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Salama
God’s
In God’s Other Book, Mohammad Salama presents a powerful critique of the ways
we study and analyze early Islam and its sacred text, filling a glaring hole in our
understanding of this formative environment. Interrogating the ideological frame-
work of late antiquity, Salama exposes hidden assumptions that prevent scholars

Other
from truly placing Islam in its sociohistorical and cultural milieu. He offers an
alternative theoretical and practical model focused on pre-Islamic Arabic cultural
production. Foregrounding the indigenous Arab community of seventh-century

The Qurʾān between History and Ideology

God’s Other Book
Hijaz, Salama demonstrates how the Qurʼān played an organic role in commenting
on, interacting with, and taking sides concerning matters of ethnicity, ethics, dress
codes, and social habits. Only with renewed attention to the Qurʼān itself can West-
ern readers engage ethically with Islamic studies and with the cultures and tradi-
Book
tions of those who live according to another book.

“This book is bold, timely, and uncompromising, demanding to be read carefully for
its erudite argument. Through ample evidence, a reimagined interpretive frame,
and analytical acumen, Salama offers insights into the irony of Western scholar-
ship on the Qurʼān: its effort to draw the Muslim scripture into a late antique land-
scape overlooks reading practices sensitive to the text’s agency and indigeneity.”
—Asad Q. Ahmed, Magistretti Distinguished Professor of Middle Eastern Languages
and Cultures at University of California, Berkeley

“In showing why the Qurʼān must be seen as an authentically Arabian and truly
revolutionary literary accomplishment, Salama provides a welcome corrective to
Euro-American Qurʼānic studies. A milestone in the field.”—Stefan Sperl, Professor
Emeritus of Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies at SOAS, University of London

Mohammad Salama is Professor of Arabic and Qurʼanic Studies and Asso-

ciate Dean for Faculty Affairs in the College of Humanities and Social Sci-
ences at George Mason University.

University of California Press|www.ucpress.edu

The Qur ʾān between
A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, ISBN: 978-0-520-39184-0 History and Ideology
University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program.
Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. 9 780520 391840

Cover design: Michelle Black. Cover illustration: Folio from a Qurʼānic manuscript, second half of 8th century. Gift of Monir Far-
manfarmaian in memory of Dr. Abolbashar Farmanfarmaian, 2021. The Met Collection. Author photo: CHSS Photography Team.
Mohammad Salama
 Luminos is the Open Access monograph publishing program
from UC Press. Luminos provides a framework for preserving and
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God’s Other Book
 God’s Other Book
The Qurʾān Between History and Ideology

Mohammad Salama

UNIVERSIT Y OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press
Oakland, California

© 2024 by Mohammad Salama

Suggested citation: Salama, M. God’s Other Book: The Qurʾān Between History
and Ideology. Oakland: University of California Press, 2024.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/luminos.202

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons [CC BY-NC-ND] license.

To view a copy of the license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses.

Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress.

isbn 978–0–520–39184–0 (pbk. : alk. paper)

isbn 978–0–520–39185–7 (ebook)

32 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Salma, Malachi, Aliya, and Noah
 C onte nts

Acknowledgmentsix
A Note on Translation and Transliterationxi

Introduction: Primum Non Nocere1

1. Remapping Qurʾānic Studies: Histories and Methods15
2. What Is Late Antiquity and What Does the Qurʾān Have to Do With It?26
3. Intelligence versus Power: Rhetorical Dynamics in Pre-Islamic Poetry
and the Qurʾān53
4. Poetic Paganism and the Monotheistic Aesthetic76
5. Adab and the Ethical Authority of the Qurʾān97
6. The Qurʾān in Context: Monotheism and the Birth of the Unmimetic116
Conclusion: The Future of Qurʾānic Studies171

Notes179
Bibliography203
Index225
 Ack nowle d gme n ts

I would like to express my sincerest gratitude to the University of California Press,

especially to Eric Schmidt, whose thoughtful direction, patience, and support have
been instrumental. I am honored and fortunate that he gave me the opportunity
to work with him. Eric exemplifies the true spirit of a visionary editor. UCP is
lucky to have him. I am also grateful to Jyoti Arvey, whose guidance during the
manuscript production process led to a smooth and reassuring publication. I am
extremely grateful to Cindy Fulton, Senior Production Editor, and Paige MacKay,
Senior Publishing Editor, for their exceptional guidance and meticulous attention
to detail during the production and typesetting phases of this book.
Because I see this study as a corrective to the 1977 book Hagarism, the most
ideologically pernicious study against the Qurʾān and Islam in recent memory, I
initially offered the book to Cambridge University Press. While Cambridge warned
me that some scholars would not be receptive of my ideas, and even cautioned that
I would need to line up readers who would be open to my challenge to the status
quo regarding the historiography of Islam, my argument was nevertheless clarified
through my early interactions with Beatrice Rehl. I would like to thank her for her
efforts. It was likewise fruitful for me to think with the comment by the member
of the Cambridge Press Syndicate who said that the contrast I underscored regard-
ing scholarship on the Qurʾān between Muslim and Euro-American scholars is
“wholly unfair to the latter.”
I am deeply grateful to scholars who have offered fruitful and stimulating feed-
back during the years it has taken me to complete this book. Asad Ahmed read
early sections of this manuscript and provided invaluable insights, which pushed
me to improve my argument and polish my thoughts. Devin Stewart read this work
thoughtfully and provided enriching comments as well as important references.
ix
x    Acknowledgments

