 is not merely an occasional polemic.
The consciousness of the existence of both clear and ambiguous verses opens a
new theoretical horizon. In the Jewish context, it is true, this perception is cur-
rent, having given rise to an entire exegetical tradition. Nevertheless, to explain Q
3:7 entirely through an exchange with the Medinan Jews fails to do justice to the
rhetorical structure of the sura and its purposeful cross-​references. As the intro-
ductory verse of the narrative (Q 3:33) makes clear programmatically, there is an
intentional equalizing of the Christian and Abrahamite traditions. In addition,
we find a detailed narration of the story of the Holy Family for the only time in
the Qur’an (Q 3:33–​64), which sketches a Christian counter-​model to that of the
families of the patriarchs and prophets of the Abrahamites. The feminine pres-
ence that comes out so strongly in the narrative reaches back into the prologue,
where in verses 6 and 7 the ambiguity in the contexts of motherhood and of the
sending down of scripture are set in parallel. It also gives hermeneutical coloring
to the situation of those “strongly grounded in knowledge” and those “who have
trepidation in their hearts,” who, measured by the social rules for behavior be-
tween the sexes, adopt either legitimate or offensive behavior toward scripture.
The problem of ambiguity and clarity is not only a hermeneutical problem
but also a theological one. In the extra-​Qur’anic religious traditions, it is bound
up in particular with the person of Mary, in whom virginity and simultaneous
motherhood are “unclear,” and even capable of raising doubts. Reading the much
discussed verse 3:7 contextually, not in isolation from the wider progress of the
sura, as is too often done, one has to connect the two sources of authority: the
authority of the Jews, based on long established exegetical praxis, and the new
Christian authority, which is based on a softening of the fiction of unambiguity,
as suggested by the behavior of its founding figures. On this point, it is helpful
to look at a central liturgical text of the Eastern Church tradition, which can
be dated into the sixth century:  the Akathistos Hymn,56 a hymn to the Virgin
Mary. Mary herself appears here as an object of contradictory perceptions. To the

55.  The problem of gendered speech in the Qur’an has received little attention to date; see Barlas, “Women’s
Readings,” and Abboud, Qissat al-​Sayyida Maryam.
56.  It is based on a series of older Mary homilies; cf. Peltomaa, The Image of the Virgin Mary.
 Stages of Communal Formation in Medina  331

believers, she is a “clear,” anamphibolos, symbol of belief, but to the unbelievers

she is “ambiguous,” amphibolos, and a cause of irritation.

Chaire ton apiston amphibolon akousma,

chaire ton piston anamphibolon kauchema

Rejoice, you who are ambiguous for the unbelievers,

rejoice you who personifies the unambiguous pride of the believers!57

In this text, it is not the “mother of scripture “but the “mother of the incarnate
Word” that is praised as a clear object of belief. Ambiguity appears solely before
the eyes of the unbelievers.58
Without attempting to establish a direct relationship between individual tra-
ditions on the basis of such an isolated testimony, it is worthwhile to pursue this
trace. In doing this, we can take up a suggestion by Nasr Hamid Abu Zaid,59
who sketches an alternative scenario for the ambiguity discourse to that of the
debates with the Medinan Jews. Abu Zaid assumes that the focus of the ambi-
guity debate was not the problem of exegetical praxis (taʾwīl) as such, but rather
a particular theological issue perceived as ambiguous, namely, Christology. This
interpretation is appealing, not only in view of the centrality of Christian tradi-
tions reflected in the sura but also in view of another consideration:  both the
prologue and the narrative part of the sura introduce new discourses. The pro-
logue opens a rhetorical-​hermeneutic discourse about the ambiguity of scripture,
while the narrative part opens a genealogical discourse. In particular, verse Q 3:7
focuses on ideas that fit well into the rhetorically and philosophically informed
Christological debates. It is true that the Qur’an text does not make explicit the
idea that triggered the debate about the admissibility of interpreting the ambiv-
alent verses, yet this trigger can be deduced from references in the sura itself.
Traces of the Christological paradox are found already in the prologue, where
the image of the “mother of scripture,” umm al-​kitāb in Q 3:7, with its connota-
tions of gender, is preluded by a reference to motherhood (Q 3:6), which evokes
the ambiguity of the still unborn child, expressed in kayfa yashāʾu, “as he wills.”
“It is he who forms you in the wombs how he wishes. No God except him, he
is the powerful, the wise.” The divinely willed fact of the ambiguity offered to
men, which is illustrated here, is relevant not only for the story of Mary—​the

57.  The (undatable) Arabic translation of the hymn does not employ the pair mutashābih and muhkam, but
rather (khabar) yaltabis, “knowledge that is unclear,” and lā yushawwihuhu ltibās, “knowledge that is not blurred
by ambiguity.”
58. An extensive discussion of the possible Christological implications of the Qur’an text is offered in
Neuwirth, “The House of Abraham.”
59.  Abu Zaid, in a lecture at the the summer academy of the Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin, entitled
“Literary and Historical Approaches to the Bible and the Qur’an,” given in September 2007 in Istanbul. His inter-
pretation is based on Sira accounts, which refer to the Christians of Najran, who according to tradition were the
audience of Q 3:53, while the interpretation offered here forgoes this reference.
332  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

conception and birth of Jesus is above all ambiguous, an extreme case of the “as
he wills,” kayfa yashāʾ, since he is conceived without the participation of a human
father, and his divine/​human nature stipulated in Christian theology defies any
expectation of clarity. If one sees the stories of birth that stand in the center of
the sura in the context of the Mariological/​Christological liturgical traditions,
marked by the ensemble of “ambiguity-​loaded motherhood” (Q 3:6, 34ff.) and
the “ambiguous word of God” (Q 3:7), then we can give credence to the claim that
it was the problematics raised by Christology that provoked this thematizing of
the ambiguity of verses of scripture.
Accepting support from the Sira, one could locate this interpretation easily
within a specific situation in the Medinan proclamation.60 In our investigation,
however, which is based on Qur’an texts exclusively, we cannot proceed beyond
hypothetical assumptions. What can be assumed with probability about the
communal-​historical status of the prologue and narrative of sura 3 is that in the
early Medinan period an attempt was made, which was not later pursued further,
to undermine or at least counterbalance the authority of the Abrahamite tradi-
tion, and thus also defy its actual heirs who possessed scripture and exegesis, the
Medinan Jews, through the projection of another historically powerful genealogical
group, the Christians. In this reflection on the genealogy and fates of the Christian
founding family, the ambiguous and even paradoxical must have been striking.
The insight newly discovered in Medina, that scripture could also contain unclear
truths of belief withdrawn from immediate understanding, may have helped to
make the difficulties of Christology graspable. The Christological paradox, which
was Ioudaiois men skandalon, ethnesin de moria, “a point of anger for the Jews and
a folly for the heathens,”61 was not taken up among the Qur’anic truths of belief,
but it seems to have entered the horizon of the community at least for some time.

9.4  From Jerusalem Back to Mecca

9.4.1 Medina
In the change of the direction of prayer, qibla, from Jerusalem to Mecca, we can
see a decisive ritual and religious-​political innovation that took place soon after
the hijra. This reform signals one of several religious-​political shifts in loyalty
carried out by the community in Medina. The often-​repeated explanation of this
step as a consequence of the so-​called break with the Jews62 is not supported by
Qur’anic texts.63 In general, we should be predisposed to think that a turn in

60.  On the exchanges with the Christians of Najran, see the commentary on sura 3; cf. Irfan Shahid, “Najrān”;
cf. also Nebes, “The Martyrs of Najrān.”
61.  1 Cor 1:23.
62. Watt, Muhammad in Medina, 202–​204; Watt, Muhammad. Prophet and Statesman.
63.  See Rahman, Major Themes, 131–​149; cf. Marshall, God, Muhammad and the Unbelievers, 148.
 Stages of Communal Formation in Medina  333

prayer toward a direction that is not suggested cosmically (such as the east in
the non-​Jewish monotheistic praxis) but rather directed toward a historically
charged space, expresses a deep affiliation to that place, so that one can speak
here of an exilic longing—​particularly if this place, as it was for the Babylonian
Jews and as it was again for the believers in Medina, was the initial homeland.
To merely assume political opportunism would not do justice to this situation.
Tilman Nagel has convincingly argued that the migration of the proclaimer and
his dependents took place without their safety being initially guaranteed, so that
it amounted to a flight, which could only succeed thanks to the existing rela-
tionships of neighbor protection warranted by the jiwār structure, a network
of relations of mutual protection.64 One should thus conceive of the resettle-
ment from Mecca to Medina not as an option that was temporarily condoned
but as an exile whose term could not be foreseen,65 and which imposed high
moral demands on the migrants. That the community risked a military conflict
with the Meccans only one year after the hijra could only have been possible
because the commitment of the believers to the newly formed society of emi-
grants that obligated them to extreme exertions, was much more rigorous than
had the loyalty requested in Mecca. The newly demanded exertion is reflected
in the stereotypical formula designating the emigrants as alladhīna hājarū wa-​
jāhadū, “those who emigrated and are striving” (Q 2:218; 8:72, 74, 75; 16:110),
often extended with the unambiguous fī sabīli llāh, “in the way of God,” that is,
“in battle” (e.g., Q 22:58). From this exilic perspective, Mecca takes on a new
position; it becomes the object of conflict, the place from which the believers
were wrongly driven, whose elite must therefore engage in struggle (Q 22:39–​
40): “Permission is given to those who fight because they are wronged. God is
surely capable of giving them victory. Those who were driven out of their living
places without right, because they said ‘Our Lord is God . . .’ ” Even if the mo-
ment of emotional loss is not itself thematized, the social and mental situation
of exile is nonetheless unmistakable: Mecca is the center of collective memory. It
is therefore no surprise that, according to tradition, soon after the Battle of Badr,
in the second year after the hijra, a change in the direction of prayer to Mecca
was proclaimed, with a text that echoes the foundational biblical text on the es-
tablishment of a direction of prayer, which had also arisen out of a situation of
exile: 1 Kings 8:23–​53.

64.  See Nagel, Medinensische Einschübe, 128–​137; similarly, also Ammann, Die Geburt des Islam.
65.  Cf. Cragg, The Event of the Qurʾān, 129; Donner, “The Historical Context.” Nagel, Medinensische Einschübe,
attempts to reconstruct the Medinan situation of the community on the basis of Qur’anic evidence. The work is an
important contribution to reconstructing the historical environment of the Qur’an, despite the ill-​founded literary-​
critical thesis claiming that the cases of supposed Medinan additions gathered by Ibn ʿAbd al-​Kāfī are in fact of
Medinan origin.
334  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

9.4.2 Jerusalem
The Meccan direction of prayer was not the first to be adopted by the Qur’anic
community. Already during the Meccan period, the community adopted a his-
torically determined direction of prayer: toward Jerusalem.66 The orientation to-
ward Jerusalem—​in place of the otherwise frequent cosmic orientation toward
the east—​was merely one symbolically expressive sign of a profound change that
was taking place in the middle Meccan period among the early community. If the
adoption of the former qibla toward Jerusalem had been a turning point for the
community striving to integrate the Holy Land into the new mental map of their
topographia sacra, the Medinan change of the direction of prayer was of no less
momentousness, marking an important signal of a new orientation. It shows that
just as the longing for Jerusalem had earlier reached far beyond the scope of the
real world, now Mecca became a similar site of exilic longing. It is worthwhile to
look closer at this act of revision of the previous great symbol of identity, which
first permitted the environment of Mecca to be perceived as a new “Holy Land,”
and to transfer central prerogatives of Jerusalem to Mecca.67

9.4.3 Mecca
The new regulation of cult can be dated to the year 2/​624, that is, just after the
stress test of the Battle of Badr that had been successfully passed by the commu-
nity. Not differently than a millennium earlier among the Jewish exilic commu-
nity in Babylon, it was the reflection on their own origins that laid the basis for
the exiles’ self-​assertion. As in the prayer for the dedication of the temple, which
in the book of Kings is articulated by Solomon (1 Kings 8:23–​53), the Qur’an text
unit that is decisive for the reform of the direction of prayer also seeks to establish
the new qibla as an exilic direction of prayer, Q 2:142–​145:

The ignorant among the people will say,

“what caused them to turn away from their former direction of prayer,
toward which they used to turn?”
Say: “to God belongs the east and the west.
He guides whom he wills toward a right path.”

We have made you into a community of the middle,

so that you may be witnesses for the rest of mankind,
and so that the messenger may be a witness for you.
We established your former direction of prayer,
so that we could distinguish between those who follow the messenger
and those who turn on their heels.

66.  See chap. 8, 282–284.

67.  Cf. Neuwirth, “The Spiritual Meaning of Jerusalem.”
 Stages of Communal Formation in Medina  335

It was indeed a hard test except for those whom God guided.
God would not allow your faith to be in vain.
He is the all-​caring, the merciful.

Surely, we see you turning your face in the heaven.

Now, we will turn you in a direction that will satisfy you.
Turn your face toward the sacred place of worship;
and wherever you are turn your faces towards it.
Those who have received the scripture certainly know
that this is the truth from their Lord.
God is not unaware of what they do.

If you went to the people who received the scripture

with every kind of proof, they will not follow your direction of prayer,
nor will you follow their direction of prayer.
Even among themselves, they do not follow one direction of prayer. And
were you to follow their desires, after all the knowledge that came to
you, surely you would be one of the evil-​doers.

The “spiritual exile,” which once caused the Meccan community to turn toward
Jerusalem, the crystallization point for the prayers of the exiled, has now given
way to an actual exile, a consciousness of being excluded from Mecca and its
cult center. The reminiscence of the Solomonic establishment of the direction
of prayer in Q 2:145, “wherever you may be,” gives expression to this exilic char-
acter. The directing of prayer to Mecca obviously met with opposition, as the text
shows. The relinquishment of the long-​practiced orientation toward Jerusalem
was found to be a difficult task (verse 143), giving rise to a controversy with the
Jews. This step could be associated with a feeling of uncertainty on the part of the
Prophet himself. It should be understood less as a gesture of turning away from
the Jews, to whom continued adherence to their direction of prayer is conceded
(Q 2:145), than as a new implementation of an established biblical model for
coping with exile,68 which is undertaken with the awareness that it will cause a
polarization of those “to whom scripture has been given,” who obviously are ir-
ritated by this step.
In what follows, Mecca takes on further distinctions, prerogatives that had
once been granted to Jerusalem. Just as it is said in Isaiah 2:3 that Jerusalem is
the place from which divine teachings issue (“For from Zion the teachings [tora]
will go out and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem”), so now Mecca is given
as the status of the origin of scripture and wisdom, according to a prophecy that

68. Rahman, Major Themes, 132–​149. Nagel’s interpretation of the change of the direction of prayer to Mecca,
Medinensische Einschübe, 144–​148, does not pay due respect to the theological dimension of the abrogation of
the direction of prayer, nor does it consider the exilic aspect or attend to the construction of Mecca as a “New
Jerusalem.”
336  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

stems from the same early Medinan period, which is articulated by Abraham, Q
2:127–​129:

When Abraham and Ishmael began

to raise the foundations of the house, they prayed:
“Our Lord, accept this from us.
You are the hearing, the knowing.
Our Lord, grant us to submit to you [muslimūn],
and make of our posterity a community
that submits to you [umma muslima].
Guide us in our rites and pardon us.
You are indeed the pardoner, the merciful.
Our Lord, send them a messenger from among themselves
who will recite to them your verses,
to teach them the scripture and the wisdom, and to purify them.
You are truly the mighty, the wise.

With the Qur’anic proclamation, this prophecy has been fulfilled, and what is
more, since Abraham founded the rites of Mecca and also implored for their
completion through verbal prayer service, which is brought about by the pro-
claimer, the rank of greatest antiquity falls to Mecca. Not to be the most recent
foundation but to be the most ancient sanctuary is what matters. Mecca can now
claim this rank, eclipsing Jerusalem, which was first provided with the Temple by
Solomon, Q 3:96:

inna awwala baytin wuḍiʿa li-​l-​nāsi

la-​lladhī bi-​Bakkata mubārakan wa-​hudan li-​l-​ʿālamīn

The first house of God which was made for the people,
is that in Bakka [= Mecca],
as a blessing and right guidance for the world.

Further distinctions of the Jewish Jerusalem come to Mecca through Abraham: after

verses Q 37:99–​113, particularly verse 102, had localized the important event of
the “binding” of the son, Abraham’s “Aqedah,” in Mecca, it is no surprise that the
later Islamic tradition continues to reclaim this event for Mecca, or for a place in
the surroundings of Mecca. This approach to the event, which is not essentially
dissimilar to that of the Christian tradition, which had moved the event from the
Temple Mount to Golgotha, confers on Mecca a further decisive prerogative of
Jerusalem, namely, to be the founding place for the special status of Abraham’s
descendants, now understood as his spiritual descendants.69 Thus Jerusalem now
retreats behind Mecca in the Qur’an. Later tradition indicates the relationship to

69.  See Schechter, Rabbinic Theology, 170–​198; cf. also chap. 11, 398–400.
 Stages of Communal Formation in Medina  337

be an overlapping sequence of ranks: Jerusalem is “the first of the two directions

of prayer,” ūlā l-​qiblatayn, but only “the second of the two places of worship,” thānī
l-​masjidayn. Already in the Qur’an, Mecca obtains the rank of a new Jerusalem.

9.5  Qur’an and Martyrdom

9.5.1  Dangerous Vicinity to Myth

The Medinan community soon became a warrior society, whose mission in
struggle, jihād, is evoked in numerous verses.70 The warrior ideal is not anchored
in salvific history, however, and is bound up with none of the previous messen-
gers with the one exception of the biblical king Saul. It is also notable that the
newly introduced concept of jihād in the Qur’an is not at first understood as a
military activity but initially represents an ascetic ideal of self-​mastery, the con-
trol of egoistic urges, entirely in the sense of a spiritualized athlōn, or “contest,
effort, struggle,” as evoked in the late Meccan text Q 29:6, 69. This connotation of
the control of the self still adheres to the concept as it later becomes a designation
of military struggle, Q 61:10–​11:

O believers, shall I point you to a commerce

that will save you from a painful torment?
That you believe in God and his messenger
and exert yourself in God’s way [tujāhidūna fī sabīli llāhi]
with your possessions and your life.
That is the best for you, if you are understanding.

But the duty incumbent on the emigrants to exert themselves in battle is indi-
cated more frequently by the word qitāl, “battle,” which was already frequent be-
fore Islam. The interchangeability of these terms shows that jihād as such is not a
struggle for a religious cause but rather refers to the military operation on behalf
of the affairs of the new community, the community of belief. In this context the
merit bound up with military operations of the believers for the survival of the
community is often dressed in the economic metaphor of exchange, which prom-
ises great profit in the hereafter (Q 9:111):

God has bought from the believers their lives and their wealth
in return for paradise.
They fight in the way of God [yuqātilūna fī sabīli llāh],
they kill and are killed.
That is a true promise from him in the Torah,
the Gospel, and the Qur’an.

70.  On all this, see now the fundamental study by Horsch, Tod im Kampf; cf. also Firestone, “Jihād.”
338  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

As Silvia Horsch has shown,71 the transformation in the understanding of struggle

that manifests itself here stands “in connection to the founding of a genealogy
based on scripture, in opposition to the genealogy based on tribal descent of the
pre-​Islamic period. Through the promise of reward in the hereafter for battle in
this world, this understanding of struggle toward the end of the development is
made apparent as an inheritance from the predecessor monotheistic religions.
Struggle is thus set into a religious tradition; it no longer serves for the win-
ning of honor for the tribe as in the pre-​Islamic period.”72 Albrecht Noth summa-
rizes: “An essential component of the tribalist form of life in Arabia at that time,
struggle, which was already placed on the positive side of the scale of values, now
becomes sublimated into ‘jihād in the way of God,’ a highly esteemed religious
merit, and it is only in this that the Islamic innovation consists.”73
But there is a verse whose interpretation of struggle goes well beyond what
is manifest here, a meritoriousness founded in religious loyalty.74 This passage,
which is often quoted in later Islam as evidence for the existence of a Qur’anic
ideal of martyrdom, is as follows (Q 3:169–​170):75

Do not think that those who have been killed in the way of God are dead.
No, they are living with their Lord and provided for.
They rejoice in what their Lord has given them of his bounty,
and they eagerly expect those who stayed behind to come after them: no
fear shall overcome them! They shall not grieve!

Is martyrdom then already a Qur’anic ideal? Do we find the concept of mar-

tyrdom in the Qur’an? In view of the prominent position that martyrdom pos-
sesses in Christian tradition, one would expect traces of this discourse in the
Qur’an. On the other hand, it is equally possible that the community taking shape
around the proclaimer might have rejected and excised individual ideas current
in the debates that took place in their environment, or might have remained si-
lent about them or reshaped them to the point that they are not identifiable in
their familiar significance. One such example seems to be the Christian mar-
tyrdom discourse, which is amply documented in Late Antiquity, but which does
not seem to have put down roots in the Qur’an.
Assuming the peculiar Christian concept of martyrdom to be self-​evident,
research up to now has continuously given a negative answer to the question

71. Horsch, Tod im Kampf.

72.  Ibid., 107.
73.  Noth, “Früher Islam,” 57. On the Prophetological implication of fighting, see Marshall, God, Muhammad
and the Unbelievers, 117–​138.
74.  Heavenly reward is also promised to those killed in battle elsewhere in the Qur’an, without, however,
implying particular nearness to God: “And do not say about those who are killed in the way of God, ‘they are dead.’
Rather, they are alive, but you perceive it not” (Q 2:154).
75.  This highly daring, indeed unique verse is still frequently cited to sanction Islamic martyrdom and can be
found in obituaries and on posters of young men who died in military conflict.
 Stages of Communal Formation in Medina  339

of a concept of martyrdom in the Qur’an.76 Overview presentations on Islamic

martyrdom, such as that by Etan Kohlberg, assert the absence of a martyrdom
concept in the Qur’an. The numerous Qur’anic examples of the term shahīd/​
shuhadāʾ,77 which would later come to mean martyr, should mostly be under-
stood in the juristic sense of “witness/​witnesses,” even if, as Silvia Horsch has
recently argued, in certain cases such as Q 3:140 an explanation in the sense of
“martyr” cannot to be excluded:78

If you have been afflicted by a wound, a similar wound has afflicted the
enemy. These are battle days we alternate among mankind, that God may
know those who truly believe and may receive some of you as witnesses,
martyrs [shuhadāʾ]. God does not love the wrongdoers.

This verse, read as a testimony about Qur’anic martyrdom, would however not
entail anything beyond the close connection between being wounded or suf-
fering death in battle and the divine acceptance of the fallen. The special status
that the Islamic martyr will enjoy later due to his extraordinary eschatological
distinction is not addressed here.
But this is different in the verse cited above (Q 3:169), which in tradition pro-
vides the Qur’anic locus classicus for Islamic martyrdom as such. Though the
verse contains no explicit designation of the martyr as shahīd/​shuhadā,79 one
cannot dispute the fact that this verse is unique in the Qur’an, that no other verse
among those that speak of the necessity of struggle conveys a comparably close
connection between struggle, violent death, and nearness to the divine. Can this
verse, then, serve as a reference text for Islamic martyrdom avant la lettre, as is
often assumed? How does it relate to the concepts of martyrdom current in the
other religious traditions?
On this point, we will first take a glance on Late Antique—​that is, Christian—​
martyrdom, which was likely known to the Qur’anic community. Late Antique
martyrdom—​roughly speaking—​derives its tension from the combination of
three components:  bearing witness, sacrifice, and mimesis/​ succession.80 All
three problem areas are treated in the Qur’an; an overview of their respective
configurations in the Qur’an should therefore help to clarify the relationship of
the Qur’anic proclamation to Christian martyrdom on the one hand and the
Islamic martyrdom that developed later, which put death in battle at its center,
on the other.

76.  Noth, “Früher Islam”; but see now Horsch, Tod im Kampf.
77.  Kohlberg, “Shahīd”; somewhat less rigidly, Cook, Martyrdom.
78.  See the Qur’anic evidence of shahīd/​shuhadāʾ in Horsch, Tod im Kampf,  15–​17.
79.  This category does occur in the Qur’an, though only by its name, in the context of schematic enumerations
of the pious dead of earlier generations.
80.  Cf. the definition of Frutaz, “Märtyrer,” 128: “Martyrs of the Divinity of Christ and His Religion,” quoted
by Horsch, Tod im Kampf, 30.
340  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

9.5.2  Bearing Witness?

The idea of bearing witness can be considered the essential backbone of the early
community, and is a trait already developed in the Qur’an. The confession of
faith, the shahāda, “I witness that there is no God except God, and I witness that
Muhammad is God’s messenger” (ashhadu an lā ilāha illā llāh wa-​ashhadu anna
Muḥammadan rasūlu llāh), is sufficient to attest to a person’s belonging to Islam.
Its first part is Qur’anic, and is pronounced by God himself in a Medinan text
(Q 3:18):

shahada llāhu annahu lā ilāha illā huwa

wa-​l-​malāʾikatu wa-​ūlū l-​ʿilm

God witnesses that there is no God except him,

and the angels and those grounded in wisdom witness this.

In many places, God appears as the witness of theological truths.81 But above all,
the covenant with God in preexistence, the so-​called ʿahd a-​last, which is funda-
mental and which in the Qur’an replaces the Mosaic giving of the tablets, consists
of a bearing of witness.82 Instead of the Israelites standing before Mount Sinai, it
is all of mankind that is called to witness (Q 7:172):

When your Lord took out

from the loins of the sons of Adam their progeny,
and had them bear witness for themselves:
am I not [a-​lastu] your Lord?
Then they said, “yes, we witness it” [shahidnā].
This we did, so that you will not say on the day of resurrection:
“we were not aware of this beforehand.”

This original scene of bearing witness, which occurs in preexistence,83 figures as

the Islamic Sinai event, so to speak, but it consists not in the giving over of divine
written signs but rather in an oral testimony. “To witness,” shahida, is a central
Qur’anic concept, which alongside its frequent usage in a strict juristic sense is
used frequently to undergird the truth claims of monotheism. On the other hand,
it does not occur where we might perceive a martyrdom scenario, as in a scene
in Q 26:47–​51, in which Pharaoh announces the execution of a number of magi-
cians whom Moses had converted to monotheism. Their assertion of belief before
their death, āmannā, “we believe,” is apparently regarded as a more significant

81.  He also attests to the second pronouncements of the later creed: wa-​yaqūlu lladhīna kafarū lasta mursalan
qul kafā bi-​llāhi shahīdan baynī wa-​baynakum wa-​man ʿindahu ʿilmu l-​kitāb, “Those who have disbelieved say, ‘You
are not a messenger.’ Say, ‘Sufficient is God as witness between me and you, and whoever has knowledge of the
Scripture.’ ”
82.  Cf. chap. 11, 408–415.
83.  See Hartwig, “Urvertrag”; cf. also Obermann, “Koran and Agada.”
 Stages of Communal Formation in Medina  341

testimony of faith than their death. It is scarcely surprising, then, that in none of
the Qur’an verses that mention the merit of death in battle do we find language
related to witnessing. The researcher of mysticism Fritz Meier has drawn a far-​
reaching conclusion from this: “The Muslims who fell in battle had nothing to
bear witness to. The word shahīd, martyr, has a Christian flavor to it.”84 One could
say more cautiously that in Islam, and above all in the Qur’an, the verbally artic-
ulated witnessing of the unity of God has a decisive rank. An explicit confession
of faith in addition to an offering of physical self-​sacrifice was at no time required
of a Muslim martyr.

9.5.3 Sacrifice?
The relationship of the Qur’anic community to the second constitutive element
of Christian martyrdom, sacrifice and sacrificial death, is ambivalent. Islam
treats blood as essentially impure, while in Judaism it is accounted also as im-
purity detergent, and as a means of atonement.85 Indeed, the sacrifice of animals
is prescribed in the Qur’an, as in the Hebrew Bible (Q 22:36),86 but the Qur’anic
instructions do not follow biblical models and instead stand in the tradition of
the Meccan pagan pilgrimage cult, whose external form they continue to uphold.
But the continuation of pagan sacrifice should not obscure the essential am-
biguity that the Qur’an ascribes to animal sacrifice. The abolition of public sac-
rifice in the course of the Christianization of the Roman Empire three hundred
years before Islam had paved the way for new forms of worship as a means of
individual redemption, such as prayer, fasting, and alms. This “end of sacrifice”
is reflected also in the Qur’an, where animal sacrifice is endowed with an en-
tirely new meaning contrasting with the pagan rites of sacrifice: first of all, the
ancient Arabian sacrificial rite is sublimated into an act of emulating the model
of Abraham. Insofar as the entire institution of the pilgrimage or ḥajj—​originally
a rite marking a seasonal turn—​is reinterpreted in terms of salvation history in
the Qur’an, that is, referred back to the biblical Abraham—​perhaps in agreement
with older locally transmitted traditions—​its climax, the ceremony of sacrifice
(ʿīd al-​aḍḥā), in which a ram or other animal is to be slaughtered, obtains the
rank of an Abrahamic foundation. Its accomplishment by the Muslim worshipper
thus becomes an imitatio of Abraham. The meaning of sacrifice for the Qur’an is
limited to this complex. Not a symbolic configuration of meaning but rather the
fulfillment of a divine command in imitation of a religious predecessor figure is
to be imagined as the backdrop of Islamic sacrifice, according to both the Qur’an
and orthodox belief. One can thus speak justifiably of a demythologization of

84. Meier, Almoraviden, 712–​713.

85.  Maghen, “First Blood.”
86.  As in Judaism, the “Noahide laws” apply also in the Qur’an, meaning the ban on spilling blood (Q 2:30,
84) and the ban on humans consuming blood (Q 2:173, 5:3, 16:115, 6:145); Islamic tradition also adopted the prac-
tice of kosher butchering.
342  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

sacrifice already with reference to the Qur’an. While the words spoken by Moses
in his rite of expiation on the Day of Atonement, “this is the blood of the cove-
nant” (Lev 16:10–​16), are reconfigured in the Christian tradition within the in-
stitution of the Eucharist (Mk 14:23–​24), they remain without reception in the
Qur’an and in later (Sunnite) Islam.
Unlike in the biblical context, in the Qur’an sacrifice has no expiatory effects.
This difference is not a mere ritual detail, but marks a decisively softened position
vis-​à-​vis the treatment of blood and sacrifice as means of atonement in compar-
ison with Judaism and Christianity. The biblical claim to an expiatory or purify-
ing power for blood in the ritual context, as is expressed in the institution of Yom
Kippur, Lev 16:10–​16, which later becomes a theologumenon of the Christian
church, in the Qur’an is unambiguously negated.
In the Qur’an, one can claim without exaggeration that the very idea of sacri-
fice is lacking: the spilling of the blood of sacrifice for atonement is not consid-
ered. It is however not simply passed over in silence, but is consciously excluded
or “silenced.” Not only is the proscribed sacrifice for the ʿīd al-​aḍḥā, the “sacrifice
festival,” emptied of all mythical function, but such a function is explicitly negated,
as Q 22:36–​37—​reminiscent of Biblical cult-​critical pronouncements—​says:

The sacrificial animals we have assigned for you to be part of the rituals of
God. Much good you have in them;
so mention God’s name over them as they stand in line.
When they are fallen over their sides,
eat of them and feed the humble and the beggar.
That is how we subjected them to you, that you may be thankful.
Their flesh and blood will not reach God, but your piety will reach him.
Thus he subjected them to you, that you may glorify God for guiding
you. And announce the good news to those who do good.

Sacrifice is thus reduced to an expression of fear of God—​quite in the sense of

the admonitions of the ancient Israelite Prophets, who called for piety rather than
sacrifice. At the same time, sacrifice is a restaging of the sacrifice of Abraham,
whose near-​sacrifice of his son, redirected into an animal sacrifice, is localized
according to the Qur’an not on Mount Moriah but in the Meccan sanctuary.

9.5.4  Negation of a Redemptive Model

In view of this lack of any recollection of the biblical institution of sacrifice in
the Qur’an, the comparison of Christ to the scapegoat or the sacrificial lamb,
whose blood redeems the sins of the community in the Yom Kippur ceremony,
could not have entered the horizon of the early believers. The Qur’an, which al-
ready downgrades the blood of the sacrificial animal religiously to a quantité
negligeable, thus distances itself from a tradition that was foundational for the
 Stages of Communal Formation in Medina  343

predecessor religions. Consequently, the image of Christ suffering on the Cross87

is replaced in the Qur’an by the image of Jesus teaching. There is no self-​sacrifice
of Christ. Jesus, who like all the other Prophets that appear in the Qur’an suffers
repercussions from his unheeding people, is ultimately saved, like all Prophets
in the Qur’anic schema, by divine intervention. He is raised to heaven, from
where—​according to later tradition—​he will return to defeat the Antichrist. Jesus
does not suffer on the cross, but another takes his place and dies there. His role is
that of a proclaimer of the belief in unity and that of a caller to unity.
The idea of sacrifice thus has no place here: according to the overall optimistic
outlook of the Qur’an, the world is not condemned; Adam’s lapse does not mark
the fall of man but merely forms an episode, since guilt can be atoned for case by
case through repentance. A “second Adam” to erase the guilt of his precursor is
not required, since there was no “first Adam” who took guilt upon himself. The
privileged model of the believers is thus not Christ elevated for the accomplish-
ment of his self-​sacrifice; the role of model falls rather in the end of the Qur’anic
development to a counter-​figure, Abraham, the most “myth-​resistant” figure
among the biblical Prophets or patriarchs.

9.5.5  The Rededication of the Sacrifice: Abraham

as Sacrificer and Model
As the Qur’an integrates the animal sacrifice into the rites of pilgrimage estab-
lished by Abraham, Abraham becomes the founder of the Islamic sacrifice—​
insofar as one can speak of such in view of the minimalized status of sacrifice.
The post-​Qur’anic Islamic tradition, which condenses the ritual ḥajj ceremonies
into a sacred drama to be reenacted by the pilgrims, raises this particular rite to
the rank of the commemoration of Abraham’s near-​sacrifice, Aqedah, of his son.
Can the “binding of the son,” the Aqedah, Abraham’s preparedness to sacri-
fice his son out of utmost self-​dedication to God then be regarded as a Qur’anic
figure of thought? A  glance at sura 37 shows that the Qur’anic reading of the
Aqedah departs from the biblical presentation in its particular thrust and in-
stead, in agreement with a Midrash tradition, remains devoid of any mythologiz-
ing dramatics: Abraham does not have to pass through the self-​negating act of
sacrificing his only son, but instead a social interaction between father and son is
staged, and the son—​informed about the divine command—​shows himself ready
to serve as the obedient victim.88 The enactment is hardly begun when it is then
broken off, since God himself frees the “bound one,” offering an animal victim
as his substitute. Thus the figure of the Aqedah, the binding of the son, although
it is received in the Qur’an and its second, salvific part is restaged annually as
the climax of the ḥajj, cannot be linked to the discourse of martyrdom. With

87.  Cf. Lawson, Crucifixion,  26–​42.

88.  See chap. 11, 391–395.
344  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

the Qur’anic reinterpretation of the Abraham model, a previously revolutionary

model is replaced by one that conforms with norms.89

9.5.6  Martyrs on the Christian model?

No bloody bearing of witness, no redemptive sacrifice, no imitation of a re-
deemer who breaks all norms—​the Qur’an is thus a scripture with a strongly
demythologizing tendency. Nonetheless, a topos of Islamic martyrdom did
arise later, which was linked closely to death in battle on the one hand and
an eschatological distinction for the fallen on the other. Fading out the de-
manding parameters set by Christian martyrdom, the uniquely emphatic verse
Q 3:161 appears to mark a break in the Qur’an’s otherwise hermetically sealed
paradigm of almost absolute restraint from mythologizing, above all from the
mythologizing of rites involving blood. The exceptional status of the fallen in
the hereafter attested in this verse clearly falls outside of the dominant escha-
tological frame of the Qur’an, according to which all the dead will be awoken
only on the Last Day. The fact that this avant la lettre description of martyrdom
in its later form as shahāda is not distinguished as such seems to indicate either
that during the Medinan period of proclamation self-​denying operations were
called for, without there being a theologically reflected concept of martyrdom
behind them yet, or that associations with the Christian veneration of martyrs
that figured most prominently were shunned. In other words:  figurations of
martyrdom are already present in the Qur’an,90 but a clear concept of mar-
tyrdom had not yet been worked out, and there was obviously a reluctance
to develop one. The once-​established connection between violent death and
privileged rank in the hereafter, which is the focus of Q 3:161, was, however,
well-​suited to paving the way for the integration of a mythical image of mar-
tyrdom into the thought of the early Islamic community:  once violent death
was recognized as a way of obtaining nearness to God, the biblical paradigm of
the exchanging of sacrificial blood for divine favor, which had been banished
from the Qur’an, was able to enter into Islam subcutaneously, as it were, and
the verse could be read as an avant la lettre testimony for Islamic martyrdom.
Certainly, the difference between the perception of the fallen warriors in the
Qur’an and after the Qur’an remains significant.91 Islamic tradition sacralizes
martyrs on the battlefield already in this world, furnishing them not with re-
demptive blood, but with a related change of substance:  the martyr’s blood
becomes musk that eliminates the impurity of the corpse—​thus no washing

89. Ibid.
90.  It is to Horsch’s credit that she opened this particular venue of thought, in Horsch, Tod im Kampf.
91.  Wensinck was not totally unjustified in putting the verse into the context of hero worship in antiquity. Thus
the Islamic martyrs featured by the author of an early martyr treatise, Ibn al-​Mubārak, are clearly modeled on heroes
of antiquity. See Saleh, “Woman,” 128.
 Stages of Communal Formation in Medina  345

of the dead body is required. Visible blood possessing magical faculties, an

anathema in the Qur’an, thus becomes the God-​pleasing emblem of the martyr.
Yet the blood remains without function for the expiation of the collective, quite
in the sense of the Qur’an. The Islamic martyr remains limited theologically to
the status of the typus of the individual exemplary pious figure, even if he does
possess special claim to reward in the hereafter.
 10

Qur’an and Bible

10.1  Similarities, Dissimilarities

10.1.1  Biblical Narrative—​Qur’anic Drama

The relationship between the Qur’an and the Bible1 is not easy to define. Already
in their literary form, the two seem to be distant from each other:  unlike the
Bible, the transmitted Qur’an is not a text to be read continuously. It does not nar-
rate chronologically structured salvation history running from creation down to
the time of the recording of the text, as is true grosso modo for the Hebrew Bible,
where a “world drama” unfolds with the acts of creation—​election—​Exodus—​
settling in the land—​exile—​promise of redemption. The Qur’an sketches no com-
parably grand picture of history, although it likewise assigns a prominent place to
the creation of the world and the history of the elected people, and although the
Qur’anic community already at an early point understood itself as a new people
of God led by a prophet akin to Moses. Also unlike the Hebrew Bible, it offers
no spectrum of narrative, prophetic, poetic, and wisdom texts clearly assigned to
individual books, but rather combines differing types of text into the new genre
of the “sura,” which is represented by the Qur’an alone. Neither does the Qur’an
follow, in the style of the Gospels, the life and work of a divinely dispatched char-
ismatic proclaimer and his founding of a community down to his death and the
conclusion of his ministry. Although the Qur’an is the decisive document for
the Islamic community’s formation and reclaims for its proclamation a speaker
endowed with divine inspiration, it offers neither a history of the community
nor a biography of its proclaimer. Instead of laying out a salvation historical past,
it rather summons up the eschatological future in its early texts, and in its later
parts debates the implementation of the scripturally based monotheistic order of
society in the present.
Concerning its diction, however, the Qur’an is indeed oriented to biblical
models of speech; even more, it is wholly “prophetic speech.” For what in the case
of the Hebrew Bible was only achieved exegetically in retrospect, the reinterpre-
tation of all parts of the corpus into one prophecy2 grounded in inspiration, in

1.  This chapter concentrates on questions that have already been treated in Bible scholarship but have not yet
been posed for the Koran. The internal Koranic development of the community’s perception of the Bible is discussed
elsewhere; see chaps. 8 and 9, as well as chap. 3, 116–119.
2.  See Kugel, “Poets and Prophets.”

347
348  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

the Qur’an is already presupposed from the start: the Qur’an not only claims the
status of prophetic speech but also, through the second-​person address main-
tained throughout the entire text, shows itself to be mantic speech displaying,
in its poetic texts and to a lesser degree also in its narrative texts, the structural
characteristics of appellatory3 persuasive speech. But since the text also displays
dialogical patterns, often even citing speech and counter-​speech, the Qur’an in
its pre-​canonical form should not be classified generically as narrative,4 as for
example the Pentateuch and the historical books of the Bible, but—​in view of the
fact that the exchange of the speaker with hearers begins early on and persists
until the end of the proclamation—​it should rather be regarded as drama.
“Drama” in the case of the Qur’an is certainly not precisely identical with the
familiar fictional genre. For in the Qur’an we are confronted with a particular
form of drama, which for the most part does not allow the protagonists to speak
directly, but rather occasionally cites their speech and more often only refers to
it; thus, it is a drama that is “presented” by an observer, who not only speaks
but rather is also himself involved in the drama. The Qur’an is the “I” and “we”
speech of a speaker perceived as transcendent, toward a “you” that is within the
world, the proclaimer, who in turn addresses a hearership—​even if this commu-
nication scenario is not yet entirely complete in the earliest suras. The voice of the
“I” or “we” speaker, which jolts the drama, does not come from the stage itself,
but rather from the “offstage” of the transcendent. Indeed, it is this voice that—​
once the address is translated into proclamation, that is, as soon as the speaker
turns with the received message to his hearers—​takes prominence, commenting
on the acceptance or rejection of the message.5 Above all, it is the voice of the de-
cisive actor in the drama itself: God is the speaker, and at the same time takes part
in what is reported as an actor. This multilayered scenario of communication and
interaction, which drives the dialogical aspect of prophetic speech to its utmost
limit, can be counted as the most decisive formal characteristic of the Qur’an, and
it has no correspondence in the Bible.
In view of this particular communication situation, the Qur’an is never truly
similar to biblical writings, even if in the different phases of its genesis it comes
very close to particular partial corpora. Thus, in its early phase, it corresponds
most fittingly in its form to the Psalms.6 Like the Psalter, the early Qur’an consists
of short, concisely formulated verses in poetic language, which, like the Psalms,
formulate praises of God and prayer, as well as the complaint of an exemplary
pious figure. In both corpora, the structure of the verses fits their purpose of

3.  The term “appellatory” is introduced by Bühler, Sprachtheorie, who classifies language into the categories of
description, pronouncement, and appellatory speech.
4.  On the narrative technique of the Bible, see especially Alter, Biblical Narrative, and Alter and Kermode,
Literary Guide to the Bible, and now also Sternberg, Poetics of Biblical Narrative.
5.  See chap. 6, 214–216.
6.  See Neuwirth, “Psalmen”; cf. chap. 7, 241–245.
 Qur’an and Bible  349

being recited, arguably with cantilena. The later suras, on the other hand, are
not only more complex thematically but also are composed of different types
of text with their respective topoi and formulae. Examined according to their
sequences of themes and genres, they are no longer comparable to biblical texts,
but rather to a liturgical text ensemble. This becomes particularly clear in the
tripartite middle Meccan suras, with their sequence of appellatory introductory
part—​narrative—​appellatory closing part, corresponding to the sequence of li-
turgical elements of a monotheistic service, which begins and ends antiphoni-
cally and includes a narrative “reading” at the center.7 Only toward the end of the
development do further forms occur recalling biblical precedents, for example
the Medinan “oratory sura,” which evokes biblical prophetic speeches, and the
“long sura,” which seems to correspond to an entire biblical book.8

10.1.2  Exegetical Thrust
Yet these similarities, traceable on the surface, are relativized through an at-
titude that dominates the entire Qur’an and that is unthinkable of in the bib-
lical books:  the exegetical bias. According to self-​referential pronouncements
in the Meccan suras, the Qur’an will not bring something new, but rather dress
in a new language what has already been proclaimed earlier, in order to reach
a language community to which earlier revelations had not arrived: “to warn a
people, whose fathers were not warned, so that they are heedless” (Q 36:6). This
is expressed even more clearly in the Qur’anic claim to tafṣīl al-​kitāb, “the ex-
position (according to situation) or interpretation of the (heavenly) scripture,”
which is expressed for example in Q 10:37: “This reading is not simply contrived
without God’s intervention; rather, it is the confirmation of that which was be-
fore it, and an exposition, tafṣīl, of the scripture [tafṣīl al-​kitāb], in which there is
no doubt, by the Lord of the Worlds.”9 Thus is set forth not only as a paraenetic
but also an exegetical thrust, which manifests itself particularly in the reformu-
lation of older traditions. Biblical narratives are not told for their own sake, but
rather with a special exegetical interest, whose narrative mode—​often bemoaned
as elliptical—​is grounded in this selective interest.
This elliptical form, however unwieldy it may seem to the modern reader, is
justifiable in the Qur’anic context, since the contents must have been familiar to
the hearers at least in rough form. Nicolai Sinai notes here that

above all early Qur’an texts, in which no extended narratives occur, . . . were

received well within an extra-​Qur’anic horizon of knowledge. The fact
that the Qur’an in the process of its proclamation  .  .  .  gives more fully

7.  See chap. 6, 217–218.

8.  See chap. 6, 229–232.
9.  See Sinai, “Qur’ānic Self-​Referentiality,” cf. chap. 2, 76–80.
350  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

detailed descriptions of the persons and events concerned indicates that

this extra-​Qur’anic horizon of understanding was to be replaced succes-
sively by an inner-​Qur’anic horizon—​i.e., the co-​existence of complemen-
tary versions within a text corpus recognized across the community as
canonical. The Meccan Qur’an texts thus selectively appropriate the ho-
rizon of understanding of the hearers, which was originally external to the
text, not only in order to control it in its theological-​moral implications
but also to standardize it within the Qur’anic community.10
The same paraenetic bias that underlies the multiple narrations of the same sto-
ries is also effective in the rewriting of psalm texts, which the Qur’an reshapes
from pure hymns into didactic argumentation: here too, we observe a normal-
izing of the theological-​moral implications of the texts. Man does not praise God
as the creator, as he does in the Psalms, but rather God himself recalls his acts
of creation to man, thus obligating man to exalt him exclusively. Even when the
Qur’an later steps out of the construction of mere succession and of a primarily
interpretative relation to the earlier messages by taking on a radically new direc-
tion through the transfer of theologumena from the history of the Israelites and
the Holy Land to the homeland of the Prophet and the Arabian Peninsula, even
this large-​scale new identity construction remains an exegetical project. If in the
early parts of the Qur’an individual biblical and post-​biblical texts are negoti-
ated exegetically—​one thinks for example of the calling of Moses, which receives
a Qur’anic “continuation” through Muhammad’s vision in sura 5311—​the later
parts of the Qur’an mirror the progression of an exegetical appropriation and
integration of entire biblical discourses that take on a new value in the Qur’an.
Understood in this way, the establishment of the prayer direction toward Mecca,
for example, reflects a reconsideration of the prototype of the Solomonic dedi-
cation of the temple. Similarly, the reformation of the Kaaba cult in the Qur’an
reflects the biblical-​Prophetic, but above all post-​biblical, devaluation of sacrifice
in favor of the fear of God that is alone regarded as decisive.12 That the treatment
of biblical and post-​biblical references is often clothed in the form of an argu-
ment is not surprising; the Qur’anic message emerged at a time when massive
amounts of exegetical literature was produced in the surrounding milieu, which
was to impart to the individual religious traditions their exclusive character.13

10.1.3  What Should Be Compared?

It may be just this dissimilarity that has blocked systematic comparative re-
search between the Bible and the Qur’an up until now. All available reference

10. Sinai, Studien zur Koraninterpretation, 83.

11.  Cf. chap. 2, 68–71, and chap. 11, 405–408.
12.  Cf. chap. 9, 341–342.
13.  Cf. chap. 13, 453–457.
 Qur’an and Bible  351

works14 contextualize the Qur’an with individual books of the Bible, not how-
ever with the entire text corpus. The problem of the similarity or dissimilarity of
the two text corpora in their status of great traditions has not been recognized;
collected volumes with the explicit theme of the Bible and the Qur’an15 though
often appearing to offer promising programs remain concerned only with acci-
dental shared characteristics. Even the most thorough and comprehensive col-
lection of biblical and Qur’anic themes, Heribert Busse’s indispensable reference
work Die theologischen Beziehungen des Islams zu Judentum und Christentum
(Islam, Judaism and Christianity:  The Theological and Historical Affiliations;
1991), which follows on Heinrich Speyer’s encyclopedic work Die biblischen
Erzählungen im Qoran (Biblical narratives in the Qur’an; 1935), systematically
compares biblical stories with their Qur’anic counterparts, it remains stuck with
the hierarchic relation between biblical “sources” and their Qur’anic “rework-
ings,” without pursuing the theological significance of the particular Qur’anic
reception of the Bible.16 More recently, Hans Zirker has given an important spur
to the synoptic treatment of biblical and Qur’anic theological positions, but his
works are based on a synchronic treatment of the Qur’an text and show no in-
terest in the progression of the negotiation of older traditions by the proclaimer
and the community.17
The lack of a systematic comparison of the Bible and the Qur’an, both as literary
texts and as evidence of changing theological conceptions, can best be explained
by the failure of many researchers to put the Qur’an and the Bible on the same
level. The reason for this should be sought in the still-​current notion of the epigo-
nality of the Qur’an.18 The verdict of epigonality, according to which the Qur’an
has selectively “taken over” narratives and ideas from the books of the Bible or
post-​biblical tradition,19 obscures the full correspondence between the Qur’an
and the two partial corpora of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, which as
the founding documents of their respective religions in unique a way provide the
mythical-​metaphorical subtext for the thought and language of their societies.

14.  Thus, both of the most recent encyclopedias on the Koran, McAuliffe, Encyclopaedia of the Qur’ān, and
Amir-​Moezzi, Dictionnaire, make reference to biblical books but do not contain articles about the hermeneutical
relation of the Koran and the Bible. The introductory works Robinson, Discovering the Qur’ān; Paret, Mohammed
und der Koran; Bobzin, Koran; and Cook, Der Koran, are also little concerned with these relationships.
15. Reeves, Bible and Qur’an, is limited—​with the exception of a single paragraph—​to evidence on common
contents, terms, and literary types; its major focus is Koran exegesis rather than the Koran itself. The title of the
collection of essays edited by Seale, Qur’an and Bible, is misleading; it is a collection of heterogeneous works spe-
cific to the Bible, the Koran, and Islam, respectively. The articles on biblical subjects in McAuliffe, The Cambridge
Companion, and Rippin, The Blackwell Companion to the Qurʾān, do not go beyond individual observations on
particularities.
16. Busse, Die theologischen Beziehungen. Thyen, Bibel und Koran, is limited to the comparison of thematically
similar biblical and Qur’anic texts.
17. Zirker, Der Koran: Zugänge und Lesarten.
18.  See the numerous testimonies in Wild, “Schauerliche Öde”; cf. also Neuwirth, “De-​mythifying Islam,” as
well as the introduction, 12–17.
19.  The image introduced by Geiger (see chap. 1, 37–40) still characterizes most notions of the Qur’anic rela-
tionship to older traditions.
352  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

This perception of the “aura” of the scriptures stands and falls with the rec-
ognition of their particular referentiality—​either transcendent or worldly—​
and, bound up with that, with the hermeneutic register to be employed in their
reading. Thus the question of the comprehensibility of a layer of meaning beyond
what is said according to the literal sense becomes inescapable also for the textual
understanding of the Qur’an. The meta-​historical dimension of speech that is
claimed in the Qur’an from the very beginning, and which manifests itself in spe-
cific textual strategies, has generally received no attention in research up to now.
For the literary-​critical handling of this dimension, the reflections of the lit-
erary critic Northrup Frye on the referentiality of the Bible are illuminating. Frye
has labeled the Bible the “great code.”20 He studied the “biblical encoding” of
premodern Western literature through numerous examples, showing how this
“encoding” arises not only from the veritative, “literal” reading of biblical texts
but frequently from their symbolic reading, which is achieved in the Christian
context through the means of typology and allegory.21
The Bible reflects different forms of the treatment of language, which, ac-
cording to Frye, require different readings. Frye reads the biblical text as a docu-
ment of successive stages in the development of consciousness. The first, “poetic/​
metaphoric” stage is typical of a phase in societal development where poetry is
the main source of cultural knowledge, not least because verse aids the preserva-
tion of memory in a mnemotechnically most effective way. The thought figure of
metaphor that is operative here, with the structure “X is equal to Y,” allows one
to speak about the numinous forces immanent in the world, which were identi-
fied in ancient Near Eastern societies with deities and mythical beings, as is still
evident from numerous texts of the Hebrew Bible. 22 Even if the origins of the
Bible date back to this first “metaphoric” phase of language, the greater mass of
biblical texts already shows evidence of a divide between poetic and dialectical
thought. They belong to Frye’s “phase of metonymy,” in which the conception
of a transcendent God moves into the center of the world’s order. “Metonymic”
then denotes a sort of analogical thought and writing, in which the verbal expres-
sion “is used for something” (X stands for Y), that per se eludes the direct verbal
mode of expression. Here, in analogy to Plato’s parable of the cave, an invisible
world makes its appearance as the a decisive reference behind reality, so that
many statements must be read metonymically, that is, as referring in their deeper
sense to the transcendent.23 This “religious reading” being suggested, according
to Frye, by parts of the Hebrew Bible, becomes a universal principle for the later

20. Frye, The Great Code.

21.  The search for forms of “rewriting the Bible” has now caught on; see Boitani, The Bible and Its Rewritings.
22.  See Fishbane, Biblical Myth.
23.  See Bruns, “Midrash and Allegory.” Bruns emphasizes (637) that the hermeneutic techniques of allegory,
so central for Bible readings, were established practices in Greek thought long before the development of grammar
and rhetoric; see in detail Curtius, Europäische Literatur, 210–​220.
 Qur’an and Bible  353

Christian-​theological reading of the text, according to which a full understanding

of the Bible must rely on an interpretation going beyond the literal sense.
In the third phase—​called “descriptive”—​the individual subject interprets the
speech by means of his own sensory experience of the objective world. Here, the
criterion of truth is derived no longer from the inner stringency of the argument
but from the extratextual sources of description. The dominant figure of thought
now is a kind of comparison, “X is like Y”; a “true” verbal structure is therefore
one that is “as that” which it describes. This mode of thought, which—​applied
to individual areas of daily life—​coexists alongside the other two and is thus re-
flected already in descriptive passages of the Bible as well, becomes a prevailing
principle of reading only in modernity. It is only since the eighteenth/​nineteenth
century that texts start to do without a symbolic interpretation “exceeding” the
meaning of the words.24 This attitude to the text, which places the literal sense
in the foreground, goes back to a rigorous application of the historical-​critical
method, which “frees” the Bible from theology in order to understand it exclu-
sively through its historical context.25 However irreversible this development
may be, according to Frye it does not permit to disrespect the diverse herme-
neutical registers of the biblical texts and submit them as a whole exclusively to
a descriptive reading which does not concede to the word any “power beyond its
literary meaning.”26
Frye’s reflections raise questions that concern the Qur’an as well; for what Frye
bemoans about the tendencies of the Bible reading that were dominant in his
time, for the Qur’an is downright the rule:  it is read not only in research but
also in contemporary inner-​Islamic (orthodox) reception, as simply veritative,
regardless of its poetical-​metaphoric or metonymic-​allegorical implications.27 In
principle however, the possibility of a poetic-​metaphorical and even allegorical
reading, proffered for the Bible by Frye, needs to be considered for the Qur’an
as well.
Frye’s model, developed on the basis of Western Bible reception, is unmis-
takably marked by Christian theological and philosophical tradition. The appli-
cability of this model to the Hebrew Bible in its early Jewish reception (at the
time after Philo of Alexandria) is currently contested,28 even if modern Jewish
readings frequently follow the model established in Western literary history.
So, for example, Robert Alter concedes to the Hebrew Bible—​quite in tune with
Frye’s observation of the oscillation of biblical texts between several hermeneutic
registers—​a double canonicity. By this he means the status of the Bible as both

24. Frye, The Great Code,  3–​30.

25.  On the implications of this revolutionary development, see Reiser, Bibelkritik und Auslegung,  1–​4.
26. Frye, The Great Code, 19.
27.  This does not apply universally to the inner-​Islamic exegetic tradition, which also recognizes various
modes of “spiritual” (bāṭinī) exegesis.
28.  Boyarin, “The Eye in the Torah.”
354  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

an aesthetically standard-​setting literary document and a theologically canon-​

forming religious one, which is then correspondingly received in this double
manner. As Alter shows, the same biblical books that were later allegorized for
discussions of doctrine or—​as in the case of Song of Songs—​already were alle-
gorized for their inclusion in the canon equally fulfilled the function of a literary
model for later Hebrew poetry, in which they were received for their exemplary
style and imagery—​in absolute independence from aspects of their transcendent
significance.29 Frye’s challenge to look at the gradual process the of successive
updatings within the Hebrew Bible itself that eventually produced the later com-
plete corpus, in terms of an oscillation between different hermeneutic registers,
is taken up today by biblical scholars such as James Kugel.30 Jewish and Christian
exegetes are now demanding new reflections on the knowledge potential implicit
in typological and allegorical reading.31

10.2  Looking for Allegory and Typology in the Qur’an

10.2.1  Reservations: Christological Implications of Allegorical and

Typological Readings of the Bible
As its etymology already indicates, allegorical thinking is grounded in the
premise that words can have meanings that say something “other” than what
is suggested by their literal sense. Allegory does not appear initially as a char-
acteristic of exegesis, but often takes part already in the production of the text.
One can think here of the parable delivered to David by the prophet Nathan (2
Sam 12:1–​4), of the one single sheep of the poor man that the rich cattle-​holder
reclaims for himself—​an allegory for the wife of Uriah whom David had taken
possession of unjustifiably. Allegory appears most often in the form of narra-
tive, as an interaction between actors that signifies something beyond itself and
employs its narrative strategies to persuade of the truth of a particular message.
The “true” significance of an allegory thus only reveals itself through the explica-
tion of its “double sense.”32
The exegetical principle of practicing allegory, allegoresis, has its roots in
scripture. Already the Jewish religious philosopher Philo of Alexandria made ex-
tensive use of it. Its Christian practice, goes back to Paul, who explicitly speaks
of “allegory” (Gal 4:24), and employs it to interpret central biblical statements
in a Christological vein.33 One of the first church fathers, Origen, in the third

29. Alter, Canon and Creativity,  1–​61.

30.  Cf. Kugel, The Bible as It Was.
31.  On this, see the introduction.
32. Frye, The Great Code, 85.
33.  The three Pauline texts Ephesians 5, 1 Corinthians 10, and Galatians 4 are considered the fundamentals for
the allegorical interpretation of the Christian tradition; see Wilken, “In Defense of Allegory,” 200.
 Qur’an and Bible  355

century, already makes it the basis of an elaborate apparatus of biblical expla-

nation. Christoph Dohmen points to the philosophical origin of this exegesis,
namely, Platonic anthropology, which distinguishes between body, soul, and
spirit. For Origen, “the Bible not only has a body—​that is the literal sense, the
surface level of the text, which everyone can immediately see—​but also a soul,
i.e., a still deeper sense, which reveals itself through allegorical interpretation.”34
The allegorical interpretation, which as a rule is applied to the Old Testament,
postulates “figurative” meanings in places where the text would also allow mean-
ingful veritative readings. It is just this cooptation of the text for purposes out-
side of the text that makes allegorical interpretation problematic for the Jewish
tradition. Daniel Boyarin points to this difficulty when he claims that “allegory
presupposes a particular ontological and political positioning, a platonic longing
for the unambiguous and unchanging, which is foreign to Rabbinic literature,
and especially to the Midrash.”35 This is particularly clear for Boyarin in the con-
trast between two frequent traditional text types: the parable, where a Midrashic
reading proceeds structurally from the abstract to the concrete, and Christian
allegorical readings, which proceed from the concrete to the abstract.36
Related to the allegorical reading, but not identical to it, is typology.37
Understood in its simple pre-​terminological sense, typology is likewise not in-
itially the discovery of exegetes, but rather is already detectable in the Hebrew
Bible, where figures and modes of behavior show typological correspondences to
each other. So, for example, Aaron’s production of the Golden Calf shows itself
as the typological precedent for the later cultic schism in the Northern Kingdom,
in which golden bulls will play a role.38 But in its theologically amplified, “tech-
nical” significance, typology is anchored in the Christian tradition, which under-
stands it above all as the rediscovery of Old Testament configurations in the New
Testament, which are identified as pre-​stampings or “types” of so-​called anti-​
types, that is, of persons and events in the life and works of Jesus. For Origen, this
typological reading goes beyond a mere feedback of New Testament events into
a divine salvific project that reaches back far into history. The particular figure
of thought that motivates Origen, according to Daniel Boyarin, is an element of
logos theology: “If the logos in its incarnation is God-​man, then, in the view of
Origen, the incarnation of the spirit in holy scripture is also divine-​human. In
this tradition, hermeneutics is an attempt to reach beyond the sensible text to
its non-​sensible meaning.”39 It is just this Christological context, which is diffi-
cult to ignore, that makes typology problematic for Jewish exegesis. The fact that

34. Dohmen, Die Bibel und ihre Auslegung,  47–​48.

35.  Boyarin, “The Eye in the Torah,” 546–​547.
36. Ibid.
37.  Frye, The Great Code, 85.
38. Frye, The Great Code, 83.
39.  Boyarin, “The Eye in the Torah,” 548–​549.
356  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

the two text corpora of the Bible stand in a typological relation to each other for
Christian theology and that the Christian reading of the Hebrew Bible is ani-
mated decisively by its typological “translation,” implies an unmistakable down-
grading of the Hebrew Bible, which is demoted from a self-​referential scripture
to a collection of reference texts for the New Testament. Frye recognizes in the
New Testament a “densely woven web of allusions to the Old Testament, often in
the form of direct or nearly direct citations.”40 Not only individual statements but
indeed entire mythic paradigms are reproduced typologically.41

10.2.2  Questions on the Qur’an

The widely divergent modes of approach to allegory and typology in rabbinic
Judaism and Christianity, respectively, raise the question of to which tradition
the Qur’an stands closest. As the Qur’an builds historically on the exegetical
practices of Antiquity and Late Antiquity and looks back in particular to the
growth of Christian teaching as an ensemble of anti-​types to the stories and
thought figures of the Hebrew Bible, it is worthwhile here to seek out traces of
typology and allegory, that is, symbolic interpretations of the concrete narra-
tive sequence of a biblical story, and the underpinning of non-​biblical, “original
Qur’anic” speech through transcendental subtexts as strategies for the commu-
nication of a theological message. Biblical intertextuality in the Qur’an has been
seen up to now above all in the resumption of narrative plots and individual
ideas;42 indeed, in 1977, John Wansbrough already addressed the Qur’an’s typo-
logical recourses to the Bible through his identification of so-​called emblems of
prophethood.43 Heribert Busse offered a first concrete contribution to the rec-
ognition of typology in the Qur’an in his article Herrschertypen im Koran (Ruler
types in the Qur’an), which appeared in 1979.44 Busse succeeds in clarifying sev-
eral typologically significant relationships between biblical figures in the Qur’an,
which up to that point had been construed as due to misunderstanding precisely
because they deviated from the biblical model. Busse still worked with a “simple”
concept of typology, that is, one that is not theologically charged, which allowed
him to uncover the interaction so frequently presented in the (early) Qur’an be-
tween contrastive negative and positive characters—​for example, the stubborn
unbelieving peoples and the persistently proclaiming messenger—​in terms of
“typology,” as a predecessor scenario for the conflict of the proclaimer and his

40. Frye, The Great Code, 79.

41.  An exemplary case—​represented by the Gospel of Luke—​of adopting the liberation story of the book of
Exodus as a typos that is restaged in later history as its antitype has recently been presented in a study by Schiffner,
Lukas liest Exodus; reaching results that are also relevant to Qur’anic references to the Gospels.
42. Speyer, Die biblischen Erzählungen im Qoran, collects traces of typology in the Qur’anic narratives without
classifying them.
43. Wansbrough, Quranic Studies,  53–​84.
44.  Busse, “Herrschertypen im Koran”; cf. also, for a discussion of the work, chap. 11, 384–385.
 Qur’an and Bible  357

overbearing opponents.45 Though this has more to do with the identification of

schematic precedents for Prophetic history than the unearthing of theologically
relevant prefigurations, Busse nonetheless has succeeded to identify an impor-
tant Qur’anic textual strategy. But reading the Qur’an as an authorial work, he
does not explore the function of biblical configurations that accrues to them
only in the course of the Qur’anic development. Thus, it goes unnoticed that
the two sanctuary histories of Jerusalem and Mecca serve the goal developed
in Medina, to construe Mecca as a new Jerusalem.46 Likewise, the Moses ty-
pology, by which the Qur’anic community understands itself as a new people of
God under Prophetic leadership,47 remains unrecognized as the central part of a
new Qur’anic Exodus paradigm. Even more limited to occasional observations,
whose theological potential is not realized, are the contributions of individual
researchers who in recent times have interpreted the biblical reminiscences in
the Qur’an48 but have not perceived the Qur’an as a new post-​biblical proclama-
tion that progressively inscribes itself typologically into a paradigm given earlier
by the Bible.
The problem of typology was recognized more clearly by Gustav von
Grunebaum, who already in 1960 raised the question of its role in early Islamic
literature, though without focusing on the Qur’an. Rather, he laid his finger on
the lack of typology in the exegesis of the Qur’an, where it would have suggested
itself to him on the basis of the fundamental commonalities between the Bible
and the Qur’an:

Both Christians and Muslims proceed from the basic premise that biblical
facts predict the coming of Christ or Muhammad, but only Christianity
reads the prefiguratio of events, as they are reported in the New Testament,
to be true through the dicta et gesta of the Old Testament. . . . David as typus
of Jesus, his victory [as] a victoria figurata et mystica of the victoria vera
Christi, the incident with Bathsheba and Uriah as praefiguratio of Jesus
wresting the church from Satan or the Jewish people, or Christ sacrificed
in Abel, the church symbolically presented in Noah’s Ark . . . this mode of
treatment has no systematic counterpart in Islamic taʾwīl. . . . Although
the relatedness between the Qur’an and the older Bible is not so close as
that between the Old and New Testaments, a typology would indeed have
been expedient, e.g., in the comparison of the fate of the earlier prophets
with that of Muhammad.49

45.  Busse assumes that the Prophet developed “an independent typology, whether animated by the Christian
Biblical interpretation or not”; see “Herrschertypen im Koran,” 58–​59.
46.  Cf. chap. 9, 332–337.
47.  Cf. chap. 8, 279–282.
48.  Samir, “The Theological Christian Influence”; Reynolds, “Reading the Qur’an as Homily.” Exceptions are
provided by Mourad, “Mary in the Qur’an,” and Witztum, “The Foundation of the House.”
49.  Von Grunebaum, “Die Erfahrung des Heiligen,” 110n4.
358  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

Certainly, the concept of praefiguratio is lacking in the Islamic tradition, but not
only can we frequently discern the phenomenon of the schematization of sacred
historical figures brought to light by Busse, we can equally trace instances of the-
ologically significant typologizing. Von Grunebaum simply looks for the parallel
in the wrong place. For it is not the commentaries on the Qur’an that form the
counterpart to the Christian exegesis of the church fathers but rather the Qur’an
itself, which, no less a post-​biblical text than the referred-​to exegesis, presents
an interpretation of biblical traditions. What is striking here is the formation,
missed by van Grunebaum, of the earlier prophets on the model of Muhammad,
as well as his self-​presentation on the model of Moses and later of Abraham.
Certainly it is hard to overlook the fact that in the Qur’an we generally do
not encounter theologically charged typology, but rather schematization. The
reported events of various earlier peoples in the early suras, which take a cata-
strophic end in the punishment stories; the harassment of the righteous by pow-
erful opponents; the final victory of the men of God: all these display a similar
structure to the position described by the proclaimer for his own community, but
they are cases of precedents willed by God rather than actual salvation-​historical
harbingers of what happens to the community. Thus, what is missing is the tel-
eological tension immanent in the “hidden sense,” which in the Christian view
makes identifiable “David as typus of Jesus, his victory as a victoria figurata et
mystica of the victoria vera Christi’50 (“the secret pre-​form of the true victory of
Christ.”)
Aside from this teleological dimension, one can in at least two cases reclaim
for the Qur’an a typological relation:  namely, between the proclaimer and his
predecessor figures, Moses and Abraham.51 both of whom are clearly depicted as
his models in the Qur’an. Abraham and Moses come close to the status of pre-
figurations of the proclaimer, in that their stories as they are told in late Meccan
and Medinan times merge with that of the proclaimer himself. Thus, for example,
when Moses’s reception of the tables of law is reported the focus—​without for-
mally marked transition—​turns to the proclaimer who is exhorted to preserve
“the most important of it” (Q 7:145).52 The working of these two biblical figures
and that of the proclaimer are linked through a theologically significant relation,
even if this is less teleologically oriented than the typological relations extant be-
tween the Old and New Testament figurations that are reclaimed in the Christian
tradition.

50. Ibid.
51.  De Prémare attempts to prove a typological relationship between the Prophet and the figure of Joseph in
Joseph et Muhammad. But in de Prémare’s portrayal, the relationship of both figures does not go beyond similar
external life circumstances and an identical monotheistic message. It is worth mentioning, however, that a theologi-
cally charged Joseph-​Muhammad typology was instrumental in the development of the new religious movement of
the Babis in the nineteenth century; see Dehghani, Messianismus und Märtyrertum.
52.  Neuwirth, “Medinan Additions,” 71–​93.
 Qur’an and Bible  359

10.3  Allegories in the Qur’an?

10.3.1  Visions of the Future

There is a sequence of early Meccan suras that begin with accumulations of
images, which clearly are not to be understood veritatively; nor are they simply
metaphors for something empirically known but rather signify something un-
known, indeed supernatural. They are frequently located in the oath clusters at
the beginning of suras, upon which, after an in-​between part with instruction to
the hearers, an explicit eschatological pronouncement often follows. A particu-
larly striking example is Q 100:1–​5:53

wa-​l-​ʿādiyāti ḍabḥā
fa-​l-​mūriyāti  qadḥā
fa-​l-​mughīrāti  subḥā
fa-​atharna bihi naqʿā
fa-​wasaṭna bihi jamʿā

By the snorting runners

striking sparks with their hooves
daring to attack in the morning,
they throw up dust with their steps,
and penetrate into the middle of crowds.54

Here, in the ancient Arabic sajʿ style, is depicted a tableau of enigmatic phe-
nomena captured in fast forward-​driving movement, which in view of their
qualities—​instead of names of the objects their qualifications that are put for-
ward metonymically—​need to signify horses and riders. Yet, what is intended
are clearly not any horses/​riders known from the history of the Qur’anic com-
munity.55 Even if one treated the riders as a general image derived from empir-
ical experience to indicate unknown, quickly approaching phenomena,56 still a
dimension of significance would remain unnoticed, one that is unmistakably
evoked by the morphological form of the named phenomena:  the participles
in feminine plural (fāʿilāt) of verbs denoting violent movement throughout the
Qur’an are bound up with eschatological associations.57 It is in this grammat-
ical form that a number of Qur’anic neologisms occur, all signifying catastrophic
phenomena of the loosing of the cosmos at the end of time. That these remain

53.  Neuwirth, “Images and Metaphors.”

54.  The German translation of this sura by Friedrich Rückert, Koran, 469 is particularly suggestive. On the
text, see also chap. 12, 431–434.
55.  Individual later commentators argue—​anachronistically—​for the possibility that what is at stake are the
riders making a raid (ghazwā) active during Muhammad’s campaigns. Ibn Qayyim, Al-​Tibyān, reviews the pertinent
attempts at explanation; cf. Neuwirth, “Images and Metaphors.”
56.  As also in Neuwirth, “Images and Metaphors.”
57.  See chap. 5, 169–171.
360  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

enigmatic in view of the indirect naming and must be filled in by the imagination
of the hearers leads some commentators to put forward an “Islamic explanation,”
and to see in the “runners” angels appearing on the Last Day—​although this
interpretation is not compatible with the horse description that is maintained
across the entire verse group.58 The tableau, which describes the breaking out
of warriors into an attack on an enemy tribe, should rather in accordance with
the fāʿilāt forms be interpreted eschatologically. The horses/​riders are then to be
understood—​no differently from the apocalyptic riders of the Revelation of John
(Rev 9)—​as omens of catastrophic events at the end of time. Here, the concept
of allegory seems justified, since the presented image—​the proclaimer presents it
like a vision unfolding before his eyes—​makes reference to an insensible world.
Although not in conventional narrative form but rather in the form of oaths,
a story is nonetheless told that, put into the categories established by Boyarin,
employs the technique of dressing the abstract in the concrete in order to con-
vince the hearers of the truth of a message. It is noteworthy that the short sura
itself solves this allegorical enigma at its close. In sura 100 first an exhortation to
the hearers follows in the form of a rebuke of man, verses 6–​8:

inna l-​insāna li-​rabbihi la-​kanūd

wa-​innahu ʿalā dhālika la-​shahīd
wa-​innahu li-​ḥubbi l-​khayri la-​shadīd

Man is obstinate against his lord

and is himself testimony of that,
and fervently he loves profit.

Only then is the eschatological interpretation of the oath series unveiled,

verses  9–​11:

a-​fa-​lā yaʿlamu idhā buʿthira mā fī l-​qubūr

wa-​ḥuṣṣila mā fī l-​ṣudūr
inna rabbahum yawmaʾidhin la-​khabīr

Does he then not know, if what is in the grave is brought alive

and that which is in the heart is uncovered,
that nothing then remains hidden to your Lord?

The tableau of riders from the oath series fades out, just when the actual raid—​
the invasion into the camps, the frightening of the opponents surprised in sleep
in the early morning, the searching out and overturning of all containers—​is to
take place. The image that was thereby “arrested” is taken up again in the closing,
but it is unraveled and reset into an expressly eschatological context: just those

58.  See Neuwirth, “Images and Metaphors.”

 Qur’an and Bible  361

images that are suppressed in the oath series are now unfolded, with eschatolog-
ical application: It is the sleeping dead that are awakened, and their innermost
things, their remembrance of guilt, are turned outward. God himself turns out
to be the performer of the raid announced in the oath series. The enigmatic phe-
nomena that in the oath series are shown approaching at a threatening pace are
none other than the harbingers of the waking of the dead and the judgment.
While in the speech of biblical prophets, monumental images are often
depicted that reach across wide space, those Qur’anic allegories in the early suras,
which in view of their ancient Arabian seer(kahin)-​style come closest to biblical
prophetic texts, remain limited to short blending of images. These always aim
at one and the same object: the loosing of the cosmos on the Final Day. Here,
not dissimilar from the prophecies of Ezekiel for instance, language itself plays
a major role. It is language that generates that enigmatic-​threatening atmos-
phere, which arises from the oath series. Several characteristics—​the structure
of syntactical repetition that recalls the performance of rites, the extensive use of
neologisms that often remain mysterious being, formed according to the prece-
dent of poetic metonymy, and phonetically the use of memorable rhyme, which
accommodates each semantic unit in a mold of its own—​all these distinguish the
allegorical Qur’anic images as something new, for which biblical speech, despite
occasional overlaps, provides no direct precedent.59

10.3.2  Allegorical Narratives in the Qur’an?

Another complex that also remains unresearched is the Qur’anic parable narratives,
whether or not they are marked as parables expressly with the term mathal.60 They
stand in a complex tradition, since parables already occur in ancient Arabic po-
etry,61 but play an especially prominent role in rabbinic discussions, and above all
in the Gospels. Daniel Boyarin has insisted on their non-​allegorical character, both
for the rabbinic parables and also for those of the New Testament.62 The assumption
of an allegorical dimension for the Qur’anic parable speeches, carrying forward this
tradition, does not therefore immediately suggest itself. Yet it is those parable-​like
narratives in the Qur’an63 that are not termed mathal that do seem to permit an

59.  As parallel cases we could name Q 77:1–​6 and 79:1–​5. These are to be distinguished from oaths upon
places and things that had already acquired additional symbolic meaning in the earlier traditions, such as al-​ṭūr,
Q 52:1 (“The Mount”); ṭūr Sinīn, Q 95:2 (“Mount Sinai”); al-​tīn, Q 95:1 (“The Fig Tree”); or al-​qalam Q 68:1 (“The
Pen”). These too cannot be read meaningfully in an exclusively veritative way. But although the evocation of Mount
Sinai does not indicate the mountain as such invoking instead a particular scenario of origins, and although the
naming of the fruit tree is less about actual means of nutrition than an evocation of a place of salvation-​historical
significance, and although the naming of the writing pen presents not the artifact but rather the complex of tran-
scendent scripture, these condensed references should be seen as evocative keys for allegory rather than as examples
of allegory itself.
60.  Some examples are discussed in chap. 8, 305–313.
61.  See Wagner, Grundzüge I, 98, 164.
62.  See Boyarin’s review of Stern, Parables in Midrash, 126.
63.  On the stories explicitly labeled as mathal, see chap. 8, 310–313.
362  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

allegorical reading. This applies, for example, to the narrative of the “owners of the
Garden,” aṣḥāb al-​janna (Q 68:17–​33). This narrative seems, like the punishment
legends, to aim at the critique of certain forms of behavior among contemporaries,
without however limiting itself to an admonishing message. Despite the detailed
presentation of the false behavior of the “owners of the garden”—​who are pun-
ished since they did not pronounce a praise of God nor respect the common-​law
custom of giving the surplus harvest to the poor—​it seems above all to be a parable
about the illusive, merely apparent reality of the earthly world. For the “testing”
proclaimed in the introductory verse refers not only to moral failures but to a fun-
damentally “wrong thinking,” the consequence of which, the real loss, therefore
only becomes recognizable in the hereafter. What is required in the Qur’an is the
recognition of the reality of a spiritual world beyond the sensible one: the “garden”
proves to be a “fleeting” possession, whose availability is revocable from one mo-
ment to the next. Read in this way, the narrative presents a reminder of the contin-
gency of the earthly world, fitting into Daniel Boyarin’s definition of allegory as an
ultimately Platonic figure of thought, which interprets mutable figures metonymi-
cally and thus replaces them with corresponding unchanging and therefore “true”
figures of the transcendent world. Q 68:17–​32:64

We are testing them, as we once tested the owners of the garden.

When they swore they would harvest its fruit the next morning but failed
to say, “If God wills.”
A disaster from your lord struck the garden as they slept
and by morning the garden was as if stripped clean.
As they rose up, they called out to each other:
“go early to your fields if you intend to cull their fruit,”
and went off whispering:
“No poor man is to enter upon you today.”
And they hastened at once in the morning.
When they saw the garden, they said, “We have lost our way,
No, we are ruined!”
The most reasonable of them said, “did I not tell you to glorify God?”
They answered, “Glory be to our Lord, we were doing wrong ”
So they turned upon each other, in mutual reproach.
They said: “Woe to us, we have done terrible wrong,
But maybe our Lord will give us something better in exchange,
we turn to our Lord sincere in will.”
Such is our punishment,
but the punishment of the hereafter is far more grievous,
if only they knew.

64.  Boyarin’s review of Stern, Parables in Midrash, 126.

 Qur’an and Bible  363

The word al-​dunyā, “the earthly world,” does not occur, but it transpires that the
here and now is no more than a weak reflection of the “other world,” al-​ākhira,
as the closing verse shows (verse 33). As Frants Buhl, and after him Heinrich
Speyer, detected, the narrative recalls Luke 12:16–​20, where there is also language
of a rich man wrongly imagining himself and his possessions to be secure. The
Gospel story is not only “reversed” in the Qur’an by the eschatological closing (in
Buhl’s view a weakening of its effect),65 but it also evokes the contingency of what
exists through the references to gardens and vegetation.66
This projection of a hidden world (ghayb) standing behind the inner-​worldly
scenario (shahāda) is found elsewhere in the Qur’an as well. Indeed, the later
mystical antinomy of ʿālam al-​ghayb /​ ʿālam al-​shahāda, “the hidden world” and
the “apparent world,” is not yet detectable, ghayb remaining closed to humans
outside of the circle of the Prophets, but God is ever clearer presented as the
omniscient ruler of both realms, as ʿālim al-​ghayb wa-​l-​shahāda, above all in
the late Meccan and Medinan periods (Q 32:6; 23:93; 64:19; 62:8; 59:22; 4:95,
105). Knowledge of what is hidden, secret67 is already a theme early on (Q 53:35,
52:41), always in the sense of what is not accessible to man.
The double-​facedness of the world, where the sensible scenario corresponds
to a hidden other that lies outside the present and is therefore unknowable, is an
explicit theme in at least one instance: in a (middle Meccan) riddle-​story, which
comes to an allegorical point: the meeting of Moses with an unnamed wise man,68
identified by tradition with the figure of Khidr, a “servant of God,” ʿabd Allāh (Q
18:64–​82). In the narrative, Moses associates with the wise man in order to learn
from him. The wise man, who anticipates the incapacity of the “novice” for deep
insight, first tries to reject him: “How can you preserve patience with me, if you
do not have full knowledge of it [wisdom]?” (verse 68). Taken in under the condi-
tion that he demand no explanations, Moses becomes three times the witness of
morally objectionable or incomprehensible actions by the wise man. The tension
increases with the delay of the solution of the riddle, which Moses demands twice
in vain, heedless of the forbidding (verses 71, 74, and 77). Finally, when Moses
prepares to ask for the third time, the wise man forestalls him: “This is the parting
between you and me” (verse 78). The striking behaviors that are now interpreted,
show themselves to be not symbolic at all, but rather thoroughly bound up with a
purpose, though charged theologically. The wise man justifies every action by the

65.  Buhl, “Mathal.”

66. Speyer, Die biblischen Erzählungen im Qoran, 434. See also the interpretation of the story as an ethical al-
legory in Mir, “Language,” 104–​105.
67.  See Izutsu, The Structure of the Ethical Terms; Rahman, Major Themes.
68.  On the tradition-​historical preconditions of the story, whose protagonist can only be related to the bib-
lical character of Moses by assuming intermediate typological linkings, see Horovitz, Koranische Untersuchungen,
141–​143, and Wheeler, Moses in the Quran. An important plea for the consideration of allegorical dimensions in
sura 18 is expressed in Hughes, “The Stranger at the Sea,” which is, however, primarily concerned with other stories
in the sura.
364  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

argument that the road to a better future must be paved: his damaging of a ship
was meant to prevent its confiscation (verse 79); his killing of a young man was
to prevent his suspected mistreatment of his parents (verses 80–​81); his building
of a wall in the inhospitable settlement should help to keep secret a treasure that
should only come to light with the coming to age of its possessor (verse 82). The
problematic actions serve to promote the breakthrough of a future that is still in-
visible for the human observer.
But as concise as the explanations are, they leave the “novice” with serious open
questions, on the one hand about divine providence, which—​in quite an antino-
mian way—​can be manifest in criminal (or unreasonably charitable) actions, and
on the other hand about the freedom to break recognized norms of behavior in
order to permit the coming of a better future. Though the story ends with a logi-
cally convincing disclosure, its formula of parting hādhā firāqu baynī wa-​baynik,
“This is the parting between you and me,” verse 78 affirms the existence of ultimately
unbearable paradoxes of earthly life, and implies the verdict of man’s incapacity to
await patiently the explanation lying in wait in the “hidden,” ghayb. The story, which
was read by later readers as testimony for the provisionality and contingency of the
earthly world,69 could be interpreted as a Qur’anic allegory, in which the “apparent
world,” ʿālam al-​shahāda, and the secret one, ʿālam al-​ghayb, are projected onto each
other as inextricable. It demonstrates the deceptive reliability of appearances.
Even if we could add more instances of the appearance of allegory in the sense
of the insertion of a counter-​world valued more highly in a Platonic sense, still
they would remain exceptional phenomena in the Qur’an. Indeed, in the genesis
of the Qur’an, the two most important preconditions for allegorical discourse are
lacking: a deep rooting in Platonic thinking and above all a practical necessity of
reinterpreting scenarios of previous salvation history regarded authoritative but
are no longer were compatible with the new worldview. Since the Qur’anic dis-
course successively grows out of debates over earlier traditions, thus eliminating
already in the course of the process of its proclamation those theologumena that
were deemed obsolete, occasionally also “overwriting” them with new ones of its
own, it copes with the predecessor traditions in a relatively uncomplicated way.
Here we need only recall the decided but inconspicuous elimination from the
Qur’anic horizon of the idea of sacrifice central to the two predecessor traditions,
which was accomplished during the proclamation itself.70 A wholly different sit-
uation had obtained for the New Testament and early Christian theology, which
built on the biblical tradition as a whole and therefore had to reform the sense

69.  Later literary authors have seen here a reminder of transience, such as Muhammad Abū l-​Qāsim al-​Ḥarīrī
(446–​512/​1054–​1122), who puts into the mouth of his last maqama’s protagonist, in a scene when this character
says farewell to his pupil, the following words: ijʾali l-​mawta nasba ʿaynik fa-​hadhā l-​firāqu bayni wa-​baynak, “Keep
death always in front of your eyes, for this is the parting between me and you,” striking a concluding note to their
lifelong relationship; see Neuwirth, “Adab Standing Trial.’
70.  See chap. 9, 326–332.
 Qur’an and Bible  365

paradigm or the predecessor traditions that was decisive for salvation history
in in a way that allowed to maintain their dimension of significance within the
new readings, but adapting them to new functions. The changed configuration of
sacrifice—​from temple cult to the ritual of remembrance of Christ’s self-​sacrifice,
demonstrates this most clearly. It is this theologically challenging confrontation
of an authoritative predecessor tradition that above all requires the strategies
of allegory and typology. The Qur’an is confronted with no corresponding re-
quirement for allegorizing a predecessor tradition. Contrarily, it confronts the
fait accompli of the allegorizations already carried out in the Christian tradition.
It is thus less Qur’anic allegorizations than the Qur’anic handling of already ex-
tant allegory that can throw light on its exegetical hermeneutic. Certainly, the
most eloquent example of how the Qur’an deals with a large-​scale Christian alle-
gory already during its genesis is offered by the Qur’anic story of Mary, which—​
following the discussion of the figure of Mary provided in ­chapter 8, will now be
reviewed under the aspect of de-​allegorization.71

10.4  “De-​a llegorizations”

As an inter-​testamental figure, Mary occupies the space of transition between

two great paradigms: temple cult and church. She was given increased theolog-
ical significance, since the Council of Ephesus in the year 431, as the mother
of God, the “God-​bearer” (theotokos).72 Already in earlier theology, she was
considered an allegory for the church, and as such implicitly the “heiress of the
temple.” The great allegory, which turns a sacred historical figure into the uni-
versal symbol of a new religion, is manifest in numerous liturgical texts of the
Greek and Syriac churches.73 In the work of Ephrem of Nisibis (306–​373), whose
poems find frequent echoes in the Qur’an, Mary stands as a typos or allegory for
the church: insofar as the church is the embodiment of Christ, the mother of the
individual body of Christ is mystically the mother of all of the members of his
mystical body.74 At the same time, the curse that bears down on the earth is con-
trasted with the blessing of Mary’s body: “Just as the bodies, which themselves
have sinned, must die, and the earth, their mother, was cursed, so because of this
body, since it itself is the church, is the earth blessed from the very beginning. For
the earth is the body of Mary, the temple, which received the seed.”75

71.  The character of Mary was discussed in the previous chapters with a focus on her mythical configuration
as relevant for the forming of the community in Mecca, and in the context of the election of the Christian holy
family as a counterbalance to the Jewish concept of Abraham’s family, as relevant for the forming the community in
Medina. See also Marx, “Mariology in the Qurʾān.”
72.  On the manifestations of this new dogma in architecture, see Bieberstein, “Zum Raum wird hier die Zeit.”
73.  See also the evidence in Marx, “Mariology in the Qurʾān”; cf. also Murray, Symbols of Church and Kingdom,
142–​150, and Beck, “Die Mariologie der echten Schriften Ephräms”; see also chap. 8, 294–300.
74. Murray, Symbols of Church and Kingdom, 144.
75. Maries, Hymnes de S. Ephrem 4.15, quoting Murray, Symbols of Church and Kingdom, 145.
366  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

The linking to the church at the same time establishes a connection to the
Jewish temple, which was “superseded” by the church, and whose last represent-
atives are accordingly imagined as interacting with the first representatives of
the church. Inter-​testamental figures that belong to the foundation history of
Christianity—​such as Zachariah, the father of John the Baptist, and Mary the
mother of Jesus—​are therefore localized within the temple itself, either in the
canonical Gospels, as applies to Zachariah (Luke 1)  or in the apocrypha (the
Proto-​Gospel of James) as applies to Mary. But it is only Mary who beyond that
enters into an allegorical relation with the temple and church.
If one reads the Qur’anic stories of Mary76 carefully, they reflect both images
of Mary:  that of Luke—​the hagiographic—​as well as the allegorical. The latter
is evident above all in the address to Mary as ukht Hārūn, “sister of Aaron” (Q
19:28), and correspondingly as bint ʿImrān, “daughter of Amram” (Q 66:12). This
naming that had long been taken as a mistaken identification with the Biblical
M has been recognized in recent times as a typological assignment—​Mary is
addressed by God, as was Miriam, the sister of Aaron, and is thus her antitype.77
This reading has again been corrected by Suleiman Mourad78 in favor of an al-
legorical understanding. In fact, both these designations of Mary seem to carry
weight; since regardless of the differing precursors of the Mary texts in sura 19
(middle Meccan; reference to Luke) and suras 3 and 66 (Medinan; reference to
the Proto-​Gospel of James), Mary is linked from the beginning to an Aaronite
genealogy. The relevant verses—​in chronological sequence—​are:

Sister of Aaron, your father was not an evildoer,

nor was your mother wanton. (Q 19:28)
When the wife of Amram said:
“My Lord, I pledge to you what is in my womb,
You alone are the hearing, the knowing.” (Q 3:35)
Then too there is Mary, daughter of Amram, she who guarded her chas-
tity; and we breathed into her of our spirt,
and she put her trust in the words of her Lord
and was devout. (Q 66:12)

What does the allocation of Mary to the house of Amram, and thus to the family
of Aaron—​Amram is Aaron’s father—​entail for the hagiographic-​veritative or
allegorical image of Mary? As Mourad has emphasized, on the basis of this al-
location Mary belongs to the priestly line of Aaron, the founder of the Israelite

76.  See Neuwirth, “Icon of Piety—​Trigger of Dispute”; Neuwirth, “The House of Abraham.”
77.  Similarly Tottoli, “Imran,” and Busse, Die theologischen Beziehungen. On Mary in general, see Stowasser,
“Mary”; however, her article is not interested in inner-​Qur’anic development.
78.  Mourad, “Mary in the Qurʾān”; Mourad, “Qur’anic Stories about Mary and Jesus,” cf. also Henninger,
“Spuren christlicher Glaubenswahrheiten.”
 Qur’an and Bible  367

sacrificial cult. But the theological implications of this assignment remain obscure
if one reads it, as Mourad does, as merely an honorary designation of genealogy
that serves to emphasize the scandalous aspect of Mary’s delivery out of wedlock
which in the eyes of her contemporaries, who would expect special observance
of the law on the basis of her belonging to the temple amounts to a transgression
that endangers her life.79 But if one sets it, on the other hand, into the context of
the Mary-​church allegory, Mary’s connection to the Aaronite temple cult, which
is superseded by the church cult, takes on theological significance. The temple
also plays a role elsewhere in her story: she is localized in Q 19:16–​33, explic-
itly in the Temple, named as in the preceding story of Zachariah (Q 19:2–​15)
miḥrāb.80 While the Gospel of Luke has Zachariah serve in the Temple but has
Mary receive the annunciation of the birth of Jesus in a private house in Nazareth,
Mary appears in the Qur’an from the beginning in the Temple, in agreement with
the Proto-​Gospel of James. While this can be understood veritatively from the
pseudo-​James tradition of Mary’s childhood in the Temple, a further reminis-
cence springs to mind, comprehensible only as an allusion to Mary as the alle-
gorical Temple: the echo of a messianic temple prophecy going back ultimately
to Ezekiel, pertaining to the locked east gate of the temple area that will only be
opened by the Messiah.81 Q 19:16 seems to refer to this east gate: “And mention
[in the reading] the writing of Mary, when she withdrew from her people to an
eastern place.” The explanation is already presented in c­ hapter 8: Mary, given her
allegorical connection to the church in the Christian tradition, stands also for
the temple, through the east gate of which God will return to the city according
to a prophecy of Ezekiel (Ez 44:1–​2). The locked gate—​which in the Christian
interpretation illustrates the virginity of Mary—​will be opened by the coming of
the Messiah or, in Christian typology, by the birth of Christ as the Messiah.82 If
this interpretation is reflected in the Qur’an only in a vague detail, the insertion
into the story of an “eastern place” belonging to the temple shows that the Temple
references go beyond the genealogy linking Mary to Aaron.
Yet, the Temple references are not fit at all for a reconstruction of Mary’s al-
legorical person. Rather, they attest a tendency to re-​interpret  allegorical texts
veritatively. Mary is not the temple, she dwells in the temple; it is not her de-
livery of the Messiah that binds her with the “eastern gate,” but rather she takes

79.  Mourad, “Mary in the Qur’an,” 165–​166, on Q 19:28.

80.  In this context the Temple is designated by the word miḥrāb, unlike at points where the Jewish Solomonic
temple (or its successors) is mentioned as the “prayer site,” masjid, par excellence (Q 17:1, 7). Miḥrāb is an expres-
sion that denotes a structure involving arches or covered by a canopy (Q 19:11, 3:37–​39); see Neuwirth, “Jerusalem”;
Neuwirth, “Erste Qibla.”
81.  On the history of the eastern gate of the Temple, see Küchler, Jerusalem:  Ein Handbuch, 180–​204; cf.
chap. 8, 294–300.
82.  See O’Shaughnessy, Meaning of Spirit in the Koran, 54, quoted after Paret, Der Koran. Kommentar, on Q
19:16. On the architectonic restructuring of the so-​called Golden Gate, with respect of this Mariological concept,
see Küchler, Jerusalem: Ein Handbuch, 180–​204.
368  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

herself to an eastern place that is no longer defined. A de-​allegorizing tendency

has materialized here; whether this occurred already in pre-​Qur’anic traditions
circulating around Mary or first through treatments in the community cannot
be determined with certainty. But Mary is not a biblical figure like others, whose
significance is based on her social role alone; rather she becomes in a unique way,
as is shown in ­chapter 8, the object of a Qur’anic myth foundation.83

10.5  Considerations on Qur’anic Prophetic Speech

10.5.1  On the Appellatory Character of Qur’anic Discourse

The Qur’an shares a number of textual genres with the Bible. The peculiarity
that they are not distributed over different books, containing, for example, nar-
rative, Prophetic speech, wisdom sayings, hymns, and the like rather occur in
short, often minimally small text units and often appear in new ensembles, is one
of the most marked Qur’anic distinctions from the Bible. Paul Ricœur identi-
fies five distinct literary “poetics” for the Hebrew Bible84—​prophetic, narrative,
prescriptive, sapiential, and hymnal.85 Although these could be identified easily
within the Qur’an as well, in view their markedly different focuses as Vernon
Robbins and Gordon D.  Newby have justifiably argued.86 they are little prom-
ising for the Qur’an.87 What seems more fruitful for a comparison is the approach
of socio-​rhetorics, which focuses on the power of oral speech and rhetoric in
the Bible. According to Robbins, “With the aid of three major literary modes—​
biographical-​historiography; epistles; and apocalypse—​first-​century Christians
interwove six sociorhetorical modes of discourse—​wisdom, miracle, Prophetic,
suffering-​death, apocalyptic, and precreation discourse—​into a distinctive, dy-
namic, and multivalent mode of discourse that became canonical for Christians
in the Mediterranean world. . . . In sociorhetorical interpretation, each discourse
represents a ‘rhetorolect’, which is construed through certain topoi, discourse
figures, and forms.”88 Although a procedure of “discourse description” notably
similar to this model has been carried out already in our sura analyses above,89
nevertheless its one-​to-​one application to the Qur’an, namely, under the presup-
position of identical discourses in the New Testament and Qur’an, will not lead
much further.
Rather, what must be insisted upon is a significant distinction between
Qur’anic and biblical speech, which also affects the transferability of such a

83.  Cf. chap. 8, 290–300.

84. Ricœur, Biblical Interpretation,  75–​85.
85.  Robbins and Newby, “A Prolegomenon.”
86.  Ibid., 29.
87.  Ibid., 29.
88.  Ibid., 31.
89.  Cf. chap. 5.
 Qur’an and Bible  369

model. In the case of the Qur’an, not only are there prophetic speeches in a strict
sense predictions of a disastrous or blessed future, but also, from a certain phase
onward, in which the proclaimer has assumed a prophetic habitus, all other kinds
of text become part of a comprehensive prophetic message. This means that all of
them are subject to the same appellatory force90 that marks prophetic speech and
accordingly go beyond pronouncements of particular semantic contents, being
not just narrative or hymn but also testimonies of the speaker that these speeches
are the word of God, presented before hearers who must be won over by this tes-
timony. The reclamation of prophetic speech also for descriptive genres such as
narrative or poetic ones such as hymns is no Qur’anic innovation, but rather goes
back to the model of early biblical exegesis.91 But while this assignment of the
status of prophetical speech to most biblical books, belonging to quite different
text genres, is first made in retrospect, the Qur’an is prophetic speech in a “pro-
grammatic” sense; throughout, it consists of “address” to hearers, and thus also
makes use of particular stylistic strategies.
Northrup Frye has contextualized the prophetic speech habitus with other bib-
lical forms: “Prophecy . . . is geared to the future as wisdom is to the past. . . . Such
prophets, though ‘called’ by God and invariably claiming to speak with the voice
or authority of God, are no longer simply ecstatics . . . they are rather people with
what seems to be an open channel of communication between the conscious and
the unconscious.”92 Prophets distinguish themselves from other biblical speaking
figures above all through their deep perception of a crisis. The task laid open to
them, to lead a way out of this crisis, generates the force that is so strikingly ar-
ticulated in language. If this force is not manifest immediately in the Qur’an, and
there are also counterexamples of a great number of early verses that thematize
trust in God (suras 106 and 96) and hope for spiritual fulfillment (sura 73), still
already in the early Meccan suras, the vision of the future that is marked escha-
tologically in the Qur’an and that recalls biblical Prophet speech is dominant.93
If Northrup Frye contrasts the typus of the wise man, who appeals to the past,
with that of the prophet, who speaks about the future, this should not give the
impression that the two speaker types are mutually exclusive. Precisely in view of
the particular speech of the proclaimer, which is both prophetic and interpretive
of scripture, the historical classification of the two speaker types offered by James
Kugel is helpful as a corrective.94 Kugel notes that the typus of the prophet had
already been replaced in the late books of the Bible by that of the wise man, who
strives to interpret the already extant parts of the scripture. Concomitant with

90.  The term is used in the sense of Bühler, Sprachtheorie, who differentiates the categories of description, pro-
nouncement, and appellatory speech.
91.  See Kugel, “Poets and Prophets.”
92. Frye, The Great Code, 125–​127.
93.  Cf. chap. 7, 254–264, and Müller, “Die Barmherzigkeit Gottes.”
94. Kugel, The Bible as It Was, 17.
370  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

the emerging authority of the scripture, the spontaneous speech of prophecy is

relinquished. This historical development is apparently not true however for the
Arabian Peninsula, where prophetic speakers still appeared in the seventh cen-
tury and mantic speech was still alive. That the image of the “wise man” as a mere
interpreter after the biblical model did not evolve may be related to the lack of an
available biblical text in writing. Yet, the characteristic attributed by Kugel to the
wise man of the Hellenistic period is all the more relevant for the proclaimer, who
with the Qur’an does not articulate exclusively spontaneous prophetic speech,
but rather for long stretches also interprets biblical and post-​biblical traditions.
The proclaimer cannot be adequately described by either of the two categories;
rather, he represents both speaker types in one person. What would appear in the
biblical milieu as an anachronism is still a living reality in Late Antique Arabia,95
and can even be embodied within a single person.

10.5.2  Qur’anic and Biblical Scenarios

It is only to be expected that in the prophetic speech of the proclaimer a typolog-
ical and image-​specific model comes to the fore that is similar to that of the bib-
lical prophets. In fact, in its eschatological parts the Qur’an comes distinctively
close to biblical prophet speech, although the great visions of the biblical proph-
ets have come to be replaced by the short sura-​introducing tableaux of the oath
series, which orient themselves stylistically to the ancient Arabic models of the
seer speech. Apocalyptic visions such as that of the “valley of the rotting bones”
in Ezekiel 37 have their Qur’anic counterpart in oath series such as Q 100:1–​5
on the suddenness of the awakening, or Q 82:1–​5 on the loosing of the cosmos.
What Daniel Weidner says about biblical prophetical speech—​“It is speech per-
formance in the most eminent sense of the word, is performance with apoca-
lyptic power, which at the same time must rely on being pronounced in the weak
voice of the prophet”96—​is true also for the Qur’an, and was certainly recognized
by the proclaimer himself. If for Jeremiah the “word of the Lord is like a fire,
like a hammer that smashes the stone” (Jer 23:29), so the Qur’anic perception of
the power of the word is no less violent. Thus Q 59:21 says: “If we had sent this
Qur’an down onto a mountain, you would see it humbled, shattered by the terror
of God.” Just as in the Bible, in the Qur’anic context the speech owes its impress-
ing power to poetic text strategies—​an immanent potential for conflict—​which
in both cases, after the discovery of the theologically normative character of the
scripture, requires a demarcation between prophecy and poetry,97 which in the
case of the Qur’an already occurred during the genesis of the text itself.98

95.  On Musaylima, Muhammad’s “counter-​Prophet,” see Eickelman, “Musaylima.”

96.  Weidner, “Literatur und Antiliteratur,” 174.
97.  See Kugel, “Poets and Prophets.”
98.  Cf. chap. 12, 419–420.
 Qur’an and Bible  371

The external circumstances also do not seem dissimilar: the fortunes of the

biblical prophets are in full accordance with that of the proclaimer of the Qur’an.
As in Ezekiel, who in several passages describes the situation of his prophetic
utterances (e.g., in Ez 8:1, 14:1, 20:1, 33:31), scenarios are repeatedly described
in the Qur’an that demonstrate an initial interest as the hearers come to listen to
the Prophet, and then a lack of participation and even rejection of the word of
God by those “striving for profit.” One can compare, for example, Ez 33:30–​32:99

As for you, son of man, the children of your people are talking about you
beside the walls and in the doors of the houses; and they speak to one
another, everyone saying to his brother, “Please come and hear what the
word is that comes from the Lord.” So they come to you as people do, they
sit before you as My people, and they hear your words, but they do not do
them; for with their mouth they show much love, but their hearts pursue
their own gain. . . . And when this comes to pass—​surely it will come—​
then they will know that a Prophet has been among them.

with Q 78:1–​2:

What are they asking each other about?