I am immensely grateful to Devin for our correspondence, which made me discover

our mutual love for Egyptian slang. Geert Jan (Gerard) van Gelder has offered me
the most generous and attentive commentary on translation and transliteration of
pre-Islamic poetry and the Qurʾān that I could have ever imagined. Words fail to
express my indebtedness to him. John Turner read this manuscript in its entirety
and offered rich comments that honed and enhanced my argument where I most
needed direction and clarity. Likewise, I received insightful comments from Walid
Saleh, Peter Gran, Maria Dakake, Stefan Sperl, Hany Rashwan, Christopher Liva-
nos, Martin Winkler, Nathaniel Greenberg, Sayed Elsisi, and Dustin Cowell.
I would be remiss not to pay tribute to the accumulative thought across his-
torical eras and geographical boundaries that gave substance to this study—
specifically, to Egypt, the birthplace of my intellectual thinking, and to my teach-
ers and professors of Arabic who instilled in me an unfathomable passion for
pre-Islamic poetry and the literary aesthetics of the Qurʾān; to the University of
Wisconsin-Madison, where I studied comparative literature and taught Arabic
as a PhD candidate; to UC Berkeley, where I gave lectures on Arabic literature
on numerous occasions, leaving me with wonderful memories of the exceptional
kindness of my hosts; to San Francisco State University, where I taught numerous
courses on modern and classical Arabic and Qurʾānic studies to many insight-
ful students; to George Mason University, where I continue to teach and interact
with outstanding students. My deep gratitude goes to Dr. Ann Ardis, professor
of English and dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences (CHSS) at
George Mason University, for her unfailing encouragement and generous research
support to complete this study.
I have been immensely fortunate to have Benjamin Davis read and reread this
manuscript. His sharp insight and intellectual generosity have made the argument
of this book both sharper and easier to follow. I am grateful to colleagues, friends,
and thought partners all over these places! Among the many to whom I owe a sub-
stantial debt of gratitude, let me mention only a few: Suzanne Stetkevych, Hanadi
al-Samman, Alexander Key, Yasmeen Hanoosh, Abd al-Rahman Abd al-Salam,
Aladdin Mahmoud, as well as the late and dearly missed Jaroslav Stetkevych.
His absence is felt acutely.
I am thankful to the anonymous reviewers who spent time and intellectual
effort reading this manuscript and helped me push my argument even further. I
am also grateful to Gabriel Bartlett, who worked diligently to check the style and
diacritical consistency throughout the manuscript. His timeliness and efficiency in
meeting the submission deadline were remarkable.
My children, Salma, Malachi, Aliya, and Noah have been the source of inspira-
tion behind this study. I am always reminded that leaving the world a better place
is predicated on an old saying: “We don’t inherit the earth from our ancestors; we
borrow it from our children.” May their world be more peaceful, more inclusive,
and more tolerant than our own.
 A N ot e on Transl ation and Tra n sl iteration