About the great tidings
About which they dispute.

And Q 70:36–​37:

What is it with the unbelievers stretching their necks towards you

And banding together from the right and left?

And—​as evidence of resignation in view of the impossibility of converting the

deniers—​Q 88:21–​24:

So, exhort, you are only an exhorter;

you are not supposed to dominate them;
except for him who turns away and disbelieves;
Him God will punish in the most terrible way.

The problem shared by the prophets is not only hermeneutical but also aesthetic
and “artistic.” Like Ezekiel, the proclaimer of the Qur’an for his early hearers was
a kind of poet, who spoke in parables and images—​an insinuation against which
he defended himself energetically. Harold Fisch even sees in the case of Ezekiel a
causal connection between the artistic form of his speech and his reception as a
poet or bard: “He is both poet and Prophet, and that other, “artistic” kind of re-
lation between text, author, and reader, shows itself as unavoidable. Namely, the

99.  See Fisch, “Prophet und Publikum,” 175–​186.

372  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

more vehemently Ezekiel protests against the role of poet, the richer and livelier
his language and images become. He seeks to ban his public, but without their
presence his words would resound in empty air. He must fascinate them with his
words, but the fascination of his words does not escape him.”100
The proclaimer of the Qur’an also is aware of the verbal force of his speech,
which can be compared throughout to that of the biblical prophets. The chal-
lenge to the opponents, to bring forth texts of equal worth, is pronounced several
times (e.g., Q 11:13, 2:23). Indeed, one could argue that the power of prophetic
language even served for a long time as the means of authorization of the indi-
vidual sura performances. But there is a major difference: for the proclaimer of
the Qur’an, it is essential for surviving survival keep aloof from the image of the
poet who fascinates by his language. His rejection of the poet connection must
be all the more energetic, since it would open the possibility of a dubious origin
for the message which would be associated with the notion of inspiration from
the demons/​jinn, which is responsible for poetic speech.101 Since he not only
speaks to principally inclined or uncommitted hearers but is also confronted by
decided opponents, he requires ever new authorizations for his speech; the fer-
vent speech gestures of the early suras are thus soon transformed into modes of
rational argumentation.102
Despite the differences, the shared characteristics remain overwhelming.
Qur’an research can thus learn theoretically from research into biblical pro-
phetic texts. Thus the relationship between Bible and literature recognized by
Harold Fisch would be worth considering for the Qur’an as well: “The rhetoric
of the biblical texts consists . . . in [the fact] that it lays out and problematizes its
own rhetorical means. It works with literary means, but revokes it at the same
time and negates it. The first ‘intention’ of the biblical text is the destruction of
the ‘aesthetic distance’ assumed by its readers; as Erich Auerbach said, the Bible
attempts to ‘compel’ its reader. . . . Thus, it draws monumental images, and then
demonstrates them further in the next step, because its hearers and readers do
not understand the images, but cannot be freed from them.”103 This necessity of
the destruction of “aesthetic distance,” which must have set in with the habitua-
tion of the hearers to the expressive oath series, may have been decisive for the
stylistic paradigm shift that took place in the middle Meccan period, where the
form of the ancient Arabian seer speech is relinquished and the suras start to ap-
pear in a rhythmic prose quite new in Arabic literary tradition—​still prophetic
speech but without the pathos that distinguished the early suras and their struc-
tural composition.

100.  Fisch, “Prophet und Publikum,” 176.

101.  Cf. chap. 12, 424–430.
102.  Cf. chap. 5, 192–194.
103.  Fisch, “Prophet und Publikum,” 173–​174.
 Qur’an and Bible  373

10.6  Considerations on Qur’anic Narration

10.6.1  Lived Reality or Biblical Text World?

In the Hebrew Bible, central figures of the topos of the exemplary pious man such
as Abraham, are flanked by a number of persons with heroic character traits, who
behave largely autonomously rather than always being led by a divine power.
Although they do not act entirely independently from the divine will or provi-
dence, key biblical figures do bear heroic traits: above all Moses and David, but
also more episodic figures such as Samson, Ehud, or Judith and Esther. In com-
parison to this, we hardly find any heroic figures in the Qur’an. Also missing
are the heroic protagonists of the local Arabian legends, who do figure in the
Qur’anic punishment legends, but who remain always anonymous,104 stigmatized
as wrongdoers and opponents of the messengers of God, with no distinct char-
acter of their own. The situation is similar in the cases of biblical figures that re-
surface in the Qur’an, who rarely take on the dimensions of autonomously acting
heroes. Some, such as Noah,105 receive no consistent presentation at all, while
others such as David and Solomon are not embedded within stories stretching
over an adequately long span of time to undergo a recognizable character devel-
opment, but rather appear episodically in quite different connections. The native
Arabian messengers of God Hūd, Ṣāliḥ, and Shuʿayb, on the other hand, do not
act autonomously, but remain throughout performers of the divine will, playing
almost identical rolls. If one excludes Moses (Mūsā),106 Abraham (Ibrāhīm),107
and Joseph (Yūsuf),108 one must agree with the judgment pronounced by Jaroslav
Stetkevych, that the Qur’anic narrative figures do not reach a degree of signifi-
cance that would allow the reader to connect them with heroes, in the sense of
those key figures “that are found in the related literary structures and symbol
systems from the Epic of Gilgamesh through the Hebrew Bible, down to Homer
and Virgil.”109
Yet such a negative evaluation of the Qur’anic narrative figures in contrast to
the Biblical ones offers little explanation.110 Such a position, which would take the
applicability of the “Bible as literature” approach to the Qur’an for granted, would
raise unjustified claims for the Qur’an. This approach, developed in the 1980s,
proceeded from the conviction that a focus “on the psychology of the figures
[gives the Bible] a unique dynamic and vivacity, through which the interpretive
approach draws the scholarly reader into the text, which in the theological or

104.  On the reconstruction of ancient Arabian myth, see J. Stetkevych, Golden Bough, ix.
105.  Cf. chap. 11, 385–391.
106.  Neuwirth, “Narrative as a Canonical Process.”
107.  Sinai, “Qurʾānic Self-​Referentiality”; Neuwirth, “The House of Abraham.”
108.  Neuwirth, “Yūsuf-​Sure.”
109. J. Stetkevych, Golden Bough, ix.
110. Ibid.
374  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

historical search for meaning has been lost.”111 It was especially Robert Alter’s
book The Art of Biblical Narrative112 that reignited the debate over the literary
qualities of the Bible and that, with unique “flair for the nature of the literary cre-
ative process of the Bible, pushed it back under the pen of its authors.”113
But is Qur’anic narrative really to be classified within the narrative genre? In
the case of the Qur’an, not only does the question of authorship represent a se-
rious problem, in that for the proclaimer no continuously maintained intentional
presentation can be assumed, but rather, what is more, the repeated narratives
of the same plot are underlain by principally different intentions. Above all, the
goal of delectare, to entertain, only rarely, most likely perhaps in sura 12, “Joseph,”
comes to the foreground ahead of teaching, docere. Robert Alter’s interpretation
of the literary techniques in the Bible as tools “to make the liveliness of artistic in-
tuition literarily effective, and so to enable the production of pleasure in the text
as an adventure of life,”114 can thus not be applied to the Qur’anic narratives. This
is because, on the one hand, the eschatologically oriented Qur’an in its early parts
strives to draw in its readers with emphatic paraenetic speeches toward new self-​
reflection: they should “test themselves,” in order to prepare themselves for the
Final Day. On the other hand, the biblical narratives are never to be assumed as
exact models for the Qur’an, since they may not have been known to the commu-
nity in their original narrative form, but rather through oral transmission, or in
the form of later re-​narrations. The problem of the different readings of scriptures
needs however—​once one widens the perspective beyond the Hebrew Bible—​be
situated on a deeper level than suggested by Hans Peter Schmidt, according to
whom it is the first requirement of the new “Bible as literature” approach to re-
vive “what was almost entirely sunken behind the Jewish and Christian overem-
phasis on norms and morals, namely, the joy in the biblical text and the desire
to raise again its background questions.”115 One could respond that a reading
oriented toward religious ideas can be equally thrilling; a glance into Midrash
literature shows a degree of enthusiasm among the rabbinic exegetes of the Bible
that scarcely pales next to the joy of discovery in the “Bible as literature” research,
although among these exegetes the linking of the Bible to “lived reality,” which is
reclaimed by modern researchers, is not a parameter of evaluation. The primary
degree of reference for the Midrash is not reality but the world of the Bible text
itself, so that historically conditioned theological and moral questions take on
an important rank. One must rather ask whether the one-​sided decision in favor
of reality referentiality as a parameter of value for literature, which is today so
dominant, and so intolerantly opposed to other readings, is not for its part also

111.  Schmidt, “Von der Kunst,” 31.

112.  See also Alter and Kermode, Literary Guide to the Bible.
113.  Schmidt, “Von der Kunst,” 31.
114.  Ibid., 32.
115.  Ibid., 31.
 Qur’an and Bible  375

historically conditioned, and whether it is not an attribute of a contemporary

secular evaluative attitude. This interpretation is suggested by Schmidt himself,
when he recognizes Robert Alter as one of the most influential comparatists, not
only because “his close textual readings made the enjoyment of the biblical text
experienceable even for the most unabashed sincerity of Western man, but [also]
because his investigations of the Bible as a literary work par excellence presented
and brought to new light the literary capacities of man and the literary constitu-
tion of the West, because great literature is not only expression but rather is also
always a means for gaining knowledge of self and world, as well as a fictional way
out of these.”116 Modern secular reality referentiality here stands in opposition to
premodern non-​Western religiously bound text referentiality.
In both Midrash and Qur’an, the orientation to authoritative texts and their
norms outranks the immediate orientation to lived reality. The author of the
most important reference work on the object, Heinrich Speyer,117 already indi-
cated for the numerous narrative texts in the Qur’an an orientation not directly
to the Bible, but rather to the exegetical literature, and thus brought them into
connection with didactic-​Midrashic contexts rather than purely narrative ones.
But Speyer’s valuable collection of Qur’anic intertexts from the Midrash and from
homilies has still not been evaluated, since he did not provide analysis of the
particular forms of reinterpretation that the biblical and post-​biblical traditions
undergo in the Qur’anic narratives. But it is evident that already the Late Antique
receptions of the Bible evince the very form of paraenetic reinterpretation that
is reflected in the Qur’an. In wide parts of post-​biblical traditional literature,
and also in the Qur’an, dramatically formed biblical narratives with psychologi-
cally sensitive personal characterizations are transformed into didactic homiletic
presentations—​with theological messages placed in the foreground. Reading the
Qur’anic narratives with appropriate expectations, one should center one’s view
less on deviations from putative biblical models than on the particular interpre-
tive strategies of typology.

10.6.2  Cyclical or Historical-​Linear Narration?

Qur’anic narration has until now been approached almost exclusively on the
basis of the text as a continuum. The Qur’anic presentation of typologically re-
lated stories of prophets, with their similar or even identical messages, charac-
teristic of the early suras, has led research to the conclusion that “the Qur’anic
narrative” as such attests to a cyclical conception of the transmission of reve-
lation. Rudi Paret’s essay Das Geschichtsbild Mohammeds (The historical image
of Muhammad), which, proceeding from the punishment legends, draws con-
clusions for the entire Qur’an without further differentiation, still holds sway in

116.  Ibid., 33.
117. Speyer, Die biblischen Erzählungen im Qoran.
376  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

research.118 Although Josef Horovitz, in his groundbreaking study on Qur’anic

narrative, held strictly to Nöldeke’s periodization and attempted to trace a linear
development of the narratives that only putatively constitute doublets of one an-
other, later researchers gave up chronology and went so far as to argue against
there being any development in the Qur’anic presentation of prophets and mes-
sengers of God, apart from the addition of narrative details. Above all, it was con-
tested whether the Qur’an has any serious interest in history such as is attested
in biblical narrative texts. Fred Donner119 does not stand alone in his assessment
when he finds no development in the Qur’anic narratives, seeing rather the de-
piction of a moral pattern.
Even if we do not find a consecutive, linearly constructed conception of his-
tory in the early parts of the Qur’an, it is all the more important to observe the
approaches toward a conception of history in the later texts. Gerhard Böwering
has spoken of a “time atomism” that underlies the Qur’anic presentation of his-
tory, a view of history “that is typological in nature, and concentrates on the his-
tory of the prophets.”120 So, for example, the myth of the first transgression of
man, the story of Adam (Genesis 3), does not serve in the Qur’an121 to introduce
history as an unforeseeable and unambiguous process of interaction between
God and man. The story of Adam according to his view offers instead an example
of the “anthropological constant” of human susceptibility to temptation and se-
duction. In fact, the lapse of Adam in the Qur’an, aside from his banishment from
the garden, has no serious consequences for the fate of mankind, let alone for
the perception of a new epoch of interaction between God and man. The myth,
which is first introduced at a late stage of the Qur’anic development and is retold
in differing contexts, serves primarily to express the evolving insights of the com-
munity into the nature of evil, and is less an origin myth than a progression in
a debate about evil. The primarily exegetical interest in the phenomenon of the
transgression overlaps here with the interest in the “explanation,” central for the
biblical tradition, of the history of humanity. It should be all the more surprising,
then, that at the end of the Qur’anic development, in the latest version of the
narrative in the Medinan text Q 2:30–​38, we can recognize a contextualization
of the story of Adam within the communal present, and thus a politicization of
the narrative:

118.  Paret, “Das Geschichtsbild Mohammeds,” 218, basing his verdict on the punishment stories, arrives at the
following conclusion: “If one wanted to characterize his [i.e., the proclaimer’s] image in history, one could say that
he did not envisage the course of world history in the form of a line that leads—​though with occasional ups and
downs—​straight from the beginning of the human race to his time, but rather in the form of a spiral or a chain, on
which a number of circularly shaped figures are connected to each other, which can be made to overlap at will.” This
sentence is explicitly affirmed by Busse, “Herrschertypen im Koran,” 56–​80.
119. Donner, Narratives of Islamic Origins, 84.
120.  Böwering, “Chronology,” 319–​320.
121.  Neuwirth, “The Qur’ān, Crisis and Memory.”
 Qur’an and Bible  377

And remember when your Lord said to the angels:

“I shall appoint a deputy on earth,” and they answered:
“Will you place therein one who sows discord and sheds blood,
while we sing your praise and glorify your holiness ?”
He said: “I know what you do not.” (Q 2:30)

The story of Adam’s election before the angels, which has already been told in sev-
eral earlier versions, takes on a political dimension in this text for the first time.
Adam will be sent down as a representative of God in the world, regardless of the
ruinous and violent actions foreseen for him by the angels. The primordial figure
Adam is thus rehabilitated in history. That men, “you,” are already designated in
some earlier texts as “representatives [of God?]” or as “successors [of the angels] on
the earth,”122 khalāʾif al-​arḍ (Q 6:165), khalāʾif fī l-​arḍ (Q 10:14; 35:29), or khulafāʾ
al-​arḍ (Q 27:62), and that Adam here also represents man in general as an original
father, does not detract from his assignment here as successor or representative. The
election of Adam in sura 2 eclipses the preceding pronouncements about the role
of mankind, in that it for the first time broaches the issue of Adam’s rulership and
reveals its ambivalence. It also departs in its tone from the biblical presentation. On
first glance, one could understand the assignment of Adam as ruler as a resumption
of the biblical act of granting power to men from the first report of creation, Gen
1:26–​27;123 but the Qur’anic version does not unconditionally assert the human ap-
pointment to rulership, equally problematizing man and making him the object of
controversy; thus the angels foresee future disaster and attempt to prevent his being
sent down. It is the historical time of the proclaimer, in which this prediction is al-
ready reality, that interferes with the narrative.
Adam obtains directives (kalimāt) for his mission in the world and is assured
the safety of his descendants (hum, “them”), who—​if following the right guid-
ance announced for the future—​will be met with no threats: the narrative, which
first reports the instruction of Adam in the names of things (cf. Gen 2:28) and
subsequently the transgression brought about by Satan’s temptation, ends with
strengthening assurances, which in the closing verses (Q 2:37–​38) even seem to
take back the hardships announced in the biblical report to the first men.
With the divine sending down of Adam as ruler to the world, human political
power is legitimized, an understanding of the important verse Q 2:30 that proved
so suggestive that the dynasty of the Umayyad Marwanids deemed it appropriate
to introduce the figure of Adam into their iconography of rulership:124 Adam is
depicted in the throne hall of the Umayyad residence at Quṣayr ʿAmra as the
“type of the ruler,” whose image is placed above the throne of the caliph. In the
context of the proclamation, the pericope Q 2:30–​38 appears to be an expression

122.  The interpretation is tentative.

123.  Cf. Heath, “Creative Hermeneutics.”
124. Fowden, Studies on Hellenism, 139.
378  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

of the perception of a salvation historical turn: it shows that the primordial pro-
ject of God’s “representative on the earth” sent down into the world with Adam,
has in the current moment, in view of the newly constituted community who is
now capable of representing the divine will, entered into a phase in which it can
be politically realized in a way pleasing to God.
The Qur’anic story of creation, which already in its earliest version had
adopted, through the displacement of the “fall” from the person of Adam to
Diabolos/​Iblīs, a beginning different from the biblical reports of creation, and
which by marginalizing the transgressive act of the first human couple had in its
later presentations radically alleviated the fatal character of the biblical primor-
dial events, undergoes in its final version yet another departure from the biblical
predecessor. In that it establishes an optimistic/​confident view of man in the face
of the doubt of the angels, in claiming that man’s rulership is adequate to ful-
fill God’s plan, it displays to the new community a testimonial of recognition as
worthy bearers of a human order pleasing to God.
The fact that the Qur’an as a Late Antique text is less narrative than discur-
sive, and that it is concerned not with salvation history told in chronological se-
quence but rather with the negotiation of theological concepts and paradigms, is
indisputable. But it is also undeniable that in the course of the development, an
increasing consciousness of the fulfillment of biblical history in the community’s
immediate present takes shape. Epoch formation is manifested in the Qur’an
not in biblical history, but rather after it, in its restaging in the history of the
community.
 11

Biblical-​Qur’anic Figures

11.1  Actors and Interaction Scenarios

11.1.1  Prophetology of the Qur’an—​Hagiography of Exegesis

The Qur’anic scene is occupied by numerous figures, most of which have a bib-
lical prehistory. As main figures of a story, we find Adam, Noah, Abraham, Lot,
Joseph, Moses, and Pharaoh as the antagonist of Moses, Mary, and Jesus, and
as a mythical figure Iblīs, later identified with Satan. Other figures make only
minor appearances, such as David and Solomon, the Queen of Sheba, the wife
of Potiphar, Azar, the father of Abraham, Goliath (Qur’anic Jālūt), Saul (Qur’anic
Ṭālūt), and as an allegorical figure related to salvation history, Alexander the
Great (Qur’anic Dhū l-​Qarnayn, “the one with two horns”). Others again are
introduced merely as exemplars of some striking moral behavior, such as exces-
sive hubris (Haman, Korah) or with the purpose either to complete a genealogy
(Isaac, Jacob), or to revise it (Ishmael). There are also marginal figures represented
only by name, such as Idrīs, Dhū l-​Kifl, and Luqmān, as well as protagonists who
remain nameless such as the son of Noah and the wives of Adam, Abraham,
Noah, and Lot. Finally, there are some isolated figures that equally remain anon-
ymous but whom we can assign with probability to certain biblical predecessors,
such as Nimrod, briefly inserted into a scene with Abraham. Representing the
local Arabian prophet histories we find extra-​biblical messengers of God such as
Hūd, Ṣāliḥ, and Shuʿayb, who are assigned to particular unbelieving peoples, ʿĀd,
Thamūd, and Madyan, respectively; the only individual negative figure from the
punishment legends located in the Arabian Peninsula is Tubbaʿ.
What is striking about these characters is first of all their different origins, the
coexistence of biblical protagonists with local Arabian figures and even a third
genre, Late Antique personages connected to the Alexander legend. What is also
hard to ignore is a certain hybridity of many of the characters. Indeed, the biblical
origin of the majority of them does not always warrant an unambiguous bib-
lical character, for more often what we find is a dense overlapping of the biblical
stratum with later dimensions of meaning that had accumulated in the long post-​
biblical history of the tradition. What further distinguishes them from their bib-
lical predecessors is their hermeneutical function: all Qur’anic figures play a part
in a new collective prophetology that gradually takes shape. They are therefore not

379
380  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

simply protagonists of narratives but are also embedded in arguments in support

of a new, differentiated model of divine-​human communication. This discursive
status of the figures obscured only a short time later, in the first post-​Qur’anic
centuries when the figures, loosed from their argumentative connection, become
the isolated protagonists of prophetic legends, qiṣaṣ al-​anbiyāʾ, which transform
the paraenetic narratives of the Qur’an by filling in often sensational narrative
details into an edificatory literary genre, thus producing a corpus of narratives
that far outstrips the Qur’anic narratives in its attraction as entertainment.
Earlier research in this field concentrated on the Qur’anic development as such.
In his work Koranische Untersuchungen,1 Josef Horovitz placed all the Qur’anic fig-
ures into the wider pre-​Islamic context; reconnecting them to their biblical, post-​
biblical, and ancient Arabian prehistory. His Untersuchungen is an exemplary work
that not only evaluates the available literary and epigraphic evidence in the different
languages of the peninsula but also draws important historical conclusions from
the linguistic forms of proper names, applying the methodology of comparative
Semitics.2 Going beyond this, Furthermore, Horovitz, in the first part of his work,3
constructed a typology of the Qur’anic narratives, in which the largely schematic
“punishment legends” take first rank, while narrative types elaborated later also
occur. As against that, the detailed presentation of Die Biblischen Erzählungen im
Qoran (Biblical Narratives in the Qurʾān) by Heinrich Speyer is oriented above all
to the history of tradition: the work contextualizes the Qur’anic narratives with rab-
binic and Christian-​apocryphal writings, though without setting these findings into
relief with their new Qur’anic reading. Contrary to Horovitz’s work, which sketches
a Qur’anic prophetology, Speyer’s work is primarily a collection of materials, whose
evaluation remains a desideratum.
Such an evaluation has still not been produced after seventy years, not least
because of the lack of recognition of the fact that the Qur’an stands in a Late
Antique, pluricultural discourse, thus distinguishing itself substantially in terms
of genre as a paraenetic text from the narrative literature provided by Islamic
tradition that reflects the reception of the already canonized Qur’an. It was John
Wansbrough who viewed Qur’an and Sira as contemporaneous, thus opening the
door to their undifferentiated synoptic treatment. While Horovitz and Speyer
took the Qur’an as such into view, in recent times Qur’anic narratives are regu-
larly illuminated through the “stories of the prophets,” the qiṣaṣ al-​anbiyāʾ4 that
developed later in the inner-​Islamic tradition—​an anachronistic approach, which
also characterizes the numerous studies on individual figures that have since

1. Horovitz, Koranische Untersuchungen, 78–​155.

2.  Cf. also Horovitz, Jewish Proper Names.
3. Horovitz, Koranische Untersuchungen,  1–​77.
4.  Cf. Tottoli, Biblical Prophets.
 Biblical-Qur’anic Figures  381

appeared.5 Through recourse to this qiṣaṣ literature, which was first codified around
a century after the Qur’an, figures that are often only sketched schematically in the
Qur’an can be made malleable, and thus they draw nearer to their biblical models.
But this perspective not only entails leveling their specific Qur’anic form but also
obscures their theological statement, which in the Qur’an is in no way identical to
that in the Bible. Loosed from their Qur’anic argumentative context, the stories
lose their direction of impact which is often a critique of earlier tradition; they
become elements of an edificatory literature devoid of theological tension. Unlike
in the Qur’anic narratives, which reflect and negotiate the knowledge circulating
in the Hijaz, the reports collected in the qiṣaṣ literature are based on a systematic
collection accomplished by scholars in the century after the Qur’an, in order to
bring together as completely as possible all the available biblical and post-​biblical
traditions—​centrally, the so-​called Isrāʾīlīyāt.6 They are evidence of an age in which
the knowledge of Jewish-​Christian traditions, due to mass conversion, was already
founded on a new, broad basis, drawing not least on written sources.
But it is not merely surplus knowledge but above all quite a different approach
to knowledge that separates these later generations from the Qur’anic commu-
nity. Qur’anic discourse adapts reports about prophets to various debates con-
cerning the community in the present, and thus employs them homiletically
and argumentatively. This functionality stands in the center of the interest of a
few scholars, who base their work exclusively on the Qur’an in isolation from
the qiṣaṣ literature. Studies in this vein are available so far on Adam,7 Abraham,8
Moses,9 Joseph,10 Saul,11 and Mary and Jesus.12

11.1.2  Punishment Legends

Research into the biblical-​Qur’anic figures thus remains in its infancy, and all
too rarely have the figures been brought into focus in their argumentative con-
text or in relation to the evolving tension with their biblical predecessors.13 A first

5.  On Adam: Schöck, Adam im Koran; on Abraham: Firestone, Abraham-​Ishmael Legends; on Moses: Wheeler,

Moses; on Solomon and the Queen of Sheba:  Lassner, “The Queen of Sheba.” This tendency is also apparent in
a number of articles in the Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān; cf. Schöck, “Adam and Eve”; Schöck, “Moses”; Brinner,
“Noah”; Firestone, “Abraham.”
6.  Cf. Tottoli, “Isrā’̄ıliyyāt”; see also Albayrak, “Qurʾānic Narrative and Isrāʾīliyyāt.”
7.  Neuwirth, “Qur’ān, Crisis and Memory”; on Satan:  Bodman, “Stalking Iblis”; Sinai, Studien zur frühen
Koraninterpretation,  86–​93.
8.  Nagel, “Der erste Muslim”; see especially Sinai, Studien zur frühen Koraninterpretation, 97–​160; cf. also
Bauschke, Abraham.
9.  Goitein, “Ramadan”; cf. also Neuwirth, “Erzählen als kanonischer Prozess.”
10.  Neuwirth, “Yūsuf-​Sure.”
11.  Walid Saleh, “King Saul.”
12.  Neuwirth, “Mary and Jesus”; Neuwirth, “Imagining Mary—​Disputing Jesus”; Marx, “Mariology in the
Qur’an”; Bauschke, Jesus im Koran.
13.  Promising new beginnings are offered in the works of Sinai, Studien zur frühen Koraninterpretation (for
Abraham); Witztum, “The Foundation of the House” (for Abraham and Ishmael); Marx, “Mariology in the Qur’an”
382  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

breakthrough was achieved with the model of the “punishment legends,” to as-
sess the topos of the umam khāliya, the “by-​gone peoples,” which Josef Horovitz
described as independent narratives in various manifestations, as parts of a narra-
tive series, or as mere evocations. In Horovitz’s view, these are stories that proceed
according to a shared pattern in which an insubordinate people disregards a mes-
senger’s call to the belief in one God and is therefore obliterated by a catastrophe.
These descriptions differ substantially from the biblical reports of the annihilation
of ancient peoples, in that they do not document God’s care for a privileged “elect”
people—​the events have no salvific or providential effect for the new elect people,
the Qur’anic community. Their positive aspect lies elsewhere; Horovitz emphasizes
“The reverse image of the downfall of the disobedient peoples is the salvation of the
messengers of God who have warned them.”14 It is this second point of the stories,
that is bound up to the fate of the proclaimer himself, who, as the occasional use of
identical arguments shows, recognized in the earlier messengers of God, who pur-
sued their message despite threatening situations, predecessors of himself. Since
most of these narratives feature biblical figures, it is their biblical pattern of thought
that appears more obvious than their extra-​biblical intertextuality:

The history of the cities of the earlier times has become for him [the pro-
claimer] exclusively the object of religious contemplation, and the method
that he applied to evaluate the traditions of his own people and that of oth-
ers, recalls the approach followed by biblical writers, for example, the re-
dactor of the Book of Judges, who in a schematic way explains the wars of
the Israelite tribes with their neighbors: they did what was evil in the eyes
of God, who therefore gave them over to the hands of their enemies, until
finally, through their supplication, he sent them a savior (Jdg. 2:11, 2:7,
3:12, passim; cf. 1 Sam 12:7–​15). If Muhammad again and again holds up
the fate of earlier peoples to his countrymen as a warning example—​one
notes also the formula fa-​l-​yanẓurū kayfa kānat ʿāqibatu l-​mukadhdhibīn,
“so let them see what was the end of the deniers”—​it can only be with the
intention to warn them of a similar fate to that which others have suffered
while living on earth, not only punishment in the afterlife: the oblitera-
tion of their city and its population, a fate that will be spared only to the
messenger of Allah and his dependents. The fact that Muḥammad always
speaks of the fate of cities (qurā) of the earlier time . . . shows that in form-
ing his narratives he was thinking of his hometown Mecca, the “mother
of the cities,” umm al-​qurā, Q 42:5, Q 6:92.8, cf. also al-​qaryatān, Q 43:30,
meaning Mecca and Taif.15

(for Mary). They take account not only of the biblical foundations but also of the figures’ successive development in
the rabbinic and homiletic literature of Late Antiquity.
14. Horovitz, Koranische Untersuchungen, 15.
15.  Ibid., 30.
 Biblical-Qur’anic Figures  383

But our view should spread beyond the reality of the proclaimer. Indeed, the
topos of the umam khāliya is rooted in a wider local Arabic tradition. The ref-
erence to topography, the emphatic viewing of the lingering traces of destroyed
settlements and the nostalgic underlining of their unique glory, equally evokes
the powerful model of the ancient Arabian perception of destroyed campsites,
and thus the nostalgic beginning part of the qasida, the nasīb. In the innumer-
able poetic instances of bemoaning over the aṭlāl, the “abandoned campsites,”
we are dealing not only with places from the personal experience of loss of the
individual poet, but rather this topos highlights subliminally, and occasionally
concretely,16 the no longer inhabited remains of earlier civilization.17 In that the
Qur’anic presentation tells or retells the “lost histories” of such cities—​in the
cases of the peoples of ʿĀd and Thamūd, pre-​Qur’anic stories about tragic heroes
have been reconstructed18—​the mute ruins reclaim language and meaning. The
question ubi sunt qui ante nos in mundo fuere (“Where have they gone who were
in the world before us?”) is so-​to-​speak “answered.”19
This far-​reaching second implication of the stories may be less relevant for
their moral message, but it demonstrates all the more strongly the affective power
of the Qur’anic hermeneutic, to take up poetic challenges and rethink the apo-
rias opened by the poetry, and even to offer solutions for them. As against these
punishment legends, whose schematic pattern is often wrongly ascribed to the
Qur’anic narratives as a whole, Horovitz distinguishes a more elaborate and more
strongly history-​oriented form of narrative, the “stories of prophets and men of
God”:20 “In the center of the Qur’anic narratives, even when they are not pun-
ishment legends, we almost always find a prophet, a messenger of God, a pious
man. The Qur’anic prophetology can thus be identified as the central part of
Muḥammad’s image of history.”21 This will be examined in what follows.

11.1.3  Ruler Typologies

Thus, while Horovitz attempts to keep the progressive history of the proclama-
tion in mind, Heribert Busse22 in his article “Herrschertypen im Koran,” “Ruler
types in the Qur’an,” consciously departs from a diachronic reading. He pur-
sues striking connections of motifs that were already recognized by Horovitz in
more detail,23 and thus reveals an important narrative principle, which he terms

16.  Horovitz, “Terminologie des islamischen Kultus,” points out several verses of complaint motivated by di-
lapidated palace architecture by the Umayyad poet, Ibn Qays al-​Ruqayyāt.
17.  See Montgomery, “The Empty Ḥijāz”; Neuwirth, “Geography”; cf. also chap. 12, 444–447.
18. J. Stetkevych, Golden Bough, Bencheikh, “Iram ou la clameur de Dieu.”
19.  See chap. 3, 129–131.
20. Horovitz, Koranische Untersuchungen,  32–​44.
21.  Ibid, 44.
22.  Busse, “Herrschertypen im Koran”; cf. also Neuwirth, “Myths and Legends.”
23. Horovitz, Koranische Untersuchungen,  8–​9.
384  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

“typology”—​flashing out however, the theological implications that adhere to

this term in biblical scholarship.

As biblical figures, we find “Pharaoh and Nimrod of legend, who both

declare themselves gods, the one as the antagonist of Moses, the other
as the antagonist of Abraham; David and Solomon, who unite kingship
and prophethood in their persons; the Queen of Sheba in connection
with the Solomon story; Joseph having fled to Egypt, who grows into a
prophet and in some sense a ruler; and Saul (Ṭalūt), who is proclaimed
king by Samuel at God’s prompting.  .  .  .  From the Alexander romance,
enriched with biblical elements, comes the narrative of Dhū al-​Qarnayn,
the “two horned one,” who travels the whole world and calls for belief. To
South Arabia belongs Tubbaʿ, mentioned briefly only twice in the Qur’an
(Q 44:37, 50:14) is; he rejects the message of God and perishes together
with his people. We thus have the following ruler types:  prophet-​kings
(David, Solomon, Dhū l-​Qarnayn, Abraham, and Joseph), God-​kings
(Nimrod, Pharaoh, and possibly Tubbaʿ), and finally Saul, a king installed
by a prophet, and the queen of Sheba who turned from paganism to right
belief. . . . He [the proclaimer] contrasts the devotion of the prophet-​kings,
their wisdom in judgment, their building activities, and their universal
rulership, which even ranges so far as to include the cosmos, to the corre-
sponding negative qualities and forms of behaviors of the God-​kings. In
central positions we find on the one side Solomon and on the other side
Pharaoh. What is required is to uncover the typological schema.24

Busse’s approach is useful above all for those texts where the information on a
Qur’anic figure is too limited to allows us to elicit the function of that figure’s
occurrence from the context, for example, for such rarely named and barely
recognizable figures as Haman (Q 40:36–​37, 28:38–​42), Korah Q 28:76–​82,
29:39), Nimrod (unidentified:  Q 21:67–​69, 2:258), or for the phenomenon of
the tower tomb/​palace building, which occurs not only with Pharaoh but also
with Solomon, where it serves to delude the queen of Sheba. But as a primary
approach to the Qur’an, this focus on schematic correspondences, Busse’s “ty-
pology,”25 is problematic; for it obscures the view to the microstructural for-
mation of figures and their narrative function,26 and, what is more, it obscures
their gradual development in the course of the Qur’anic proclamation. Busse’s
conscious relinquishment of chronology leads him to the untenable assumption

24.  Busse, “Herrschertypen im Koran,” 58.

25.  Cf. chap. 10, 354–355.
26.  In relation to Saul, Saleh, “King Saul,” has been able to show that he takes on the function of a model in a
particular communal situation, in which Prophethood is complemented with political authority through the power
of rulership, so that the proclaimer becomes the representative of rulership and warriorhood, eclipsing the func-
tions of Moses, who does not appear as a warrior.
 Biblical-Qur’anic Figures  385

that the proclaimer follows a firm, unchanging thought pattern through his en-
tire ministry, according to which “names, qualities, and behaviors of persons
of salvation history [are] almost arbitrarily interchangeable. Muhammad seeks
to elicit the typus, developing an independent typology, whether inspired by
the Christian biblical interpretative tradition or not.”27 That this view leaves no
room for the possibility of the negotiation of differing prophet traditions that
were available to the community but rather assumes an exclusive role of the pro-
claimer as author clinging to an identical position across the entire text must be
considered as a major weakness.
Although the Qur’an is “a book of the working of a prophet in the world”28
rather than a work of history, it is an astoundingly revealing mirror for the per-
ception of history. It documents an interest in salvation historical persons that
follows less a linear development of their vitae than the line of their progressive
exegetical “increase in meaning,” which is achieved through the undergirding
of what is historically reported about them with theologically important post-​
biblical traditions, or through the evocation of the figures’ significance for the
contemporary situation of the proclaimer himself. This multilayered character
of the presentation cannot be observed from the very beginning. It shows it-
self clearly only in the successive formation of individual prophets, from whose
synopsis—​as Horovitz already showed programmatically—​a Qur’anic prophetol-
ogy can be read out. In the following sketch, particular attention will be paid to
the gradual exegetical development of the figures through reference to the stories
which grew up around them in post-​biblical tradition.29

11.2  Noah—​H is Qur’anic Development

11.2.1  Noah in the Qur’an

Stories about Noah/​Nūḥ and the flood were familiar to the Qur’anic hearers not
only from the oral tradition but also from poetry30—​apparently stripped, how-
ever, of their salvation historical interpretation in the sense of a renewal of the
world (Gen 6:5–​8). The flood stories connected to Noah31 occur in the Qur’an
similarly emptied of symbols, and demythologized in a way that recalls the
Qur’anic story of Adam, which did not permit a reading as a myth of origin for
the attainment of human self-​responsibility. Although the events around Noah
are recognized as having occurred at a time before those of all other messengers

27.  Busse, “Herrschertypen im Koran,” 58–​59.

28. Ibid
29.  In order to make the chronological relation immediately clear, the period of origin for the pertinent texts,
indicated by I, II, III (= first, second, and third Meccan periods) and (M = Medina), precede the verse citations.
30. Horovitz, Koranische Untersuchungen, 146. Cf. also Hirschberg, Jüdische und christliche Lehren.
31. Speyer, Die biblischen Erzählungen im Qoran, 84–​115; cf. also Abdel Haleem, “Story of Noah.”
386  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

after Adam (Q I (=early Meccan) 53:53, I 51:46, II (=middle Meccan) 50:12), the
Flood seems to be without relevance as a salvation historical new beginning, or as
an end marker of the primeval, antediluvian epoch of direct divine intervention
in creation that would be succeeded after Noah by the stories of the patriarchs.32
Correspondingly, the Flood and the Ark have no mythical-​allegorical dimension,
but are reduced in the Qur’an to mere instruments of individual punishment or
salvation.
Yet the narrative undergoes a clear and discernible development, so that the
figure of Noah is significant for more than one of the Qur’anic discourses that
evolve out of each other. It is first relevant for the early Meccan discourse of pro-
phetic warning, which focuses primarily on the visualization of the peoples oblit-
erated by punishment (umam khāliya). This function of Noah is foreign to the
biblical report but plays a role in the rabbinic and patristic reception.33 Later,
Noah underpins the middle Meccan discourse of communal self-​construction as
a people of God standing in the tradition of biblical predecessors, where Moses
ranges as the most direct model but is preceded by other exemplary figures.
Finally, in Medina, Noah gains yet another significance, first in the genealogy
discourse as the founder of a succession of prophets that culminates in the person
of Muhammad and, at the end of the Qur’anic development, as a predecessor of
the Prophet in his function as universal lawgiver.34

11.2.2  Noah—​Proclaimer and Survivor of a Divinely

Imposed Punishment
Noah occurs in the earliest suras together with the ancient Arabian messengers of
God, who fail in their effort to call their peoples to the belief in one god. His story,
which reaches back into the primordial times of salvation history, is told as the
opening of a series of punishment legends, wherein the stories of ʿĀd, Thamūd,
Lot (Lūṭ), and the people of Pharaoh (Firʿawn) follow, each being closed with the
same refrain (verses 16–​17), Q II 54:9–​17:

kadhdhabat qablahum qawmu Nūḥin

fa-​kadhdhabū ʿabdanā
wa-​qālū majnūnun wa-​zdujir
fa-​daʿā rabbahu annī maghlūbun fa-​ntaṣir
fa-​fataḥnā abwāba l-​samāʾi bi-​māʾin munhamir
wa-​fajjarnā l-​arḍa ʿuyūnan

32. Kugel, How to Read the Bible, 78.

33.  Ibid,  72–​73.
34.  Noah’s profile does not emerge if one pursues the texts about him through a purely synchronic reading of
the Qur’an, as in Brinner, “Noah.” Neither can the “traditional-​historical context of the Qur’anic portrayal of Noah”
be illuminated merely through the collection of isolated Christian traditions on Noah, as attempted by Goßmann,
“Noah im Koran.”
 Biblical-Qur’anic Figures  387

fa-​ltaqā l-​māʾu ʿalā amrin qad qudir

wa-​ḥamalnāhu ʿalā dhāti alwāḥin wa-​dusur
tajrī bi-​aʿyuninā jazāʾan li-​man kāna kufir
wa-​la-​qad taraknāhā āyatan fa-​hal min muddakkir
fa-​kayfa kāna ʿadhābī wa-​ndhur
wa-​la-​qad yassarnā l-​qurʾāna li-​l-​dhikri
fa-​hal min muddakkir
Before them the people of Noah cried lies,
They denounced our servant as a liar.
They said: “one possessed,” and he was frightened.
So he called his Lord: I am defeated, so help me!
So we opened the gates of heaven with flooding water;
And caused the earth to gush with springs
and the waters converged in accordance with a decided decree
and we carried him on a ship of planks and nails
that coursed under our eyes, as reward for one who had encountered
unbelief.
We left it as a sign. Is there someone who recalls?
How then was my punishment!
We eased the recitation for recollection.
Is there one who recalls?

The story narrates—​at first view no differently than the Bible—​the catastrophe
of the Flood imposed by God as punishment for human corruption. But in the
Qur’an, it is not the frivolity, the socially manifest wickedness of men, that causes
God to regret their creation and leads to the drastic step of their obliteration
(Gen 5:5–​8). In the Qur’an we find no near total annihilation of mankind—​such
a dramatics would be alien to the Qur’anic presentation. While the biblical re-
port and its mythical parallels, such as the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Deucalion
Saga,35 aim toward a radical renewal of mankind, in the Qur’an, prophetology
is put into the foreground: men, concretely the society in which Noah appears
as a proclaimer, meet punishment for their unbelief and their intimidation of
the servant of God—​crimes that also brought about the downfall of other “ear-
lier peoples.” So it is no wonder that, although the description of the flowing
together of the waters suggests a cosmic scale, the annihilation of the frivolous
is not the central theme in this early sura, but rather the miraculous saving of
the messenger of God aboard an apparently scantily timbered ship (verse 12),
which glides smoothly under God’s direction across the violently stirred waters
(verse 13). The ship—​whether materially or as an idea—​is to be received as a

35.  This parallelization already occurred among Hellenized Jews; see Feldman, “Josephus’ Portrait of Noah,” 44.
388  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

warning sign (verse 17). The conciliatory tone predominates, for as severe as the
punishment—​which is here only implied—​is, the warning is easily available in
the “reading whose recollection is made easy.” The story does tell of a threatening
punishment for the frivolous, but above all relates a message awakening hope, a
message that is “made easy” in the reading.
A little later, Noah’s story fills out the entire sura 71. As in the cases of the
other punishment legends, the emphasis is now on the annihilation of the insub-
ordinate people, but this people is still not equated with all of humanity.
After a few cursory mentions (Noah is apparently a figure familiar to the hear-
ers), he appears in a detailed story (Q II (= middle Meccan), 54:9–​17, II 71:1–​28).
This narrative, which departs radically from the biblical report, places him in
a situation that is strikingly similar to that of the proclaimer himself:  Noah is
not only being denigrated as one possessed, as in Q I (= early Meccan) 54, or
someone inspired by demons (Q II 54:9, II 23:24), but is also despised for the
fact that he does not win distinguished followers but only those in a socially low
position (Q II 26:111). He sermonizes to his people about belief in one God (Q
II 71:1–​28) in the style of the proclaimer, reminding his hearers of the divine
attributes and the requirement of repentance (Q II 71:10), which has become
urgent in view of the impending judgment (Q II 71:18). But he is rejected, and
his people insists on the worship of pagan divinities that are given by name (Q
II 71:23–​24)—​a crime that is already laid on them in the rabbinic tradition.36
Noah ultimately despairs and complains his sorrow to God, as in sura 54 he prays
for the punishment of the people (Q II 71:21.26, Q II 26:117–​118). His prayer
is heeded, not simply with divine intervention but also with divine encourage-
ment:  it is announced to him that the frivolous will be drowned and will fall
victim to the punishment of hell (Q II 54:15). Noah’s story thus should serve as
a sign (āya; Q II 54:15, Q II 26:121). He is further honored though a formula
of blessing, “peace to Noah among men,” salāmun ʿalā Nūḥin fī l-​ʿālamīn (Q II
37:79) and taken up among the model figures from the biblical tradition. The text
thus follows those of the exegetical traditions which accept Noah’s righteousness
(Genesis 6) without restrictions. This runs against the rabbinic tradition (Genesis
Rabba 30:9, 32:6), which tended to downgrade Noah, the original father of the
non-​Jewish peoples, who were called “sons of Noah” because they were bound
only to the commandments given to Noah.37 Louis S. Feldman has seen in the
rabbinic relativizing of Noah’s merits a reaction to his reception in the church as a
typus of Christ.38 The thoroughly positive Qur’anic image of Noah does not enter
into these debates but is oriented rather to Noah’s immediate significance for the
contemporary believers: with the formula of blessing, which defines the nature of

36. Speyer, Die biblischen Erzählungen im Qoran, 101.

37.  Ibid., 96.
38.  See Feldman, “Josephus’ Portrait of Noah,” 44.
 Biblical-Qur’anic Figures  389

the communal handling of Noah, now raised to a model figure to be collectively

honored, his story is interwoven with the history of the nascent community.
Although Noah appears again in the lists of the ancient Arabian warners, to
which he belongs beginning with the early Meccan punishment and judgment
discourse (Q II 38:12–​14, III=late Meccan) 14:9), the circumstances and dimen-
sions of the catastrophe that he is elected to survive come more clearly into view
with time. In the middle Meccan discourse of the construction of communal
identity as a new people of God in Q II 37:75–​79, his story is connected with
the story of Abraham, who also confronts his unbelieving people, alongside
other episodes of the history of the Israelites (Banū Isrāʾīl); he thereby becomes
a member of the biblical tradition that is being newly adopted for the Qur’anic
community.

11.2.3  Noah—​Marker of a Turn in Salvation History

But it is not only through these events, which distinguish themselves from other
acts of salvation as the realization of a divine plan (Q I 54:14), that Noah acquires
new relevance; it is also thanks to the new orientation to scripture, to the kitāb of
the Israelites, which emerges in the Late Meccan discourse. The changed perspec-
tive, according to which the prophets now appear as a succession, gives each of
them his own significance, that at the same time affects the Qur’anic community
oriented to its model. This change shows itself clearly in the detailed version of
the Noah story in Q III 11:25–​49. Noah now takes on the double task of building
the ship (fulk; Q III 23:22) and selecting the pairs of animals (Q III 23:27). The
cosmic dimension of the Flood is now recognizable for the first time, and salva-
tion is staged as a new beginning. Noah is now distinguished as the messenger of
“the generation that we pulled across the water” (dhurrīyat39 man ḥamalnā maʿa
Nūḥ, Q III 17:3; cf. II 19:58). It is part of the salvation history of the Banū Isrāʾīl,
which the Qur’anic community has incorporated in this period into its own un-
derstanding of history.
Noah’s sermon is quoted in detail; it shows him—​in spite of his connection to
the fateful flood—​as a predecessor of the proclaimer, who for his part had already
in the late Meccan period come to the insight that the unbelief of the pagans
should be due to the divine will (Q III 11:34), and therefore would be inevitable.
Noah is comforted in his despair by the divine request to take the believers and a
pair of every creature (Q III 11:40) into the saving ship.
Only now is a son of Noah introduced, a negative figure who, though not
reaching the degree of condemnation of the biblical son of Noah, Ham, will not
adopt his father’s belief in one God and must drown despite Noah’s attempt to
intercede for him with God (Q III 11:45–​46). Noah gives up his son and thus

39.  Dhurrīya denotes progeny in the sense of the inheritors of a charismatic role and does not necessarily in-
dicate physical progeny.
390  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

gives up the preservation of his genealogical relations, in order to strengthen

his transcendent relation—​a decision before which the individual believers in
the late Meccan period (Q III 29:8) also stand. Speyer attempted to find models
in rabbinic tradition for this figure, who shares with Ham the negative reputa-
tion. But more likely this figure represents the actual conflicts between believers
and unbelievers, which at the time of the proclamation of the sura were shaking
inner-​familial structures.
Noah obtains divine blessing not only for himself but for all peoples to come
(umam, Q III 11:48). The ship ultimately drops anchor before Mount Jūdī,40
which is localized in Arabia (Q III 11:44). Now too we see the first mention of
Noah’s long life span: already before the “Flood” (now termed for the first time
as ṭūfān, Q III 29:14), he lived 950 years among his people—​a specification that
is perhaps meant to illustrate the grotesque situation of the pious man patiently
but hopelessly proclaiming the belief in one God.41 Without reference to a narra-
tive, finally there is mention of Noah’s wife; she figures as a negative example of
a prophet’s wife, alongside the baselessly punished wife of Lot (Q M 66:10–​12).

11.2.4  Noah—​Opener of a Succession of Prophets

Still in the Meccan period, Noah is recognized in what is from the Qur’anic per-
spective perhaps his most significant role: as the initiator of biblical prophecy (Q
III 6:84). Alongside this, he is a model for the proclaimer, in that the prescrip-
tions that go back to him, the “Noahide commandments,” are also laid out for
the proclaimer and the Qur’anic community: sharaʿa lakum mina l-​dīn mā waṣṣā
bihi Nūḥan wa-​lladhī awḥaynā ilayka, “He has defined the religion for you, which
he has also laid out for Noah, and which we have inspired to you” (Q III 42:13).
Here, he appears as the first lawgiver, who, with a non-​codified “natural law” so-​
to-​speak undermines the barrier erected by the Mosaic legislation of Jewish law,
and therefore rises to the rank of a model of the proclaimer for the “transconfes-
sional community” of the proclaimer.”
As in the cases of other biblical figures, Noah’s image is “politicized” in the
Medinan period; that is, his mention is inserted into a religio-​political argu-
ment. He now appears no longer as a warner, but rather as a biblical Prophet,
and, what is more, an axial figure, who divides past human history from the
new “post-​diluvian” chain of generations, so that now his achievement of rees-
tablishing the human race after the Flood finds at least implicit recognition (Q
M  =  Medinan) 3:33–​34; Q M 19:58  =  Medinan addition). In that religiously
based genealogy takes on a central significance in Medina, as the Jews claim

40.  On localizing the landing site of the ark on a mountain in Arabia, see Speyer, Die biblischen Erzählungen
im Qoran, 107.
41.  In ibid., 93, Speyer refers to a Midrashic parallel, which also expresses the lengthiness of the unsuccessful
sermon in numeric categories.
 Biblical-Qur’anic Figures  391

primacy by way of their privileges as “successors of Abraham,” Noah, together

with Adam, and especially the House of Amram, Āl ʿImrān, the Christian holy
family, form a counterbalance to the successors of Abraham that dominate the
Medinan scene (Q M 3:1).42
In yet a later period, when there was no longer a standing political necessity
to “balance out” the successors of Abraham through figures outside of the Jewish
tradition, Noah and his successors again become mere salvation historical pre-
decessors of Abraham and his descendants (Q M 52:26, M 4:163). At the same
time, attempts are made to unite the biblical and Arabian messengers of God in
one and the same succession of prophets (Q M 22:42–​44, M 9:70). Finally, at a
period when the Prophet himself is raised to the rank of the biblical prophets
(anbiyāʾ) and all prophets are counted as participants in a shared covenant—​
wa-​idh akhadhnā mina l-​nabīyīna mīthāqahum wa-​minka wa-​min Nūḥ, “At that
time, when we sealed a covenant with the prophets, so also with you and with
Noah” (Q M 33:7)—​Noah is the first among them, followed by Abraham, Moses,
and Jesus, and closing with Muhammad himself.43 The sequence is to be under-
stood as a succession of prophets, and not as a biological genealogy, even if the
Islamic tradition later fits them into genealogically oriented family trees.
Noah’s Qur’anic career then culminates in his role as opener of a succession of
prophets and as a lawgiving prophet. His elevation to the “forefather” of prophet
generations is superior to his biblical role, scarcely noted in the Qur’an, as the
forefather of the new humanity after the Flood. At the same time, at the end of
the development, Noah has grown out of the role of the patient messenger of God
proclaiming in vain, the righteous man of the local Arabian history. What was al-
ready his determining dimension in the Christian tradition—​his initial position
in a historically structured sequence of covenant partners of God, as the giver of
pre-​Mosaic law—​also makes up his particular significance for the Qur’anic com-
munity in the late proclamation.

11.3  Abraham—​H is Qur’anic Development

11.3.1  Genealogical Paternity versus Transcendent Bond

Abraham,44 who at the end of the Qur’anic development holds first rank among
the prophets as the founder of the “original monotheism” foundational to Islam,
accompanies the Qur’anic proclamation from the very beginning. Elements of
his story are obviously known already to the hearers, since he occurs as a mere

42.  Neuwirth, “The House of Abraham.”

43.  On this succession, which conforms to the standard sequence of Prophets in Christian theology, only
prefixing Adam to this series and leaving the final position unoccupied, see Samir, “The Theological Christian
Influence, who, however, does not acknowledge the Qur’anic reinterpretations.
44.  On his Qur’anic career in the Meccan suras, see now Sinai, Studien zur frühen Koraninterpretation.
392  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

name (Q I 87:19) before any account of him is given. Early on, he is associated
with a virtue that already adheres to him in the Bible (Neh 9:7–​8): loyalty, faith-
fulness, Q I 53:37: wa-​Ibrāhīma lladhī waffā, “and Abraham, who preserved loy-
alty.” He becomes the protagonist of a typologically diversified story, which is
dispersed among Qur’anic texts ranging from the earliest period to the very end
of the Qur’an’s emergence. The chronological sequence of Abraham-​references
is Q I 53:37, II 37:83–​98, II 19:41–​50, II 21:51–​73, II 26:69–​86, III 29:16–​27, III
43:26–​27, III 6:74–​84, III 14, M 60:4.
Abraham’s first merit is not, as in Gen 12:1–​5, his decision to leave his father’s
house and homeland, in order to follow the call of God to “go forth” (Gen 12:1).
In the Qur’an, Abraham has a pre-​history in his original homeland. There, he
confronts idolatry, a biographical detail that is equally recorded in the Book of
Jubilees and the Testament of Abraham.45 He does so by attacking the idols of
his father and successively also those that are displayed in public (Q III 6:74–​84,
II 19:41–​50, II 21:57–​58, II 26:16–​27, II 37:93); attempting, as he does in the
Midrash,46 to demonstrate their nullity rationally. A death penalty imposed on
him for this is foiled through divine intervention (Q II 21:68–​69, II 37:97–​98,
III 6:74–​84, III 29:24). It is this experience, the rejection of idolatry, that causes
him—​as is laid out in one of the first Abraham stories—​to emigrate from his
homeland, which remains unnamed.47 Spurred by his father (uhjurnī, “Leave
me,” Q II 19:46), who rejects him on account of his defense of idolatry, he seeks
to accomplish a hijra, a “secession” from father and homeland, in order to en-
counter God in a new land, where he aims to establish a new clan (Q II 19:48–​
49, II 21:71, III 29:26). The earliest pericope on this, Q II 37:99–​109, is briefly
presented here:48

wa-​qāla innī dhāhibun ilā rabbī sa-​yahdīn

rabbi hab lī mina l-​ṣāliḥīn
fa-​bashsharnāhu bi-​ghulāmin  ḥalīm
fa-​lammā balagha maʿahu l-​saʿya
qāla yā bunayya innī arā fī l-​manāmi
annī adhbaḥuka fa-​nẓur mādhā tarā
qāla yā abati fʿal mā tuʾmaru
sa-​tajdunī in shāʾa llāhu mina l-​ṣābirīn
fa-​lammā aslamā wa-​tallahu li-​l-​jabīn
wa-​nādaynāhu an yā Ibrahīm
qad ṣaddaqta l-​ruʾyā innā ka-​dhālika najzī l-​muḥsinīn
inna hādhā la-​huwa l-​balāʾu l-​mubīn

45. Speyer, Die biblischen Erzählungen im Qoran, 131.

46.  Genesis Rabba 38:19, quoted in ibid., 135–​136.
47.  In the Book of Jubilees and in Philo, idolatry, or star worship, is the motivation for his emigration.
48.  On this text, see now Sinai, Studien zur frühen Koraninterpretation, 117–​120.
 Biblical-Qur’anic Figures  393

wa-​fadaynāhu bi-​dhabḥin ʿaẓīm
wa-​taraknā ʿalayhi fī-​l-​ākhirīn
salāmun ʿalā Ibrahīm

He said: I will go forth to my Lord, He will guide me.

My Lord, give me one of those who are righteous!
So we gave him news of a boy with forbearance.
When he reached with him (i.e. Abraham) the age of doing the
circumambulation,
he said: “My son, I saw in a dream that I will sacrifice you.
What do you think?”
He said: “My father, do what you are ordered,
you will find me, God willing, one of the patient”;
when they both had submitted,
and he had thrown him on the forehead,
then we called him, “Abraham,
you have fulfilled the vision,
so do we reward those who do good.”
This is the clear testing.
We ransomed him with a great sacrifice,
and for those who come later we left upon him: “peace be upon Abraham.”

Abraham’s principal great merit is his readiness to sacrifice his son. The short
pericope was told first more concisely, without the indented verse 102 which was
added only in Medina:  Abraham leaves his father, the idolater, and emigrates
trusting in divine guidance. His prayer for a son is heard—​a thought that origi-
nally segued directly into the sacrifice (verse 103), which is at the center of this
episode, the “testing story.” Although the victim is substituted thanks to divine
intervention, the sacrifice is to be understood as a “clear test” (balāʾ, verse 106,
compare Gen 22:1)—​an idea also stressed in Haggadic literature.49 Abraham’s
passing of the test entitles him to an honorific eulogy; from now on his name is
linked with the formula ʿalayhi l-​salām, “Peace be upon him.” The story is clearly
not meant to supply initial information about a crucial episode of salvation his-
tory, but rather to present a paragon of exemplary piety, relevant enough to merit
resonance in the liturgical praxis of the present.
Perhaps it was Abraham’s all too rigid obedience to God in this example that
in Medina called for an explanation. In any case, the story, documenting a high
degree of paternal cruelty, was subsequently expanded by means of a prose inser-
tion, verse 102. This insertion provides an explanation involving the agreement
of the son, who, asked for his consent, now volunteers himself for sacrifice—​in

49.  Isaac’s contribution to his own sacrifice can already be found in Josephus; cf. Kugel, The Bible as It Was,
175ff. For further testimonies, see Witztum, “The Foundation of the House.”
394  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

agreement with a Midrashic interpretation.50 The Qur’anic reading differs deci-

sively in its thrust from the biblical presentation of the Aqedah, “the binding,”
in Gen 22:1–​19, by not allowing for a unilateral act of sacrifice: Abraham does
not resolve upon the sacrifice by himself, but rather is supported by the decision
of his son. As a result, and quite in accordance with the Midrash, an act of self-​
destruction is turned into a joint virtuous deed of father and son.51 Obedience to
God no longer transcends what man can bear, and its meritoriousness is more-
over enhanced by the synergy of father and son.
There is not much here to recall the emphatic biblical “Go forth.” Yet by
turning away from his father and turning toward “his lord” (“I will go forth to my
lord [rabbī], he will guide me,” Q II 37:99), Abraham breaks exemplarily with the
genealogical paradigm replacing it by a religious one. During the middle Meccan
period, the Qur’anic community performs the same movement and exchanges
its genealogical forefathers for spiritual predecessors. The development is height-
ened further in the late Meccan period, when some must even renounce their
own genetic kin (Q III 29:8). Although the middle Meccan grounding of the
physical hijra of Abraham is not linked with the later hijra of the community, it
constitutes a model for the desirable behavior of believers in a situation of reli-
gious oppression by unbelievers, a behavior that may extend as far as renouncing
one’s own tribe. In the Qur’an, it is the destruction of the old order exemplified by
Abraham that is the precondition for the setting up of a new one. The narrative of
the destruction of the idols, which involves a rational argument, already familiar
from Midrash,52 raises Abraham to the level of a hero of cultural renewal.53

11.3.2  Abraham as Cult Founder

In view of the fact that the Qur’anic community gave no special status to the
progeny of Abraham,54 it is unsurprising that Abraham, whose name appears al-
ready in the earliest suras (Q I 87:19, I 53:37), never occurs as the progenitor of
the Israelites. Rather, he is a model of exemplary piety, which includes uncon-
ditioned obedience and readiness to sacrifice even that which one holds most
dear. Right at the beginning, Abraham appears in the Qur’an as the epitome of
unconditional trust in God. Honored by a visit from supernatural messengers,

50.  Cf. Speyer, Die biblischen Erzählungen im Qoran, 164–​166.

51.  This synergy of the father and son becomes a typological prefiguration of Christ’s self-​sacrifice willed by
God the Father; see the attestations in Kugel, The Bible as It Was, 177.
52.  Firestone, “Abraham”; Speyer, Die biblischen Erzählungen im Qoran, 134–​140.
53.  A different model of dealing with a religious opponent is the debate, thematized as an option in Medina,
where Abraham conducts an argument with an anonymous, unbelieving ruler (Q 2:258–​260), a scenario familiar
already from apocryphal literature, but this occurs only in the Medinan period; see Die biblischen Erzählungen im
Qoran, 140–​142.
54.  The privileged status of the Israelites as the people of God is nevertheless acknowledged; see, for example,
Q 17:70; 2:47, 122.
 Biblical-Qur’anic Figures  395

who announce the birth of a son to a man who is already at an advanced age (Q
I 51:24–​30), he believes in the announcement despite its improbability.55 In the
same story, he negotiates with God over the fate of the people of Lot (Q III 11:74–​
75; cf. Gen 18:1–​20) but ultimately acquiesces to God’s decision and rejection of
Abraham’s intercession.
The most important event is the Aqedah, the “binding” (Gen 22:1–​19),
Abraham’s sacrifice of his son, which he readily undertakes (Q II 37:99–​113), and
which is only averted at the very last moment by divine intervention.56 This event,
however, does not take place in the Holy Land, but rather in the surroundings of
Mecca or within the Meccan sanctuary,57 which recent research assumes to have
been associated with Abraham already at the time of the Qur’an’s emergence.58
This sacrifice remained closely tied to Abraham and Mecca in post-​Qur’anic
Islamic worship as well. It is re-​enacted at the local sanctuary down to the pre-
sent day in the form of the sacrificial rites of the annual pilgrimage, which are
etiologically grounded in this Qur’anic story.
That the sacrifice story,59 which foregrounds the notions of genealogy and
sacrifice, also contributes significant weight to the corroboration of patrilineal
thought is not only a result of later development. According to M. Elaine Combs-​
Schilling, this myth of sacrifice at once contains and strengthens the significance
of patrilineal bonds:

Transcendence comes because, as told in the Qurʾān, the Prophet

Abraham had to deny his own father in order to remain faithful to the
one God. . . . Yet the Qurʾān also reinforces patrilineality by portraying
the ultimate sacrifice that God demands of humans as the sacrifice of the
most precious tie on earth—​the father’s link to his male child—​the funda-
mental patrilineal connection. The myth of sacrifice ennobles that bond
over all others. So at the same time that the Qurʾān underlines the limits of
patrilineal affiliation . . . , it reinforces patrilineality, for it was the father in
connection with the son that made for connection to the divine and won
for father and son—​and by extension all of humanity—​long life on earth
and eternal life thereafter.60

In view of his unique role in the biblical discourse of sacrifice, it is hardly sur-
prising that in the Medinan period Abraham is connected with the introduction

55.  On the pre-​Qur’anic exegetical traditions of this story, see Speyer, Die biblischen Erzählungen im Qoran,
148–​150.
56.  See ibid., 164–​166.
57.  This is reflected in the Qur’anic Aqedah story, which seems to reflect the background of a pilgrimage rite;
see Firestone, “Abraham.”
58.  Nagel, “Der erste Muslim”; see more recently also Nagel, Muhammad. Leben und Legende.
59. Delaney, Abraham on Trial.
60.  Combs-​Schilling, Sacred Performances,  57–​58.
396  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

of the pilgrimage, which culminates in the performance of the sacrificial rites at

Mina. It is he who makes the first call for pilgrimage, the ḥajj, Q M 22:26–​27:61

When we prepared for Abraham the site of the temple:

“You are not to associate anything with me,
and to purify my temple for those who circumambulate
and those who stand and pray,
and for those who kneel down and prostrate!
And call out to people to go on pilgrimage,
they shall come to you on foot,
and on all kinds of lean riding animals,
which shall come, from all the distant valleys.”

Abraham’s function as a founder of cult can hardly be overstated in its significance.

A middle Meccan text already paves the way for the connection of Abraham to
pilgrimage, through the contextualizing of the sacrificial event with the ancient
Arabian rite of the “circumambulation,” saʿy (Q II 37:102; see p. 392–​393), here
presupposed as already being a common practice. Abraham’s being charged with
enjoining people to perform the pilgrimage, made explicit in Medina (Q 22:26–​
27), lays the basis for the reinterpretation of the pilgrimage as a whole as an act of
imitation of Abraham, which can be discerned already in early Islam. Following
the example of Abraham, the pilgrims accomplish his (intended) sacrifice. The
Abrahamic sacrifice, which prefigures the Islamic sacrifice, aḍḥā, the slaughter of
a sacrificial animal obligatory for every pilgrim in Mecca, became a ubiquitous
theme even of popular pictorial representation. That this is not a sacrifice in the
biblically established sense of vicarious atonement62 does not detract from its sig-
nificance in Muslim piety.

11.3.3  Not “Father of Peoples”; “Paragon of Humanity”

In terms of religious politics, the significance of Abraham comes into view for
the first time with his prayer for Mecca, communicated in a late Meccan sura
(Q III 14:35–​41). Abraham—​so the prayer starts—​has settled his progeny in
Mecca, indirectly expressed as “in a valley without plant growth,” and prays for
their preservation and religious right-​guidedness. Although Abraham’s prayer
transfers the most important activities out of their biblically attested milieu, the
Holy Land, and into the Arabian Peninsula—​and in so doing also inserts the son
Ishmael, who is marginal in the Jewish tradition—​the text does not show any
polemical bias against the heirs and representatives of the older traditions. With
Tilman Nagel,63 it may be assumed that Abraham traditions, which connect him

61.  See Sinai, Studien zur frühen Koraninterpretation, 144.

62.  See chap. 9, 341–342.
63.  Nagel, “Der erste Muslim”; see also Nagel, Muhammad: Leben und Legende.
 Biblical-Qur’anic Figures  397

with Mecca and the Meccan shrine, were already widespread on the peninsula
before Islam. Biblical stories according to his thesis were already integrated into
the local traditions at the time of the emergence of the Qur’an text. The Qur’anic
reference to local history here attests to the community’s new recollection of the
local tradition, a shift in focus that was required in order to confront the pagans’
insinuation that the believers had distanced themselves from the “paternal tradi-
tion.” Nicolai Sinai, who has thoroughly analyzed the “Mecca pericope” (Q 14:35–​
41), comes to the conclusion: in that this pericope introduces Abraham into local
Meccan history (probably through a processing of existing presumptions, which
for us must remain diffuse), it rudimentarily “bridges the gap between the con-
temporary reality of the community and an imagined counter-​history.”64 This gap
had opened up since the middle Meccan period, through the construction of a
close relationship of the community to Israelite salvation history.
No polemical tones can be read into this connection of Abraham to Mecca,
which antedates the hijra. It is only later, in the central Medinan Abraham text
(Q M 2:124–​129), that not only does the genealogical Abraham-​Ishmael lineage
enter into the foreground, but the privilege of Abraham’s progeny through Isaac
is also explicitly denied. The text begins with a promise to Abraham, who is to be
held up as a model, imam, for mankind generally, in recognition of his faithful-
ness even to the point of sacrificing his son—​a promise that is immediately fol-
lowed, however, by a divine restriction of favor: the clear rejection of a privileged
rank of Abraham’s decedents through Isaac conceded to them in Jewish tradition
on the basis of the “dignity of the fathers,” zekhut avot,65 that is, by virtue of their
genealogical descent, Q M 2:124:

When Abraham was tested by his Lord through words

that he then fulfilled.
He spoke: “I want to make you an example for mankind.”
He spoke: “Also people from my descendants?”
He spoke: “My covenant does not include the frivolous!’

In the Qur’an, the raising of Abraham to the rank of a universal model, imāman
li-​l-​nāsi, “a model for mankind” is plainly clear. The divine intent to make this dis-
tinction public is found in the Jewish tradition as well, where the reinterpretation

64. Sinai, Studien zur frühen Koraninterpretation, 131.

65.  This distinction of the progeny of Abraham stems from the promise of blessing, which follows in Genesis
on the divine recognition of Abraham’s faith: “Through your offspring all of the peoples of the earth shall be blessed,
because you have heard my voice” (Gen 22:18). On this, see Aurelius, “Durch den Glauben gehorsam”; see also
Schechter, Rabbinic Theology, 170ff. The Qur’anic retraction of the “merit of the fathers,” zekhut avot—​which is also
attested by Speyer; see Die biblichen Erzählungen im Qoran, 169, and Sinai, Studien zur frühen Koraninterpretation,
138ff.—​is all the more striking, since the “testings” (Q 2:124) that mentioned immediately beforehand, which
Abraham underwent, are understood in Jewish tradition as actions by which he brought about the privileged status
for his offspring; cf. Pirqe Avot 5:3.
398  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

of the biblical wording of Gen 22:12, “Now I know that you fear God,” into the
causative “Now I  have made it known to all [that you have fear of God],” is
attested in the Book of Jubilees, and it then has further iterations in the rabbinic
tradition.66 The promise of salvation to Abraham’s progeny, following on divine
recognition in Gen 22:18, is however turned down in the Qur’an in the address
of God to Abraham (Q M 2:124).
The denial of this privilege in the Qur’an is interpreted by Nicolai Sinai in
terms of religious politics:

While in the Qur’anic version [of the sacrifice] Abraham’s deed is valued
merely as an individual merit [cf. Q II 37:105, 108–​113], according to
rabbinic conception it produced a collective salvific effect whereby the
Medinan Jews could shore up their superiority against the Qur’anic com-
munity. Moreover, the zekhut avot idea was apt to neutralize the Qur’anic
appeal to conversion. If God’s forgiveness by the power of Abraham’s
zekhut, his readiness to sacrifice his son, is assured even for the renegade
descendants of Abraham, and if the Jews are Abraham’s descendants, there
would exist no need for them to recognize the Qur’anic revelations out of
fear of God’s wrath. . . . It is very likely that this is the reason that Q 2:124,
the “sacrifice pericope,” is supplemented by an inversion of the promise of
salvation that follows the sacrifice of the son according to Genesis.67

11.3.4  The Synergetically Erected Shrine: Ishmael instead of Isaac

What then follows in sura 2 is the requirement of Abraham and Ishmael, who
enter together into sura 14, to purify the temple of God for the participants in
cult (verse 125). After a petition by Abraham for the safety and the preservation
of the residents (verse 126), there follows the great prayer for consecration of
the Kaaba (verse 127), said by Abraham and Ishmael during their erection of
the foundation walls of the Kaaba, which reminds in some details of the prayer
for the consecration of the temple by Solomon, 1  Kings 8:14–​61.68 It culmi-
nates in a plea for the perfection of the Meccan worship, which in the form
given by Abraham consisted only of the pilgrimage rites and the postures of
humility required for prayer, but which is now to be complemented by a verbal
liturgy. This specific petition is a vaticinatio ex eventu in the Qur’an, a prayer
that had already found fulfillment with the onset of Muhammad’s ministry, Q
M 2:127–​129:69

66.  Cf. Kugel, The Bible as It Was, 172–​173.

67. Sinai, Studien zur frühen Koraninterpretation, 140.
68.  Neuwirth, “The Spiritual Meaning of Jerusalem in Islam.”
69.  On the idea, represented elsewhere in the Qur’an, that earlier scriptures had prophesied the coming of
Muhammad, see Lazarus-​Yafeh, Intertwined Worlds, 41–​49, and McAuliffe, “The Qurʾānic Context.”
 Biblical-Qur’anic Figures  399

wa-​idh yarfaʿu Ibrāhīmu l-​qawāʿida min l-​bayti wa-​Ismāʾīlu

rabbanā taqabbal minnā innaka anta l-​samīʿu l-​ʿalīm
rabbanā wa-​jʿalnā muslimīna laka
wa-​min dhurrīyatinā ummatan muslimatan laka
wa-​arinā manāsikanā
wa-​tub ʿalaynā innaka anta l-​tawwābu l-​raḥīm
rabbanā wa-​bʿath fīhim rasūlan minhum
yatlū ʿalayhim āyātika wa-​yuʿallimuhumu l-​kitāba w-​l-​ḥikmata
wa-​yuzakkīhim innaka anta l-​ʿazīzu l-​ḥakīm.

When Abraham began to erect the foundations of the temple, he and

Ishmael [prayed there]:
“Our Lord, accept [our prayer, or: our sacrifice] from us!
You are the hearing and the seeing.
Our Lord, let us be submitted to you [muslimīna],
and make from our descendants a community submissive to you [umma
muslima].
Guide us in our rites, and forgive us!
You are the one who forgives, the merciful.
Our Lord, send them a messenger from their midst,
to recite Your signs/​verses to them
and teach them the scripture and the wisdom and purify them.
You are the powerful, the wise.

Neither the event of the erection of the Kaaba by Abraham and Ishmael nor their
prayer is biblically grounded. Nor are they however a Qur’anic ad hoc construc-
tion, as has long been assumed in research, but rather, as Joseph Witztum70 has
convincingly shown, they constitute a Qur’anic restaging of the complex Late
Antique vita of Abraham. In order to demonstrate this, Witztum contextual-
izes both the building activity of the two patriarchs (verse 127) and the prayer
spoken by them with rabbinic and Christian traditions. While in the Qur’an we
are faced with the building of a shrine, in the previous traditions it is instead an
altar that is discussed: already Josephus has Isaac participate in the building of
the altar on which he will be sacrificed.71 It is this building whose erection the
son is most strongly highlighted in the Christian traditions, as various Syriac and
Greek homilies of the fourth and fifth centuries show which interpret the event in
a Christological vein: father and son, the “wise architects of belief,” together build
the altar on which the redeeming sacrifice of the son will be offered. It should
have been the Christological relevance of the father-​son synergy that triggered

70.  Witztum, “The Foundations of the House.”

71.  Ibid., 29. Further rabbinic sources quoted by Witztum are mostly drafted later than the Qur’an; see ibid.,
30, note 32.
400  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

the promulgation of the altar topos in the Christian tradition, while Jewish tradi-
tions about the building of an altar after Josephus can only be traced back to the
period after the emergence of the Qur’an.
In the Qur’anic reception, the idea of the altar is marginal; here, we are primarily
dealing not with sacrifice but with the building of a concrete shrine, in which no
sacrifice will be offered, but which will instead serve for the verbal worship of God.
Abraham’s following prayer is missing in the Christian texts; as it is in the
Jewish tradition; Witztum can only refer to prayers spoken by Abraham alone,
which relate not to the distant future, as in the Qur’an, but rather to Abraham’s
coping with the shocking situation of sacrifice. In the prayer, we should probably
see not a recourse to Late Antique Abraham traditions as much as the expression
of a new perception of the Meccan shrine. For the prayer can best be understood
as a prayer for the “sanctity of the Kaaba” derived from the prayer for the sanctity
of the Jerusalem temple (1 Kings 8:14–​61, especially verses 33–​34 and 55–​58), a
prayer which moreover should involve the son Ishmael, now acting in synergy
with his father in the founding of the shrine.
If one takes into account the structural similarities of the three modes of a
father-​son synergy discussed in Late Antiquity, all engaged with the erecting of
the respective shrine, then Ishmael takes part in the Meccan founding of the
Kaaba, just as Isaac took part in the founding of the Jerusalem sacrificial site
on Moriah or, according to the allegorical homilies, Christ in the founding of
the sacrificial site of Golgotha. In the Qur’an, however, this father-​son synergy
lacks the mythic dimension, which in the other two traditions is culled from the
weighty theological concept of sacrifice.

11.3.5  Mecca Inherits Jerusalem

The innovative attribution of the erection of the Kaaba to Abraham and Ishmael,
their prayer together for the sacral integrity of the Kaaba, has further implica-
tions. It is a station on the way of the supersession of Jerusalem, previously so
central for the community, by Mecca. Nicolai Sinai remarks: “Against the back-
ground of the erection of the Jerusalem temple on the site of Abraham’s sacrifice,
the invocation ittakhidhū min maqāmi Ibrāhīma muṣallan (Q M 2:125) could
have originally had the meaning ‘Take up the place in which Abraham stood,
when he wanted to accomplish the sacrifice of the son, as a place of prayer!’ . . . ; for
with the emphatic identification of the sacrificial place as the Kaaba, Jerusalem
has already been replaced by Mecca.” An additional reference to Jerusalem is
offered by the part of verse 125 that immediately precedes this invocation (“And
when we made this temple into a place frequented by mankind, a sanctuary”)
where, with Josef Rivlin, one can see an allusion to Is 56:7—​“for my Temple [beti]
is called a house of prayer for all people.”72 Above all, Q M 2:129, on the coming

72. Sinai, Studien zur frühen Koraninterpretation, 142.

 Biblical-Qur’anic Figures  401

of a Prophet of scripture, must be read as evidence for the successive emerging of

a cult which upholds the preeminence of Mecca over Jerusalem:73 in Abraham’s
prayer, the important privilege of Jerusalem to be the original place of scripture
and the liturgy of the word, are transferred to Mecca: what in Is 2:3 is true of
Jerusalem (“For from Zion will come forth teaching and the word of God from
Jerusalem”) should now apply to Mecca, where with the arrival of Muhammad,
the proclaimer of scripture and God’s word that Abraham had prayed for, has
appeared. With the participation of Ishmael, the progenitor of the Arabs, in the
foundation of the shrine, a further step in the Arabizing of the cult is achieved.
The verses Q M 3:96–​97 finally make clear the seniority of Mecca’s sanctuary
over that of Jerusalem, justified by Abraham as founder:

The first temple, which was built for men,

is that in Bakka [=Mecca],
as blessing and right guidance for all the world.
In it are clear signs,
the place in which Abraham stood, whoever enters it is safe.

Mecca is thus “the first temple of God,” that is, the older shrine with respect
to Jerusalem, because it goes back all the way to Abraham. One could also
claim:  Mecca is the original Jerusalem. In this process of the “biblicizing” of
Mecca, its cult, and its history, no figure is as deeply involved as Abraham.

11.3.6  The Abrahamic Covenant

In verse Q M 2:130, the covenant of Abraham, apparently considered as already es-
tablished in fulfillment of the prayer, is declared the new and ideal collective identity:

wa-​man yarghabu ʿan millati Ibrāhīma llā man safiha nafsahu

wa-​la-​qadi ṣṭafaynāhu fī l-​dunyā
wa-​innahu fī l-​ākhirati la-​mina l-​ṣāliḥīn

Who would willfully abandon the covenant of Abraham,

unless he wanted to make a fool of himself?
We chose Abraham in this world,
and in the hereafter he will be among the righteous.

The covenant of Abraham, millat Ibrāhīm, named after the biblical covenant of
circumcision, Hebrew berit mila, is still ambiguous in the Qur’an: on the one hand
milla,74 borrowed from the Hebrew, means God’s biblical covenant with Abraham

73.  Neuwirth, “The Spiritual Meaning of Jerusalem in Islam.”

74.  On other interpretations, see Horovitz, Koranische Untersuchungen, 62–​63; Jeffery, Foreign Vocabulary,
268–​269; Ambros, A Concise Dictionary, 259. The lexeme milla already takes on the meaning of “community”
during the Qur’anic development; see Q II 38:7. It occurs seven times in the Medinan suras, referring in all cases but
one to Abraham: Q III 16:123, III 12:37–​38, III 6:161.
402  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

delineated by circumcision, but at the same time it also designates the community
of Muhammad, which now reconstitutes itself on the model of the Abrahamic cov-
enant and identifies itself through the self-​designation millat Ibrāhīm, “Abraham’s
covenant (community),” as a successor to the Abrahamic tradition.
This gradual appropriation of the figure of Abraham signifies at the same time
its dissociation from the Jewish tradition surrounding it. For just when Abraham
developed into a prototype of the new believers, al-​muslimīn (Q M 2:135–​136),
he was also installed as the founder of the rites of the Arabic pilgrimage, which
culminate in the slaughter of a sacrificial animal. To reclaim Abraham for a local
praxis that must have been foreign to post-​temple Judaism, which no longer per-
mitted animal sacrifice, meant to distance him from the post-​biblical foundations,
which had previously been shared by the community and the neighboring Jewish
groups. Indeed, the aspect of sacrifice, which in later Islam becomes the most
visible marker of Abraham in popular religion and art, is not dominant in the
Qur’anic image of Abraham, but rather ranks as a part of his earlier role as founder
of monotheism before the revelation of scriptures. It is moreover an entirely demy-
thologized sacrifice, as Q M 22:36 attests. Yet Abraham’s function as the founder
of the Meccan rites reveals a basic new reflection of the Qur’anic community re-
garding their relationship to Abraham and the traditions connected to him.

11.3.7  Abraham as “Righteous among the Peoples”

Abraham is not only the figure that transfers the decisive symbols and issues
of belief from the Holy Land to Arabia but also the biblical figure that by the
end of the Qur’anic development holds a unique position as having been active
before the two great religions, and thus outside of them. Abraham takes on a
symbolic character; he is a universal figure, who goes back before Judaism and
Christianity. Q M 3:65–​68:

You people of the scripture, what do you dispute concerning Abraham,

when both the Torah and the Gospel
were first brought down after his time? Do you not understand?
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Abraham was not a Jew or a Christian.
He was rather a god-​pleasing ḥanīf [i.e., a servant of God from among the
peoples].
He was no idolater.
The men who stand closest to Abraham are those who have followed him
and this Prophet and those who believe!
God is the friend of the believers.

The qualification ḥanīf, which is paraphrased as “servant of God from among

the peoples,” is Abrahams’s designation at the end of the Qur’anic development.
 Biblical-Qur’anic Figures  403

What does the Arabic ḥanīf75 mean? The Syriac word ḥanpā, from which it
derives, means “heathen,” or “one standing outside of established religion.” In
pre-​Islamic poetry, however, ḥanīf occurs designating an ascetic who practices
his worship alone. If one takes these two together, then ḥanīf bundles together
independence from the established religions and exemplary piety, both charac-
teristics of the Qur’anic Abraham. This increase in momentum of the figure of
Abraham is no accident. He enters the stage at a time in which the image of the
proclaimer himself is being formed anew. The erstwhile apostle, the “messenger,”
rasūl, in Medina has changed into a biblical “Prophet,” nabī,76 who places him-
self in the succession of prophets from Adam through Noah, Abraham, Moses,
and Jesus. What is more, the proclaimer is not only a prophet from the biblical
tradition but at the same time a prophet from a counter-​tradition. Toward the
end of his career he takes on the title of a nabī ummī, a “Prophet from among
the peoples,” Hebrew navi me-​ummot ha-​ʿolam.77 Ummī, a calque, a new coining
made up of more than one language, is on the one hand a derivation from the
Arabic umma, “community,” and on the other hand a transmission of the Hebrew
ummot ha-​ʿolam, “non-​Jewish peoples.” and forms the adjectival counterpart of
ḥanīf, reserved almost exclusively for Abraham. This revaluation of the “peoples,”
who from the Jewish perspective were excluded from the privileges of the elect
people, is connected to Abraham already by Paul,78 as it is in the Qur’an. Gal
3:6–​10  reads:

Abraham trusted in God, and believed in him. This was credited to him
as righteousness. Therefore know that those who are of faith are the sons
of Abraham. And the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the
Gentiles through faith [i.e., if only they believe], announced beforehand
to Abraham: “in you shall all nations be blessed.” So those who are of faith
are blessed along with Abraham, the man of faith.79

In the Qur’an, the revaluation of the “peoples” extends to those outside Judaism
and Christianity who exalt the one God, and from among whom came the pro-
claimer himself, al-​nabī al-​ummī, “the Prophet from among the peoples,” Q M
7:156–​158:

I shall write my mercy for those who are pious . . . /​

for those who follow the messenger,
the Prophet from among the peoples [al-​nabī al-​ummī],

75.  Rubin, “Ḥanīfiyya and Kaʿba.”

76.  Bobzin, “The Seal of the Prophets.”
77.  On the development of the word ummī, see Horovitz, Koranische Untersuchungen, 52–​53, and Horovitz,
Jewish Proper Names,  46–​47.
78.  I owe thanks to Friedmann Eisler for important insights regarding the Pauline conception.
79.  Translation follows the English Standard Version (ESV).
404  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

whom they find indicated among them in the Torah and the Gospel,
who bids them to the good, and forbids them what is reprehensible,
who makes licit to them good things and forbids them bad things,
and takes away the oppressive obligations and chains that lie upon
them. . . . /​Speak: “O mankind, I am the messenger to you all
from God [rasūlu llāh], the ruler of the heaven and earth,
no God but him.
He grants life and gives death.
So believe in God, his messenger [rasūlihi],
the Prophet from among the peoples [al-​nabī al-​ummī],
who believes in God and his words, and follow him!”

Alongside the “Prophet from among the peoples,” the “believers from among the
peoples”—​al-​ummīyūn—​are equally part of the salvific plan. Q M 62:1–​2 encap-
sulates this development:

Glorifying God is all that exists in heaven and on earth,

the king, the holy, the powerful, the wise.
It is he who among the peoples [al-​ummīyūn] has raised up a messenger
[rasūl],
who reads to them his verses and purifies them
and teaches them the scripture and wisdom,
though they were previously in manifest error.

Here a revaluation of a descent “from among the peoples,” which was already
asserted by Paul, is repeated once again. The Prophet and his community
are not simply “illiterate,” or even “unlettered,” as the qualification ummī is
often understood. This understanding would be contradicted by his call “to
teach the scripture and wisdom.” Ummī, “from among the peoples,” reflects
rather the perception of a status outside the recognized religions, a perception
that in Judaism was meant to be disparaging, but that was inverted into an
honorary title.
Abraham, who in the Pauline conception already served an exemplary func-
tion, takes on an even richer role in the new model of the Qur’anic commu-
nity: he becomes the actual founder of the new religion taking shape, which the
proclaimer only comes to complete. Abraham—​not Moses or Jesus—​is for that
reason the only biblical referent in the daily prayer of the community, which con-
tains a short litany that brings together Muhammad and Abraham:

Allāhumma ṣallī ʿalā Muḥammadin wa-​ʿalā Āli Muḥammad

ka-​mā ṣallayta ʿalā Ibrāhīma wa-​ʿalā Āli Ibrāhīm
wa-​bārik ʿalā Muḥammadin wa-​ʿalā Āli Muḥammad
ka-​mā bārakta ʿalā Ibrāhīma wa-​ʿalā Āli Ibrāhīm
 Biblical-Qur’anic Figures  405

God, bless Muhammad and the House of Muhammad

as you have blessed Abraham and the House of Abraham
And give salvation to Muhammad and the House of Muhammad
As you have given salvation to Abraham and the House of Abraham.

11.4  Moses—​H is Qur’anic Development

11.4.1  Moses’s Calling—​The Visions of the Proclaimer

A central historical development that runs parallel to the genesis of the Qur’an
is the process of the proclaimer’s becoming a prophet. To assume a role already
shaped by eminent predecessors, is an act of self-​authorization and at the same
time an essential step to connect the community to biblical tradition.80 The pro-
claimer was able to clearly perceive in the image of Moses, as though through a
burning glass, the psychological contours of a prophet’s becoming—​the spiritual
movement toward the transcendent God, the feeling of insufficient strength in
the face of the task, the ambivalence between the obligation to familial lineage
and the necessity of breaking with it, the experiencing of fear and overcoming it,
and the power for patient persistence in a situation of humiliation. Thus, in the
reflection of the life of Moses, the proclaimer experienced his own development
as a divinely guided event.
Moses is evoked as the receiver of the Torah already in very early suras: wa-​l-​
tīni wa-​l-​zaytūn /​ wa-​ṭūri Sinīn /​wa-​hādhā l-​baladi l-​amīn, “By the fig tree and
by the olive tree, /​by Mount Sinai /​and this secure city” (Q I 95:1–​3); wa-​l-​ṭūr
/​ wa-​l-​kitābi l-​masṭūr /​fī raqqin manshūr /​wa-​l-​bayti maʿmūr, “By the Mount /​
and by the scripture, written down /​on parchment unrolled /​and by the visited
house” (Q I 52:1–​4). In these oaths, Moses’s reception of the scripture is hinted
at, which occurs as a divine self-​manifestation in an especially distinguished site.
Although the event of the giving of the Torah, together with Moses’s deliverance
of the Israelites through the Exodus from Egypt, is the most significant event
in Moses’s career in the Bible and in Jewish tradition, the earliest narrative tes-
timonies of Moses in the Qur’an follow a different line. Moses occurs first as a
warner, sent not for the liberation of his people but to convert an unbelieving
ruler, Pharaoh. Indeed, Moses, unlike the other warner figures of the early suras,
is ideally prepared for his task. He has experienced a call, in which he could hear
the voice of God himself in a sanctified place (bi-​l-​wādī l-​muqaddasi Ṭuwā, “in
the sanctified valley of Ṭuwā,” Q II 20:12), which instructs him to worship him
alone and, reflecting early Meccan circumstances, to perform the ritual prayer

80.  On Moses in the Qur’an, see Neuwirth, “Erzählen als kanonischer Prozess,” and Wheeler, “Moses.” Wheeler,
however, bases his interpretation of the Moses texts on the exegetical tradition. The title of his monograph, Moses in
the Qurʾān, is somewhat misleading in that it only deals with the story cycle of sura 18.
406  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

(verse 14). After an introduction given in an almost amicable tone to the per-
formance of two magical tricks, which he will employ at Pharaoh’s court (cf. Ex
4:3–​7), he is dispatched to approach Pharaoh. Only through this authorization
and after having been freed from fear—​Moses prays ishraḥ lī ṣadrī, “Widen my
breast,” verse 25—​does he assume a position from which to fulfill his public task.
Like Moses, the proclaimer himself had experienced a deliverance, a “widening
of his breast” (a-​lam nashraḥ laka ṣadrak, “Have we not widened your breast?” Q
I 94:1), before the beginning of his public proclamation.
Moses is a typological precursor of the proclaimer. Indeed, further shared
characteristics cannot be overlooked, even if the two diverge from each other in
important details: not unlike Moses, the proclaimer is also granted a personal en-
counter with God and experiences a vision81 in which he sees God himself sitting
upright on his throne: dhū mirratin fa-​stawā /​ wa-​huwa bi-​l-​ufuqi l-​aʿlā, “Great
in prestige he sat erect, enthroned /​on the highest horizon” (Q I 53:6–​7). While
the site of the vision here remains open, the second vision of the proclaimer takes
place, like Moses’s meeting with God, in a specified place: ʿinda sidrati l-​muntahā
/​ ʿindahā jannatu l-​maʾwā, “at the lote tree at the furthest end /​there where the
garden of the retreat is” (Q I 53:14–​15). Here too it is a tree (or shrub) that is dis-
turbingly altered. In place of the burning bush of thorns, or “the fire” of Moses
(Ex 3:2–​3 and Q II 20:10), is a “covered tree”: idh yaghshā l-​sidrata mā yaghshā
“when the lote tree was covered by what covered [it],” Q 53:16.
Reading the two stories of encounter in context, it emerges that the middle
Meccan story of Moses, together with its introduction, highlights just those
details that are also relevant for the early Meccan vision report of the proclaimer;
Moses’s calling (Q II 20:1–​5, 9–​14):

Ta ha. We have not revealed the qurʾān to you

to make you unhappy
but only as a reminder to him who fears
a sending down from him
who created the earth and the highest heavens
The compassionate—​he sits upright on the throne.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Has the story of Moses reached you?
When he saw a fire, he said to his people:
“Wait, I have noticed a fire,
perhaps I can bring you a torch from it
or find guidance from it.”
Then when Moses approached it, there was a calling out to him:
“Moses, I am your Lord, take off your shoes,

81.  Cf. chap. 2, 68–71.

 Biblical-Qur’anic Figures  407

you are in the sanctified valley Ṭuwā

I have chosen you, so listen to what is being inspired.
I am God, there is no God but I!
So worship me and perform the prayer in my remembrance.”

One can compare this to the vision of the proclaimer (Q 53:4–​10, 13–​18):

It is only an inspiration being given to him

taught to him by a mighty one
steadfast to look at. Enthroned
on the upper horizon.
Then he came closer and hung suspended,
only two bows’ lengths or nearer.
And he inspired to his servant what he inspired. . . .
He saw him still another time
at the lote tree at the farthest end,
where the garden of retreat is
when the lote tree was covered by what it was covered by.
His sight did not fail nor did he err.
Of the signs of his Lord he saw the greatest.

Both Moses and the proclaimer are at first granted a visible sign: a mysterious fire
for Moses and an appearance of God on the horizon for the proclaimer in a first vi-
sion a “covered” tree in a second. Moses then experiences an audition that seals his
calling: God calls him directly, gives him his name, and instructs him to worship (Ex
3:4.15; Q II 20:9–​14); he announces to him inspirations (Q II 20:13). The proclaimer
also experiences an inspiration, though without being called by a voice; for him the
encounter with God remains above all without a verbally unambiguous commu-
nication and instead lingers as a non-​verbal “inspiration”: wa-​awḥā ilā ʿabdihi mā
awḥā, “He inspired to his servant what he inspired” (Q I 53:10).
The second vision of the proclaimer remains limited wholly to vision: here, only
the location in a specified place and the tree changed in its form recall the Moses
scenario (Q I 53:14–​15). Although the report about Moses’s call in sura 20 is to be
dated later than sura Q 53, the earlier text on the vision of the proclaimer clearly
orients itself to the apparently familiar model of the call of Moses. But the differ-
ences between the two experiences are hard to ignore: the visions of the proclaimer
are not an experience of calling. God does not reveal himself to him with his name,
nor does he give him an unambiguous assignment, but rather grants to him a sign
of his appearance (Q 53:10) or lets him witness a natural wonder (Q 53:18), without
the inspiration thus received marking the beginning of his mission.82 The double

82.  For this reason, in looking for a text referring to a calling, the tradition has not made use of this vision re-
port but rather made reference to other suras; on sura 96, see chap. 7, 247–250.
408  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

report in sura 53 is preceded by a still earlier vision report (Q I 81:15–​29), which

remains wholly without references to Moses. The relatedness to Moses seems to
first become important at the end of the early Meccan period, as the discourse re-
lated to the followers of the people of God emerges, a discourse that dominates the
middle Meccan texts.
Later presentations come to complete the image of the events of Moses’s di-
vine calling to prophethood through further details, but without whitewashing
his ambivalent actions: while Moses remains in Egypt, he unintentionally kills a
man (Q II 20:40, III 38:19–​33) and must then go into hiding. On his way back
from Midian, his place of exile, he then experiences his calling. But while the
story of his childhood, the miraculous salvation from the Egyptian murder of
children, and his stay in Midian all form parts of the narrative, the main focus in
the Qur’an clearly lies in his debates with the unbelieving ruler, Pharaoh, whom
he is not able to convince, and who instead triumphs over the messenger. There
is no collective exodus that first has to be fought for, no founding of the feast
of Passover—​and thus no dramatic crisis of events to culminate in the Exodus.
Instead, these events are mentioned later, and rather cursorily, without any con-
nection to Moses’s confrontation of Pharaoh. Taking the attempt of the conver-
sion of Pharaoh as the central point of the Qur’anic story of Moses, which is
linked to the biblical narrative only through the episode of Moses’s magic tricks
performed at Pharaoh’s court, the story remains bound to the textual genre of the
punishment legend, even if the messenger attempts to convert not his own people
but rather his personal opponent, Pharaoh. As in other punishment legends, the
unbelieving Pharaoh is indeed punished in the earthly world, but he awaits his
more serious punishment in the next. The believers are saved, in this case not a
small crowd but rather the people of the Israelites led by Moses in the Exodus, to
whom is granted a miraculous crossing of the sea on dry feet.83

11.4.2  Moses’s Exodus as a Model for the “Inner Exodus” of

the Proclaimer
In the Jewish Moses tradition, there are two episodes that stand above all at the
center:  the deliverance of the people through the Exodus and the granting of
the scripture, matan tora. Strikingly, these have no outstanding position in the
Qur’an; Moses’s confrontation with Pharaoh and his magicians clearly occupies
the center of the story. However, the two biblically central events will figure as
the model for the perception and presentation of key events in the life of the
proclaimer himself. Indeed, the Exodus, reported three times in the Qur’an and
which could seem to be a prefiguration of the hijra, is never linked explicitly to
the hijra experience; rather, the experience of liberation conveyed by the Exodus

83.  See Neuwirth, “Erzählen als kanonischer Prozess.”

 Biblical-Qur’anic Figures  409

re-​appears other Qur’an contexts. This is consistent with the paradigmatic char-
acter of the Exodus. Complete absence of this particular Mosaic experience in
the Qur’an would have been surprising, since the “Exodus . . . is the central expe-
rience of the deliverance of Israel, treated in the scripture as a story of liberation
in detailed or concise form in different places. Also in post-​biblical time, the
Exodus remains one of the key elements of Jewish history writing, of the reading
of biblical tradition for the ascertainment of one’s own identity and the lasting re-
lation to YHWH, the deity of Israel; it becomes a central element of the cultural
memory of Israel and is thus transferable to the respective present.”84 As such, it
would seem also to be transferable to the experience of the Qur’anic community.
Yet, in what seems to be the clearest reference to Exodus in the Qur’an, the
“nocturnal visionary journey,” what is presented is, remarkably, not a collective
liberation but a personal experience of liberation of the proclaimer. The event,
which is resonant with the Qur’anic designation of Exodus, isrāʾ/​asrā, “night
journey,” “to (make) travel at night,” enables the proclaimer to gain—​spatially
conceived—​spiritual freedom:  the word asrā, in reference not to Moses but
rather to the proclaimer, stands in Q II 17:1 for a new model of exodus, which
is achieved not physically but rather in the imagination: the “visionary journey”
from the place of social oppression, Mecca, which had become an unbearable
place of sojourn for the believers, to a place of spiritual freedom, the sanctuary
of Jerusalem.85
On the Mosaic Exodus, in Q II 26:52 it says: “We inspired to Moses: go out in
the night with my servants [asri bi-​ʿibādī], you will be followed.” The story that is
then narrated (verses 53–​68, especially 61–​66) dramatically reports the persecu-
tion of those in flight and their final salvation through a miracle: Moses parts the
sea with his staff, so that the Israelites can pass drily between the towering waves,
while Pharaoh drowns with his armies. While this punishment of Pharaoh is
evoked numerous times (Q II 17:103, III 10:90, III 44:23–​24, III 43:55, III 7:138,
M 2:50, M 8:54), the Exodus as such occurs only two other times, and there in the
same very condensed form (Q II 20:77 and III 44:23).
The striking verb asrā bi-​, to “make (someone) journey at night,” to “drive
(one) out at night,” occurs, apart from the Exodus context, in two mentions of the
“nightly flight” of the people of Lot from Sodom (Q II 15:65 and III 11:81), and a
single time in reference to the proclaimer. In Q II 17:1:

subḥāna lladhī asrā bi-​ʿabdihi laylan

mina l-​masjidi l-​ḥarāmi ilā l-​masjidi l-​aqṣā
lladhī bāraknā ḥawlahu
li-​nuriyahu mina āyātinā innahu huwa l-​samīʿu l-​baṣīr

84. Schiffner, Lukas liest Exodus, 20.

85. On the whole, see Neuwirth, “Erste Qibla—​fernstes Masjid?” Cf. also Rubin, “Muhammad’s Night
Journey”; Cf. chap. 8, 282–290.
410  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

Praised be He, who let his servant travel by night

from the sacred place of worship to the far/​further place of worship,
whose precincts we have blessed, to show him our signs.
He is the all-​hearing, the all-​seeing.