This book follows a specialized diacritical system for Arabic for all scholarly pur-
poses. I use the standard Western spelling of terms that have entered the English
language, such as “Islam” and “Arab.” I also use anglicized country names. I use the
noun “Qurʾān” instead of “Qurʾan” and the adjective “Qurʾānic” instead of
“Quranic” or “Qurʾanic.” The Prophet’s name is transcribed as “Muḥammad” in
the nominal form, “Muḥammadan” in the adjectival form, and is referred to either
by his first name or as “the Prophet.” I use the standard Library of Congress trans-
literation system for all other Arabic terms, with a few exceptions. In Arabic words
such as ʿĀʾisha, the (ʿ) symbolizes the Arabic letter (‫[ )ع‬ʿayn], while the (ʾ) sym-
bolizes the glottal Arabic (‫[ )ئ ؤ إ أ ء‬hamza]. I do not use hamza (ʾ) in cases where
the initial glottalization is obvious, e.g. “Aḥmad” or “Umayyad.” An accented (á)
symbolizes the form of ism maqsūr written with yá (‫ )ى‬or alif maqsūra at the end of
an Arabic word, as in “‫( ”األعشى‬al-Aʿashá). I kept the final long -ā written with alif,
as in dunyā orʿasā (“stick”), which is also a form of ism maqsūr written with an alif
qāʾima (a term used to distinguish -ā from -á, called alif mamdūda). This is an
important distinction because many Arabists seem to think that only the form
written with yá is called alif maqsūra.
The definitive (‫ )ال‬is fully transcribed as (Al-/al-) regardless of whether the fol-
lowing letters are ḥurūf shamsiyya or ḥurūf qamariyya. In genitive iḍāfa construc-
tions, the pronounced (‫ )ة‬is transcribed as a -t- between two nouns. Quotations
from the Qurʾān, pre-Islamic Arabic poetry, and Arab-Muslim sources are kept in
their original and translated into English between brackets within the sentence, or
as block quotations as deemed necessary. Arabic words that have entered the Eng-
lish language (e.g., Kaaba, qibla) retain their English spelling. When it was neces-
sary to transliterate a full case ending, in cases of tanwīn ‫َتَنوين‬, or nunation, the sign
xi
xii    A Note on Translation and Transliteration

(-ūn) indicating the nominative case, (-ān) indicating the accusative case, and (-īn)
indicating the genitive case are all superscripted. Dagger alif, which is also known
as symbolic alif, small alif, superscript alif, or historical alif, and which many or
may not appear in Arabic script as a short vertical stroke on top of a consonant, is
symbolized as a long /ā/ sound. For example: (‫[ )هذا‬hādhā] or (‫[ )الَّرّْحْ ََم ٰٰـ ِِن‬al-Raḥmān].
The (‫ )ه‬at the end of a transcribed Arabic word such as the possessive pronoun in
‫[ كتابه‬his book] refers to Arabic words ending in an (h) (‫ )ه‬and not in a (‫)ة‬, as com-
monly practiced. The final (‫ )ة‬is not transcribed, as in ‫[ سورة‬sūra].
Throughout this study, I translate ‫ هللا‬as God. All translations, or rather approxi-
mations, of verses from the Qurʾān into English are my own. These approximations
are for context and explicatory matters only and are therefore not to constitute
a basis for further scholarly investigations without consulting the original Arabic
text of the Qurʾān, which may include myriad meanings beyond what I am able to
capture in English. Unless otherwise noted, all other translations of pre-Islamic
Arabic poetry and Arab-Muslim sources, as well of French and German sources,
are my own.
 Introduction
Primum Non Nocere

Today, as the concept of religion is receiving less attention in the secular academic
world, Euro-American scholarship on the origins of Islam is experiencing an
unusual surge. If postmodernity has finished the incomplete project of modernity
by secularizing the public sphere, academia included, then what do we make of
this renewed obsession with Islam’s “origins”? Is there a connection between the
academic rise of Qurʾānic studies starting in the 1960s, and, say, the decoloniza-
tion of Arab/Muslim states, the rise of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood (1928–),
the Iranian Islamic Revolution of 1979, the Salman Rushdie affair of the 1980s, or the
events of 9/11? Did the accumulative ideological shaping of Islam as a threat to
the West authorize Western historians of Islam to explain away the “problem” of
Islam from exclusive and parochial perspectives? The position of Islam and, in
particular, of Qurʾānic studies in the Western academy over the last five decades
surely lends some credibility to these questions.
Addressing the status of contemporary Euro-American scholarship on
the Qurʾān, Angelika Neuwirth comments that “apparently what is lacking is the
hermeneutic corrective accumulated in the inner-Arabic linguistic-stylistic tra-
dition.”1 This timely acknowledgement draws pointed attention to a yet-to-be
addressed lacuna in approaching and understanding the Qurʾān. “At present,”
asserts Neuwirth, “historical Western research is only breathing with one lung, so
to speak. The second lung, the Arabicity and poeticity of the Qurʾān, has not yet
been utilized.”2 If the academic body of Qurʾānic studies wishes to remain healthy
and to breathe fresh air, to dwell on the metaphor, it is high time to address this
gap or, if I may put it this way, to heal this wound.