The verse is striking, since it does not introduce the proclaimer in second-​
person address, as is usual, but rather speaks about him in the third person. As
Wansbrough has noted, the beginning sentence of the verse—​whose internal
rhyme eventually indicates that the passage was originally formulated as a short
independent verse group—​could be taken to refer to Moses if treated in iso-
lation from the rest of the sura. But this interpretation is excluded by the two
following sentences, which clearly mention a movement between the endpoints
“sanctuary of Mecca” and the “site of the Jerusalem temple,” and thus presup-
pose a scenario for which only the proclaimer sojourning in Mecca can be the
actor. His mention in the third person is not unique in the Qur’an. An early sura
even begins with a speech about, rather than to, the proclaimer: “He frowned
and turned away” (Q I 80:1).
Verse Q II 17:1 can most probably be interpreted in the sense of an experience
perceived as miraculous by the proclaimer, who was taken from his location,
the Meccan sanctuary, al-​masjid al-​ḥarām,86 to an apparently comparably sacred
place, al-​masjid al-​aqṣā, the “far/​further sanctuary.” There, he received “signs,”
āyāt—​a detail that recalls the earlier reported experiences of the vision of God
in sura 53. The supernatural experience is, according to Islamic tradition, most
probably to be imagined in the frame of prayer, where the “visionary transfer” of
the proclaimer, here communicated through allusion, is most probably explain-
able. The idea of prayer also fits well with the interpretation of the majority of
scholars of the destination site as Jerusalem,87 whose temple Mount according
to biblical and Jewish tradition is the crystallization point of prayer par excel-
lence. With the assumption of the direction of prayer, qibla, toward Jerusalem,
which—​according to our hypothesis—​belongs in the context of a set of middle
Meccan cult reforms, the community had drawn symbolically closer to the local
center of the biblical tradition. The salvation historical past that thus comes to
the fore forms a text world in competition with reality, which one approaches in
prayer through the physical gesture of bowing toward Jerusalem, as well as with
cultic recitation. The experience of liberation innate in the Exodus thus becomes

86.  The designation of the Meccan sanctuary as al-​masjid al-​ḥarām is striking; it first becomes frequent in
Medina. In Mecca there is mostly reference to al-​bayt, “the temple.” The new expression may have been coined in
analogy to the title al-​masjid al-​aqṣā for the Jerusalem temple, whose historical fate is discussed in the course of
the sura.
87.  But see Horovitz, Koranische Untersuchungen, 140, who views aqṣā as a reference to the seventh heaven;
on this position, see Busse, “Jerusalem.” Busse presents the same interpretation in “Jerusalem in the Story of
Muhammad’s Night Journey.” This interpretation, which contradicts the explicit statement in verse 93 of the same
sura, is problematic.
 Biblical-Qur’anic Figures  411

a model for the praying community’s “inner exodus,” their “emigration” into the
memory world of the Israelites, which is actualized anew with every ritual prayer.
That the Exodus, as prototype of the taking of refuge of the believers from
repressive, unbelieving wielders of power, is the decisive intertext for Q II 17:1
is suggested above all, however, by the structure of the sura itself, which, as has
been shown, is underlain by a pattern of multiple parallels between Moses and
the proclaimer,88 to which the beginning verse of sura 17, with its recollection of
an experience of Moses by the proclaimer, forms the prelude.
What is apparently less important in the Qur’anic understanding of the Exodus
is the geographical location of the “Promised Land.” This is located simply in a
place where it is possible for the believers to practice their worship unmolested,
be it because the unbelievers themselves are annihilated, as in the Moses story
where the Israelites “inherit” the land left by their opponents (Q II 26:58–​59), or
be it because they simply no exposed after they have found their refuge elsewhere
through a hijra, as for example in the story of Abraham (Q II 37:99). Finally, an
Exodus, isrāʾ, can be achieved non-​physically, that is, spiritually, as is shown in
the example of the “night journey” of the proclaimer, his imagined displacement
to the “far/​further place of worship,” the Jerusalem temple (Q 17:1).

11.4.3  Moses’s Covenant on Sinai—​A Qur’anic Shibboleth

Similarly to the Mosaic Exodus as a whole, the second great salvation histor-
ical event connected to Moses, the reception of the tablets, matan tora,89 which
together with the Exodus plays a central role in Jewish tradition, in the Qur’an
remains an episode that is not unfolded narratively in a single instance but is
rather summarized in two verses (Q 7:145–​154) and evoked in one other verse
(Q 20:80). This striking fact is comprehensible within the Qur’an:  on the one
hand, with the early developed concept of the transcendent “preserved tablet,”
al-​lawḥ al-​maḥfūẓ (Q I 85:22),90 there is an intact replacement for the tablets that
were shattered after first being handed over to Moses. In addition, according to
a Qur’anic conception that was already developed early, the written divine word
is kept in the transcendent realm, in a “hidden writing,” fī kitābin maknūn (Q
I 56:78), or on a “preserved tablet,” from which it is communicated to the indi-
vidual proclaimers. In that this mode of the reception of revelation, shared by all
prophets, is conceived as oral, it is difficult to reconcile it with a handing over of
scripture or parts of scripture in history to a privileged receiver.
But if the mode of biblical reception of revelation by Moses falls out of the
Qur’anic schema, nevertheless the central element of the event on Sinai, the
drawing of the covenant between the Israelites and God, is an event that is also

88.  Neuwirth, “From the Sacred Mosque.”

89. Fishbane, Sacred Attunement.
90.  Cf. chap. 2, 282–290.
412  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

treated in the Qur’an. It is around this very event that a controversy rose up in
Medina. The controversy culminates in the uncovering of what the community
perceived to be a breach of trust, an act of hermeneutical deceit committed by
the Medinan Jews. The presentation of the Sinai event by the Jewish interlocutors
was understood, in any case, as a wanton deception, although it could also be
explained simply as an unbiased recourse to a rabbinic tradition that reinterprets
the biblical text in a self-​critical way—​a shibboleth that retrospectively can hardly
be illuminated.91 The evidence for the controversy over this story, which as such
had already been proclaimed in late Meccan times, is scattered across several
Medinan texts. What develops into a point of controversy is a recollection, at first
quite uncontroversial, of the gathering at Sinai in Ex 19:18–​19 (a description fol-
lowed, in Ex 20:2–​17, by the anticipatory revelation of the Ten Commandments):

Moses led the people out to God from the camp. . . . The mountain was
entirely covered with smoke, because the Lord had come down to him in
the fire. The smoke rose like the smoke of a furnace. The whole mountain
shook violently.

The scene is condensed in the late Meccan sura Q III 7:171 into a single verse:

Then, when we shook the mountain over them

as though it were a canopy,
and they thought that it would fall on them:
“Hold fast to what we have given you,
and remember what it contains!
Perhaps you will be God-​fearing.”

The answer of those addressed, which is not communicated in the cited text, is in
the Pentateuch: naʿse wa-​nishmaʿ, “We will do and hear” (Ex 24:7), or shamaʿnu
weʿasinu, “We hear it and will do it” (Dtn 5:24). An analogous answer from the
Israelites is at first lacking in the Qur’an, but is added in a later Medinan text, Q M
2:93, which reassumes the scenario of the drawing of covenant. It appears there
however, disfigured:

When we made the covenant with you

and raised above you the mountain and said:
“Take what we have given you and obey!”
They said: “We hear and we disobey!” [samiʿnā wa-​ʿaṣaynā].
They were instilled with the love of the calf in their hearts.
Say: “Evil is what your faith commands you, if you truly believe!”

91.  The controversy is treated in detail in Hartwig, “Urvertrag.”

 Biblical-Qur’anic Figures  413

This new answer of the Israelites, so contrary to the biblical one, cannot be linked
to any verse of scripture, but is only explainable through oral tradition. It does
not necessarily spring from an absolute error, but rather, as Julian Obermann
has shown,92 may go back to a play on words, specifically a calque.93 In the bib-
lical Hebrew wording ʿasinu, “we will do (it),” one can hear with only slight au-
dible change the Arabic ʿaṣaynā, “we disobey,” alternately—​and this is the alleged
stumbling block—​this could have been deliberately produced through calculated
manipulation. For, as a slightly later Qur’an text commenting on this verse attests,
the irritating wording of the Israelite answer was understood as a wanton falsifi-
cation of the biblical text. The Jewish interlocutors of the community are accused
of having done this intentionally to their illiterate and ignorant compatriots in
the new community.
Such an intention did not necessarily exist. Julian Obermann94 has drawn at-
tention to the fact that rabbinic tradition itself has preserved such a negative eval-
uation of the intention of the Israelites at Sinai. He cites Shemot Rabba, a Midrash
to Exodus, where we read: “On the day when they stood at Sinai and said with
their mouth:  ‘We will do it and hear it [naʿase we-​nishmaʿ],’ their hearts were
already concerned with worship of idols [literally:  astral bodies—​libbam haya
mekhuwwan li-​ʿavodat kokhavim].” This interpretation is supported, according
to Dirk Hartwig,95 inter alia, by Psalm 78:36–​37:  “They deceived Jim with the
mouth, and with their tongue they lied to Him. Their heart did not hold fast to
Him, and they did not stay true to His covenant.” This tradition already presup-
poses the insincerity of the Israelites addressed at Sinai to the God who demands
to be worshipped alone, which they will then go on to prove through the worship
of the calf. They would already have vowed their own disobedience, “we disobey,”
at Sinai. Whether the Jewish informants of the community had this interpreta-
tion in mind or not, the formulation of the answer of the Israelites in Q M 2:93
was in any case understood by the Qur’anic community as a wanton deception,
which, according to the Qur’an, did not even stand alone. In the late Medinan
verse Q M 4:46, it is brought together with comparable instances:

Some of the Jews take words out of their context and say:

“We hear and we disobey” [samiʿnā wa-​ʿaṣaynā] . . .
and thus they twist their tongues and abuse the religion. . . .

92.  Obermann, “Koran and Agada.”

93.  On this language play, see Rippin, “The Poetics of Qurʾānic Punning,” which however does not take ac-
count of the numerous cases of calques in the Qur’an.
94.  Obermann, “Koran and Agada.” This important article asserts for the first time—​against the misleading
interpretation in Wheeler, Moses in the Qurʾān, 1–​3—​the ambiguity of the judgment on the Israelites obtaining
already in Judaism itself and which is attested in rabbinic tradition, as a possible vantage point of the Qur’anic com-
munity’s perception of the other.
95.  All of the texts discussed here, as well as important further evidence, have been treated by Hartwig,
“Urvertrag.”
414  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

It would have been better and more upright for them to say:
“We hear and we obey” [samiʿnā wa-​aṭaʿnā],
but God has cursed them on account of their disbelief.
So they disbelieve except for a few.

Without being able to reconstruct this scenario of interreligious engagement

with any final clarity, it can be asserted here that we are not dealing with a po-
lemic of the new community against the biblically grounded Jewish founda-
tional text, even if we find in Q M 2:93 a thrust diverging from the biblical text.
Rather, this community feels misled in their effort toward the “right” reception
of scripture by their Jewish interlocutors. Since the biblical and the post-​biblical
materials are difficult to distinguish in oral tradition, the community remained
unaware of the fact that post-​biblical exegesis had long interpreted the text in di-
verse ways. The key event of the divine drawing of a covenant with the Israelites
thus fell outside of its politically neutral salvation historical context, so to speak;
it became instead the site of remembrance of an incident of failed communica-
tion that was felt as humiliating. It may have been experiences and perceptions
of this kind that finally led to the indictment of the manipulation of scripture,
taḥrīf al-​kitāb (Q M 2:75).96

11.4.4  The New Covenant

But it cannot be overlooked that the biblical establishment of covenant as such,
which was understood as including the Israelites uniquely, did not fit well con-
ceptually into the Qur’an, which had already in late Meccan time developed
the conception of successive divine covenants with individual prophets,97 and
thus had advanced to a kind of prophet genealogy. It therefore should not be
surprising that the Mosaic drawing of covenant is rethought in the Qur’an and
given a universal form. A rabbinic tradition had already given a new thrust to
the drawing of covenant at Sinai, questioning the exclusive privileging of the en-
titlement of the recipients. In the Midrash to the Song of Songs, Shir ha-​Shirim
Rabba, we read:

As Israel stood before Mount Sinai to receive the Torah, God spoke to
them: should I give to you the Torah undeservedly? Bring me warrantors
for that, and I will give it to you! They said: Lord of the world, let our fa-
thers be warrantors for us! Then God said: Your fathers need warrantors
for themselves. They said:  Let our prophets be warrantors for us! Then
God said: I even object to them. They said: then let our children be our

96.  See Lazarus-​Yafeh, Intertwined Worlds, 18–​35, and McAuliffe, “The Qur’ānic Context.”
97.  Cf. Samir, “The Theological Christian Influence,” whose construction of dependency has, however, already
been disputed by Marx, “Mariology in the Qur’an.”
 Biblical-Qur’anic Figures  415

warrantors. Then God said: truly, those are good warrantors; for their sake
I give you the Torah.

Dirk Hartwig has demonstrated that this text throws light on the Qur’anic dis-
cussion.98 It has to be juxtaposed with Q M 7:172. That Qur’anic text, which
marks the conclusion of the debate about the covenant in the Qur’an, formulat-
ing the Mosaic divine covenant anew, equally withdraws from the sacred histor-
ical past, orienting itself instead to the future. Here too, it is the “descendants”
who should be the partners of the covenant. But the verse goes a step further
than the rabbinic text, in that it removes the event entirely from history and
transfers it—​as had already occurred with the Mosaic tablets, which assumed
a new form in the Qur’an as al-​lawḥ al-​maḥfūẓ, the “preserved tablet”—​into
the transcendent realm. The Medinan verse Q 7:172, which in the Qur’anic text
follows immediately the verse on the Mosaic drawing of covenant, takes on for
later Islamic theology the status of the decisive equivalent of the Mosaic cove-
nant, it is the so-​called ʿahd al-​last, that is, the covenant sealed with the words
a-​lastu bi-​rabbikum, “Am I not your Lord?”:

When your Lord brought forth

from the loins of the children of Adam their posterity
and made them testify against themselves:
“Am I not your lord [a-​lastu bi-​rabbikum]?”
They said: “Yes, we testify to it” [balā shahidnā]—​
Lest you should say on the day of resurrection:
“we were not aware of this.”

This new covenant, which is a covenant in the transcendent realm,99 could not be
more universal—​it is made outside of history, in preexistence, and is valid for all
the descendants of Adam, whether or not they believe. They are all addressed by
God, and are determined “naturally” for monotheism, so to speak, by their dec-
laration of readiness delivered already before their birth.
With this episode, a central Moses event has made history again, in the com-
munal engagement. It has however been detached from Moses, in that his role
was obscured by the incident of a distorting wordplay, and “superseded” by the
more universal covenant drawn in the transcendent realm. Certainly, the model
of the drawing of covenants with distinguished prophets is maintained—​these
even yield a sequence that, opening with Adam or Noah, includes also Moses
and the proclaimer. Wa-​idh akhadhnā mina l-​nabīyīna mithāqahum wa-​minka
wa-​min Nūḥin wa-​Ibrāhīma wa-​Mūsā wa-​ʿĪsā bni Maryam . . . , “Then, when we

98.  Hartwig, “Urvertrag.”

99.  The covenant has been interpreted variously in the research; cf. Gramlich, “Der Urvertrag,” and Kadi, “The
Primordial Covenant.”
416  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

made a covenant with the prophets, with you and with Noah, Abraham, Moses,
and Jesus son of Mary . . .” (Q M 33:7). The decisive covenant with the people of
Moses is replaced by a covenant, no longer privileging a prophet and his elect
community of believers, that is drawn between God himself and men as a whole
in preexistence.

11.4.5  Moses and Muhammad

We must not overlook, however, the fact that Moses, together with Abraham, is
the model, indeed the “type,” of the proclaimer. The performance of leadership
and the lawgiving function that distinguish both the proclaimer and Moses come
fully into view in Medinan texts, in which we also find reflections of the polit-
ical activities of the proclaimer. Sura 2 links the instruction to fast on Ramadan
(Q M 2:187–​190) with the corresponding lawgiving of Moses, setting its narra-
tion into the frame of the Jewish Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur. Shlomo Dov
Goitein remarks: “Moses’s stay at Mount Sinai, the sin of the Golden Calf, God’s
forgiveness and his granting of scripture . . . are presented in sura 2 with partic-
ular emphasis.”100 But it is not the biblical text itself that provides the background
here; instead it is obviously its oral reception in the liturgy. Goitein convincingly
identified elements of the Yom Kippur liturgy in the text of sura 2—​findings that
fit together with reports from Islamic tradition attesting to a particular interest
of the proclaimer and the community in this particular Jewish holiday. Goitein
himself has shown that the Islamic fast grew out of the Jewish fasting practice, be-
ginning, as is known, with the adoption of the one-​day Yom Kippur fast. The suc-
cessive formation of the Islamic Ramadan fast, which is reflected in the Qur’an,
is apparently connected less to biblical textual than to liturgical traditions of the
Jewish community in Medina.101
Yet another characteristic connects the work of Moses and Muhammad: both
are granted a decisive, saving, victory over overwhelming enemies. The proc-
lamation of sura 2 that contains the institution of the fast seems to have come
soon after an important military victory, the Battle of Badr; both the saving vic-
tory and the reception of revelation are mentioned together in Q M 2:185, as the
occasions for the establishment of the fast, so that the fasting month appears as
“proofs of the right guidance and the saving decision,”102 bayinātin mina l-​hudā
wa-​l-​furqāni (cf. Q M 44:1–​4). The ambiguous word furqān—​it can mean “deci-
sion” but also “salvation”—​recalls the verse of commemoration of the Battle of
Badr: “What we have sent down to our servants on the day of the saving deci-
sion [yawma l-​furqāni], on the day, when the two armies went out against each

100.  Goitein, “Zur Entstehung des Ramadans,” 190.

101.  Neuwirth, “Ramadan.”
102.  The word furqān as an inner-​Arabic derivation denotes “decision”; as a Syriac loan word it denotes
“saving.”
 Biblical-Qur’anic Figures  417

other” (Q M 8:41). In this last context, furqān means a decisive, liberating victory
over threatening enemies. Furqān, apparently in the sense of a saving victory,
is a privilege of Moses: “Then, when we granted to Moses the scripture and the
saving decision [al-​furqān], so that he may be able to lead you” (Q M 2:53; cf. M
21:48).103 It is these two experiences, the decisive victory and the communication
of scripture, that the Qur’anic community shares with the people of Moses and
that, as Kees Wagtendonk has concluded,104 gave the occasion for the introduc-
tion of the Ramadan month of fasting.
This double etiology of the Islamic fast, as a thanksgiving for both the salva-
tion and for the reception of scripture, fits in with the double role of Moses, who
at once institutes a fast and at the same time is the recipient of scripture and the
leader of his people. Even if Moses’s double performance, both delivering scrip-
ture and effecting a national liberation, is not brought into connection in the
Qur’an with his third role as giver of the law of fasting, it is these three services
that Muhammad can lay claim to as a “second Moses”: the transmission of a rev-
elation, the leading out of his people/​community from the situation of oppres-
sion that threatened their existence, the “liberation,” and the implementation of
orders of worship.

103. Marshall, God, Muhammad and the Unbelievers, 117–​137, sees in the event at Badr the climax of a
Prophetological development, which begins already with the early Meccan punishment legends: the enforcement of
the inner-​worldly punishment of the unbelieving opponents of the Prophet. They were annihilated in earlier history
through the intervention of God. In Medina, the proclaimer and his dependents themselves become the instru-
ments of the inner-​worldly punishment of the unbelievers.
104. Wagtendonk, Fasting in the Koran.
 12

The Qur’an and Poetry

12.1  Prophecy and Poetry

The close kinship between poets and prophets1 is not a discovery of European
Romanticism; it is manifest first in Antiquity. If we look at the books of the Bible
that contain prophetic and poetic texts, we see that, as James Kugel shows,2 there
is a clear distinction between these two types apparent already in the proce-
dure of the redactors who assigned the two categories to different text blocks.
Kugel3 sees this intention confirmed in the fact that the books of the “prophets,”
neviʾim, make up their own partial text corpus held distinct from other “writ-
ings,” ketuvim. He also sees a similar distinction active in the later marking of
reading pauses, ṭeʿamim, which distinguish the three books received as poetic—​
the Psalms, Proverbs, and Job, the so-​called Libri Metrici of the Renaissance—​by
a unique system of reading techniques. Slightly later, in rabbinic Judaism, we
even meet with an explicit and rigorous division between prophecy and poetry.
Poetry is disdained to such a degree that the poetic activity of the biblical proph-
etess Deborah, for example, is presented as a demotion from her rank as a proph-
etess, even a punishment.4 But such boundaries were blurred among Hellenized
Jews. Among them, we even observe a close proximity between the literary forms
of the Bible and those of the local cultural environment. Thus Josephus compares
Moses and David to Greek poets, an approach that was continued and developed
in the early church. Kugel cites the Didascalia apostolorum: “If you wish to read
histories, take those of the Book of Kings; if you want poetry and wisdom, take
the Prophets . . . if you desire songs, you have the Psalter.”5 He summarizes: “In the
world of Western Christianity, Scripture in effect became a ‘surrogate literature,’
for a time rivaling classical texts in the curriculum; although the classics man-
aged, more or less, to stay on in their educational role, learned churchmen from
Jerome to the Renaissance did not tire of exalting the literary values of Scripture
over classical (pagan) models.”6 Thus, the poetic side of prophecy over time came
to be a subject of intense interest. On the other hand, the prophetic dimensions

1.  See the illuminating remarks by Kermani, Gott ist schön, 342–​456.
2.  Kugel, “Introduction,” 1–​25, esp. 8–​9.
3.  Ibid., 9.
4.  Ibid., 11.
5.  Ibid., 13.
6. Ibid.

419
420  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

of certain poetic texts were pondered on, starting from Vergil’s Fourth Eclogue to
the books of the Sibyl. With the proliferation of the Greek concept of inspiration,
a common mode of the mediation of prophecy and poetry became determined.
Indeed, this concept opened the possibility for the understanding of all the books
of the Hebrew Bible as inspired, and therefore prophetic—​here, Kugel detects
a decisive step toward canonization. It is to this debate that the field of tension
between poetry and prophecy in the Qur’an is linked as well. In the Qur’an, how-
ever, instead of explicit debates we find implicit evidence, intertextual traces of
an exchange. In what follows, five types of poetic-​prophetic intertextuality in the
Qur’an will be presented. The central reference text here is ancient Arabic poetry,
which existed in the same language as the Qur’an.

12.1.1  The Qur’anic Relationship to Poetry: A Terra Incognita

While the relationship of the Qur’an to the neighboring monotheistic traditions
across various language barriers has been a central critical interest since the
beginnings of Qur’an research, the highly developed and extensively transmitted
literature in the Qur’an’s own language, ancient Arabic poetry, has rarely been
contextualized with the Qur’an.7 It is only in recent times that the request has
been expressly raised for a connection of the two major early Arabic text cor-
pora within a shared Late Antique research program.8 Partially to blame for the
neglect of poetry in Qur’an research is the verdict against the “authenticity” of
early Arabic poetry that is connected to the figures of Taha Hussein9 and Samuel
Margoliouth.10 For some researchers, even down to the present day, the dating of
the initial systematic codification of the poetry in the eighth century, alongside
that of the early Arabic heroic prose narratives, the ayyām al-​ʿArab, raises ques-
tions about the authenticity of that poetry even as documentary evidence of in-
tellectual history and is enough reason to ignore pre-​Islamic literature altogether,
even in the face of the widespread consensus among literary scholars about its
authenticity. Thomas Bauer, in his programmatic essay of the relationship be-
tween poetry and Qur’an,11 points also to a further prejudice, the claim that the
literary texts of early Arabic poetry are irrelevant to the religious document of

7.  Neither the introductory works Paret, Mohammed und der Koran; Bobzin, Koran, Cook, Der Koran; and
Déroche, Le Coran, nor either of the two “companions,” McAuliffe, The Cambridge Companion, and Rippin, The
Blackwell Companion, discuss the significance of poetry in the Qur’an.
8.  Montgomery, “The Empty Ḥijāz.”
9.  The Egyptian historian and cultural philosopher in 1926 raised the claim that ancient Arabic poetry was
mostly the product of later philologists; see Hussein, Fī l-​Shiʿr al-​Jāhilī.
10.  Margoliouth considered the poetry to be influenced by the Qur’an and to have first emerged in a later pe-
riod; cf. his Mohammed and the Rise of Islam, 60; also Margoliouth, “Muhammad,” 874, and especially Margoliouth,
“The Origins of Arabic Poetry.” His hypothesis raised a controversy into which significant researchers of his period
entered, e.g., Lyall, “Some Aspects of Ancient Arabic Poetry,” 374; Bräunlich, “Versuch einer literargeschichtlichen
Betrachtungsweise,” 826; Brockelmann, GAL I, 32–​33; Levi Della Vida, “Pre-​Islamic Arabia”; Blachere, Histoire de la
littérature arabe, 83–​117 (Gottfried Müller, personal communication).
11.  Bauer, “The Relevance of Early Arabic Poetry,” 702.
 The Qur’an and Poetry  421

the Qur’an. Early Arabic poetry, it is true, contains little evidence relevant to the
history of religion (apart from that of individual town dwellers such as Umayya
ibn Abī Ṣalt);12 but this overly strict limiting of source texts to clearly religious
material is highly questionable. “Early Arabic literature,” writes Bauer,

will prove to be a far more productive source for the cultural background
at the time of the Prophet if it is approached using current literary and
cultural methods of inquiry appropriate to the sources at hand. An in-
quiry would need to turn—​more systematically than has been done until
now—​to cultural patterns, attitudes and values, beliefs, and mores. One
could attempt to explore concepts like virtue, honor, manliness and others
as displayed in poetry, on the one hand, and in the Qurʾan, on the other,
and study basic issues such as ideas about death13 and sexuality, expres-
sion of feelings such as fear, sorrow, and joy. Inquiries such as these would
without doubt demonstrate the “originality of the Arab Prophet,”14 which
manifests itself not only vis-​à-​vis the earlier religious cultures but equally
vis-​à-​vis his Arabian milieu, more effectively than any singular or one-​
sided approach limited to a history-​of-​religions approach.15

In several studies, James Montgomery has shown the productivity of such com-
parisons.16 Until now, this avenue of research has remained largely unpursued,
despite Toshihiko Izutsu’s otherwise important studies on the ethical positions
represented in the two text corpora.17 Indeed, Izutsu’s results are strongly limited
by his neglect of a diachronic reading of the Qur’an; based on general judgments
about the Qur’an as an undifferentiated whole, they are ill-​suited to producing
a reliable image.18 There are only a few isolated investigations that throw light
onto central concepts from both poetry and Qur’an, above all Werner Caskel’s
study on fate19 and Tilman Seidensticker’s study on the heart.20 First steps toward
a mental-​historical comparison between poetry and Qur’an have been taken by
Agnes Imhof, in her pathbreaking monograph on the image of man reflected in

12.  On this poet, see Borg, “Umayya b. Abi al-​Salt as a Poet”; Seidensticker, “The Authenticity of the Poems”;
Montgomery, “Umayya b. Abi l-​Salt”; Nöldeke, “Umaija.” One should nonetheless assume a significant though still
underestimated presence of Christian and Jewish Arabic poetry before and around the genesis of the Qur’an; cf.
Nöldeke, “Samau’al”; Jacobi, “Mukhaḍram”; Dmitriev, “A Christian Arabic Account”; Hainthaler, “Adī ibn Zayd
al-​ʿIbādī.”
13.  For a short contrasting of death in battle in poetry and in the Qur’an, see Neuwirth, “From Sacrilege to
Sacrifice”; on funeral poetry, see Borg, Mit Poesie.
14.  This is the title of an essay by Fück that was programmatic for the Qur’anic scholarship of his time (1936),
“Die Originalität des arabischen Propheten.”
15.  Bauer, “The Relevance of Early Arabic Poetry,” 702–​703.
16. Montgomery, Vagaries of the Qasida, 260–​208.
17. Izutsu, The Structure of the Ethical Terms.
18.  The same applies to Farrukh, Das Bild des Frühislam, which remains a valuable collection of work.
19. Caskel, Das Schicksal; see also more recently Dmitriev, Das poetische Werk, 105–​128.
20. Seidensticker, Altarabisch “Herz,” and Seidensticker, Das Verb sawwama, which explore the meaning of
Qur’anic expressions on the basis of early Arabic poetry; cf. also Seidensticker, “Herumirrende Dichter.”
422  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

the work of several poets who were contemporary with Muhammad,21 and by
Ludwig Ammann, whose essay on the pre-​Qur’anic Arabs coming to terms with
contingency22 reflected in poetry and the Qur’an will be resumed in what follows.
It is not just the “originality of the (Arab) Prophet” that would be brought
into relief by the inclusion of poetry in Qur’an research but also the innovative,
indeed revolutionary, dimension of the Qur’an itself, which only becomes clear
against the background of early Arabic poetry. As Thomas Bauer emphasizes,23 it
should be assumed, contrary to the standard position of research, that poetry was
an integral part of the formation of the Meccan and then Medinan countrymen
of the Prophet. The heroic worldview that takes shape in poetry must have been
a constant challenge and a central object of dispute for the Qur’anic community.
In order to oppose a new social conception to the ideals constructed and enunci-
ated in the poetry, that is, the anthropocentric ethos of Arab heroism, or murūʾa,
central concepts from the world of the poetry had to be confronted, and their
compatibility with the new theocentric worldview had to be tested. In his con-
trasting of poetry and Qur’an, Bauer introduced the criterion of a “negative in-
tertextuality,” founded on the assertion that certain elements of the poetic canon
are consciously bypassed or excluded in the process of the Qur’an’s self-​definition
in relation to poetry. Beyond this assertion of an absence, it is also worthwhile
to search for traces of the negotiation of such elements, in order to trace the pro-
cess of their reformation or suppression. According to the hypotheses pursued
here, the Qur’an is not merely a counter-​model to poetry, but rather in its central
points it is also a trans-​formation or metamorphosis of poetry, which becomes
the blueprint for a radical rethinking and which—​as the spiritual achievement
of an emerging community—​would bring the revolutionary dimension of the
new scripture into relief no less strikingly than the amalgamation of biblical and
post-​biblical traditions, which has so long functioned as the center of research.

12.1.2  Inversion and Subversion of Poetic Discourse in the Qur’an

Although on first view there may subsist an apparent discrepancy between the
Qur’an, which calls for the self-​submission of man to the will of God, and the
poetic corpus, which calls for heroic self-​assertion, nevertheless on closer study a
more intricate relation come to the fore: The Qur’an highlights a number of cen-
tral values that had been shaped in poetry, sometimes rigorously criticizing them
but in other instances engaging them in negotiation and debate. Among these
values reflected in the Qur’an are the cardinal virtues of the heroic ethos: “gen-
erosity,” jūd; “bravery,” ḥamāsa; “ancestral nobility,” nasab; and the goal of self-​
immortalization, the striving after khulūd, with which the poet-​hero seeks to

21. Imhof, Religiöser Wandel; Imhof, “The Qur’ān and the Prophet’s Poet.”

22. Ammann, Die Geburt des Islam.
23.  Bauer, “The Relevance of Early Arabic Poetry.”
 The Qur’an and Poetry  423

combat the dominant perception of transitoriness, of time’s destruction.24 That

these ideas are also major themes of the Qur’an is easily obscured by the fact that
in the Qur’an they are not treated consistently but rather sporadically and, above
all, because they are rigorously reinterpreted. Jūd is reconstrued in the Qur’an as
a social behavior derived from man’s createdness, and the jūd-​motivated honor
of the hero is thus replaced by the sovereignty of God. Ḥamāsa—​tempered in
its exuberance and extended in its application—​is carried on in the form of the
Qur’anic cardinal virtue of patient “persistence,” ṣabr.25 Finally, nasab is displaced
in the Qur’an and transferred from the biological forefathers of the Bedouin
elite to the spiritual forefathers of the community. Genealogy is re-​embodied
Qur’anically in the succession, dhurriyya, of Prophets, the new guarantors of au-
thority of whom the proclaimer of the Qur’an is himself the final one, according
to a late Qur’anic testimony (Q 33:40). These Qur’anic re-​readings have not been
the object of systematic investigation.
To examine, in the present state of research, the relationship between Qur’an
and poetry, we must proceed from the Qur’an itself, investigating the explicit and
implicit Qur’anic references to poetry. In several early suras, the proclaimer him-
self fends off insinuations from opponents who wish to discredit him as a shāʿir,
“poet” or kāhin, “seer.” This confrontation with what—​in view of to the exclu-
sive truth claim raised in the proclamation—​had become a problematic counter-​
model of public speech is particularly relevant, in that it sheds light on the
perception of poetry and mantic discourse in early Arab society. Even stronger
evidence for the practical power of the poetical discourse is offered by the cases
of poetic intertextuality in the Qur’an itself, where poetic topoi are negotiated
in a new way, as can be shown by an initial sketch of the Qur’anic treatment of
generosity, jūd.
Thomas Bauer’s “negative intertextuality” not least refers to formal features
that are avoided in the Qur’an.26 In fact, Qur’anic discourse is not poetry in the
conventional sense. But, with a broader perspective of poetry in mind, one could
speak of a new form of religious poetry in a large range of texts of the Qur’an.
The Qur’an with its short text units bundled by a distinctive rhyme, displays a vi-
able alternative form to the metrically bound monorhyme poetry—​which no less
could justly claim to be “poetic.” This praxis of the simultaneous employment of
semantic, morphological, and phonetic references within the limited space of just
a few verses—​succeeds in generating an innovative form of utterance. It is oper-
ative above all in the early Meccan suras. To proceed from these rather minute
commonalities and divergences to the more fundamental questions of the history
of mentalities, one has to discuss, building on the work of Ludwig Ammann, the

24.  See Ammann, Die Geburt des Islam.

25.  Cf. Cragg, The Event of the Qur’ān, 157–​160.
26.  See Bauer, “The Relevance of Early Arabic Poetry.”
424  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

Qur’anic claim to have inherited from poetry the age-​old function of coping with
contingency.
Early Arabic poetry deserves the intense interest of Qur’an research, not only
because it is a literary corpus that formed part of the “formative canon” shared by
the proclaimer and his hearers. Poetry, as an authoritative expression of mental,
social, and political conditions, is also instrumental in the history of the procla-
mation itself. During the ministry of the proclaimer, individual poets appeared
who, in competition with him, used the authority of their ancestral function as
public speakers to engage the proclaimer in disputes though occasionally also to
support him. Twice we find explicit mention of these figures in the Qur’an, in Q
26:224–​226 and Q 26:227. Bauer’s new interpretation of verses 224–​226 repre-
sents an attempt to revise the earlier reading of the entire sura 26, “The Poets,”
and to make sense of its emphasis on the “untruthfulness” of poetry in contrast
to the “truthfulness” of mantic discourse.
The relationship between Qur’an and poetry can also be investigated in a still
broader aspect: it is a uniquely felicitous accident in the history of transmission
that, in addition to the Qur’anic evidence, texts have been transmitted authored
by poets who interacted with the proclaimer in Medina, which become relevant
as Qur’anic paratexts, parallel evidence for the Qur’anic assessment of the social
situation and general atmosphere in Medina. In several cases, these texts throw
light on particular political events that are merely alluded to in the Qur’an. These
texts have not been consistently taken into account in Qur’an research, although
some of the events mentioned here, such as slanders of the Prophet and the ar-
ranged killings of poets, have long been integrated into the Prophet-​biographical
literature. A thorough analysis of the relevant poems has been offered in a recent
study by Agnes Imhof,27 which can here be merely referred to.

12.2  The Ambivalent Heritage of Poetdom and Seerdom

The Prophetic type that Muhammad represents is not easy to grasp.

There are mentions of visions in the Qur’an, but we do not know whether
they occurred at the earliest phase. Ecstatic experiences are reported;
Muhammad apparently covered himself in these instances, as is familiar
from other visionaries. But the Qur’an gives only hints, and the later exe-
geses have often obscured them. . . . The only firm criterion that we possess
is the diction: short, frequently elliptical, abbreviated sayings, reminding
one of outbursts and introduced by puzzling oath forms, held together by
urgent prose rhymes, gripping images brought into closely packed suc-
cession with each other—​the style of a fortune teller, well-​known to the

27. Imhof, Religiöser Wandel.

 The Qur’an and Poetry  425

Arabs. It is to them that Muhammad is probably related most strongly

in his behavior; of prophecy in the sense of the Old Testament, he knew
nothing. . . . For that reason, it is to fortune tellers or the possessed that
his contemporaries most often compared him—​or to poets, who were
also thought to be possessed or inspired by a jinn. He himself indignantly
rejected this accusation, most likely because he was well aware of his viti-
ating closeness to these false predecessors. Of course, he was correct to
emphasize the difference: what he brought forward was no longer a telling
of signs, and, above all, he sought no payment for his visions. He worked
under holy compulsion.28

Van Ess’s classic presentation presents the proclaimer, at least at the start of his ac-
tivity, alongside models from the pagan Arab world: the two older speaker types
of his environment, who shared the essential characteristic of excited, emphatic
speech in sajʿ, concise rhymed discourse: the “seer,” kāhin, and the poet, shāʿir.

12.2.1  The Seer
The connection to the early Arabic “seer,” kāhin, pl. kuhhān, who articulated
his speech in an ecstatic state, is most problematic for the proclaimer of a strict
monotheism: the early Arab kāhin belongs to the cultic personnel of the pagan
shrines, whose cult was soon to be brought to an end by the victory of Islam.
Seers who continued to perform until the onset of Islam are—​if we follow the
largely unexamined evidence of the traditional literature—​persons who under
supernatural compulsion articulated oracular pronouncements, often intro-
duced by mysterious oaths and accompanied by magical practices, without ra-
tional control over their expressions, which were presented as messages received
from inspiring forces in the form of direct “second-​person” address. They per-
formed these tasks at the order of groups or individuals that sought counsel or
help, and sometimes also accepted payment for this. Although the Qur’an offers
only polemic against the seers, it nonetheless attests a clearly perceived formal
relationship to the mantic forms of discourse of the early Arab seers, whose
oracular pronouncements were characterized by metrically undefined rhyming
prose, which shared with the early Meccan suras the form of the introductory
oath cluster, a form that is nowhere else in evidence. Qur’anic features that could
formally be perceived as a break with early Arabic poetry becomes plausible
in connection to the pronouncements of seers. Yet, a source-​critical and her-
meneutically grounded processing of the early Arabic mantic traditions still
remains to be carried out. Reports regarding seers, from the fifth to sixth cen-
turies recorded in later sources, were collected by Julius Wellhausen;29 but the

28.  Van Ess, “Islam,” 38; Hirschfeld, New Researches (1906), is already more critical. See in general Neuwirth,
“Der historische Muhammad im Spiegel des Koran.”
29. Wellhausen, Reste, 130–​140.
426  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

authenticity of these pronouncements must always be interrogated, since kāhin

traditions are essentially dubious, representing evidence of rites that had long
become obsolete and could thus easily be distorted or even fabricated. More
recent researchers, such as Toufic Fahd, have placed the Arabic kāhin in a com-
parative ancient Near Eastern context, and have attempted to draw conclusions
about various seer functions but do not go beyond defining the kāhin in the
immediate pre-​Islamic period as “a bearer of supernatural wisdom inspired by
a demon or ṭābiʿ,” or “a proclaimer and interpreter of oracular communications
from an individual deity.”30

12.2.2  The Poet
In comparison, the second association that the Meccan opponents draw for the
speaker, that with the poets, at first seems innocuous. But who is meant by the
poet? It is not entirely clear that the shāʿir references in the pagan accusations
refer to the authors of socially prestigious qasidas, the complexly constructed
long-​form poems. Typological similarities would rather suggest the authors of
spontaneously produced occasional poetry in the vernacular, following none of
the complex meters of long-​form poetry but rather the primitive iambic meter
rajaz.31 The shāʿir of this simpler type shares with the kāhin the verbal form of
utterances composed out of a few closely linked parallel verses, which, although
organized metrically through the simple iambic verse meter, still clearly reflect
an emergence from strong psychic excitement. It is this type above all who, as
Ignaz Goldziher showed,32 is traditionally considered to be possessed, majnūn
by a demon (jinn, shayṭān, ṭābiʿ) bound to him personally. But the Qur’anic den-
igration of the proclaimer as a poet is not unambiguous. At least once, he is also
connected to the qasida poets. This form seems to be referred to in the polemical
evocation of a poetic motif, which the Meccan mockers “quote” in order to illus-
trate their disdain of poets: in Q 52:30 they ridicule the proclaimer: am yaqūlūna
shāʿirun natarabbaṣu bihi rayba l-​manūn, “Or do they say: ‘A poet! Let us wait
and see what the powers of fate do to him!’ ”33 The rayb al-​manūn is a topos of the
qasida, where the power of fate is a central object. With this reference, it seems
that they attempt to fight the putative poet with his own weapons. The proclaimer
is likewise instructed to play at the same game: qul tarabbaṣū fa-​innī maʿakum
mina l-​mutarabbiṣin, “Say: just wait, I wait with you!” (verse 31). Despite these
references to the qasida, the association with rajaz poets cannot be dismissed out
of hand. Even if we were to assume that the belief in inspiration through jinn had

30. Fahd, “Kāhin” 421. But see the contrary position—​ presented somewhat selectively—​
in Stewart,
“Soothsayer.”
31. Ullmann, Untersuchungen zur Rajazpoesie.
32. Goldziher, Abhandlungen.
33.  Bauer, “The Relevance of Early Arabic Poetry,” 723–​725.
 The Qur’an and Poetry  427

faded at the time of the Qur’anic proclamation,34 so that invoking the jinn had
become a mere verbal convention, nevertheless the Meccan accusations seem to
be related to reminiscences of these sources of inspiration, originally relevant to
both kāhin and shāʿir.
Seen from the social perspective, the proclaimer’s arguments should have
been convincing. For in their social function or in the particular thrust of their
articulation, the two old speaker types, kāhin and shāʿir, do not show much sim-
ilarity to the proclaimer: the kāhin is responsible for the communication of prac-
tically useful supernatural knowledge, while the shāʿir is generally responsible for
the (occasionally aggressive) public representation of his clan; the proclaimer, as
against that, is primarily communicating a pious teaching. Where then should
we look for the shared characteristics that might have triggered the insinuations
of the Meccans? Might they lie in the ecstatic disposition of the proclaimer, as
described in the opening quotation above? Or do they lie rather in the alleged
sources of inspiration for the two speaker types? Let us look at the Qur’an itself
on this matter, and then at some literary evidence from early Islam.

12.2.3  The Proclaimer as Ecstatic Speaker? The Meccan Insinuations

The characterization quoted at the start, which concludes in favor of an ecstatic dis-
position, is in no way a construct of Western criticism but is indeed supported in
large part by the Qur’an and by a significant body of indigenous exegesis. In fifteen
places within the Qur’an, we find energetic defenses mounted against the insinu-
ations, brought forward forcefully and repeatedly by the Meccans, that the pro-
claimer is majnūn, possessed by jinns, demons, or inspiring spirits, or that he is a
kāhin or shāʿir. In later suras, this defense takes on a stereotyped character; but its
initial aspects convey the impression of a primarily real shock effect that shozld have
triggered these insinuations. Of the total fifteen places in which we find language
related to pagan types of inspiration, two early Meccan pieces of evidence will be
presented more closely in what follows: Q 81:19–​27 and 52:29–​34.35 For clarification
of the particular steps of the argumentation, we offer a schematic classification:
I  = (a) transmitter of the discourse to the proclaimer; (b) rejection of the
“false” transmitter
II  = producer of the message
III  = receiver of the message; a/​b/​c/​d/​e/​f each defense against an allega-
tion of the receiver as (a)  possessed, (b)  suppressing secret know-
ledge, (c) accepting wages, (d) kāhin, (e) shāʿir, (f) devising something
arbitrarily

34.  The survival of the belief in jinn inspiration, which for the time of the Prophet had already been questioned
by Goldziher, Abhandlungen, cannot be proven by the reports drawn from the Kitāb al-​Aghānī presented by Shahid
in “A Contribution to Koranic Exegesis,” 563–​580. On invective poetry, see van Gelder, The Bad and the Ugly.
35.  The other two early Meccan statements of self-​defense are Q 68:1–​4, 46–​52, and 69:40–​48.
428  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

IV  = reception situation
V  = qualification of the discourse as liturgical text
VI  = performance situation
Q 81:19–​27

innahu la-​qawlu rasūlin karīm

dhī qūwatin ʿinda dhī l-​ʿarshi makīn
muṭāʿin thamma amīn
wa-​mā ṣāḥibukum bi-​majnūn
wa-​la-​qad raʾāhu bi-​l-​ufuqi l-​mubīn
wa-​mā huwa ʿalā l-​ghaybi bi-​ḍanīn
wa-​mā huwa bi-​qawli shayṭānin rajīm
fa-​ayna tadhhabūn
in huwa illā dhikrun li-​l-​ʿālamīn

It is none but the speech of a noble messenger (Ia),

with power before the Lord of the throne (Ia, II),
to be obeyed and be trusted (Ia).
Your companion is not possessed (IIIa),
he saw him on the clear horizon (IV),
He is not greedy about what is hidden (II).
It is not the speech of a cursed Satan (Ib),
So where are you heading?
It is but a reminder to the worlds (V).

In suras 69 and 52 we find an additional accusation, that the proclaimer invents

parts of his message independently: sura 52, belonging already to the end of the
early Meccan period, contains a challenge; Q 52:29–​34:

fa-​dhakkir fa-​mā anta bi-​niʿmati rabbika bi-​kāhinin wa-​lā majnūn

am yaqūlūna shāʿirun natarabbaṣu bihi rayba l-​manūn
qul tarabbaṣū fa-​innī maʿakum mina l-​mutarabbiṣīn
am taʾmuruhum aḥlāmuhum bi-​hādhā am hum qawmun ṭāghūn
am yaqūlūna taqawwalahu bal lā yuʾminūn
fa-​l-​yaʾtū bi-​ḥadīthin mithlihi in kānū ṣādiqīn

So recall! By the grace of your Lord,

you are not a seer or one possessed. (IIId, a)
They say: “A poet! Let us await the ill-​doings of fate for him!” (IIIe)
Say: “Wait. I shall be one of those waiting with you.”
Do their whims command them to do this? They are an insolent people!
Or do they say: “he has invented it?” No, they do not believe! (IIIf)
Let them bring a discourse like it, if they are truthful!
 The Qur’an and Poetry  429

Again and again the proclaimer defends himself against the ranking of his ex-
perience of revelation alongside older models of inspiration: he defends himself
against the kāhin accusation with the remark that he receives no payment (Q
68:46) and harbors no hidden wisdom; he defends himself against the charge
of being a shāʿir and majnūn by claiming he has a more wholesome attitude (Q
68:4) and defends himself against the accusation of arbitrary fabrication of parts
of his message by pointing to the mortal danger of such actions (Q 68:44–​46).
Clearly, he understands these accusations also as insinuations of the compro-
mising social/​moral behavior characteristic of seers and poets-​for-​pay. That his
own personal chief argument, the steadfast reference to his own other sources of
inspiration, does not catch on, should not be surprising in view of his opponents’
expectations. His whole project of self-​justification comes to nothing, since for
the Meccans these were clearly not concrete, objectively founded accusations. The
identification of Muhammad as shāʿir and kāhin, which are mutually exclusive if
taken in a strict sense, already points to the Meccan dilemma described aptly
by Albrecht Noth:36 “The shared feature in these attempts by Quraysh to classify
Muhammad among their common personal categories, can be seen in the fact
that they identify him as a social outsider. . . . For [the Quraysh], it was . . . dif-
ficult to comprehend functionally the self-​understanding of Muhammad  .  .  .  ,
[someone who] had the task of warning his fellow tribespeople, since for them,
this was no such current character type [and] thus they were never able to prop-
erly classify the proclaimer from the Hāšim clan.”
Corresponding to this, the proclaimer himself has no verbal designation for
the role available to him; he resorts to functional terms such as “warner,” nadhīr
(Q 51:50–​51) and mundhir (Q 79:45), and “recaller,” mudhakkir (Q 88:21); the
title of the receiver of the divine message, rasūl, envoy, apostle, which will later be
used as his personal title of honor, is connected not to him in the early Meccan
suras but instead to the divine messenger. The reference to the message itself
with the ambiguous word dhikr, “reminder,” or rather “recitation,”37 seems also
to have been unfamiliar, particularly in light of its constant qualification by the
Aramaic loanword li-​l-​ʿālamīn, “for the worlds,” which makes reference to a
Jewish-​Christian context that was not highly appreciated to the pagan Meccans.

12.2.4  Sira versus Qur’an

Should we interpret the Meccan accusations, clearly received as harmful, in
terms of a psychological insecurity on the part of the proclaimer, in terms of
an initially suspected nearness to the earlier speaker types? The inner-​Qur’anic
evidence does not make this clear; the confrontations culminate rather in the

36.  Noth, “Früher Islam,” 20.

37.  On this understanding of dhikr, literally “reminiscence, remembrance, warning,” in the sense of an abbre-
viation of udhkuri sma rabbika, “Praise the name of your Lord! Recite, praise!” see Rubin, “Iqra bi-​smi rabbika . . . !”
430  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

statement that the speech being performed is a liturgical text, a dhikr, not an
ephemeral communication in fulfillment of a seer’s or poet’s task. It is in this, in
the misperception of the message, that we have to see what was truly harsh and
shocking about the insinuations, not in the disclosure of embarrassing similari-
ties suggested by tradition; if it were not so, the telltale diction would hardly have
been maintained for so long after these accusations were lifted. We do find attes-
tations of Muhammad’s fears of being closely related to the kāhin type, but this
occurs only in the Sira, which was codified some hundred years after the Qur’an
and from which the linking of the proclaimer to the kāhin, and only to this type,
was carried over into the Western discussions. In the Sira, we find for example
the attribution to the Prophet of a confession to his wife Khadīja: “I see a light
and hear a voice. I am afraid I may be a kāhin.”38
The Sira should possess no documentary value, yet this particular piece of
evidence, because it diverges notably from the elevated image of the Prophet
that later became canonical, has frequently been accepted as historical. Rudi
Paret speaks approvingly of the presentation in the Sira of “a kind of obsession
on the part of Muhammad, creeping into his consciousness.”39 Were this taken
for granted, the Prophet would have to have suffered from such a complex until
around the end of the middle Meccan period—​since corresponding polemic pas-
sages are found still in later suras. Even a superficial acquaintance with the Sira is
sufficient to recognize a pattern in such passages that is characteristic of its type
of exegesis, that is, imposing of a narrative-​edifying interpretation on a Qur’an
verse that was felt to be devoid of dramatic pathos.

12.2.5  Qur’anic Testimonies on the Reception of Revelation

But it is primarily the Qur’anic testimony about the reception process of reve-
lation that makes an ecstatic disposition of the proclaimer extremely unlikely,
above all suras 73 and 74, in which he is portrayed preparing himself for the
reception of new revelations during nighttime. What we find here are outlines
of divine worship largely on the model of the monastic night worship, the vigil,
familiar in the region. A special emphasis is laid on the particular liturgical per-
formance, on the tartīl required from the proclaimer, probably a reference to
techniques of psalm-​chanting.40 The notion is conveyed that at this special time

38.  The quotation attributed to the proclaimer in Ibn Saʿd, Al-​Ṭabaqāt al-​Kubrā, 195, referred to by Paret,
Mohammed und der Koran, 51, and which could be supplemented with an abundance of parallels, can be easily
explained through the “Midrashic technique” of the Sira, whereby individual elements of Qur’anic verses are ex-
panded into independent narratives.
39. Paret, Mohammed und der Koran, 51.
40.  On the vigils, see chap. 2, 71–73. For the requirement of cantilena as a ceremonial form of reciting the
suras, we need not rely on evidence from the native lexicography, which understands tartīl in Q73:4 in the technical
sense of the Qur’an recitation with cantilena that was developed later. The form of the Qur’anic verse itself suggests
this designation; cf. Neuwirth, Studien zur Komposition. 117–​174; cf. chap. 5, 189–190.
 The Qur’an and Poetry  431

of day, and particularly in the situation of the conducting of the liturgy,41 words
become more effective. There is no reference to a state of trance, in which divine
contact usually occurs according to the ancient Near Eastern concepts of seer-
dom and prophethood, ḥazon and nevuʾa;42 neither is there any clear reference
to ritual self-​covering in the face of present shock. The two supposed references
to the proclaimer’s self-​covering in the beginning verses of suras 73 and 74 both
appear on closer inspection to be no more than references to the specific gown
worn by the proclaimer at night, who by this time of late vigil has put on a kind
of cape, called either a dithār or zimāl.43
Nor does the argument linking the proclaimer with the kāhin on account of
his visions carry much weight, as the visions, which are limited expressly to two
in sura 53, the first of which perhaps corresponding to the earlier vision in sura
81, are mentioned in a subdued tone and are connected there to the legitimiza-
tion of the Qur’anic message through claims of a truly divine origin.44
Thus, the only remaining proof from the catalogue presented by Josef van Ess
for the hypothesis of an essentially ecstatic disposition of the proclaimer would
be the diction of the Qur’an itself.

12.2.6  The Real “Offense”: Proximity to Ancient Discourse Types

in the Qur’an
It certainly cannot be denied that certain formal markers of the early suras were
meant to raise associations with the discourse of an ecstatic speaker, the kāhin
discourse or, in the case of one single complete sura, sura 111,45 rajaz poetry and
the shāʿir discourse. Here we should think above all of the oaths, and in partic-
ular the suras that are introduced with entire oath clusters. One of these suras will
now be compared with an example of seer discourse, the sayings of the seer Satīḥ
before the Yemeni king Rabīʿa ibn Naṣr.
The Life of the Prophet by Ibn Isḥāq in its section dedicated to pre-​Islamic his-
tory transmits an episode, that can shed light on the function and structure of the
discourse of the ancient Arab seer.46 The Yemeni king Rabīʿa ibn Naṣr has a dream
vision, which he wants to have interpreted by his seer, Satīḥ; in order to show his

41.  Apart from the specific reference in Q 73:1–​8 to the development of early Meccan suras from the con-
text of vigils, individual introductions to the suras also refer to this same process; see Neuwirth, “Images and
Metaphors”
42. On ḥazon, cf. Jepsen, “Hazon”; on nevuʿa, see H. P. Müller, “Nebhu’ah.
43.  See Rubin, “The Shrouded Messenger.”
44.  See chap. 3, 68–71.
45.  See Fischer, Der Wert der vorhandenen Koran-​Übersetzungen; cf. chap. 5, 182–184; cf. van Gelder, The Bad
and the Ugly,  20–​24.
46.  Ibn Isḥāq, Sīra, 15–​17; Guillaume, The Life of Mohammad,  4–​6.
432  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

competence, Satīḥ must first repeat back the dream itself.47 His pronouncement
has the following structure:

Enigma:
raʾayta ḥumama
kharajat min ẓuluma
fa-​waqaʿat bi-​arḍi tahama
fa-​akalat minhā kulla dhāti jumjuma

Something hot and glowing you saw

come forth out of darkness.
It fell over the flat land
and consumed everything that had life.

Presented first is the enigmatic dream, the enigma: a threatening phenomenon

emerging from the darkness, descending over the land, and finally obliterating
all life. This dream vision, which is apparently politically intended, permits a con-
crete interpretation.
The interpretation of the enigma begins with an oath, which likewise refers to
threatening phenomena, but ones known through social experience; this is then
followed, in the form of the pronouncement of an oath, by the identification of
the aggressors and the revealing of the catastrophe.
Analysis of the enigma:

aḥlifu bi-​mā bayna l-​ḥarratayni min ḥanash

la-​tahbuṭanna arḍakumu l-​ḥabash
fa-​la-​yamlukunna mā bayna Abyana ilā Jurash

By the snakes between the lava plains I swear:

The Ethiopians will fall upon your land,
They will rule from Abyan to Jurash.

This discourse model can also be observed in several early suras, particularly
in sura 100, “The Runners,” which was discussed in c­ hapter 10. The short sura48
consists also of these two parts, enigma and analysis of the enigma, divided by a
brief paraenetic interlude: the riddle, corresponding to the obscure vision of the
king, is formed into a series of oaths, in which coded elements of social experi-
ence (horses, riders) are conjured and conveyed with a sense of fast approach.

47.  For the historical background, see Rothstein, Lakhmiden, 39.

48.  For a discussion of this sura’s structure and its typological counterparts in the Qur’an, see Neuwirth,
“Images and Metaphors,” 6–​12. The sura is discussed in chap. 10, 359–365, for a second time, in relation to allegor-
ical speech.
 The Qur’an and Poetry  433

The oath series culminates in the disclosure of aggression in verse 5, though this
aggression cannot be concretely identified.

Enigma (Q 100:1–​5):49
wa-​l-​ʿādiyāti ḍabḥā
fa-​l-​mūriyāti  qadḥā
fa-​l-​mughīrāti  subḥā
fa-​atharna bihi naqʿā
fa-​wasaṭn bihi jamʿā

By the snorting runners

Striking sparks with their hooves
Venturing an attack in the morning
Raising dust with stomps
Penetrating the middle droves.

Just as the epithet “hot and glowing” (ḥumama) stands for fire or for some totally
destructive power in the speech of the seer, so here “runners” (ʿādiyāt) stands for
horse/​rider, a cipher for threatening aggressors. This is followed immediately by
a paraenetic reflection about mankind in the form of an oath pronouncement
(Q 100:6–​8). These explicit verses fall outside the frame of the encoded enigma
discourse and, with their calming monotony, serve to decelerate the previously
accumulated movement. This movement is then restored in its intensity, when
after this delay we find the solution of the enigma (Q 100:9–​12):

a-​fa-​lā yaʿlamu idhā buʿthira mā fī l-​qubūr

wa-​ḥuṣṣila mā fī l-​ṣudūr
inna rabbahum yawmaʾidhin la-​khabīr

Then does he not know: when what is in the graves is brought back

and what is in the heart is revealed,
that nothing remains hidden before his Lord?

No surprising and unexpected danger is presented as a solution to the riddle

expressed by the fast movement of the riders; we find no fatal political phenom-
enon such as in the seer’s speech, but rather something that is long familiar in
the frame of the proclamation:  the coming of the Final Day, when the dead,
torn from their graves, undergo a testing of their hearts and are led before their
judge—​a scene that takes on an additional connotation of fatedness through the
flash-​forward in the oath series. Although the old elements of seer discourse can
easily be recognized structurally in the sura, the function of the discourse has

49.  The translation is influenced by Rückert, Der Koran, which conveys the dynamics of the tableau quite
clearly.
434  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

changed: in the case of Satīḥ’s pronouncement the enigma was an actual puzzle
concerning an unknown and deadly political phenomenon pressing on the
person or group seeking council, but in the case of the suras introduced by oath
clusters, the enigma represents something that must have been known by the
Meccan hearers previously. A survey of the suras introduced by these types of
encoded oath objects shows that they all stand for the catastrophic phenomenon
of the Final Day, not a fated event that is limited to the group seeking council but
rather a universal catastrophe announced through the encoded communication.
We see here a repurposing of the previous discourse, which no longer relates to
what is actually known; the old seer formula has been blunted by an implosion of
its literary genre. Nowhere in the earlier seer speeches do we find an intervening
paraenetic text that delays the moment between enigma and solution. Precisely
for that reason, because the schema of the seer’s speech is imploded by the inser-
tion of a strikingly different formal religious language in the Qur’an, we can trace
the successful “negation” of an old pagan discourse form and its integration in
the frame of monotheistic forms of expression. That the solution passage is not
purely ancient Arabic in its phrasing but rather is marked by biblical tradition
should not be surprising: the ghazwa or “raid” that is evoked in the enigma is ul-
timately revealed to be an attack on the human heart, which is “attacked” on the
Last Day, emptied out, and tested for the value of its contents—​like the contain-
ers in the tents of enemies surprised by an attack. The “test of the heart” by the
Lord of the Worlds who is “aware of all things” is a motif that, in terms of content
and history, stands entirely outside of the horizon of the early Arabic seer. Their
rhythm, diction, and structure faithfully preserve the earlier form, so that if the
words referring to eschatological or psychological matters, “graves,” qubūr, and
“hearts,” ṣudūr, were replaced by concrete elements of the nomadic environment,
the passage could refer to a ghazwa. But we see here the abandonment of an old
pattern and the emergence of a new form that can be used liturgically, in a prayer
service to God.50

12.3  Poetical Topoi in the Qur’an

One of the central virtues of the Bedouin code of values, and a standard sub-
ject of the poetry, is the hero’s generosity, jūd or karam.51 It is often linked to
ostentatious expenditure of possessions, denounced reproachfully by a critical
observer as ihlāk al-​māl, “the exhaustion of possessions.” This Bedouin virtue
achieves greater pathos because its ambivalence, the heroically undertaken self-​
harming of the generous man, is clearly recognized and referred to by name in

50.  On the overall characteristics of early Meccan suras, cf. Neuwirth, “Einige Bemerkungen.”
51.  Further poetic motifs and topoi are discussed in Caskel, Schicksal; Ammann, Die Geburt des Islam (khuld,
“immortality”); Bauer, “The Relevance of Ancient Arabic Poetry” (rayb al-​manūn, “unpredictability of fate”).
 The Qur’an and Poetry  435

the poetry. A figure is introduced precisely to serve this critical function, that of
the “rebuker,” al-​ʿādhila, who contests the poet with pragmatic arguments. The
topos of the intervention of the rebuker (male or female) is widespread; it occurs,
for example, in Taʾabbaṭa Sharran, where a rebuker reproaches the hero: ahlakta
mālan law ḍaninta bihi, “You have wasted your goods, when you should have
preserved them!”52 In response to this, a poet proudly defends his own heroic
principle. For what would be seen as a loss in practical terms is transmuted into
a display of manly honor, murūʾa, in the Bedouin worldview. Excessive giving
and sharing is also bound up with excessive consumption. The poet ʿAntara says
proudly of himself: fa-​idhā sharibtu fa-​innanī mustahlikun mālī, “If ever I drink,
then it is to the ruin of my wealth!”53
Toshihiko Izutsu, in the context of a comparison between the values of murūʾa
in poetry and their reception in the Qur’an,54 saw early Arabic generosity as an
attitude related essentially to the Qur’anic concern for the poor, which would
later be institutionalized as an alms tax. Surely, stinginess is frowned upon in
the Qur’an, as in the early Meccan period, Q 104:1–​2: waylun li-​kulli humaza-
tin lumazah /​alladhī jamaʿa mālan wa-​ʿaddadah, “Woe to every backbiter and
whiner /​who accumulates and counts wealth,” or, in the Medinan period, Q
4:128: wa-​uḥḍirati l-​anfusu l-​shuḥḥa wa-​in tuḥsinū wa-​ttaqū fa-​inna llāha kāna
bi-​mā taʿmalūna khabīra, “The souls are set before greediness. If you do good
and are pious before God—​he is aware of what they do.” The implication here is
not a positive attitude toward jūd/​karam, the excessive generosity of the Arabic
hero, which arises from quite different motives. On the contrary, this attitude is
parodied and antagonized in the Qur’an, from the very beginning, as a form of
self-​deception, or istighnāʾ, the “deeming oneself rich or independent,” which is
opposed in the Qur’an by the idea of taqwā, “dependence” or “piety.” The later
collective obligation for almsgiving develops out of a protracted negotiation,
employing biblical arguments, in tension with the old ideal.
Already in an early sura, we find a reproach of the type of the generous man
who exhausts his possessions. In Q 90:6, we even find a direct representation of
the voice of one such type, who defends himself: yaqūlu ahlaktu mālan lubad,
“He says, I have exhausted a great deal of possessions.” This verse is a rare ex-
ample of a paraphrase of poetry in the Qur’an. What would be invoked in the po-
etry as a rebuke of the poet-​hero’s ihlāk al-​māl, his “exhaustion of possessions,” is
reformulated in the Qur’an into a proud boast of one’s own deeds by the spender
himself, making his flawed behavior seem all the more grave. It is useful here to
look at the entirety of the short sura 90, al-​balad, “The City,” because, uniquely

52. Ta’abbaṭa Sharran, Mufaḍḍaliyyāt, 1:21, quoted in Hamori, The Art of Medieval Arabic Literature, 11; cf. also
Izutsu, The Structure of the Ethical Terms,  67–​75.
53. Antara, Muʿallaqa, 40, quoted in Hamori, The Art of Medieval Arabic Literature, 11.
54. Izutsu, The Structure of the Ethical Terms,  65–​99.
436  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

in the Qur’an, it embeds the treatment of property into an elaborate theology of

creation.
The three-​part sura is introduced by an oath series upon the town of Mecca,
thematized as a place of settled life where the proclaimer himself stays. It is
also presented as a place of social coherence, ensured by blood ties and father-​
son genealogies (verse 3). Conveying ideas about procreation, here imagined
as the essential foundation of all communal social life, the oath series pre-
ludes the middle section, which is filled out with signs of creation (verses 8–​9).
Through this initial double setting that unites creation and divine providence,
which is evoked by the naming of the holy city of Mecca, an expectation is
awoken. It is directed toward the eschatological resolution of creation and
man’s rendering on the Final Day of the pledge received in divine communi-
cation. But the fulfillment of this expectation is initially delayed, and is only
redeemed in the final verses.
A reprimand of man follows in the form of an oath statement (verse 4), an
early Meccan topos that asserts an instability and ambivalence instilled in man
from creation, while he is charged concretely with the burden of toil and perhaps
sluggishness.55 This is offered as the explanation of his insistent wastefulness, an
attitude inherited from the anthropocentric world of the Bedouin hero. Desire
for expenditure is ultimately an expression of the contempt for death that was
celebrated as a virtue in the pre-​Qur’anic Arab Bedouin world,56 an attitude that
is, however, diametrically opposed to the fear of God and the restrained lifestyle
that are propagated by the proclaimer. In that the unrepentant person’s speech
that originally carried positive connotations in the earlier poetic context is rigor-
ously overturned, the sura reveals itself to advocate an alternative social model,
opposed to the Bedouin lifestyle. This interpretation is also suggested in the text
by the parallelism between the microcosm of the human body and the macro-
cosm of the city, Q 90:1–​7:

lā uqsimu bi-​hādha l-​balad

wa-​anta ḥillun bi-​hadhā l-​balad
wa-​wālidin wa-​mā  walad
la-​qad khalaqnā l-​insāna fī kabad

I swear by this town
—​you are a dweller in [or: you dwell legally in] this town—​
by one who begets, and by what he begot,
we have created man in distress.

55.  This connotation is suggested by the Semitic etymology; the translation with “travail” or “heaviness” seems
to be preferable to the common “hardship,” or “distress”; cf. Ambros, A Concise Dictionary.
56.  Cf. Hamori, The Art of Medieval Arabic Literature,  3–​19.
 The Qur’an and Poetry  437

a-​yaḥsabu an lan yaqdira ʿalayhi aḥad

yaqūlu ahlaktu mālan lubad
a-​yaḥsabu an lam yarahu aḥad

Does he think that none has power over him?

He says: “I have exhausted much wealth.”
Does he think that no one has seen him?

The Bedouin heroic ideal of a licentious lifestyle is confronted in the second part
(verses 8–​16) with arguments from biblical tradition, first by a recollection of
God’s special creation of man that takes up psalmic formulations. God “installed”
sense organs in man, giving him eyes and lips and a tongue (verses 8–​9), which
represent the organs of understanding (quite in the sense of psalms such as
Psalms 94:9, “He who planted the ear, shall he not hear, who formed the eye, shall
he not see?” or Psalms 40:47, “Sacrifice and oblation is not pleasing to you, ears
you have drilled into me, whole burnt offerings and sin offerings have you not
required”). Q 90:8–​10:

a-​lam najʿal lahu ʿaynayn

wa-​lisānan wa-​shafatayn?
wa-​hadaynāhu l-​najdayn?

Have we not given him two eyes

And a tongue and two lips?
And guided him along the two high paths?

The sense organs enable and compel man toward insight into the divine order.
This is followed by a recollection of the guidance that brings man to a fork in
the road, evoking a New Testament image. What is brought out here is the eth-
ical requirement of experience, illustrated by the choice that has to be taken be-
tween two differing and demanding ways—​that is, one must walk the “steep way,”
ʿaqaba, and this requires selflessness.
This challenge at first remains enigmatic, until it is decoded by means of
an interposed rhetorical question, in initiatory question (“Do you know what
is X?”), which increases the tension. The solving of the ʿaqaba riddle translates
ideas that were evoked in the oath cluster, such as the symbol of Mecca as orig-
inal place of theophany and divine devotion to man and the emergence of man
from the act of procreation as the basic fundament of social life, translating the
universal idea of the pledge of divine devotion that must be rendered into an in-
dividual obligation: the steep way consists of the accomplishment of social acts
such as freeing a slave and feeding poor relatives and the needy (verse 11–​16):

fa-​lā qtaḥama l-​ʿaqabah

wa-​mā adrāka mā l-​ʿaqabah
438  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

fakku raqabah
aw iṭʿāmun fī yawmin dhī masghabah
yatīman dhā maqrabah
aw miskīnan dhā matrabah

But he has not climbed the steep way.

Do you know what the steep way is?
The loosening of a neck
or feeding on the day of hunger
an orphan of relation
or a poor person lying in dirt.

It is interesting to see that the Bedouin approach to the consumption of wealth

(verse 6) is contrasted with an opposing model that is rooted in the known biblical
tradition: the three acts of charity—​the liberation of the oppressed, the feeding
of the hungry, and the provisioning of the poor—​already form an ensemble in
Isaiah (Is 58:6–​7):  “Is the fast that I  have chosen not rather the loosing of the
chains of evil, the untying of the straps of the yoke, to free the downtrodden and
break every yoke? Is it not the sharing of bread with the hungry and that you
receive in your house the poor man, who is outcast? That you, when you see a
naked man, cover him and not hide yourself before your own flesh?” The three
acts of freeing, feeding, and providing for the poor are also featured in Mt 25:34ff.
The Lord praises those on his right for having fulfilled the three benefactions.
On the other hand, he lets those on his left, who have denied these three acts, go
into the fire: Mt 25:41ff. The three acts of charity of the Isaiah tradition thus take
on an additional eschatological dimension in their rereading in Matthew, which,
just as in the Qur’an text, picks up the image of those on the right and left. More
surprising is the new thrust of the Qur’anic text, which no longer thematizes the
righteous man as a responsible individual, but rather treats him, quite in har-
mony with the ideal space of the town, as a part of a collective, where individuals
encourage each other to deliver charitable services (third part, verses 17–​20).
The text, however, stands in both the ancient Arab and the biblical tradi-
tions. In the sura’s rhetoric and progression of thought, the proclaimer fulfills
an aim suggested by the references to poetry: to outdo the poetry and the he-
roic worldview that it transmits. This is done structurally: in sura 90, the town
as a macrocosm matches the microcosm of man. The physiology of man and
the topography of the place correspond in their harmonic-​symmetrical structure
(verses 8–​10), in that the natural symmetry of man’s physiology adds persuasive
power to the topographical symmetry of the two ways:  “two ways,” “two lips,”
“two ears.” The imposing “steep way,” ʿaqaba, corresponds to the psychological
challenge of burdensome practices, the “climbing” iqtiḥām, which again is trans-
lated immediately from the physiological-​psychological into the ethical. Just as
 The Qur’an and Poetry  439

the solution of the metaphor of the ʿaqaba (verses 13–​16) makes recognizable the
charitable activity, so too is the topographical-​physiological cosmos of the town
ethically coded. God’s accomplishment of creation gives an ethical thrust to both
elements—​providing man with knowledge and capabilities of articulation (eyes,
lips, tongue), and providing the town with symbolically readable signs (ways,
the steep path). A tension is named through the reference to the inherent flaw
in man’s nature (verse 4, kabad, “toil,” “difficulty’), and this tension is solved only
through the redress of this flaw through insight (the eyes) and responsible con-
duct (the lips and tongue) (verse 13–​16), reflecting also the divinely willed ideal
of the political body, the polis.
This train of thought is expressed less through argumentation than through
the insertion of imagery. Indeed, beyond its semantic content the “image ma-
trix”57 constituted in the oath series remains effective throughout the entire sura;
proceeding from the topographical balad, “city,” on the one hand and the phys-
iological walada, “beget,” on the other to evoke associations of both topograph-
ical and physiological-​social links. Thus, balad finds its echo in such toponymic
metaphors as najdayn, “two high roads” (standing for the choice given to man
between good and evil), and above all ʿaqaba, “steep way” (for the compulsory
difficult choice). Related to walada, on the other hand, in the physiological realm,
there are such terms for organs as ʿaynayn, “two eyes,” lisān, “tongue,” shafatayn,
“two lips” (as the means of knowledge and insightful conduct), and raqaba,
“neck” (as an image for servitude), and, in the social realm, such classifications as
“orphan,” “relations,” and “the poor.”
Through a supplement to this idiosyncratically formulated catalogue of vir-
tues (verse 13–​16) in a later passage (verse 17–​20), the actions compelled by the
model of the city are “translated” into eschatological value categories and the
tension built up with the double incipit of creation and instruction of man is
released through the rendering account of both, physis and reason, at the last
judgment on the Final Day (verse 17–​20):

thumma kāna mina lladhīna āmanū

wa-​tawāṣaw bi-​l-​ṣabri wa-​tawāṣaw bi-​l-​marḥamah
ulāʾika aṣḥābu l-​maymanah
wa-​lladhīna kafarū bi-​ayātina
hum aṣḥābu l-​mashʾamah
ʿalayhim nārun muʾṣadah

Then is he one of those who believe

and spur each other on to patience and spur each other on to mercy.
They are the companions of the right hand.

57.  Neuwirth, “Der Horizont der Offenbarung.”

440  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

And those who lie about our signs

they are the companions of the left hand.
Upon them a blazing fire!

Although this final verse group, with its clarity, stands out from the largely ambig-
uous earlier topics of the sura, it can nonetheless claim a basic formal unity with
the rest of the text, through its proportional correspondence to the beginning
section (each four verses) and through its continuation of the rhyme scheme,
sometimes through spontaneously formed neologisms (mashʾama, “the left” for
shimāl, “left,” and maymana, “the right,” for yamīn, “right’).
Charitable behavior is thus not a new form of the Bedouin praxis of gener-
osity, but rather its antithesis. The distinction does not just lie in the Qur’anic
disavowal of the pre-​Islamic boasting about generosity and its practice for the
sake of glorification and the self-​aggrandizement of the hero, as Izutsu claimed,
but in fact it lies much deeper.
Even the verse Q 2:264, adduced by Izutsu as evidence,58 goes beyond a mere
critique of falsely motivated generosity:

O you who believe, do not render your alms void

by reproach or vexation,
like the one who spends his possessions
to make a show to the people
and does not believe in God and the Last Day.
He is like a rock on which is soil,
which is struck by heavy rain, leaving it bare.
They have no power over any of that which they have acquired. God does
not guide the unbelievers.

Here the one who gives out of a selfish motive is accused of hypocrisy, which
will be immediately debunked in a test. The seemingly empirical statement gains
additional impact through its application of a New Testament simile (mathal),59
which is given a different meaning than that developed in Christian theology,
where it refers to a transcendent world beyond apparent reality. The Qur’anic
simile likewise through its final clausula turns out to be an expression of divinely
warranted truth. Sincerely practiced charity—​in contrast to feigned—​reflects not
apparent but rather true stability of the cosmos.
As the poetically dense sura 90 shows, true charity is not warranted by mere
avoidance of excesses and bragging. Rather, it is bound up in a creation theology
that requires certain behaviors from man toward his creator, as a being endowed

58. Izutsu, The Structure of the Ethical Terms, 69.

59.  See Ben-​Shammai, “The Status of Parable and Simile”; cf. chap. 8, 305–313.
 The Qur’an and Poetry  441

with physical capacity and the capacity for reason—​accomplishments that form
the basis for urban life and piety in the Qur’an.

12.4  Poetical Operations in the Qur’an

Not only do we find poetic topoi in the Qur’an—​alongside the local Arabic
topoi, anthropomorphic divine predicates familiar from biblical tradition such
as the Light Verse, Q 2:155, would deserve mention—​but we can also trace
particular poetic techniques. A remarkable feature of the Qur’an is its neolo-
gisms: previously unattested word forms that can best be understood as spon-
taneous coinages, which were later considered so exclusively Qur’anic that they
are never used outside of the Qur’an. For the most part, they designate em-
pirically unknown issues, such as the eschatological site of hell (presented in
places as hāwiya, “abyss,” literally “collapsing,” Q 101:9–​10, or al-​ḥuṭama, “the
crusher,” Q 104:4), or individual actors or circumstances involved in the reso-
lution of the cosmos (al-​nāziʿāt, “the tearers,” Q 79:1; al-​qāriʿa, “the knocker,”
Q 101:1–​3). These neologisms, which are for the most part metonymic, that is,
they stand as adjectival or participial qualifiers in place of the expected nom-
inal signifier, are not to be considered something entirely new, for we find a
frequent use of metonymical expressions in the poetry as well. They serve not
simply as semantically unfamiliar designations but also function on the mor-
phological and phonetic level as components of an argument. Introduced right
at the beginning of their sections, they establish reference points for a network
of individual thoughts, which only crystalize into an argument through their
“amalgamating” effect.
In sura 104, “The Backbiter,” the two unfamiliar forms humaza/​lumaza,
“backbiter/​grumbler,” at the start of the sura and the new coinage al-​ḥuṭama, “the
crusher,” at the beginning of the second section, serve the function of reference
points for an argument, verses 1–​9:60

waylun li-​kulli humazatin lumazah

alladhī jamaʿa mālan wa-​ʿaddadah
yaḥsabu anna mālahu akhladah
kallā la-​yunbadhanna fī l-​ḥuṭamah
wa-​mā adrāka mā l-​ḥuṭamah
nāru llāhi l-​mūqadah
allatī taṭṭaliʿu ʿalā l-​afʾidah
innahā ʿalayhim muʾṣadah
fī ʿamadin mumaddadah

60.  For a contrasting attempt at interpretation with stronger emphasis on formally surprising effects than log-
ical structure, see Robinson, Discovering the Qur’ān, 164–​166.
442  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

Woe to every backbiter and grumbler

who has gathered and counted riches
thinking his riches make him immortal.
No indeed! He will be thrown to the crusher.
Do you know what the crusher is?
The fire of God, kindled,
it ascends unto the hearts
its flames clash together over them
in high towering columns.

The sura stands in the tradition of invective poetry (hijāʾ) and consists mainly
of exclamations marked through elements such as waylun li-​, “woe to” (verse 1),
kallā, “indeed no!” (verse 4), and the polemic wa-​mā adrāka mā . . . , “do you
know what is . . . ? (verse 5). Structurally, it consists of an exclamation of woe,
declared against the backbiter and the grumbler, followed by a short catalogue of
vices (verse 1–​2), which is countered by the exposure of wrong behavior (verse
3) and the threatening of otherworldly punishment, which will take place in an
enigmatic site (verses 4–​9) designated by ḥuṭama. More than half of the text is
dedicated to this place and the conditions there; its puzzling quality is further
underscored by a rhetorical question (“do you know what is . . . ?”). But above
all, the wordplay triggered by the neologism ḥuṭama, the playful repetition of
references, is a clear sign that hearers are to be impressed: those reprimanded as
humaza/​lumaza, “backbiters and grumblers” here appear for the only time in the
Qur’an in the rare morphological form fuʿala,61 while the same type elsewhere
appears in the more common form hammāz, as in Q 68:10–​13:

And do not obey everyone who swears much and is lowly,

who rushes and spreads base slander [is a backbiter; hammāz]
who hinders the good,
a transgressor who sins,
a rude person and a bastard.

In both cases, the accusation against the hammāz/​humaza is rooted in social mis-
behavior. In sura 104, the two-​part, penultimate-​stressed form humaza/​lumaza
binds together the accusation and its substantiation across the verse break and
acts as a prelude to the unusual rhyme of the statement ʿaddadah, “he counts it.”
The unfamiliar humaza/​lumaza echoes the rhyme of the absurd assumptions of
the greedy one (verse 3), who claims that his possessions “will give him immor-
tality” (akhladahu).

61.  An intensive form with reference to human behavior, not listed in Brockelmann, Semitische Grammatik;
but see Grande, Kurs arabskoj, 82 (personal communication from Kirill Dimitriev).
 The Qur’an and Poetry  443

The naming of the ḥuṭama then makes new recourse to the beginning word
pair humaza/​lumaza, now through precise iteration of the morphological form
fuʿala. The otherwise unknown name al-​ḥuṭama in this context can only sig-
nify hell, which seems to be personified here, as is the case elsewhere. This alone
would explain the morphological form, which is an analogue to humaza/​lumaza
expressing intensive or constant behavior. There is thus a close relationship be-
tween the offenders and their otherworldly destination:  they follow their wild
cravings on a path toward debasement, while the place itself pursues its cravings
toward their dismemberment. In other words, for the behavior of the humaza/​
lumaza, a suffering in the hereafter is decreed that is “homeopathichally” equiv-
alent in intensity.
Yet the answer given in verse 5 to the rhetorical question connected to ḥuṭama
is not congruent with the image, since fire does not crush or grind, but rather
consumes, and the associations of the familiar etymologically related Qur’anic
ḥuṭām, “dry chaff ” (Q 56:65, 39:21, 57:20), are difficult to bring together with
fire. It is difficult also to associate it semantically to the familiar element of the
Meccan shrine known as al-​Ḥaṭīm, which served as a place for sacrifice and
other activities.62 But what stands out above all is the use of a form reserved for
animated beings. Clearly, there are two images of hell superimposed here, that
of a place of fire and that of a mythical being—​distinguished by insatiability, and
crushing its victims—​as in Q 50:30: “On the day, when God speaks to hell: ‘have
you been sated?’ And she replies: are there more supplies?”
After the conventional image of hell as a place of fire in verse 6, the perspec-
tive turns from physical punishment to psychic punishment, to the affecting
of the hearts. Fuʾād, “heart,” is not primarily a bodily organ in the Qur’an, but
rather the site of feelings.63 Elsewhere we find similar language for eschatological
experiences that affect the “heart” or the “breast,” as in:  “When what is in the
heart is brought forth” (Q 100:10). The punishment through enclosure in flames,
which stands alongside the terrifying image of high blazing flames, resumes the
antepenultimate-​stressed rhyme of muʾṣada, afʾida, ʿamada, which now feeds
back into the misconduct (humaza, lumaza, ʿaddadahu) and miscalculation
(akhladahu) of the punished, while in the final fī ʿamadin mumaddada, “high
towering columns,” we find audible and morphological reference to the intensive
counting of the greedy, ʿaddadah.
The coherence of this text is due above all to the operation of semantic-​
morphological-​phonetic reference points introduced right from the beginning.
The accusation of hamz, “jibing,” and the closely related lamz, “grumbling,”
becomes a forceful beginning signal through the doubling of its morphological

62.  See Rubin, “The Kaʿba.”

63.  Cf. Seidensticker, Altarabisch “Herz,”  42–​62.
444  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

expression (humaza/​lumaza). Further accusations are bound closely to these

phonetically related rhymes. The deterrent site of hell then “works” continuously
like the punished himself, taking shape as its counterpart through a shared mor-
phological form humaza/​lumaza/​ḥuṭama. The newly introduced signifier of hell,
ḥuṭama, is thus closely linked poetically to the specified group of people of the
humaza/​lumaza, or is even generated because of this group, whose verdict and
punishment thus receive a convincing legitimation.

12.5  Coping with Contingency in Poetry and Qur’an

While a number of theologically and liturgically important concepts shared by

the Qur’an and its predecessor traditions still indicate their historical origin
through their expression in loan words, it is remarkable that the central desig-
nation for the message received by the proclaimer is indicated with a genuine
Arabic word. It is a word that is first introduced almost casually, to indicate the
modality of the divine communication (Q 53:4, 10–​11) and that does not be-
come a technical term in later Qur’anic texts either, but maintains a variety of
meanings—​namely, waḥy, “inspiration.” For a long time in Qur’anic usage, waḥy
remains a nomen actionis derived from awḥā, “to inspire, to indicate through
signs, to suggest,” a behavior displayed almost always by God.64 It often denotes
the act of inspiration, not in connection to revelation, but rather with quite prag-
matic implications.65 Because waḥy is also directed at nonhuman entities such as
the heavens (Q 41:12), earth (Q 99:5), and bees (Q 16:68), it is to be understood
in the Qur’an as including nonverbal communication. It is in this sense, that is,
as a nonverbal communication converted into an understandable message only
by the messenger, that waḥy should be understood when it is connected to rev-
elation. This nonverbal understanding of waḥy can be found in ancient Arabic
poetry as well, where it even plays a prominent role. It is therefore probable that
the concept, which appears already in the early Meccan suras, of “inspiration,”
of “that which is inspired” (in huwa illā waḥyun yūḥā, Q 53:4), did not develop
in complete isolation from a “topos of waḥy” that was already extant in ancient
Arabic poetry.

64.  Satan only interferes once: Q 6:121. On waḥy, see also chap. 2, 68–71.
65.  Noah “is inspired” to build the ship (Q 11:37; 33:27); something “is inspired” to the mother of Moses
(Q 20:31); Zachariah “inspires” his community to sing praises in the morning and evening through a language of
signs (Q 19:11); the bees “are inspired” to build habitations on the mountains (Q 16:68); and finally the heavens
and earth themselves figure as receivers of waḥy (Q 41:12, 99:5). In all other places however, awḥā is reserved for
Prophets: Noah, Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac and Jacob, Moses, Jesus and his disciples, and the proclaimer. Although
often admonitions for behavior can be the object of waḥy (Q 10:87 to Moses, Q 16:123 to the proclaimer), as a rule
what is “inspired” is the divine word, which must be communicated further. From the middle Meccan period on-
ward, “inspiration” often designates a concrete mass of texts that is already available, Q 18:27; 12:3; 17:86.
 The Qur’an and Poetry  445

This topos is manifest in the initial sections, nasīb, of the qasida, the standard
long poem, where the poet in his nostalgic contemplation of the weathered camp
traces, the aṭlāl, the remains of a former dwelling of his tribe, expresses a com-
plaint about transience. The poet “questions” the weathered traces or bare rocks,
addressing them directly, and censures himself at the same time for this act, which
he recognizes as a senseless turning toward mute and time-​resistant natural phe-
nomena. That this address relates to the question of the whereabouts of a once
flowering but now extinct social life, the ubi sunt qui ante nos fuere,66 “Where
have they vanished to who came before us?” is suggested by the theme of tran-
sience that dominates ancient Arabic poetry. In this situation of aporia, the poet
compares the traces of the settlement to the writing on a rock, which he attempts
to identify, but which, although it is made up of signs, is not readable to him, and
which thus carries for him a locked message.67 In view of its non-​accessibility as
a signifier, it is—​analogous to other nonverbal messages—​indicated by waḥy.68
The traces of the encampment, that is, of one’s own history that is no longer
accessible, convey an incomprehensible message, whose interpretation the poet
strives for in vain. Following the work of Gottfried Müller,69 Ludwig Ammann
has attempted to bring this particular mental situation of the poet, and of ancient
Arabian society, to a point:

The dramaturgy of the polythematic qasida . . . gives an implicit answer

to the “question of sense.” The first part describes the Bedouin experience
of transience triggered by the remains of an earlier inhabited campsite,
which evokes the memory of the poet’s parting with the beloved. This
part ends with a questioning of the remains, for which there are no words.
Then, for example, we read: “I asked them, but how can we ask deaf and
immutable things, whose speech is not clear,” or “No clarifying word do
they offer for him who asks, only riddles.” This question (suʾāl) is the total
question, the question about sense, and this remains unanswered, at least
in the first part.70

Ammann then adds, following the accepted notion that the poet’s aporia is over-
come by his departure from the devastated place and the return to his tribe: “Yet
the qasida moves on, toward the praising of self and tribe,  .  .  .  the poetic im-
mortalization of heroic deeds; and this praise stands—​as we read in a verse of
al-​Hādira—​as immortality. The practical answer consists in no more than the he-
roic conduct of life, the turning away from all reflection and toward courageous

66.  Cf. Becker, “Ubi sunt qui ante nos in mundo fuere.”
67.  For citations, see Montgomery, “Dichotomies.”
68.  There are also other terms, such as zubūr, cf. the citations in ibid.
69. Müller, Ich bin Labīd.
70. Ammann, Die Geburt des Islam,  32–​33.
446  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

action.”71 But then Ammann concedes:  “For that very reason, the question
about sense remains theoretically virulent. The integration of both, the question
about sense that is still not conceptualized and the fact of achieved awareness of
meaning through heroic conduct, into a coherent whole, takes place only aes-
thetically, through verse measure and rhyme that binds it all together.”72 One
could add: through the restitution of that which appeared as frustratingly inac-
cessible and incomprehensible, waḥy, which has now become comprehensible in
language. But this restitution is not accomplished for good, but rather must be
constantly reformulated from case to case in poems and is only realized through
performance; in poetry, there is thus no stable restitution of sense warranted with
poetry. Though Ammann in his reconstruction of a Qur’anic answer to the an-
cient Arabic situation of loss does not discuss the particular aporia captured by
the waḥy reference, he nonetheless takes up the idea of a necessary perpetuation,
which he sees as the Qur’an’s trumping of the poetic question. He supports this
through reference to Q 50:2–​3, 9–​11, 15:

The unbelievers say: that is a wondrous thing. O how!

When we are dead and turned to dust—​
a return to life is surely far-​fetched!
. . . From heaven we send down blessed water and let gardens grow and
grain for the harvest
and high palms with compact spathes,
for the subsistence of the servants, and thereby revive the dead land. So is
the coming forth.
. . . Did the first creation make us weary?
No! But they are in darkness about the new creation.73

Ammann interprets this as follows: “The argumentation connects to what is al-

ready believed, the first creation and the giving of vivifying rain, and concludes
from the primordial dealing with contingency and its perpetuation in the world
that there will be a final coping with contingency as well: the resurrection of the
dead. The given sense is thus continued. This leads to the result of an entirely new
answer to the question about sense: there is a life in the hereafter.”74
This is certainly a convincing interpretation as far as the semantic develop-
ment of the message is concerned. But with waḥy, perceived as problematic,
the poet has opened up yet another question, which is hermeneutical in na-
ture, namely, the question of the comprehensibility of history.75 The aporia that

71.  Ibid., 33.
72. Ibid.
73.  The translation reflects the understanding of Ammann.
74.  Ibid.,  36–​37.
75.  Cf. chap. 3, 127–129.
 The Qur’an and Poetry  447

crystalizes in the incomprehensible script so momentous in poetry is canceled

from the outset in the Qur’an. Already, the earliest suras bind the idea of phys-
ical creation to that of the providing of knowledge, emphasizing the privilege of
man, who is “addressed” from the beginning of creation by God.76 The question
about sense that is raised in poetry would not be fully answered in the Qur’an by
the guarantee of the cancelation of physical transience alone, however; it is only
answered through the solution of the hermeneutic puzzle of the waḥy, that is,
the removal of the aporia in face of the verbally inaccessible message of history
that is symbolized by the unreadable writing of waḥy. That the Qur’an offers this
solution is signified most clearly in the newly acquired positive connotation of
waḥy, which is not aporetic anymore, but is manifest in the divine message to the
community. The proclaimer is instructed to transfer what he receives as preverbal
inspiration into articulated discourse (tilāwa) and to communicate it on to his
hearers. “Signs of God’s reign, such as procreation and birth, are embedded in na-
ture as proofs to reason of his omnipotence. They are embedded also in history,
in which God intervenes to save and condemn, to reward and to punish—​a no-
ticeable extension of the conception of God as the driver of fate.”77 Waḥy is thus a
conceptual “puzzle picture.” Although its verbal form awḥā, “inspire,” continues
to denote a preverbal form of communication in the Qur’an, which requires a
particular natural or cultural deciphering code, it has obtained a new valence in
the Qur’anic nominal form waḥy: it stands for the communication of God, suc-
cessfully decoded by the proclaimer, to men, whose “writing” no longer consists
of unreadable signs, but rather of a system of proof signs amenable to reason,
engendering a sensible ordering of the world.

12.6  Poets in the Qur’an

The “Poet Verses” in Q 26:224–​226

In light of such intense disputes over the central problems of the worldview of
the poets, it is surprising that in the Qur’an we only find two places where poets
are directly mentioned, and even there the language is hardly unambiguous.
Numerous studies have addressed the fact that the ending verses of the middle
Meccan sura 26 allude to something known to contemporary hearers and that its
points can only be deduced from knowledge of these intertexts. But it is only in
a recent reinterpretation by Thomas Bauer that this problem has been brought
closer to a solution.78 This interpretation now permits us to fit these verses mean-
ingfully into the context of the sura, and thus to form a new understanding of the

76.  Cf. chap. 7, 264–277.

77. Ammann, Die Geburt des Islam, 39.
78.  For earlier interpretations, see “The Relevance of Early Arabic Poetry.”
448  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

sura as a whole. In the conventional translation of Q 26:224–​226, the verses read

as follows:79

wa-​l-​shuʿarāʾu yattabiʿuhumu l-​ghāwūn

a-​lam tara annahum fī kulli wādin yahīmūn
wa-​annahum yaqūlūna mā lā yafʿalūn

The poets, they are followed by those who go astray.

Have you not seen that they wander in every valley
and say what they do not do?

Thomas Bauer has shown that this translation cannot be maintained and has
demonstrated on the basis of poetical references that the verb hāma, yahīmūn
instead denotes “suffering from thirst pangs.” The verses seek to demonstrate the
mendacity of the poets, and thus to discredit the worldview of “those who follow
them,” or those who are dedicated to the ancient Arabian ideals. He clarifies:

The worldview of the aristocratic elite stemming from powerful Bedouin

tribes is characterized by the concept of the murūʾa, which describes a
heroic and manly ethos held by a social group. . . . The virtue of murūʾa
includes bravery, generosity, courage, a sense of honor, and other similar
qualities. All of these values are glorified in early Arabic poetry. Talks of
fights, wine and feats, the maysir game, of the hunt, of conquests in love
with pampered and elegant women, and other such subjects occur fre-
quently. When the poets spoke of these subjects, to be sure, they might
exaggerate and embroider them, but it cannot be claimed that they were
outright lying. In Q 26:226, instead, the poets are accused of “say[ing]
what they do not do.” Consequently, we have to look for a common motif
in pre-​and early Islamic poetry, in which the poets boast of acts which in
reality they did not perform. . . . One of the actions by which one proves
one’s murūʾa is suffering deprivation and facing dangers. As one of the
most common of themes in poetry, proving oneself is often achieved
by fighting bravely or in bearing the hardships of a long desert journey.
The “desert journey” is not only mentioned alongside the other murūʾa-​
themes in the self-​praise or fakhr-​section of Qasidas, which serve for the
presentation of one’s own bravery, but also became a fixed constituent part
of a particular type of Qasida, in which this motif binds together two parts
of the Qasida. . . . There could hardly be any poet of any importance who
did not treat this subject in one fashion or the other for whom this theme
did not occur. . . . And therein lies the explanation for the Qur’anic verse
26:225. What the poets say but do not in fact do is found in the Qur’an

79.  The translation reflects the understanding of Paret, Der Koran, 309.

 The Qur’an and Poetry  449

itself: fī kulli wādin yahīmūn, “to die from thirst in all those wadis”. . . . In
countless pieces of poetry poets claim to have crossed wastes where for
days on end there was no water to drink, where they and their camels were
dying of thirst. But this is exactly what the poets, as members of an aristo-
cratic and wealthy upper class, did not do.80

Building on this, Bauer’s new translation is as follows:

And the poets: Those who go astray follow them.

Don’t you know that they “die from thirst in all kinds of valleys
And that they (as you can see) do not do what they say?”

He comments on this:

This passage makes two points: it begins as a straightforward and rather

simple statement about the path of righteousness:  whoever follows the
poets is not following the right path, the path that leads to salvation. But it
also contains a somewhat surprising point, which is that, in the end, this
is exactly what the poets themselves say! The poets themselves are being
quoted, as they themselves say that they constantly “die from thirst in all
those wadis!” The same destiny thus awaits those who follow the poets.
Or maybe not. For there is also a second surprising twist to this saying: in
reality, poets do not die of thirst at all in the valleys, but are just boasting.
That of course makes the accusation here even worse: those who follow
the poets have lost their way because poets are liars, when they glorify the
deceitful ideal of the virtue of the murūʾa.81

But what motivates this designation of the poets at the end of a sura, which,
after a short address to the proclaimer (verses 1–​9), refers in detail in its main
part (verses 10–​191) to no fewer than ten prophet stories? The sura, which, with
this contrasting of proclamation and poetic performance, has been read as a
“mantic manifesto,”82 offers a narrative tour de force, presenting a larger number
of prophet stories than any other Qur’an text. The stories are always concluded
with a double-​verse refrain: inna fī dhālika la-​āyatan wa-​mā kāna aktharuhum
muʾminīn, “Truly, in that is a sign, which however most of them do not be-
lieve.” In this multiplication of the model of ethical exhortation practiced by the
proclaimer himself, which is achieved through its projection of diverse earlier
prophets, we find a suggestive communication of the monotheistic worldview.
What is at stake, then, is the persuasive character of prophetic discourse and the
truth value of the message of the new worldview. The status that obtains for the

80.  Bauer, “The Relevance of Early Arabic Poetry,” 727.

81.  Ibid., 729; but see the modification of this thesis by Seidensticker, “Herumirrende Dichter,” according to
which the poets are denigrated for their exalted, erotic lifestyle rather than for mendacity.
82.  Following Zwettler, “A Mantic Manifesto.”
450  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

poet polemic in this context becomes recognizable through the analysis of the
entire ending part of the sura (verses 192–​226).83
The concluding section begins with an affirmation of the truth of the
proclamation:

It [the Qur’an /​the reading] is a sending down from the lord of the worlds,
which the reliable spirit
has sent down on your heart, so that you may be a warner,
in clear Arabic speech. (Verses 193–​195)

The Qur’an thus clearly stands in competition with other Arabic pronounce-
ments. It is a proclamation that is also accepted by Jewish scholars (verse 197),
and the Arabness of the proclamation is of central significance:  “Had we sent
it down on a non-​Arab /​and he had read it out to them, they would not have
believed” (verse 198–​199). After this follows a complaint against the unbelief of
individual hearers (verses 200–​209). The ensuing rejection of the idea of an in-
spiration of the Qur’an through Satan—​the model that applies to the inspiration
of the poets—​indicates that an insinuation that the proclaimer is a poet had pre-
ceded. This accusation can only be countered by the worship of God alone and
the performance of liturgies (verses 210–​220).
The hymnic predication in verse 220 (innahu huwa l-​samīʿu l-​ʿalīm, “He is the
hearing, the seeing”) is followed by a polemic postscript that typologically could
easily serve as conclusion to the sura. It is, however, directed to a plurality of hear-
ers, unlike the preceding twenty-​eight verses of the concluding part, which were
directed toward the proclaimer (verses 221–​223): “Should I announce to you all,
onto whom the satans truly come down? They come down upon every sinful
liar! /​They attempt to eavesdrop [on the edge of the heavenly spheres, in order
to overhear divine wisdom];84 indeed, most of them are liars.” This disavowal, not
unique in the Qur’an, of inspiring spirits that are “for the most part insincere,”
in contrast to the “reliable spirit” (al-​rūḥu l-​amīn, verse 193) responsible for the
inspiration of the proclaimer, is an index of the untruth of any discourse in com-
petition with the proclamation that would lay claim to supernatural origin—​an
allusion to the poets and seers, who were known to be “inspired” by the jinn
or satans. The allusion is made explicit in what follows by the mocking of the
poets (verses 224–​226), who, as representatives of the heroic worldview, were
the most dangerous competitors of the proclaimer. Their truthfulness is mocked
sarcastically—​an important strategic step in the context of the double contest
with the poets: about the “right worldview” and about the more verbally con-
vincing presentation.

83.  On the structure of the entire sura, see Neuwirth, Studien zur Komposition, 276–​277.
84.  See Hawting, “Eavesdropping.”
 The Qur’an and Poetry  451

12.6.1  Postscript to the Poet Verses

This polemical closing of the sura, in the late Meccan, or more likely early
Medinan period, is finally appended by a modified statement about the poets,
Q 26:227:

illā lladhīna āmanū wa-​ʿamilū l-​ṣāliḥāti

wa-​dhakarū llāha kathīran wa-​ntaṣarū min baʿdi mā ẓulimū
wa-​sa-​yaʿlamu lladhīna ẓalamū ayya munqalabin yanqlibūn

Except those who believe and do good works and praise God often, and
defend themselves after they have suffered wrong. Those who do wrong
will come to know what kind of turn they will take.85

Stylistically, it is hard to decide clearly when this addition was appended.

Later clarifications or exceptions from general judgments are frequent in the
Qur’an in the Meccan and Medinan periods.86 But how can the mendacity of
the poets and their lack of credibility, which is asserted in Q 26:224–​226, be
relativized through the exception of single individuals? Obviously, a special
poet type is being given protection with these verses and brought forward as
an exception:  those who have become believers, thus having renounced the
heroic worldview, and who—​in addition to observing the elementary religious
duties—​also show personal zeal, which in the case of poets should not be mili-
tary zeal but rather verbal engagement. As to Mecca, we know nothing of poets
who exerted themselves through poems on behalf of the believers; for Medina,
however, transmitted collections of poetry show evidence of poets who inter-
fered into the political conflicts of the community. Within the ranks of the
“zealous poets,” we might therefore most plausibly count those famous figures
known from tradition who defended the new political entity by means of their
hijāʾ poems, putting themselves and their polemical poetic art into service for
the community.
Some of these poets were active in Medina, or in the wider vicinity of the
Prophet; these include Labīd, Ḥassān b. Thābit, Kaʿb b. Zuhayr, and Kaʿb b. Mālik,
whose poems have been discussed by Agnes Imhof in her study Religiöser Wandel
und die Genese des Islam (Religious change and the genesis of Islam).87 The con-
textualizing of these and other poems with the Qur’anic depiction of contempo-
rary events that feature in both the Qur’an and poetry, as for example the battle
of Badr, which is treated by Ḥassān, still remains a desideratum. Imhof ’s study of

85. Paret, Der Koran: Kommentar, 372, remarks: “In 227 the little flattering statements about enthusiasm and
boasting are retrospectively restricted.”
86.  Cf. chap. 5, 185–187.
87.  Cf. Imhof, Religiöser Wandel. She discusses Labīd, Ḥassān b. Thābit, Kaʿb b. Mālik, and Kaʿb b. Zuhayr.
452  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

the image of man in the early Arabic panegyrists of the seventh century can be
supplemented by Suzanne Stetkevych’s discussion of the “mantle ode” (qaṣīdat al-​
burda) by Kaʿb ibn Zuhayr88 and Werner Diem’s Studies on the Transmission and
Intertextuality on the same poem—​all of these studies already present a prom-
ising entry into the comparative study of poetry and Qur’an as part of a history
of mentalities.

88.  S. Stetkevych, “Pre-​Islamic Panegyric and the Poetics of Redemption.”

 13

The Rhetorical Qur’an

13.1  The Qur’an—​D ocument of an “Age of Rhetoric”

13.1.1  Answer to the Expectations of Hearers

To every prophet is given a sign that proves the truth of his message: God
sent Moses at a time when Pharaoh believed in the omnipotence of magic,
and so his sign was the transformation of his staff into a snake. He sent
Jesus in an age at a time when the art of healing stood in the highest re-
gard, therefore Jesus had to outdo the craft of the doctors—​by raising the
dead. In Muhammad’s time, one could no longer impress with such sen-
sory miracles, since he came before listeners for whom the art of speech
possessed the highest rank, and so his sign needed to be a linguistic
one: the rhetorical miracle of the Qur’an.

This is the report of the ninth-​century encyclopedist al-​Jāḥiẓ (160–​255/​777–​

869), who worked in Basra.1
This classification of the prophets can be easily recognized as an Islamic con-
tinuation of the Christian theological topos of successive divine covenants, each
with its own prophet.2 But Muhammad now forms the apex, whose rank clearly
rises above that of the others, since his sign is not physical but rather spiritual in
nature. Yet, however disparaging the evaluation of the earlier prophetic messages
may be, which are presented as relying for their authentication on theologically
insignificant miracles, the text nevertheless brings to a point a central trait of
the Qur’an itself: the simultaneous claim of theological-​semantic and aesthetic-​
hermeneutical value. This claim is historically grounded by al-​Jāḥiẓ in the
emergence of the Qur’an in an age of special sensibility vis-​à-​vis the word, and
through the linking of its proclamation to a particularly literarily sophisticated
hearership. Even if this idea in al-​Jāḥiẓ is difficult to separate from his apologetic-​
linguistic position in confrontation with non-​Arabs,3 still he addresses an impor-
tant aspect that connects the Qur’an to Late Antiquity. Because the Qur’an makes

1.  This citation summarizes a longer explanation in al-​Jāhiẓ, Ḥujaj al-​Nubūwa, 3:221–​281, esp.  278–​280.
Pellat, Arabische Geisteswelt, also offers a paraphrasing translation, 80.
2.  Samir, “Theological Christian Influences.”
3.  See Heath, “Adab and the Art of the Essay”; Agha, “Language as a Component.”

453
454  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

use of the highly rhetorical ancient Arabic language employed by the poets of
the sixth and seventh centuries, and even surpasses this register innovatively in
many ways, it gains access to a hermeneutical potential for the display of its su-
pernatural origin to an Arabic audience that is more effective than any sensory
miracle could be. James Montgomery has recently pointed to the vast ideological
radiation of ancient Arabic poetry, which thanks to the strategy of cladding its
world view in a Bedouinizing guise4 had become the central manifestation of
Arab cultural and political autonomy. High linguistic standards were thus set,
which the Qur’an had to meet in order to confront this worldview. At the same
time a new discourse had been opened that was to steer the entire proclamation,
which one could without much exaggeration term a “contest for the optimal art
of persuasion.” It is a contest that was staged with various opponents, whether
they were personally present on the stage of the debate (like the pagan Meccan
opponents), heirs of differing Late Antique religious traditions present among
the hearers (as in Medina), or, finally, absentees, to be identified as “hermeneu-
tical Jews”5 (or Christians).
The strategy of raising the linguistic form to the rank of a proof of the au-
thentication of the message is also suggested by another observation: the Qur’an,
unlike the Hebrew Bible and Gospels, consists throughout—​notwithstanding the
great number of narrative passages—​of direct speech and often even exchanges
of speech. In Ludwig Ammann’s words, “The Qur’an is the word of God without
narrative frame. This word can be understood as continuous reflection, to convey
to the notion of God’s rulership . . . an ever increasing, comprehensive validity.”6
But this prophetic speech not only operates in the sphere of lived reality; it also
operates, to no lesser degree, in a text world as well. This is not surprising histor-
ically. In biblical tradition, already centuries earlier the “wise man,” that is, the
man who is aware of tradition and capable of interpreting scripture, had replaced
the spontaneously articulating prophet, since, as James Kugel claims, the “word
of God was regarded as having already been laid down in scripture.”7 This per-
spective is shared also by the Qur’an, which continuously refers to and interprets
the earlier “writings.” Yet the Qur’an is also to a high degree spontaneous mantic
speech, a practice that had remained alive in the Arabian Peninsula, perhaps be-
cause biblical tradition did not circulate there in written form, but rather in oral
transmission. Thus, the role of Muhammad is not captured satisfactorily by that
of a prophet in the biblical sense: Muhammad is at once a mantic speaker and the

4.  Montgomery, “The Empty Ḥijāz.”

5.  The term “hermeneutic Jew” goes back to Jeremy Cohen. In his work the term refers not to an actual
person but rather to the stereotypical image of a representative of Judaism whose understanding of the Bible is
perceived to be unacceptable in Christian polemic; see Cohen, Living Letters of the Law (Dirk Hartwig, personal
communication).
6. Ammann, Die Geburt des Islam,  44–​45.
7. Kugel, The Bible as It Was, 17; cf. chap. 10.
 The Rhetorical Qur’an  455

interpreter of tradition. In light of its expressive pathos, the Qur’an as a whole can
be seen as an Arabic prophet text closely related to biblical prophet texts, but at
the same time, and with only slight exaggeration, one could assign it to the genre
of “exegesis.” In fact, semantically, it consists to a great extent of interpretations
and reformulations of already known biblical and post-​biblical traditions; as to
its form, however, it is replete with apologetical-​polemical argumentation.8 These
observations confirm the close relationship to rhetoric claimed by al-​Jāḥiẓ: the
Qur’an enters the stage in an epoch that is rightly distinguished by al-​Jāḥiẓ from
the earlier periods, an epoch that corresponds to our category of Late Antiquity.
Looked at from a more universal perspective, al-​Jāḥiẓ’s statement places the
text into an epoch that is acclaimed in literary history for its rhetorical produc-
tivity, even if in established scholarly presentations Arabic is seldom discussed;
what are discussed are rather works in Greek, the language of rhetoric par excel-
lence. Thus, Albin Lesky’s comprehensive history of Greek literature9 includes for
the fourth century a number of Near Eastern rhetoricians who, although them-
selves pagan and having Semitic-​language backgrounds, became the teachers of
Christian scholars who wrote in Greek. Thus the most significant among them,
Libanios of Antioch (314–​393),10 was the teacher of the later church fathers
Chrysostom, Basil the Great, and Gregory of Nazanius11—​founding a rhetorical
tradition that was to span centuries. Sophronios, patriarch of Jerusalem from
634–​638, who gave the city over to the Muslims five years after the death of the
Prophet, bore the honorary title “the Sophist” and enters into history as the poet
of highly rhetorical Greek hymns.12 Rhetorical praxis was clearly not reliant on
professional discipline alone. Daniel Boyarin has recently reclaimed Hellenistic
satirists such as Menippos to have provided the indirect models for individual
structures of argumentation of the Talmudic Amoraim.13 Exegesis, especially as
it was practiced dialogically, was often produced by means of rhetoric. Indeed,
the Qur’an emerged contemporaneously with parts of the Talmud and important
patristic literature, to name only the most central corpora. Read together with
the writings of the Late Antique rhetoricians, the church fathers, and the rabbis,
all of whom are commonly claimed as part of the European legacy, the Qur’an
actually becomes a text that is familiar to us—​or it would, if our own intellectual
preconceptions did not skew our perceptions.

8.  McAuliffe, “Debate with Them in a Better Way.” Sinai, Studien zur frühen Koraninterpretation, 1–​22, also
summarizes “intra-​Qur’anic” and “extra-​Qur’anic exegesis” as “scripture interpretations.” A  similar treatment of
scripture is common in Syrian religious poetry; cf. Brock, “Syriac Dispute Poems.”
9. Lesky, Geschichte der griechischen Literatur, 907.
10.  On him, see Brown, Macht und Rhetorik.
11. Lesky, Geschichte der griechischen Literatur, 907, 972.
12. Donner, Anakreontische Gedichte.
13.  Boyarin, “The Talmud as a Fat Rabbi.”
456  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

13.1.2  The Qur’an as the Site of Late Antique Knowledge Transfer

The fact that the assignment of the Qur’an to this particular epoch has not yet been
noted in Western research in its full dimension is due not least to another problem-
atic chronological assignment: the usual dating of the first Hellenistic imprint on
Arabic culture within the Abbasid period, when an official translation movement
sought to make the decisive texts of Greek theoretical literature available in Arabic
translations,14 laying out explicit translation principles and transmitting texts in
philologically integral versions under professional supervision.15 But as momentous
as this philological movement surely was, it represents only the tip of the iceberg,
the institutionalization rather than the initial moment of the reception of Hellenistic
learning in Arabic. One should however assume a living oral transmission of forms
of thought and knowledge, above all from philosophy and the disciplines prepar-
atory for it in the Hellenistic curriculum, already in the period before the official
translation movement. Fahmi Jadaane16 has spoken of a voie diffuse, an unofficial
and hard to control trajectory of transmission by which Stoic doctrines reached
the Arabic language area. If reflections of Aristotelian terms can already be seen
in the Qur’an, as for example the antinomy amphibolos and pithanos in the forms
mutashābih and muḥkam in Q 3:7,17 then this too would be an example of the com-
munication of elements of Hellenistic language-​related sciences into the Arabic lan-
guage area, reaching far back before the Abbasid period.
Historical study has long been devoted to a number of abstract terms in
the Qur’an that can be recognized as loanwords of non-​Arabic origin, mainly
from Hebrew18 and Syriac-​Aramaic.19 On the other hand, those abstract terms
in genuine Arabic dress, which just as surely presuppose theoretical debates in
Hellenistic circles, have not yet been studied in relation to their corresponding
Hellenistic terms. The Qur’anic word taʾwīl (Q 3:7), for example, which denotes
an explanation of something through “reference back to a first (awwal),” seems
related to the notion of deduction, but this remains a still unclarified issue in the
history of tradition. We can assume a wide proliferation of theoretical know-
ledge in the Arabian-​language area in Late Antiquity, whose full dimensions can
only be assessed through the analysis of those literary text corpora that have for
too long been neglected as evidence of Late Antique culture—​namely, ancient
Arabic poetry and the Qur’an. On the other hand, historical research has made
important new discoveries in recent times:20 G.  W. Bowersock21 has detected

14.  See Strohmeier, Hellas im Islam.

15.  See Rosenthal, Das Fortleben der Antike im Islam.
16.  Jadaane, Stoicisme dans l’Islam.
17.  See chap. 9, 327–330.
18. Horovitz, Jewish Proper Names.
19. Jeffery, Foreign Vocabulary.
20.  Easily accessible in Hoyland, Arabia and the Arabs; see also the comprehensive bibliography there on
256–​315.
21. Bowersock, Roman Arabia.
 The Rhetorical Qur’an  457

clear traces of Hellenistic culture in the southeast of the Arabian Peninsula, such
as a universally distributed nomenclature and iconography of pagan deities rep-
resented in locally differing modes. According to Peter Brown,22 the spread of a
linguistic koine that united culturally different groups, which was characteristic
of Hellenism,23 offered the ideal precondition for the fast spread of Islam in its
own new koine, Arabic. Based on ancient Arabic poetry, one could speak justi-
fiably of Arabic-​language culture as an Arabic analogue to the Greek-​language
culture and rhetorical education known as paideia,24 which has been illuminated
by Peter Brown as a unifying bond among the elites of the Late Antique world.25
By activating this linguistic culture that united tribal societies, the message ac-
quired a dimension of persuasive power, persuasio, which in the Qur’an suc-
cessively becomes an integral part of its theological self-​grounding. The Arabic
language of the Qur’an, which was to trigger debates over dogma in later Islamic
theology,26 is already perceived in the course of the proclamation as an integral
part of the Qur’anic message itself.27
But in historical research, the most important text of Arab Late Antiquity has
hardly ever been considered: the Qur’an itself, which is as a rule excluded from the
historical presentations of Late Antique Arabia.28 It is true that the Qur’an through
its very structure defies its own immediate historical evaluation; yet its significance
as a theological-​historical document of Late Antiquity cannot be overlooked. The
obscuring of this perception is often grounded teleologically. Treated from a bird’s
eye view, and viewed from a perspective shaped by the shifts of power brought about
by the victory of Islam, the Qur’an, which was the trigger of these developments,
must appear to represent a break, as a radical “other” that breaches the frame of Late
Antiquity as an epoch imprinted by Hellenism.
As against that, al-​Jāḥiẓ had valorized the special rhetorical character
of the Qur’an as a sign of its belonging to an “age of rhetoric.” Although
al-​Jāḥiẓ should not be taken to be referring consciously to a pluricul-
tural milieu imprinted by Hellenism for the Qur’an, his “age of rhetoric”
strikingly coincides with the rhetoric-​ oriented Late Antiquity. Al-​ Jāḥiẓ’s
pointed formulation is only the beginning of a learned engagement with
the form of the Qur’an that was to stretch over centuries, carried forward
in the tenth century by ʿAlī ibn ʿĪsā al-​Rummānī (d. 384/​994), Muḥammad
al-​Khaṭṭābī (d. 386/​996), and Abū Bakr al-​Bāqillānī (d. 403/​1013).29 Navid

22. Brown, The Making of Late Antiquity.

23.  See already von Grunebaum, “Arab Unity before Islam.”
24.  The later educational canon of the Islamic elite was in fact denoted by the term adab, equivalent to paideia.
25. Brown, Macht und Rhetorik; Brown, “Late Antiquity and Islam.”
26.  Caspar, “Parole de Dieu.”
27.  See chap. 2, 95–100.
28.  Thus even Hoyland, one of the most energetic advocates of the conception of a Late Antique Arabia, in his
Arabia and the Arabs, 139–​166, refers only cursorily to the Qur’an, placing it in the context of wider Arabic literature
references, without setting it into relief as a significant innovation of Late Antique theology.
29.  Von Grunebaum, “Arab Unity before Islam.”
458  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

Kermani30 has seminally described this history of impact. He aptly refers for
the bulk of his evidence to ʿAbd al-​Qāhir al-​Jurjānī (d. 471/​1078), a literary
scholar who authored what is, in Arabic tradition and Western research alike,
celebrated as the subtlest theoretical reflection on the linguistic form of the
Qur’an. But al-​Jurjānī only marks the peak of a long development:  within
Islamic tradition, the Qur’an was perceived from an early point onward to be a
poetic-​rhetorical masterpiece, and from the Abbasid period onward it became
the object of an extensive stylistic-​theoretical learned literature. In this liter-
ature, the boundaries between theology and literary theory are fluid: forceful
language, that is, applied rhetoric, is acknowledged as a decisive character-
istic of the Qur’an, not only in poetological literature but also in standard
prophetology. According to the Islamic view, rhetorically high standards not
only support but prove the truth of the message, quite unlike what applies
according to Islamic perception to the scriptures of the past, to which is con-
ceded no comparably close relation between verbal form and pronouncement.
Although the classical Arabic rhetorical literature treats Qur’an and poetry in
close connection, this synoptic view is almost entirely lacking in critical re-
search:  there are no monographs available on this close aesthetic-​rhetorical
connection between ancient Arabic poetry and the Qur’an.31 It appears that
the rigorous distinction between “profane” and “sacred” literature, which
arose in modernity, has been projected into the past.
In what follows, a an examination of the status of Qur’anic rhetoric, focused
first from outside and then from within, is meant to shed light on the scene of the
continuous rhetorical contest with other traditions that is reflected in the Qur’an.
Once we presuppose religious variety—​bridged by Hellenistic culture as a shared
legacy—​to have been the characteristic of the milieu of the Qur’an’s genesis, the
question appears promising to the degree to which rhetorical praxis and reflec-
tion were involved in this reception of Late Antiquity.

13.2  “Incapacitating” Rhetoric

13.2.1  The Later Dogma of Iʿjāz al-​Qurʾān

If one takes seriously the notion attested in the Qur’an itself, that with the suc-
cessively occurring inspiration and proclamation a text took shape that was
newly formed, not wholly identical with its transcendent templates but rather
adapted for the communication situation and its respective receivers,32 then the
inner-​worldly side of the process, the process of the Qur’anic genesis from the

30.  See Kermani, Gott ist schön.

31.  A pioneering work is Bauer, “The Relevance of Early Arabic Poetry”; cf. chap. 12.
32.  See Sinai, “Qur’ānic Self-​referentiality”; Sinai, Studien zur frühen Koraninterpretation, 84–​85; cf. chap. 2,
73–76.
 The Rhetorical Qur’an  459

reinterpretation of older traditions, becomes of central interest. Traditions are

not simply “taken up” by the emerging Qur’anic community, but rather taken as
challenges to be answered dialectically through new readings. With the adoption
of this perspective, we can observe a muʿāraḍa, a “textual contest,” or collision of
concepts and ideas strong enough to set free an energy that results in the genesis
not only of a new scripture but also of a new community, a religious movement.
This Qur’anic “eclipsing” of older traditions through new readings would be
unthinkable without the particular linguistic factor to which the Qur’an makes
numerous references, for example, with its self-​designation as an “Arabic reading,”
qurʾānun ʿarabīyun (Q 12:2 and passim). This Qur’anic self-​reference calls for a
short comment: ʿarabīyun here stands not simply for a national language but for
the high Arabic standard language that was in use alongside a number of dia-
lects and that—​according to one of its most diligent scholars, Anton Spitaler—​“is
the original Arabic language surviving from earliest times, which had long been
withdrawn from everyday use and was kābiran ʿan kābirin, “from generation to
generation,”33 . . . transmitted together with particular texts.”34 Spitaler assumes a
situation of diglossia: “To learn this language according to patterns heard again
and again, to speak in it, was . . . a matter of natural talent, of an inborn sense of
hearing, that distinguished poetic speech from the everyday language in a purely
formal way, and this talent could be found just as well among the ʿāmma, the
‘lowly people,’ as among the khāṣṣa, ‘the elite.’ ”35 The high Arabic language, which
had been given form in the highly developed poetry practiced already for cen-
turies and which was particularly rich in evocations thanks to its unexampled
lexical polysemy, granted the Qur’an a high degree of pathos from the very begin-
ning, a gravity that is registered consciously by the proclaimer and community.
It is due to this power of expression, based on various rhetorical figures and on
a very free handling of syntax, that the Qur’an achieved that aura by which, ac-
cording to tradition, it deterred its opponents already during the communication
process.
This rhetorical “incapacitation,” Arabic iʿjāz, becomes a keyword, which
would have a major career as a central characteristic of the Qur’an in the ninth
century, giving its name to the Islamic “dogma” of iʿjāz al-​qurʾān, “the inimita-
bility of the Qur’an.”36 The dogma of the Qur’an’s “inimitability” (as iʿjāz is usually

33.  In his review of Fück, Arabiya, 145, Spitaler adds: “The expression is of course to be taken cum grano salis.
August Fischer (ZDMG 59 [1905] 662) . . . wanted to assume a particular dialect as the foundation of the classical
language, and in principle that would hold true; but it seems to me quite difficult, almost impossible, to locate this
dialect more precisely in place and time. It cannot be determined when and in which phase it was extracted from
the everyday language, and at what point in time it became a high language recognized by all the speakers of dia-
lects, whose use was required under certain conditions.” On the other hand, Retsö, The Arabs in Antiquity, 49–​53,
has now put forward a new theory on the significance of ʿarabīya in the Qur’an; on this, see Wild’s criticism in “An
Arabic Recitation.”
34. Spitaler, Rezension zu Fück, Arabia, 144–​145.
35.  Ibid., 145.
36.  Martin, “Inimitability”; on the aesthetic implications, see Kermani, Gott ist schön, 233–​314.
460  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

rendered, though it is better translated literally as “incapacitation, disablement”)

is not elaborated only through rhetoric. It also belongs to a theological con-
text,37 where the divine “deterrence” or “turning away,” al-​ṣarfa (of opponents
from imitation), of the Qur’an is often foregrounded vis-​à-​vis the Qur’an’s rhe-
torical perfection.38 It is hard to understand the iʿjāz debate independently of
the Christian-​Muslim rivalry over the consummate manifestation of the word
of God. The Qur’an, as the Muslim equivalent to the incarnate word of God in
the Christian tradition, becomes, in the wider context of the iʿjāz debate and
the confrontation between the rational theologians of the Muʿtazila and their
opponents, the object of reflections that clearly relate to Christian theological
patterns. The closeness of the Islamic and Christian debates goes so far as to pro-
duce “trans-​confessional” reactions. Thus, in the eighth/​ninth century, Theodor
Abū Qurra, bishop of Harran, heard in the Muʾtazilites’ thesis of khalq al-​qurʾān,
“the createdness of the Qur’an,” a “denial of the logos,” which motivated him to-
ward a polemic against the advocates of the created Qur’an.39 The unmistakable
analogy between Christ and Qur’an as embodiments of the word of God40 had
already struck numerous early Islamic theologians as problematic. The judgment
of the Qur’an to be makhlūq, “created,” articulated by the Muʾtazila, can be rec-
ognized as a negative echo of the Nicene Creed on the nature of Christ: Greek
genēthenta ou poiēthenta, Arabic mawlūd ghayr makhlūq, “born, not created.”41
But the Qur’an retained the quality of miraculous perfection shared with the in-
carnate word. The iʿjāz debate gave rise to theological tractates, and to a sequence
of rhetorical-​poetological works, among which is the work of al-​Jurjānī, Dalāʾil
al-​īʿjāz, The Proofs of Inimitability, which is rightly celebrated as the high point
of Arabic poetics.
The dogma of iʿjāz al-​qurʾān, which in Western research was never taken se-
riously, has until now not been discussed in its Christological context. The fre-
quent low evaluation of the literary character of the Qur’an itself would make
the doctrine seem baseless, and the lack of a synopsis of Byzantine and Islamic
theology further inhibited its systematic treatment in the theological context of
confrontations around the createdness or eternity of the Qur’an. The previous
dialogue between the traditions, which led to the formation of the dogma, still
awaits investigation.

37.  See van Ess, Theologie und Gesellschaft, 3:410–​413, 4:609–​612.

38.  Even for al-​Jāhiẓ, iʿjāz is not a permanent, static trait of the Qur’an “but rather a kind of shock, which is set
loose by the challenge”; see van Ess, Theologie und Gesellschaft, 3:411.
39.  Ibid., 3:137.
40.  See chap. 2, 89–94.
41.  In the Muʿtazilite declaration that the Qur’an is the created word of God, we should see not least the
attempt to dispute any nearness to the Trinitarian conception of God; cf. Nader, Le systeme philosophique, 101;
Maalouf, La place du verbe, 85–​107. The contextualization of Islamic and Christian theological debates still remains
to be done; it has long been a neglected avenue of research; see Martin, “Inimitability.”
 The Rhetorical Qur’an  461

Research so far has treated the dogma above all from the cultural-​historical
perspective, as an index of an exaggerated Arabic cultural pride. Behind this
perspective may have often loomed a contrary expectation suggested by the
Christian tradition, the opinion that an especially glamorous verbal dressing of
a scripture would be inappropriate. For just as Christ, according to Phil 2:5–​8,
“though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be
grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the
likeness of men,”42 so must the word of God, the scripture, “make its way through
history in the form of a servant.” It thus consciously employs a “humble way of
speech,” the so called genus humile.
Gustav von Grunebaum, who dwells on this idea, comes to the conclusion that
the early church laid emphasis on the theory of the genus humile because a com-
parison of the Gospels with classical Greek literature compelled them to take this
stance. The Qur’an, however, for which no comparable previous writings existed,
was not confronted by such standards.43 But even in relation to Christianity, this
claim only touches the surface. If one wanted, one could also recover from the
Christian Bible sufficient poetical and rhetorical “pearls” to set against the clas-
sical authors. After all, Longinus, a pagan aesthetician of Late Antiquity, cited
the beginning of Genesis in his treatise On the Sublime as an example of partic-
ular linguistic magnificence.44 On the Arabic side, the claim is grotesque: the low
literary evaluation of pre-​Islamic poetry and the often unquestioned assump-
tion of the isolation of the Qur’an from the culture that preceded it could hardly
be expressed more clearly than in von Grunebaum’s verdict. It is all the more
astonishing in view of the fact than the theoreticians of iʿjāz, among whom is
al-​Bāqillānī (one of whose tractates was edited by von Grunebaum himself),45
continuously contextualize their Qur’an-​specific observations with observations
on the poetry.

13.2.2 Iʿjāz in the Qur’an
Although these are later developments, they heuristically offer a promising ap-
proach. The Qur’an does not yet use the term iʿjāz, nor does its self-​reference
throughout the proclamation as a qualitatively unmatchable text refer to any
tradition outside the text. Again and again, the Qur’an text pronounces the

42.  This epistolary passage belongs to the particularly well-​known texts of the Eastern Church; it figures as a
reading on the Day of the Assumption of Mary. In that it makes an important statement about the Christian repre-
sentation of the word of God, it belongs also in the context of the discourse within the iʿjāz dogma about the partic-
ular form of the word of God. This quotation follows the English Standard Version (ESV).
43.  Von Grunebaum, A Tenth-​Century Document, xv.
44.  On the work attributed to the otherwise unknown Longinus, Peri hypsous, whose composition dates to
the first half of the first century ce, see Fuhrmann, Die Dichtungstheorie der Antike. For further testimonials of the
perception of aesthetic coequality between the Bible and classic literature, see Kugel, “Poetry and Prophecy”; cf.
also chap. 12, 419–421.
45.  Von Grunebaum, A Tenth-​Century Document.
462  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

challenge to individual hearers to bring something comparable and of equal

rank, reflecting the ideological and verbal contest between different stakehold-
ers striving to convey the most persuasive message, the rivals of the proclaimer
addressed in the Qur’an being apparently not monotheist but pagan critics of his
message. No firm judgments about the chronology of the challenge verses can be
made, since they already develop during the proclamation into a topos. Yet the
Qur’an does not simply lay out a challenge; Qur’anic speech itself also responds
to a challenge. Following Ludwig Ammann, one might see the emphasis on lan-
guage as evidence of transcendent origin in relation to the conservative position
of the Meccan hearers:

The Meccans do not trust that Muhammad is the messenger of God. His
extraordinary textual creation could also be explained otherwise in their
view: with the help . . . of the jinn, the lower spiritual beings that inspire the
soothsayers and poets. Thus, in view of the hints at the speech of soothsay-
ers in the earliest suras, they concede Muhammad to be supernaturally
inspired, not however by God, and rank him among the charismatic fig-
ures of weaker authority. . . . The speech of revelation must therefore strive
to attest to its privileged mantic status. To this end, it lays out the chal-
lenge of a contest in verbal art, for which the following assumption is the
basis: “Even if men and jinn united together, they would not bring forth
something equal to the Qur’an!” (Q 17:89).  .  .  .  The Qur’anic speech is
thus—​based on the power of its inimitability—​its own miracle of authen-
tication. The claim of inimitability “tops” the observation that the Qur’anic
speech art is exceedingly creative. It regards the continuously forceful oth-
erness of this speech, in that the new pattern remains unachievable, as a
performance of a wholly “other” speaker, as divine inspiration.46

In Ammann’s view this is a triumphal claim of rupture with tradition: this “sura

corpus, which would replace the qasida as the founding text of the Bedouin form
of life, knows no predecessor as a literary genre; as an art work in language, the
Qur’anic event of reflection stands unique in history.”47
In the Qur’an itself, the confrontation with anonymous opponents is pre-
sented on several levels. Already in an early Meccan sura, the charge of arbitrary
invention of speech is met with the challenge to bring “a speech such as this,”
bi-​ḥadīthin mithlihi. In the middle Meccan sura 17, on the other hand, the su-
periority of the Qur’anic recitation over all conceivable rivals is already affirmed
triumphally (verse 88):

46. Ammann, Die Geburt des Islam,  45–​46.

47.  Ibid., 46.
 The Rhetorical Qur’an  463

Say: “Were humans and jinn to band together to produce a semblance of

this Qur’an [an yaʾtū bi-​mithli hādhā l-​qurʾān], they could not do so, even
if they backed one another up.”

In the late Meccan texts, an open confrontation is even staged, and the challenge
of bringing ten text units for recitation, “suras” (suwar), is raised (Q 11:13):

Or do they say: he fabricated it? Say: “Bring forth ten suras like it [fa-​ʾtū
bi-​ʿashri suwarin mithlihi], and call upon whomever you can, apart from
God, if you speak the truth.”

Finally, we find language of one sura (fa-​ʾtū bi-​sūratin mithlihi, “Bring yet a sura,
which is equal to it,” Q 10:38). The debate reaches its climax with the explicit ref-
erence to the unattainability of the sura performance, whose disdain brings with
it the loss of life in the hereafter, in the Medinan text Q 2:23–​24:

If you doubt what we revealed to our servant, bring forth one sura like it
[fa-​ʾtū bi-​sūratin mithlihi]. And summon your witnesses, any other than
God, if you are truthful. But if you do not, and surely you will not, be-
ware of the fire whose fuel is mankind and stones, made ready for the
unbelievers.

It is irrelevant here whether the Arabic word sūra already designates the unit
“sura” as it was later determined or if it is used here rather to indicate a text for
recitation undefined in length. What is important is that we see here a contest
around the verbal, and the exclusion of the possibility that the performed speech
can be outdone by an opposing speech from outside. This occurs, as the quoted
verses show, according to a fixed rhetorical scheme, in which a text performance
is required as proof of the validity of the opposing truth claim.
The historicity of the staging of these particular challenges is not certain.
Matthias Radscheit takes the so-​called taḥaddī verses, the “challenge verses,” as
wholly fictive,48 which however would say nothing about their effectiveness for
Qur’anic argumentation. Even if they are merely rhetorical challenges, or “simu-
lations,” they nonetheless represent the expression of a new self-​consciousness
based not least on verbal competence. The verses give expression to the scenario,
characteristic of the Qur’an, of an enduring rhetorical challenge reflected in the
dialectical form of the suras,49 which grows ever more dominant from the middle
Meccan period onward.

48. Radscheit, Herausforderung, and Radscheit, “Ijāz al-​Qur’ān im Koran?” argues on the basis of Wansbrough’s
scenario of a later anonymous compilation of the Qur’an, so that all Qur’anic dialogues would then have to be only
retroactive simulations. His explanation is rejected by Ammann, Die Geburt des Islam, 45, and Gilliot, review of
Radscheit, Herausforderung, 130.
49.  See McAuliffe, “Debate with Them in a Better Way.”
464  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

Within the context of the Qur’anic affirmation of its rhetorical dimension

belongs also the insistence on the point that it is a proclamation in Arabic lan-
guage, which crops up in the middle Meccan period (Q 20:113):

Hence we sent it down, an Arabic Qur’an [anzalnāhu qurʾānan ʿarabīyan],

and we detailed in it all kinds of threat; perhaps they will turn pious, or
else it may inspire them to remembrance.

Such references to the Arabic language occur into the late Meccan period:  Q
12:1–​3, 26:192–​201, 16:101–​103, 39:27–​28, 41:1–​4, 42:7, 43:1–​4, and 46:12.
Stefan Wild50 points out that the Arabness of the Qur’an attested here is occasion-
ally contrasted with the foreign-​language form of the earlier scriptures. This spe-
cial self-​referentiality does not yet seem to stand in a religious polemical context,
however, but rather to be the triumphal expression of a purely empirical percep-
tion. The rabbinic confrontations around the particular rank of Hebrew as leshon
ha-​qodesh, “the sacred language” of the Bible, will be reflected further in the later
Islamic discussion of the divine “setting,” tawqīf, of the language in Arabic,51 but
these discussions remain unconcerned with the Qur’anic understanding of lan-
guage as a part of the transcendent message.52 It is striking that no other scripture
besides the Qur’an thematizes its own particular language, let alone insists on it
as a significant medium of the revelation.53
The conviction that stands behind the challenges, that the proclamation as
such should be sufficient to render opponents and opposing claims silent, al-
ready stands firm and is articulated in a sequence of Meccan debates, in which
the Qur’anic proclamation presents itself as its own proof of validity, as a “sign,”
āya, that should fulfill the opponents’ demand of a “miracle,” āya, such as in the
late Meccan verse Q 29:50–​51:

They say:  “If only some miracles had been sent down on him from his
Lord!” Say: “Miracles are with God. I am only a manifest warner.” Was it
not enough for them that we sent down the scripture on you to be recited
to them? In this is a mercy and a remembrance to a people who have faith.

Though we already find an even higher rank given to the recitation as a reproduc-
tion of the preexistent word of God (Q 55:1–​4),54 this rank was not made explicit
in the challenge debates. But the challenge to bring forth something equal to the

50.  Wild, “An Arabic Recitation.”

51.  Caspar, “Parole de Dieu.”
52. Wansbrough, Quranic Studies, 93–​106. On leshon ha-​qodesh, see Veltri, Gegenwart der Tradition, 51ff. The
expression, which does not occur before the Mishna, indicates particular pericopes, which are to be read out in the
leshon ha-​qodesh. Veltri connects the concept with a historical situation in which the Hebrew text of the Torah had
become unintelligible (Dirk Hartwig, personal communication).
53.  Wild, “An Arabic Recitation,” 136, which makes reference to the merely occasional mentions of the respec-
tive languages in the biblical books.
54.  See chap. 2, 89–94.
 The Rhetorical Qur’an  465

reading, which is made six times, and behind which lies the conviction of the
ability to overwhelm all opponents through the Qur’anic speech, carries a trium-
phal tone that is not frequent elsewhere in the Qur’an.
Such a triumphal tone is in no way alien, however, to the reflections in the
neighboring traditions about the persuasive power, persuasio, of their own
believed truths. A hymn to Mary composed around one hundred years before
the Qur’an, the Akathistos Hymn,55 praises the power of persuasion, exceeding
all opposing rhetorical professionalism, of a central theological message, the in-
carnation symbolized by Mary:

We see articulate orators struck dumb as fish, in view of you, mother of

God. . . . Hail to you, who have stripped philosophers of their philosophy,
hail to you, who have made the teachers of rhetoric speechless. Hail to
you, for the powerful in contest have become dumb because of you, hail,
for through you the inventors of follies have become still. Hail, for you
have torn the captious entanglements of the Athenians, hail, for you have
filled the fishermen’s nets.56

This degree of hyperbolic rhetoric is foreign to the Qur’an—​but a triumphal

tone of victory, of the verbally convincing guise of its own transcendent mes-
sage, is nevertheless unmistakably present in the Qur’an from the middle Meccan
period on.

13.2.3  Contest of Traditions

However clearly the “challenge verses” indicate a concrete interaction scenario
in which contesters of the Qur’anic message are brought to silence, the definitive
challenge should be assumed to have come less from individual opponents, who
then had to be encountered with further challenging speeches, than from “her-
meneutic opponents,” effective older traditions that had to be dealt with as such.
The perception that central traditions of the two older religions were dressed in
verbally convincing form, and that they drew authority from this form, is re-
flected in the Qur’an in numerous places. It was above all ubiquitous texts clad
in “convincing” formulations, such as creeds, prayers, and hymns, from which
a challenge came forth, and this challenge had to be answered by the Qur’anic
community through the replica of a new text that would be stylistically close
enough to the precursor text to integrate it as an authority-​founding reference.
In this process, individual personal representatives of these traditions did not
necessarily need to be present and involved. Rather, we should understand

55.  On the Akathistos Hymn see Peltomaa, Image of the Virgin; cf. chap. 9, 324–332.
56.  The Greek text is as follows: “rhētoras polyphtongous, hos ichtyas aphonous, oromen epi soi, Theotoke.
Chaire, philosophous asophous deiknyousa . . . , chaire, technologous alogous elenchousa. Chaire, hoti emoranthēsan
hoi deinoi syzētētai. Chaire, hoti emaranthēsan hoi ton mython poiētai. Chaire, ton Athēnaion tas plokas diasposa.
Chaire ton alieon tas sagenas plērousa.”
466  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

“textual contest” here in a wider sense, in that the response to older traditions
was addressed less to the heirs of these traditions, so that the goal was not the
triumph over an opposing religious group but rather a continuous reform within
the community, in which the traditional material belonging to the formation of
individual hearers was checked, sharpened, and modified according to the new
consensus taking shape. This can be shown at the end of the early Meccan pe-
riod in relation to Psalm 136, which is reformulated in an entire sura—​without
the Jewish or Christian “heirs” of this psalm appearing on the stage.57 A similar
state of affairs holds true for the Christian text models, which are newly formed
in the Fātiḥa.58 The rhetorical moment in this lies not in a polemical address to
the hearer but rather in the verbally convincing reformulation of the traditions
available in various text types into a new form of rhythmical rhymed prose char-
acteristic of the early Meccan suras.

13.3  A Contest Before Polemic: From Biblical Hymn

to Qur’anic Paraenesis

13.3.1  Psalm 104 and Sura 78

An actual contest with the older traditions was already underway in the early
Meccan period. The powerfully effective and much cited traditions of the dom-
inant belief communities demanded a response, irrespective of their individual
origins. In the beginning, we still sense nothing of that polemical atmosphere
that resonates in the challenge (taḥaddī) verses cited above. Yet in the early,
still unpolemical handling of the challenge coming from the older traditions,
we already find a central role played by the moment of persuasio, persuasive
power, and thus the art of rhetoric. One could even claim that in the Qur’an,
older traditions are effectively reformulated not only semantically but also rhe-
torically, in that they are recast from narrative or hymnic speech into parae-
netic speech. One can only trace this reception of older traditions in the final
result, for in view of the purely oral transmission of the predecessor texts that
we must presuppose for the community, the concrete process of the amalga-
mation of these traditions cannot be reconstructed. It can be ascertained that
a sequence of Qur’anic texts reformulate biblical traditions in accordance with
the Qur’anic worldview, without thereby making the older authority-​bearing
text wholly unrecognizable. The older text remains preserved in important
details in the new text, and thus forms the still-​comprehensible premise for the
Qur’anic antithesis.

57.  Neuwirth, “Psalmen.”

58.  On this, see chap. 8, 282–​290.
 The Rhetorical Qur’an  467

Several examples of such “antithetical” readings pertain to the new inter-

pretation of psalms. The tension-​rich relation between Psalm 104 and sura 78,
“The Tidings,” is an example that has not yet received due notice, although
this very psalm does figure in Heinrich Speyer’s list of Qur’anic references to
the Psalms.59 The numerous Qur’anic traces of this Psalm can be explained
though its outstanding significance in Jewish and Christian liturgy.60 The dis-
cussion should be premised with the Qur’anic text that is related to the psalm
(Q 78:6–​17):

a-​lam najʿali l-​arḍa mihādā

wa-​l-​jibāla  awtādā
wa-​khalaqnākum  azwājā
wa-​jaʿalnā nawmakum subātā
wa-​jaʿalnā l-​layla libāsā
wa-​jaʿalnā l-​nahāra maʿāshā
wa-​banaynā fawqkum sabʿan shidādā
wa-​jaʿalnā sirājan wahhājā
wa-​anzalnā mina l-​muʿṣirāti māʾan thajjājā
li-​nukhrija bihi ḥabban wa-​nabātā
wa-​jannātin  alfāfā
inna yawma l-​faṣli kāna mīqātā

Did We not make the earth a couch for you?

And the mountains pegs?
Did We not create you in pairs?
Did We not make your sleep a time of rest
and the night a garment,
and the day a source of livelihood?
Did We not build above you seven firmly established,
and fix a glowing lantern?
Did We not send down rich water on you from clouds, flooding,
to sprout seeds and vegetation, and gardens intertwined?
The day of decision shall be a date appointed.

The short introductory part of the sura (verses 1–​5),61 with its rhetorical ques-
tion, sounds a theme that is apparently controversial to the hearers, but which
itself remains unpronounced. The “great tidings” (verse 2)  are—​in view of the
centrality of eschatology in the early suras—​not difficult to identify as the Day of
Judgment, especially since it is followed by a threat to the doubters (verses 4–​5).

59. Speyer, Die biblischen Erzählungen im Qoran, 498, names thirteen Qur’anic references to Psalms 104.
60.  See the evidence from the Jewish tradition in Neuwirth, “Psalmen.”
61. Neuwirth, Studien zur Komposition, 217.
468  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

The second part that follows (verses 6–​16, presented here) responds to the be-
ginning dialectically: the catalogue of divine acts of creation (āyāt series) should
disperse all doubt about the omnipotence of God, which for some still block the
belief in the Final Judgment. The third part (verses 17–​40), setting in with an ev-
ocation of the day of Judgment, merges into an eschatological scene, followed by
a detailed double image.
Sura 78 offers one of the rare cases in which a non-​narrative biblical subtext
becomes clearly evident: the āyāt series in the middle part, verses 6–​16, is unmis-
takably evocative of Psalms 104:1–​2362 (Ps 104:1–​5, 13–​14, 19–​23):

Praise the Lord, my soul.

Lord my God, you are very great;
you are clothed with splendor and majesty.
The Lord wraps himself in light as with a garment;
he stretches out the heavens like a tent
and lays the beams of his upper chambers on their waters.
He makes the clouds his chariot
and rides on the wings of the wind.
He makes winds his messengers,
flames of fire his servants.
He set the earth on its foundations;
it can never be moved.63

He waters the mountains from his upper chambers;

the land is satisfied by the fruit of his work.
He makes grass grow for the cattle,
and plants for people to cultivate—​
bringing forth food from the earth . . .

He made the moon to mark the seasons,

and the sun knows when to go down.
You bring darkness, it becomes night,
and all the beasts of the forest prowl.
The lions roar for their prey
and seek their food from God.
The sun rises, and they steal away;
they return and lie down in their dens.
Then people go out to their work,
to their labor until evening.

62.  The translation is influenced by Gunkel, Die Psalmen; the name of God used in Gunkel’s historical reading,
YHWH, was supposedly replaced by Adonai/​Kyrios already in the psalm reception of Late Antiquity.
63.  Verses 6–​12 depict the myth of the parting of the waters.
 The Rhetorical Qur’an  469

13.3.2  Comparison of the Texts

Despite the differing frameworks—​in the psalm, the praises enumerated are an
integral part of a great hymn, while in the sura they are framed as eschatological
descriptions—​the two texts nonetheless show significant commonalities. Most
striking is the image that occurs nowhere else in the Qur’an of the earth as a
tent64 (Q 78:6–​7), set on pillars (Ps 104:2; cf. Q 78:7), holding up the heavens as a
roof (Ps 104:2), held in place by pegs (Q 78:7). In both texts, however, the image
of the tent is not exclusive: in the sura text, the “seven firmly established,” which
presuppose the Ptolemaic cosmology with the sun as light source (Q 78:12–​24),
cannot be united without tension with the metaphor of the tent; in the psalm, the
image of the tent runs counter to the conception of the cosmos as a multistoried
house of God, from whose upper “chambers,” ʿaliyot (Ps 104:3; 13), God provides
for his creation.65 Furthermore, in both texts, clouds (Ps 104:13, Q 78:14), moun-
tains (Ps 104:13, Q 78:7), sun and moon (Ps 104:19; 22, Q 78:13), and night (Ps
104:20, Q 78:10), as well as the nourishment through the growth of plants (Ps
104:14, Q 78:15–​16), are presented as divine supports. The time of mankind is
the bright day for earning his living (Ps 104:13, Q 78:11), a thought that is not
taken up elsewhere in the Qur’an. But the two texts diverge in the depiction of
the nighttime, since, going beyond the psalm, the sura mentions the idea that
humans have been created as gendered pairs, for whom the night is given as the
time of their sexual fulfillment—​a remarkable Qur’anic addition to the psalmic
image of the human habitat, which does not thematize sexuality. This thought is
expressed with a metaphor that is unique in the Qur’an:66 the two sexes appear
wrapped in a cosmic garment (Q 78:10: wa-​jaʿalnā l-​layla libāsā, “Have we not
given to you the night as a garment?”). Such a cosmic metaphor in the psalm
is conceded only to God as a depiction of his majesty (“with glory and majesty
you are doned [lavashta]. You wrap yourself in light as in a garment [ka-​samla],”
verse 1–​2). In the Qur’an, this anthropomorphism is “corrected,” so to speak, in
that the perspective of God is directed away to humans. The cosmic metaphor
thus does not need to be relinquished; it is transferred to the human couple. Not
only through the strategy of “correcting anthropomorphisms” that was current
in contemporary Bible exegesis as well but also through the reference to the con-
temporary state of knowledge, the cosmic structure based on seven planetary
spheres, the Qur’an text shows itself as a document of Late Antiquity.
But what is unmistakable above all is a fundamental difference:  the psalm
draws a great mythical tableau in which a deity is presented in an anthropo-
morphic shape who—​before the eyes of the psalmist, so to speak—​rules in a
lordly way, drives along in a heavenly chariot, and personally shapes the living

64.  On the ancient Near Eastern context of this image, see Lumpe and Bietenhard, “Himmel.”
65.  The translation follows Gunkel, Die Psalmen; see his commentary, 448; cf. also Zenger, Psalmen, 2:27–​43.
66.  It is quoted again in Q 25:47 from Q 78:10.
470  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

conditions of his creation, taking care of their sustenance. Creation itself seems
dynamically affected, set in motion by his presence; wild creatures come for-
ward and retreat and request from him their nutrition (Ps 104:20–​22). One could
speak here of the topos of the locus amoenus,67 the “pleasant place” that from
Greek Antiquity down to the Renaissance was a dominant motif in descriptions
of nature, including those of the afterlife, and which, according to Ernst Robert
Curtius, involves the setting of a light grove, trees, and running water or springs
forming an idealized scenery of human and especially animal interaction. It is
true that in the psalm the description of nature is set in service of the praise of
God, but without losing its aesthetic appeal: the world, particularly in view of the
presence of God who rules in it, is distinguished as a “pleasant place” marked
by natural riches and the lively interaction of men with their environment. This
judgment cannot be readily applied to the nature description in the sura. As har-
moniously as the human habitat is described there, it does not combine into a
coherent scenario. The individual elements stand for themselves and, instead of
being components of an image, are charged with meaning in themselves: as the
paraenetic form of the rhetorical question that holds the whole tableau together
demonstrates these individual components are meant to point to a theological
message.
For here the work of creation is not envisioned as a creatio perpetua, as in the
psalm, but rather it appears as having been long completed. God is no longer pre-
sent as the agent of creation but rather as a speaker, who in first-​person speech
calls his deeds to memory as instruction. All the provisions for his creatures
enacted by God appear as frozen into timeless divine speech. It is the field of es-
chatological tension created by the new Qur’anic context that has reconfigured
the narrative report of creation anew, transforming it from an image to a part of
a discourse: the text answers in rhetorically expressive speech, through the use
of the figures of speech of anaphor (Q 78:9–​13) and the (cosmic) metaphor (Q
78:10), and also the consistent use of personal address, to the doubt that still
exists among the hearers about the omnipotence of God, which was expressed in
the initiatory provocative rhetorical question. It is a discursive offer that is pro-
posed to the hearers: to decide between the correct side, in view of the judgment
presented in conclusion, and the “opposite place” of hell, a locus terribilis. The
passage is not a hymn, as in the psalm, an expression of spontaneous emotion,
but rather a warning reminder, an argument.
Just as the Qur’an with its unemotional gaze at creation distances itself from
the psalm, which revels in its mythic dynamic and cosmic metaphoric, its posi-
tive reinterpretation of the great predecessor text is all the more significant and
theologically enriching for the new perception of the world. The tent that the

67. Curtius, Europäische Literatur, 202–​209.

 The Rhetorical Qur’an  471

Qur’anic verse group sketches is not part of the cosmic dwelling place of God but
rather a “habitation” trimmed back to human dimensions. Man, who in the pre-​
Islamic worldview is abandoned to nature,68 is presented in the Qur’an as housed.
For him, unlike the pre-​Islamic hero, neither maintenance nor sexual fulfillment
are denied or made unavailable. The Qur’an reverses the ancient Arabic relation
of man and nature.69 It does this not through an argumentation derived from re-
ality but rather by means of referentiality, with the help of the psalmic intertext,
from which it excises, so to speak, the elements relevant for man. The psalmist
praises the monumental glory of God with a view directed upward, while the
Qur’anic speaker has God, looking down on man from above, explain to man
his earthly habitation as a work of divine creation: a quasi-​paradisiacal scenario
of interaction, in which man stands in the center. Set against the psalm text, we
find a Qur’anic counter-​version, in which the change of speaker from man to
God, and the reversal of perspective thus achieved, has led to a frigidly argu-
mentative presentation of the world that appears—​in comparison to the psalm—​
emotionally withdrawn. The hymnics of the psalm give way to Qur’anic rhetoric.
In all this, we should not overlook that the Qur’an, based on its textual, that
is, psalmic, images of nature, describes a turn in relation to the pre-​Islamic per-
ception of nature.70 In the pre-​Islamic worldview, the natural milieu occurs as
a challenge to mankind; it is not immediately accessible but rather a disputed
space, which must first be conquered by the Bedouin hero. The image of nature
sketched by the early poets in the opening sections of their odes expresses no
aesthetic delight in nature, but presents rather the hero’s struggle to restore the
lost form of that space, which was earlier filled with felicitous social interaction
but is now abandoned and obliterated by nature.71 Even the descriptions of spring
looming large in the presentation of the “camel journey,” which do praise the
bounties of nature, restrict the undamped enjoyment of these blessings to the
realm of animals, while the phenomenon of nature’s cyclical self-​renewal exerts
the opposite effect on man, only bringing to his mind his own temporality. In
contrast to this heroic or melancholic position toward space in poetry, the early
Qur’an texts present, in their psalm-​imprinted āyāt-​passages, the earthly space
as trust-​inspiring, as a habitation, at times even as an idyllic scenario. They pre-
sent it as a place of happiness and leisure, of the enjoyment of divine benefac-
tions and ethically directed human interaction. Later parables and even polemics
equally reflect, as Patricia Crone has shown,72 rural life. The Qur’anic orientation
to biblical images that is detectable in the reworkings of Psalm 104 and Psalm

68. Müller, Ich bin Labīd.

69.  Neuwirth, “Geography.”
70.  See Neuwirth, “Geography.”
71.  See Neuwirth, “Geography.”
72.  Crone, “How Did the Qur’ānic Pagans Make a Living?”
472  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

13673 clearly suggest the assumption of a fundamentally text-​referential rather

than reality-​referential pronouncement in the Qur’an, though this problem still
requires more precise treatment.

13.4  Rhetorical Bonding of Earthly Events to the

Transcendent Lord of the Worlds:
Paraenetic Clausulas

13.4.1  From Sajʿ Rhymed Verse to Clausula Verse

Rhetorical innovation manifests itself in the Qur’an not only in the reformulation
of existing traditions but even more in the production of a prose style unknown
in Arabic up to that time, the clausula discourse.74 With the new form of prose
interspersed throughout with recollections of God, valuations, and admonish-
ments for behavior, we see the creation of an effective stylistic medium of sacrally
coded speech and a uniquely flexible theological strategy of connecting inner-​
worldly relations to the transcendent God. This has not been closely observed
as such in research up to now.75 Thus, Friedrich Schwally76 states rather pejora-
tively: “Muhammad’s style becomes ever more slack, so that in the late Meccan
and Medinan suras only two types of rhyme, easy to achieve through grammat-
ical endings and frequent words, prevail. . . . The carelessness in the use of rhyme
becomes more palpable, the less rhyme comes to suit the prosaic tone of the later
pieces, and we have to regard it—​particularly in legal instructions and the like—​
as a heavy fetter, which does not at all decorate the speech.” But already Josef
Horowitz77 drew attention to the parallels with the law texts in the Pentateuch,
where the individual prosaic provisions likewise end with warning or with
strengthening of God’s authority, such as Leviticus 19–​20. Clausula speech thus
can be regarded as thoroughly suitable for the communication of religiously es-
tablished laws, particularly if these are meant as oral public proclamations. Yet
later researchers have remained dependent on Nöldeke’s and Schwally’s mistaken
evaluation of the long verses as prose units flawed by an unsuitable rhyme.78

73.  Neuwirth, “Psalmen”; cf. also chap. 3, 119–131.

74. Neuwirth, Studien zur Komposition, 56–​178; cf. chap. 5, 192–196.
75.  Nöldeke’s verdict, GdQ, 30, repeated in GdQII (second edition), 6, has persisted into later research: “But
even with the strict care that he dedicated to rhyme or assonance, he shows a lack of appreciation for the form, and
he shows this yet more in that he persists with rhymed verse even though his revelations have become closer to pure
prose. On account of this admittedly imperfect rhyming, his language was subject to much compulsion, although
the individual verses of the respective sections often varied greatly with respect to length. Muhammad certainly
meditated greatly over the content of his revelation before he brought it to light, but very little over its form.”
76. Schwally, GdQ2, 40.
77. Horovitz, Koranische Untersuchungen.
78. Bell, Introduction to the Qurʾan, 69–​70, taken over by Watt, Bell’s Introduction to the Qurʾan, 70–​71;
Blachère, Histoire de la Littérature arabe 2:216, 221, 225; Gibb, “ʿArabīya,” 585; Gabrieli, Storia della letteratura
araba, 89; Müller, Untersuchungen zur Reimprosa, 3–​4; cf. also Wansbrough’s review of Müller. All these positions
are discussed by Neuwirth, Studien zur Komposition, 171–​174.
 The Rhetorical Qur’an  473

Within the dominant approach, the clausulas—​not being current in profane nar-
rative technique and not required for the progress of the narrated event—​are still
today treated as disturbing or at best superfluous. What is overlooked here is that
the introduction of the widely stereotypical cola of the long verses, in place of
the rhyming endings of the short verses, signals not only a stylistically and mne-
motechnically relevant change of form but also a change of the intended function
of the Qur’an texts. The clausula endings of the verses are indeed not only end-​
markers of a complex semantic-​syntactic speech unit and elements to support
the memorizing of intended sense-​units, but they are in most cases paraenetic
comments on what is presented, metatextual “recollections” of the source of the
speech, God himself, or at least of his admonishments and claims. Thus, every
statement, even descriptive or reporting ones, becomes a direct or indirect “ap-
peal,”79 an instigation to resume communication. Even Qur’anic salvation history
thus turns into cultic address.
The Qur’anic effectiveness of this device will be demonstrated in an ex-
ample. The early Meccan sura 97, “The Determination,” and the introduction
to the middle Meccan sura 44, “The Smoke,” (verses 2–​8) are dedicated to the
same object, the “night of the determination.”80 Both texts work with metatextual
elements, sura 97 through rhetorical questions, and the later sura 44 through
clausulas.

innā anzalnāhu fī laylati l-​qadr

wa-​mā adrāka mā laylatu l-​qadr
laylatu l-​qadri khayrun min alfi shahr
tanazzalu l-​malāʾikatu wa-​l-​rūḥu fīhā
bi-​idhni rabbihim min kulli amr
salāmun hiya ḥattā maṭlaʿi  l-​fajr

We sent it down in the night of determination.

Do you know what the night of determination is?
The night of determination is better than a thousand months.
In it angels and the spirit descend
by permission of their Lord in every matter.
It is a blessing until break of day! (Q 97:1–​5)

ḥāʾ mīm
wa-​l-​kitābi l-​mubīn
innā anzalnāhu fī laylatin mubārakatin
innā kunnā mundhirīn

79. Cf. the three-​part division of speech into declaration, description, and appellatory speech in Bühler,
Sprachtheorie.
80.  On the two suras, see Neuwirth, Studien zur Komposition, 157.
474  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

fīhā yufraqu kullu amrin ḥakīm

amran min ʿindinā
innā kunnā mursilīn
raḥmatan min rabbika
innahu huwa l-​samīʿu l-​ʿalīm
rabbi l-​samawāti wa-​l-​arḍi wa-​mā baynahumā
in kuntum mūqinīn
lā ilāha illā huwa, yuḥyi wa-​yumītu
rabbukum wa-​rabbu abāʾikumu l-​awwalīn

Ha mim
By the clear writing!
We sent it down in a blessed night—​
It is We who are the warners -​
In which all the wise decisions are taken
By instruction from us—​
It is We who send down,
Out of mercy from your Lord—​
He is the all-​hearing, the all-​knowing,
From the Lord of the heavens and the earth and what is between them,
If you would indeed recognize it!
No God but him! He brings to life and lets die,
Your Lord and the Lord of your forefathers! (Q 44:1–​8)

Three statements are shared between the two texts:  (1) the sending down of
the qurʾān figuring as a medium of divine-​human communication, in a blessed
night, (2) the glorification of the night, and (3) God’s position on this. In the early
Meccan sura 97,81 these statements are distributed over four short verses: verse
1 = statement (1), verses 3 and 4a = statement (2), and verse 4b = statement (3).
This distribution avoids the stylistic flaw of overly compressing the weighty mes-
sage into verses following immediately on each other; therefore in verse 2 a rhe-
torical question82 halts the progression of the discourse and thus lends additional
weight to the statements. In sura 44, whose style is already more syntactically
complex, multipartite, verses, that is, verses consisting of more than one sentence,
the prevailing verse rhythm requires longer verse units. To compress more than
one of the important statements into a single longer verse, which would be tech-
nically possible, would deprive them of their particular pathos. The three state-
ments are therefore isolated from each other through clausulas: statement (1) is
additionally accounted for in verse 3b through a self-​praising of God as mundhir,

81.  It is considered here in its final form. On verse 4, which was added later, see Sinai, Studien zur frühen
Koraninterpretation, 157.
82.  On the structural elements of the suras, cf. chap. 5, 166–187.
 The Rhetorical Qur’an  475

“warner”; statement (2)  borders directly on statement (3), but the sequence is
loosened stylistically through the enjambement yufraqu . . . /​ amran, “decisions
are taken . . . /​by instruction.” A clausula is used for closure, which now praises
God as the sender of messengers (verse 5b). Then statement (3)  is taken up
again in verse 6a, focusing now on the divine motif, after which comes another
clausula—​about God as the all-​hearing, the all-​knowing (verse 6b). Connected
to both closing verses of the passage we find further hymnic praises, expressed in
7b by a paraenetic and verse 8c by a hymnic clausula. Both texts, sura 97 and Q
44:1–​8, employ stylistic strategies to avoid an overly strong amassment and thus
a devaluation of important statements. This is effected in sura 97 by a rhetorical
question, while in sura 44 it is achieved by the employment of clausulas, which
has become a regular strategy from the middle Meccan period on.

13.4.2  What Exactly Are Clausulas?

On the one hand, clausulas are markers of verse endings. In the early Meccan
period, individual marked rhymes signaled the verse ends unambiguously; but
this effect can no longer be brought about by the rhyme alone, after the adoption
of rhymed prose composed of long verses with rhymes largely based on the mor-
phologically easily achieved -​ūn/​-​īn pattern. The element that is to be repeated,
which now signals the close, is thus no longer purely phonetic, but rather takes
on syntactical dimensions, since the masculine plural ending (-​ūn/​-​īn), which is
now necessary for the completion of the rhyme at the conclusion of the sentence,
can only be achieved through particular syntactical constructions. But not all
concluding cola83 are clausulas; the term should only be applied for those cola
that structurally resemble formulas and thus have a clear concluding character.84
These stand out from their context semantically as well, containing for the most
part transcendence referents that give the text a sacral encoding. The following
types can be distinguished:85
1. Clausulas confirming the revelation (Q 44:3 and 5)
2. Hymnic clausulas, often predications of God (Q 44:6 and 8)
3. Evaluative clausulas, the chief function of which is to judge the actors of
the narrated story or their behaviors positively or negatively from a reli-
gious or moral aspect, e.g., wa-​mā anā mina l-​mushrikīn, “I am not one of
those who associate others with God” (Q 12:108c)

83.  On the term, see chap. 5, 192–196.

84.  The author has attempted to classify the specific formal characteristics on the basis of the constituents of
sentences in Studien zur Komposition, with reference to the criteria developed for the formulaicity of early Arabic
poetry by Monroe, “Oral Composition.”
85.  In what follows, the description of the clausulas provided in an earlier study is taken up again; cf. Neuwirth,
“Yūsuf-​Sure.”
476  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

4. Clausulas focusing on conditions or behaviors. These determine actions

or temporary conditions that are value neutral but significant for the prog-
ress of the plot, so, e.g., wa-​hum yamkurūn, “while they were intriguing”
(Q 12:102c).
5. Paraenetic clausulas in a stricter sense. These appeal directly to the in-
sight or gratitude of the hearers. They can entail a direct exhortation or
a warning against wrong behavior, e.g. in kuntum mūqinīn, “if you but
would recognize clearly” (Q 44:7), or laʿallakum taʿqilūn, “that perhaps
you might comprehend” (Q 12:2b).
In sura 12, the evaluative clausulas and the predications of God alone amount to
nearly half of all verse endings, fifty of a total 111, which is not surprising in a
sura that is claimed in the Qur’an itself to be “the most beautiful narration” (verse
3), and which therefore is acknowledged as especially formidable and well-​suited
for meditation. In sura 12, which has been specially studied with regard to its
clausulas, we find an extraordinary intensive employment of that hermeneutical
element, which deserves to be termed the basso continuo of the later Qur’anic
discourse, namely, the all-​penetrating remembrance of God as the absolute ruler
and consequently the awareness of the division of men into those who act ac-
cording to the will of God and those who act against it. It is worth noting that
the evaluative clausulas not only make statements about the respective persons
in question but implicitly contain an appeal to the reciter and his hearers to join
the positive group or at least endure with them and part ways with or remain
separate from the negative group. We should also understand accordingly the
analytic constructions with min, “one of,” + plural. In sura 12, this construction
appears nine times: in the verses 24, 26, 27, 29, 33, 36, 51, 78, and 108. Q 12:78
is an example:
qālū yā ayyuhā l-​ʿazīzu inna lahu aban shaykhan kabīran
fa-​khudh aḥadanā makānahu
innā narāka mina l-​muḥsinīn

They said: O powerful Lord, he has a father who is very old,

So take one of us in his place;
we see that you are one of those who do good.
It is not merely the compulsion of rhyme that prompts the choice of the unwieldy
means of expression; rather, in view of the frequent Qur’anic division of mankind
into two camps without any intermediary levels, this kind of recouping of rhyme
simply comes in handy. The fact that it also imported from poetry which is rich in
analogous constructions, the flair of sophisticated speech, was certainly welcome.
In sura 12, which itself includes no hymn as such, elements of hymn are
strewn throughout the entire narrative part in the form of verse-​ending clau-
sulas. For a contemplative hearer, these predications of God could even appear
 The Rhetorical Qur’an  477

as the actual backbone of the narrative. Seen as such, the narrative is not inter-
twined and adorned with epithets of God, but rather the various praiseworthy
characteristics of God are unfolded by means of a narrative. The short clausula,
limited to the ending colon of individual verses, can be considered as a Qur’anic
coinage of what in Christian-​Jewish contexts takes the form of hymnic speech
across entire verse groups.
This change of hermeneutical keys, by which the discourse occasionally tran-
scends its actual themes, also made an impact on some unbiased intellectuals
of markedly European training. Just one example is Hugo von Hofmannsthal,
whose testimony is all the more valuable as it is based not directly on the Qur’an
but rather on the strong aftereffect of this Qur’anic mode of discourse in later
Islamic culture. In his classic introduction to One Thousand and One Nights (first
printed in 1907) he writes:

In the story of ʾAlī Shār and the faithful Zumurrud, to hit on just one of
a thousand pages, there is a moment that I  would not trade for any of
the most sublime places in our most venerable books. And it is almost
nothing. The lover wants to free his beloved, who has been stolen away by
an evil old ghost. He has scouted out the house, and is under the window
at midnight; a sign is agreed upon, and he merely needs to give it. But he
must wait a short while. Then he is overtaken by a leaden sleep, as incon-
venient as it is irresistible, as if fate from the darkness had breathed stulti-
fyingly onto him. “Indeed then sleepiness overtook him,” it says, “and he
fell asleep—​mighty is he, who never sleeps!”86

13.5  Rhetorical Triumph over the Jewish and

Christian Credos

There is yet a further contest recognizable in sura 112, “The Pure Belief,”87 see
table, which is represented by the single voice of the Qur’an itself, although which
other voices can still be heard in it; here we will lay out a discussion of this contest
in its rhetorical aspects.88
It is difficult not to hear the beginning verse qul huwa llāhu aḥad, “Say: He
is God is one,” as a free translation of the Jewish credo, Shmaʿ Yisraʾel, adonai

86.  Von Hofmannsthal, “Tausendundeine Nacht,” 473, reprinted in Littmann, Tausendundeine Nacht, 1:12.
87.  For the reference texts to sura 112, see the databank of “intertexts” in the project Corpus Coranicum,
Berlin-​Brandenburg Academy of Sciences. The first part of the sura was already connected with various biblical
texts, including the Shemaʿ Yisraʾel, by Paçacı, “Sura 12.” However, Paçacı does not understand the Qur’anic relation
to these texts dialectically, but rather assumes a shared store of traditions that has been incorporated in the Qur’an.
The contextualization of the second part is due to a conversation with Michael Marx. The studies by Newby, “Sūrat
al-​Iskhlāṣ”; Rubin, “al-​Ṣamad”; and Ambros, “Sura 112,” which do not contain discussion of the Jewish-​Christian
credo intertexts, do not recognize the dialectical character of the sura.
88.  Cf. chap. 3, 116–119.
 The Rhetorical Triumph: Creeds Negotiated

Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed (381 ce) Dtn 6:4 Q 112: “Sincerity” (al-ikhlāṣ)

English Greek English Hebrew English Arabic

We believe in one God, Πιστεύομεν εἰς ἕνα Θεόν, Hear, Israel, ‫ יְ הוָ ה‬:‫יִ ְׂש ָר ֵאל‬ Say: He is ‫َولَمۡ يَكُن لَّهُۥ كُ ُف ًوا أَ َح ٌد‬
the Lord is our ‫ יְ הוָ ה‬,‫ֹלהינּו‬
ֵ ‫ֱא‬ God, one,
God, the Lord ,‫א ָחד ְׁש ַמע‬.ֶ
is One.

The Father Almighty, Maker of Πατέρα, Παντοκράτορα, ποιητὴν God, the ‫َولَمۡ يَكُن لَّهُۥ كُ ُف ًوا أَ َح ٌد‬
heavens and earth, and of all οὐρανοῦ καὶ γῆς, ὁρατῶν τε absolute,
things visible and invisible. πάντων καὶ ἀοράτων.

And in one Lord Jesus Christ, Καὶ εἰς ἕνα Κύριον Ἰησοῦν He did not ‫َولَمۡ يَكُن لَّهُۥ كُ ُف ًوا أَ َح ٌد‬
the only-begotten Son of God, Χριστόν, τὸν Υἱὸν τοῦ Θεοῦ τὸν beget, nor is
begotten of the Father before μονογενῆ, τὸν ἐκ τοῦ Πατρὸς he begotten,
all worlds (aeons), Light of γεννηθέντα πρὸ πάντων τῶν
Light, very God of very God, αἰώνων· φῶς ἐκ φωτός, Θεὸν
begotten, not made, ἀληθινὸν ἐκ Θεοῦ ἀληθινοῦ,
γεννηθέντα οὐ ποιηθέντα,

being of one substance with ὁμοούσιον τῷ Πατρί. And there ‫َولَمۡ يَكُن لَّهُۥ كُ ُف ًوا أَ َح ٌد‬
the Father. is none like
him.
 The Rhetorical Qur’an  479

elohenu adonai eḥad, “Hear Israel: the Lord, our God, is one” (Dtn 6:4). The key-
word “one” eḥad, resonates unmistakably in the Arabic text with aḥad, “one.” This
“multivocity” “polyphony,” of two texts in one is achieved through an “ungram-
maticality,” a violation of Arabic grammar, which in place of the noun aḥad in
rhyme position would require the adjective wāḥid. According to the theory of the
researcher of poetics Michael Riffaterre, ungrammaticality denotes a verbal phe-
nomenon that, by standing out from a certain text, makes reference to another
text where this form is “normal.” What initially appears as an irregularity shows
itself, through knowledge of the “other text,” to be a bridge between two texts
that mutually illuminate each other: Riffaterre speaks here of a dual sign, a sign
of double significance: “The sign of double significance works through a play on
words. . . . It is initially perceived as mere ungrammaticality, until one discovers
that there is another text in which the word is ‘grammatical.’ Once this text is
identified, the sign of double significance becomes significant in its form, which
makes reference to that other code.”
As we have seen, the Jewish text remains hearable through the Qur’anic ver-
sion. This audible “citation,” hearable across linguistic borders, underlines the
new Qur’an-​specific turn, which transfers the old credo, a confession-​specific
text marked by address to Israel, into a universal text to be repeated by all men.
To make the Jewish credo universally valid, and thus also acceptable to a non-​
Jewish hearership, the text is reformulated, but without losing the distinct form
in which it already possesses authority.
Not quite so striking on first glance is the fact that the short sura makes ref-
erence to a further credo. The text that was central in Judaism had long been
interpreted in Christian theology in terms of a Trinitarian credo. In the Nicene
Creed, it takes this form: “We believe in one God, the Father, the all-​powerful,
who created everything, heaven and earth, all that is sensible and insensible. And
in the one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who was born as the only child
from the Father before all time, light out of light, true God out of true God,
born, not created, of one essence with the father.” The Qur’anic verse 112:3, lam
yalid wa-​lam yūlad, “he did not engender a child, nor was he born,” resonates
as an echo of the Nicene Creed “born, not created.” But the verse unmistakably
rejects the statement of the Nicene Creed, genēthenta ou poiēthenta, “born, not
created.” It is remarkable that it thereby employs a double expression that is no
less emphatic than the original, lam yalid wa-​lam yūlad, “he did not engender
child and was not born,” and thus remains close to the “translated” text in its rhe-
torically marked form. A negative theology is here established, achieved through
a recognizable inversion of a key text that is prominent locally—​though among
Christians rather than Jews. This negative theology is condensed in verse 4: wa-​
lam yakun lahu kufuwan aḥad, “and no one is equal to him.”89

89. Riffaterre, Semiotics of Poetry, 92.

480  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

This verse, which up to now has been read simply as a particularly forceful con-
fession of monotheism, is striking. It introduces kufuwan, “equal,” which occurs
only once in the Qur’an, as a reproduction of the important theological con-
cept homoousios, Greek for “equal in nature.” It thus not only inverts the Nicene
Creed’s statement of the essential likeness of Christ with the Father, homoousios
to patri, but also goes beyond it to epistemically exclude the mere thought that
any created being could be equal to God—​to say nothing of the essential likeness
of a son. This is yet another ambitious rhetorical translation, but one that induces
a rigorous reinterpretation of an older text.
Where do such probings of the Qur’anic wording lead? Not least to the traces
of that “conversation” from which the Qur’anic text, as we have it, came forth.
For the text that opposes the Nicene Creed is of course not simply a polemical
address to the Christians but also forms a part of a new cross-​confessional for-
mulation of the two familiar credos as they may have been acceptable not just to
the Qur’anic community but also to hearers from among the Jewish community
of Medina: a reformulation of the Jewish confession of God’s unity, expanded by
a delimitation against Christological interpretations of the unity of God.
This kind of historical illumination of the structure of Qur’an texts stands at
a far remove from inner-​Islamic exegesis. Yet inner-​Islamic exegesis attributes
the highest significance to the structure of the discourse. The classical scholar of
rhetoric al-​Jurjānī based his defense of the uniqueness of the Qur’an predomi-
nately on “structure,” that is, the “meaningful linking of word signs to the com-
munication of an intention,” naẓm. Navid Kermani has cited the programmatic
passages in his work on Qur’anic rhetoric:

We say that the qualitative excess (mazāyā) appeared to them (i.e., the
contemporaries of Muhammad) in the naẓm of the Qur’an, that it was
the peculiarities they found employed in the linking of verbal expressions
(alfāẓ) that incapacitated them in the face of any response or challenge;
we say that it was the figures of word and sense (badāʾiʿ) comprised within
the individual elements of the verses that filled them with shudders, and
that every expression was in its place and in harmony with the oth-
ers. . . . They found a well-​structuredness that overwhelmed their spirits
through its majesty and paralyzed all men on the basis of verbal order and
harmony, by its inner perfection and the conclusiveness of its construc-
tion. No longer did any speaker feel the ambition to set something against
it; he would rack his brains if he wanted, but nothing would come to him,
so that no tongue was able any longer to say anything or make claims, and
even the greatest of the opponents admitted defeat and withheld every
word of resistance.90

90.  Al-​Jurjānī, Dalāʾil al-​Iʿjāz fī l-​Qurʾān, 44; translation by Kermani, Gott ist schön, 256.
 The Rhetorical Qur’an  481

Although it is itself a paradigmatic example of hyperbole or “exaggeration,”

mubāligha, this encomium brings to a point a central characteristic of the
Qur’anic language: its particular pathos due to conscious rhetorical molding. The
social frame of this success is, in al–​Jurjānī’s view, that of a contest. In agree-
ment with the literary genre of his tractate on “inimitability,” he thinks in partic-
ular of the rhetorical triumph over verbally gifted rivals of the Prophet. What he
describes as a trump card of the Qur’anic style, however, the impressive figures of
word and sense in the individual verses, stands out all the more if one contrasts
it with familiar older formulations from the Jewish/​Christian predecessor texts.
In the two examples already presented, suras 78 and 112, we see a tendency to
eclipse the Christian or Jewish texts taken as challenges, through the heighten-
ing of expression: this was achieved in sura 112 through the universalization of
particulars, qul, “speak!,” instead of “Hear, Israel,” or “he did not engender a child
nor was he born,” which is clearly more categorical in comparison to “born, not
created.” It was achieved in sura 78 through the redistribution of anthropomor-
phic or cosmic attributes from God to mankind. Ornamental rhetorical figures,
badāʾiʿ, are also instrumental in this, such as anaphor [qul huwa] Allāhu aḥad,
Allāhu l-​ṣamad, “[say, he] God is one /​God, the constant” in Q 112:1–​2, or the
anaphoric sequence khalaqnākum . . . wa-​jaʿalnā . . . wa-​jaʿalnā . . . , “We created
you . . . /​We made . . . /​We made . . . ,” in Q 78:8–​11;13. It was not only that con-
temporary opponents, as the “challenge verses” might suggest, were to be over-
come, but also, and above all, it was necessary to confront the powerful traditions
of the predecessor religions on the same level.
Rhetoric in the Qur’an is thus not only a means for spontaneous persuasion;
it also stands in the service of the creation of a new speech form. It is concerned
with the communication of theological positions, which subliminally accompa-
nying the semantic message, suggest the epistemic verifiability of the message.
It is for the sake of this new speech form that the emotionally affecting image of
Psalm 104 was “recast” in the Qur’an into an epistemically oriented structure that
aims at rational insight, thus pursuing the goal of persuasio, persuasion, through
consciously employed means. This new structure can be termed the specific “rhe-
torical structure” of the Qur’an.
What we have presented in this last section is not transmitted in the Islamic
tradition. The biography of the Prophet shows little interest in the debates with
the older communities, and even less does it allow for these to be the triggers of
Qur’anic textual production. No one would read sura 112 or sura 78 against the
background of their pre-​Islamic, Christian and Jewish, intertexts. The reasons
for this refusal to face the multifacetedness and polyphony of the Qur’an as ulti-
mately a reflection of the pluriculturality of pre-​Islamic Arabia are too complex
historically and politically to be discussed in detail in this framework.
One important reason, however, can certainly be identified: it is concern for
the integrity of the Qur’an. The problematics inherent in our new perspective
482  The Qur’an and Late Antiquity

on the history of the Qur’an’s genesis should therefore not be downplayed: the

reading we have suggested would make sensible a wide spectrum of “buried”
theological and liturgical traditions that were once transmitted in the Arabic lan-
guage. The great wealth of long ignored and forgotten traditions thus would be-
come recognizable again. It would however also require—​and this, seen from
the conservative standpoint, would be an imminent negative result—​breaking
taboos: the exclusivity of the classical Arabic language, which reaches its climax
in the Qur’an, is problematized. Looking at the Qur’an through a historical-​
critical lens, we can glimpse the diversity of the “inartificial” linguistic and cul-
tural idiom that circulated in the Near East before Islam shining through the
varnish of the aesthetically developed and unprecedentedly successful medium
of Arabic, a diversity that was obscured from historical consciousness by can-
onization. Ultimately, the Qur’an’s—​historically unique—​unifying achievement,
once the text is reconnected to the diversity that it came to cover up, would be
available for discussion again.
At the same time—​and this seems to be the most important argument for our
approach—​it is only through historical reflection that the text becomes fully rec-
ognizable in its dimensions of innovation. Only when the epistemic revolution
achieved by the Qur’an is set into relief against a historically illuminated back-
ground can the Qur’an be recognized as both an Islamic inheritance and a Late
Antique legacy to Europe. And only then can we begin to perceive it, finally, on
the same level as the two more ancient scriptures.
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 Index of Persons

ʿAbd al-​Baqi, Fuʾād 162 Ben-​Shammai, Haggai  306

ʿAbd al-​Malik  7, 47, 147–​149, 159–​160 Bergsträsser, Gotthelf  40, 139, 158–​159
Abdu, Muhammad  61, 62 Bint al-​Shāti (ʿĀʾisha Abd al-​Raḥmān) 61
Abū ʿAmr ibn al-​ʿAlāʾ  153, 154 Birkeland, Harris  166, 243, 255
Abū Bakr  140, 144 Blachère, Regis  42, 141, 162, 165
Abū Qurra, Theodore  460 Bloch, Alfred  22
Abū ʿUbayd ibn Sallām  151 Bobzin, Hartmut  162
Abu Zayd, Nasr Hamid  36, 62, 63, 71, 82, Böwering, Gerhard  376
94, 102, 331 Bowersock, Glen  456
Ahrens, Karl  41 Boyarin, Daniel  91, 312, 319, 355, 360–​362
Alter, Robert  353–​354, 374 Bravmann, Meir M.  57
Ammann, Ludwig  55, 202–​204, 238, 422, Brockelmann, Carl  114
423, 445–​447, 454, 462 Brown, Peter  108, 456
Andrae, Tor  41, 43, 255 Buhl, Frants  363
ʿAntara 435 Bukharin, Mikhail  54
Arberry, Arthur  12, 162 Burton, John  50
Arkoun, Mohammed  13 Busse, Herbert  351, 356, 358, 383, 384
al-​Ashʿarī, Abū Mūsā  144
Assmann, Jan  100, 143, 193, 207, 213, Caskel, Werner  421
220, 286 Chabbi, Jacqueline  60, 203
Azmeh, Aziz  75 Colpe, Carsten  54
Combs-​Schilling, Elaine  395
al-​Bāqillānī  457,  461 Cook, Michael  47 f.
Basil the Great  455 Crone, Patricia  47–​49, 204–​205, 313, 471
Bauer, Hans  145, 146, 193 Curtius, Ernst Robert  470
Bauer, Thomas  55, 420, 422–​424, 447–​448
Baumstark, Anton  42, 284 al-​Dānī  153,  155
Beck, Edmund  151 Dayeh, Islam  62
Becker, Adam  273–​275 Déroche, Francois  147, 159, 161
Becker, Carl Heinrich  235 Diem, Werner  452
Bell, Richard  34, 41–​42, 141, 162, 165, 208 al-​Dimyāṭī al-​Bannā  154

521
522  Index of Persons

Dohmen, Christoph  355 Hoyland, Robert  54, 59, 60, 108

Donner, Fred  105, 137, 376 Hughes, Aaron  55, 119
al-​Husari, Mahmud Khalil  99, 156
Elbogen, Ismar  209 Hussein, Taha  420
Ess, Josef van  268, 425, 431
Ibn Abī Dāwūd al-​Sijistānī  151
Fahd, Toufic  426 Ibn Hishām  8
Farahi, Hamid al-​Din  63 Ibn Isḥāq  8, 431
al-​Fārisī  153 Ibn Jinnī  151
al-​Farrāʾ 152 Ibn Kathīr  153
Feldman, Louis F.  388 Ibn Khālawayh  151, 153
Finster, Barbara  54 Ibn Khāqān  155
Fisch, Harold  371 Ibn Masʿūd  111, 144, 145 f., 151
Fischer, August  42 Ibn Mujāhid  151 f.
Flügel, Gustav  162 Imhof, Agnes  57, 315, 421, 424, 451
Flusser, David  58 Irenaeus of Lyon  129
Fraser, Marcus  159, 160 Islahi, Amin Ahsan  63
Frye, Northrup  352 f. Izutsu, Toshihiko  272, 421, 435, 440
Fück, Johann  41 f.
Jacobi, Renate  202
Geiger, Abraham  37 f., 61 Jadaane, Fahmi  456
al-​Ghazālī  96 al-​Jāhiẓ  453 f., 457
Goerke, Andreas  58 al-​Jazarī  153
Goitein, Shlomo Dov  215, 233, 234, 284, 416 al-​Jurjānī  458, 460, 480, 481
Goldziher, Ignaz  38, 40, 59, 426 Jeffrey, Arthur  142, 144, 151, 162
Graf, Friedrich Wilhelm  101 Josephus  399 f.
Graham, William  114 Jülicher, Adolf  307 f.
Gregory of Nazanius  455
Grunebaum, Gustav E. Von  44, 45, 46, Kaʿb ibn Mālik  315
357 f., 461 Kaʿb ibn Zuhayr  315, 452
Karimi, Ahmad Milad  162
Ḥafṣ  8, 152, 154, 157, 161 Kassir, Samir  14, 21
Hamdan, Omar  147, 148 Kellermann, Andreas  97 f., 114 f., 156
Hamori, Andras  202 Kermani, Navid  24, 96, 458, 480
Ḥamza 153 Kessler, Christel  148
Hartwig, Dirk  38, 308, 413, 415 Khalafallah, Muhammad  61 f.
al-​Ḥasan al-​Baṣrī 154 Khalidi, Tarif  43, 131
Ḥassān ibn Thābit  315, 451 al-​Khaṭṭābī 457
Hawting, Gerald  48, 55 Khoury, Adel Theodore  162
Heidemann, Stefan  54 al-​Khuli, Amin  36, 61
Hirschfeld, Hartwig  38, 308 al-​Kindy, Sallam  57
Hofmannsthal, Hugo von  477 f. al-​Kisāʾī 153
Horovitz, Josef  38, 40, 43, 129, 131, 165, 179, Kister, M.J.  59
205, 262, 264, 290, 376, 380, 382, 383 f. Knauf, Axel  58
Horsch, Silvia  338 f. Kohlberg, Etan  339
 Index of Persons  523

Koloska, Hannelies  308 Premare, Alfred-​Louis  147

Kugel, James  80, 354, 369 f., 419 f. Pretzl, Otto  157, 159, 161

Labīd ibn Rabīʿa  263, 315, 451 Qālūn 161

Lammens, Henri  59 Quraysh  145, 213, 429
Lecker, Michael  59 Quṭb, Sayyid  62
Lesky, Albin  455
Lohmann, Theodore  308 Rabīʿa ibn Naṣr 431
Longinus 461 Radscheit, Andreas  162, 463
Luxenberg, Christoph  51–​57 Rahman, Fazlur  7, 203, 208
al-​Rāzi, Fakhr al-​Dīn  146
Madigan, Daniel  76 f., 89, 93, 95, 142 Reeves, John  139
Makī ibn Abī Ṭālib  153, 155 Reiser, Marius  33
Margoliouth, Samuel  420 Richter, Gustav  42
Marshall, David  48 Ricoeur, Paul  368
Meier, Andreas  94 f. Rida, Rashid  61, 62
Meier, Fritz  341 Riffaterre, Michael  479
Mingana, Alphonse  42 Rippin, Andrew  47, 57
Mir, Mustansir  63 Robbins, Vernon K.  241, 368 f.
Mittwoch, Eugen  235 Robin, Christian  54 f.
Montgomery, James  15, 21, 421, 454 Robinson, Neal  48, 189
Motzki, Harald  58 Rosenthal, Franz  121–​123, 271
Mourad, Sulaiman  297–​298, 366, 367 Rubin, Uri  59, 213, 216 f., 224, 242, 245, 246
Müller, David Heinrich  42 Rückert, Friedrich  12, 162
Müller, Gottfried  244, 247, 255, 264, 445 Rudolph, Wilhelm  41
al-​Rummānī  457
Nāfiʿ  153–​154,  161
Nagel, Tilman  43, 58, 208, 333, 396 al-​Saʿid, Labib  156
Nebes, Norbert  54 Sale, George  12
Nelson, Kristina  97 Satīḥ  431 f.
Noja Noseda, Sergio  159, 161 Schmidt, Hans-​Peter  374 f.
Nöldeke, Theodor  20, 38, 39, 43, 114, 119, Schoeler, Gregor  58, 208
140, 141, 165, 166, 187, 190, 192, 210, Schöller, Marco  58, 137
292, 376, 472 Schwally, Friedrich  141, 144, 472
Noth, Albrecht  338, 429 Sells, Michael  189
al-​Shāṭibī, Abū l-​Qāsim  62, 153
Obermann, Julian  413 f. Shawqi, Ahmad  100, 102
Ohlig, Karl-​Heinz  53 Sinai, Nicolai  49, 50, 57, 60, 76, 115, 175,
Origen  354 f. 184, 349, 397, 398, 400
Speyer, Heinrich  38, 108, 290, 351, 363,
Pacaci, Mehmet  36, 117 375, 380, 390, 467
Paret, Rudi  42, 43, 162, 375, 430 Spitaler, Anton  151, 157, 459
Pearson, James D.  162 Sprenger, Alois  40
Peters, Francis E.  55 Stegemann, Hartmut  94
Philo of Alexandria  353, 354 Stein, Peter  54
524  Index of Persons

Stetkevych, Jaroslav  57, 373 Warsh  154, 161

Stetkevych, Suzanne  57 Watt, W. Montgomery  42
Weidner, Daniel  370
Tamer, Georges  122 f. Weidner, Stefan  12, 162
Thanavi, Ashraf Ali  63 Weil, Gustav  20
Toorn, Karl van der  78 Welch, Alford  146
Wellhausen, Julius  38, 55, 59, 425
Ubayy  140, 144 f., 151 Whelan, Estelle  147, 148, 149, 160
ʿUmar ibn al-​Khaṭṭāb  140, 144 Wielandt, Rotraud  62 f.
Umayya ibn Abī al-​Ṣalt 421 Wild, Stefan  89, 464
ʿUthmān  144 f., 147 Winkler, Helmut  284
Witztum, Joseph  53, 399 f.
Vollers, Karl  152 Wolfson, Elliot R.  103
Wolfson, Harry A.  93
Wahb ibn Munabbih  59
Wansbrough, John  24, 34, 47–​50, 57, 209, Zayb ibn Thābit  140, 143, 145
240, 306, 356, 380, 410 Zirker, Hans  162, 351
 General Index

Abbasids  122, 201 chronology  9, 19–​20, 24 f., 27, 30, 39, 43,
abrogation, see al-​nāsikh wa-​l-​mansūkh 109, 131, 138, 163 f., 183, 190–​199, 239,
ʿahd a-​last (original covenant)  340, 415 376, 384, 462
the Akathistos Hymn  330–​331, 465 circumstances of the revelation (asbāb
allegory  16, 101, 289, 308 f., 352, 354 f., al-​nuzūl)  3, 7, 19, 163
360, 362, 364 f., 365–​367 codification  1, 46, 58, 111, 114, 208, 221, 420
angels  70, 178, 186 f., 196, 261 f., consolation, Suras of  166 f., 182, 227,
279 f., 294–​297, 302, 304, 340, 360, 239–​244, 255, 278
377–​378, 473 contingency (coping with)  127, 131, 202,
apocryphal gospels  78, 139, 289, 297 f., 268, 362 f., 422–​424, 444–​446
380, 394 Corpus Coranicum Project  25, 40, 53,
Apparatus criticus zumf Koran  151, 158 f. 117, 140, 160, 477
ʿAqeda  336, 343, 394 counter-​history  107, 135 f., 277, 397
asbāb al-​nuzūl, see circumstances of the creation  122–​131
revelation
ʿĀshūrāʾ Festival  55, 233 dahr  122, 263
aṭlāl  129, 132, 263, 383, 445 Decalogue  226, 300
aya, see signs diptych  174, 176 f., 259, 261
ayyām al-​ʿarab  15, 108, 420 Dome of the Rock  89, 148, 160
doxology  84, 182, 218, 284
Badr  198, 211, 231, 234, 315, 333 f.,
416, 451 epigonality  8, 12 f., 15 f., 26, 39, 51, 351
banquets  129 f., 165, 259–​264 Eucharist  12, 90, 96, 211, 342
basmala  100, 116, 142, 146, 148, 237, 284 exodus  106, 211, 232, 270, 287, 290, 315,
bedouins  21, 56, 60, 175 f., 203, 240, 423, 320, 322, 347, 356 f., 405, 408–​413
434–​438, 440, 445, 448, 454, 462, 471
Fakhr  56, 448
canonization  35, 40, 75, 95, 107, 114, Fātiḥa  111, 116, 164, 192, 224 f., 233, 237,
420, 482 282–​285

525
526  General Index

fawātiḥ (letter combinations that intro- mathal  56, 87, 226, 306–​311, 361–​363, 440
duce suras)  99, 100, 113, 116, 145–​147, murūʾa  57, 422, 435, 448
146 f., 193, 266, 273–​275 mushrikūn  191, 204–​206, 475

Golden Calf  119, 232 f., 318–​323, 355, 416 al-​nabī al-​ummī  93, 403–​404
nasīb  16, 129–​132, 168, 262–​264, 383, 445
ḥag ha-​sukkot  55, 234 al-​nāsikh wa-​l-​mansūkh (abrogation)  3,
ḥajj  55, 203, 216, 238, 341, 343 f., 396 141, 286
ḥaram  213, 221, 229 f., 286, 409 f.
hijāʾ  56, 183, 442, 451 oath clusters  167–​169, 174, 192, 359,
hijra  5, 6, 13, 211, 239, 288, 313 f., 332 f., 431, 434
392, 394, 397, 408, 411
Holy Land  100, 123, 136, 194, 220, 286 f., panim shel ha-​Tora 326
334, 350, 395, 402. See also Jerusalem paradise, description of  127, 132. See also
banquets
ʿīd al-​aḍḥā 341 poetry  292, 306, 315, 352, 354, 361, 370,
inlibration  44, 65, 68, 89 f., 92–​95, 102, 103 383, 385, 403, 419–​426, 431, 434, 441–​452
inspiration  52, 58, 63, 65–​72, 97, 102, 110, poets  39, 67, 73, 123, 202, 262, 314, 315,
252, 279, 280, 347, 372, 407, 420, 426, 347, 369, 370, 419, 422–​425, 447–​451
429, 444, 450 prayer, direction of  100, 135, 194, 220,
introitus  111, 193, 225, 238, 283 230, 286–​288, 332–​334, 410
prayer, times of  172, 214, 216 f., 223, 225,
Jāhiliyya  14 f., 38, 119–​122, 191, 201 f., 420 228, 236
Jerusalem  89, 100, 113, 135, 136, 148, 194, providence, assurance of  127, 131, 166,
211, 220 f., 236, 282, 286–​289, 293, 317, 240 f., 244 f., 278
332, 334–​337, 400 f., 410 Psalms  72 f., 76, 97, 125, 166, 197, 229,
Jerusalem Temple  211, 221, 288 f., 290, 240, 241–​243, 249, 251, 252, 261, 290,
293, 400 309, 348, 419, 437, 467, 468
John, Prologue  90–​92 punishment legends  131–​134, 179, 180,
jūd  56, 423 254, 310, 362, 373, 375, 379, 381 f., 386,
388, 408. See also al-​umam al-​khāliya
Kaaba  100, 136, 213, 215–​217, 220, 225,
230, 234, 247, 287, 350, 398, 400 qaṣīda  16, 108, 129, 155, 168, 202, 262,
kāhin  67, 77, 108, 168, 217, 361, 423, 425, 314, 383, 421, 426, 445, 448
426–​431 Qaṣīda poets  202, 314, 426
qibla  194, 221, 230, 236, 286, 288, 290,
‘Last Thirtieth’ of the Koran (juzʾ ʿamm) 332, 334, 337, 367, 409
106, 166, 211, 217
locus Amoenus  470–​471 Raḥmān period  142, 208, 224, 262
Logos theology  13, 89 f., 94–​95, 355 Ramadan festival  55, 210, 211, 232–​234,
316, 381, 416–​417
manuscripts  7, 48, 139 f., 147, 151, 158–​161
Martyrs  54, 311, 317, 337–​341, 343–​344 sacrifice  95, 211, 213, 311, 328, 339,
al-​masjid al-​aqṣā  211, 221, 286, 288, 341–​345, 365, 393–​396, 398, 399, 400,
290, 410 402, 421, 437, 443
 General Index  527

sajʿ  187, 198, 221, 359, 425, 472 throne  69, 70, 174, 178, 267, 377, 406
seer  67, 77, 108, 124, 168, 190, 244, time, cyclical  56, 125
255, 361, 370, 423, 426, 428, 431, time, linear  125, 167
433–​434, 450 typology  16, 29, 352, 354–​365, 375,
shemaʿ Yisrael  117, 238, 477 380, 384
Signs  28, 70, 81–​89, 101 f., 130, 146, 150,
180, 216, 221, 237, 264–​270, 273–​280, al-​umam al-​khāliya  131–​135, 240, 382,
425, 436, 439, 444–​447, 480 383, 386
Sira (Prophet vita)  5, 7, 19, 36, 44, 46, Umayyads  7, 47, 49, 122, 144, 147, 160,
107, 157, 186, 199, 203, 212, 239, 243, 201, 377
247, 252, 290, 313, 331, 332, 380, umm al-​kitāb  78, 102, 103, 329, 331
429 f., 431
symmetry  125, 128, 438 vigil recitation  71 ff., 102, 172, 198, 214,
232, 243 f., 430, 431
tablet, preserved  73, 93, 100, 103, 117, virtues, catalogue of  186, 214, 230, 439
411, 415
tafṣīl  79, 82 f., 349, 423 waḥy  52, 65, 68–​71, 100, 102, 110,
tafsīr adabī  3, 24, 61–​63, 165 444–​447
taḥaddī Verses  164, 463, 466 Wrath, God’s  318–​321, 398
tajwīd  98, 153, 155 f.
theodicy  267, 280 Yom Kippur  55, 119, 233, 322–​324, 342, 416
 Citations of Scripture

Qur’an
Sura 1 Sura 4
1–​7  224;  283 46 413

Sura 2 Sura 5
1–​2  238 50 120
2 115
Sura 7
1–​5  112 ff.
156–​58  403
23–​24  463
171 412
30 377
172 415
75 414
93 412 Sura 8
124 397 41–​44  315
127–​29  399
130 401 Sura 9
142–​45  334 111 337
183–​87  198 Sura 10
187–​90  416 1 86
264 440 93 86
Sura 3 Sura 11
1–​7  324 1 182
6 329 13 372
7 456 110 86
18 340 114 223
33–​34  327
35 366 Sura 12
65–​68  402 f. 1–​2  481
96 401 2 459
140 339 23 222
154 120 78 476
169–​70  338 111 82

529
530  Citations of Scripture

Sura 13 Sura 25
1 88 32 77
30–​31  88
Sura 26
Sura 14 221–​22  67
1–​2  371 224–​26  424
24–​27  309 227 451

Sura 15 Sura 29
1–​48  279 1–​12  226
49–​51  281 16–​27  226 f.
78–​84  279 41–​44  226
85–​99  281 f. 46 80
50–​51  85
Sura 16
76 311 Sura 30
17–​18  229
Sura 17 52–​53  87
1 409 58–​60  87
78–​79  223
89 307 Sura 31
27 89
Sura 19 28 195
1–​15  293
1–​40  290 Sura 33
1–​98  290 f. 7 391
16–​21  293 33 120
22–​33  294 56 149
28 366
34–​40  300 Sura 36
58 304 13–​32
66–​98  305 Sura 37
88–​91  301 99–​109  392
97 305
Sura 41
Sura 20 2–​3  79
1–​5, 9–​14  406
83–​99  320 Sura 43
113 464 57 302
81 302
Sura 21 63–​65  302
105 253
Sura 44
Sura 22 1–​4  416
26–​27  396 1–​8  474
 Citations of Scripture  531

Sura 45 Sura 68
1–​6  84 10–​13  442
3–​4  265 17–​33  362
35  84 f. 41 205

Sura 48 Sura 69
26 120 19–​37 177 ff.
40–​42  76 f.
Sura 50 41–​43  67
2–​3  446
9–​11  446 f. Sura 70
15  446 f. 1–​7  186
36–​37  371
Sura 52
1–​4  405 Sura 71
1–​8  171 1–​28  388
29–​34  427
30–​31  426 Sura 73
43 205 1–​4  182
1–​9  72
Sura 53 2–​4  214
4–​10  407
4–​12  68 Sura 74
13–​18  70 2–​3  214
59 183 Sura 75
62 214 39–​40  265
Sura 54 Sura 77
9–​17  386 1–​7  170
Sura 55 48–​50  215
1–​4  464 Sura 78
26 269 1–​2  371
46–​78  128 f. 6–​17  467
62–​78  128 f. 8–​11  481
Sura 56 17–​36  260
77f. 73 17–​40  467
Sura 59 37–​40  261
21 137 Sura 79
Sura 62 1–​4  169
1–​2  404
Sura 80
Sura 66 11–​16  184
12 366 33–​42  188
532  Citations of Scripture

Sura 81 Sura 97
1–​14  174 1 67
19–​27  427 1–​5  473

Sura 85 Sura 100
21 73 1–​3  169
22 73 1–​5  359
6–​8  433
Sura 87 6–​12  433
1–​2  269
1–​8  180 f. Sura 101
1–​3  441
Sura 88 4–​11  441 f.
21–​24  371
Sura 102
Sura 89 3 224
6–​14  179
Sura 103
Sura 90 1–​3  191
1–​3  213
1–​7  436 Sura 104
8–​10  437 1–​2  435
11–​16  437 f. 1–​9  441
17–​20  438
Sura 105
Sura 91 1–​6  245
1–​15  133
Sura 106
Sura 92 1–​5  246
1–​4  172
5–​13  172 Sura 107
4–​7  182
Sura 93
1–​12  242 Sura 111
1–​5  182 f.
Sura 95
1–​3  405 Sura 112
1–​9  123 1 238
1–​4  112 f.
Sura 96
1–​20  248 Hebrew Bible
1 269 Genesis
3–​4  277 1:1 113
9–​10  215 2:4–​8  113
 Citations of Scripture  533

2:28 377 2 Chronicles
5:5–​8  387 36:22–​23  113
6:5–​8  385
22:1–​19  394 Nehemiah
22:12 398 10:29 299
22:18  397n65 Psalms 1
Exodus 1:3–​4  309
3:2–​3  406 8:4–​5\9:3  250
3:4–​15  407 9:14 243
3:14 266 16:8  290n53
19:18–​19  412 20:5 243
20:2–​17  412 21:13 251
20:2–​23  300 22:25 243
20:3 300 23:5 261
24:7 412 37:1 246
32:7 319 40:47 437
32 :15–​35  318 50:1 73
33:23–​38  266 64:6 251
34:6–​7   270, 322, 323 67:5  125n68
34:28 266 58:7 246
94:9 437
Leviticus 98:9  125n68
16:10–​16  342 104 467
104:1–​23  468
Deurteronomy 113:1 73
4:13 266 119:55 243
5:24 412 119:62 72
5:34 299 119:147
6:4   117, 478 149:5 248
Judges Proverbs
2:11 382 8:22–​31  103
3:7 382
3:12 382 Isaiah
2:3 335
1 Samuel 6:1–​11  69
12:7–​15  382 58:6–​7  438
2 Samuel Ezekiel
12:1–​4  354 14:1 371
1 Kings 20:1 371
8:14–​61  398 33:30–​32  371
8:23–​53  288 44:1–​2  367
534  Citations of Scripture

New Testament John

Matthew 1:1–​5  91
1:1 113 1:45  301n92
1:1–​17  301n92 2:11–​18  274
4:10 300 6:42  301n92
6:26 228
7:28  312n120 1 Corinthians
7:28–​29  306 1:23  332n61
12:33  310n118
13:10–​17  306n103 Galatians
16:28 228 4:24 354
21:33–​44  210
25:34 438 Philipians 2:5–​8  461
25:41   258, 438
Revelations
Mark 9 360
1:1  113n28 15:3 299
6:3  301n92 22:20 113
9:1 228
14:23–​24  342 Rabbinic Literature
Mishna
Luke Avot 5:3  397n65
1:5  289n49 Avot 5:9  121
1:5–​25  293
1:8–​25  297 Talmud
1:38 297 Rosh ha-​Shana 17b  322n35
1:46–​56  294n72 Sanhedrin 34a  322n36
1:67–​79  294n72 Shabbat 88b  326n47
2:1–​20  298 Sukka 6b  329n54
3:23  301n92 Sukka 45b  205n22
3:23–​38  301n92
4:22  301n92 Midrash
6:43  310n118 Genesis Rabba 30:9  388
9:27–​29   228 228 Genesis Rabba 32:6  388
11:27–​28, 299  299 Genesis Rabba 38:19  392n46
12:16–​20  363 Numeri Rabba 18:2  326n47