1
2    Introduction

Engaging the Arabicity of the Qurʾān in Western research, however, is a

task easier said than done. Neuwirth herself is deeply aware that her own work
“demands an initial approach oriented to Biblical scholarship, if only to warrant
an equal treatment for the Qurʾān and to ‘synchronize’ the three scriptures, to set
their respective perceptions on the same level.”3 In other words, engaging this “her-
meneutic corrective” with a focus on the Arabic language and the literary signifi-
cations of the Qurʾān remains a desideratum that may have to wait until the most
urgent task of repositioning Islam on equal footing with Judaism and Christianity
is achieved. This repositioning is predicated, Neuwirth stresses, on the crooked
line of first engaging with biblical scholarship in order to offer a fresh “European
reading” and “a hope that her recent book [Der Koran als Text der Spätantike. Ein
europäischer Zugang (published in an English translation by Oxford in 2019 as The
Qurʾan as a Text of Late Antiquity: A Shared Heritage)] will make Western readers
aware of the Qurʾān’s close connection to an epoch that has been reclaimed for
European identity.”4
I examine the histories of the development of the new framing of the Qurʾān
in what is called late antiquity in a separate chapter. For now, it is worth noting
that late antiquity means different things for different scholars. Some employ late
antiquity to revive Hagarism, which was an extreme and dangerous manipulation
of historical sources. Proponents of such radical revisionism want to throw out all
Arabic and Islamic sources as unreliable and to rely only on outside sources. There
are two major problems with this approach. First, insiders often have better infor-
mation than outsiders; secondly, the alternative scenarios they present are based
on minimal evidence and are often just unscholarly. Others use late antiquity to
revive Biblicism, a trend in Qurʾānic studies scholarship that sees the Qurʾān with
biblical eyes and emphasizes the connections between the Qurʾān and Christian-
ity in particular as a way of shedding light on some passages of the Qurʾān.
But so far, Neuwirth’s approach to late antiquity has been the most involved.
Her study is part of a series of recent attempts to explore the category of late antiq-
uity as an “epistemic space” that includes Islam. The idea is to prompt Western
readership to see for itself that the Qurʾān is part of the same late antique dis-
course that envelops the Jewish and Christian traditions commonly assumed to
be an exclusive European heritage. But Neuwirth also admits that her work “is
primarily an engagement with historically oriented Western research.”5 Hers is a
project written with multiple goals in mind: it supports the notion that the Qurʾān
must be understood in relationship to ancient Arabic poetry6 in order to open a
productive conversation between Muslim and Western scholarship on the Qurʾān,
a conversation that has been deeply polarized and fractious.7 It furthermore seeks
to educate Western audiences, teaching them that the “Europeanness” of the
Qurʾān is not a fantasy but a remarkable shared history that can be appreciated if
only scholars apply a more inclusive epistemic space regarding late antique times.8
Neuwirth is quite successful in achieving the last of these sundry and ambitious
 Introduction    3

goals. In her over five hundred-page volume, she dedicates a pithy chapter
(chapter 12, “The Qurʾān and Poetry”) to what she refers to as the Arabic “poetic-
ity” of the Qurʾān. This is a promising endeavor, even though the formidable task
of engaging with biblical criticism has exhausted the bulk of her study.
Neuwirth also hoped her book could have something “to say to Muslim read-
ers.”9 Who are these readers? With over two billion Muslims in the world today—
concentrated mostly in twenty-three Asian and African countries (to count only
the ones where Islam is a state religion) and including a sizable population spread
across the Americas, Australia, and Europe—Muslim readers cannot be seen
to constitute a monolithic whole. If by “Muslim readers” Neuwirth is referring to
more specialized readers and practitioners of orthodox Islam, or traditional schol-
ars of the Sunni and Shia persuasions, then her effort has had a limited effect,
largely because her book stays within an accumulated body of Western scholar-
ship, which, Neuwirth would admit, follows a historical-critical method famil-
iar with an extensive hermeneutic tradition of biblical criticism. The constitutive
tenets of Neuwirth’s study thus remain faithful to the “first lung,” so to speak, at
least as that lung is outlined in the book’s original German title, Ein europäischer
Zugang (A European approach). Even the exhaustive list of the works consulted in
this enormous undertaking makes scant references to Arab-Muslim scholars and
texts (e.g., al-Jāḥiẓ, al-Jurjānī, Khalafallah), references that remain inconsequential
in the heavy-handed thirty-eight-page bibliography of biblical scholarship. In its
totality, then, Neuwirth’s book subjects the Qurʾān simply to Western scholars
who talk about other Western scholars, Western thought, and Western texts.
I speak more about the Qurʾān’s literary signification and Arabicity in the book’s
later chapters, but a central goal of this study is also to offer an acade­mic con­
textualization of late antiquity as a contested period in history. This important
contextualization is absent from Neuwirth’s study, understandably, because she
not only thinks of late antiquity as an epistemologically enriching space; she is also
positing “a radical turn of perspective,” one that will entail “repos[ing] the question
of the historical anchoring of the Qurʾan in time and place.”10 This drastic shift will
necessarily mean (and it is hard not to see the Eurocentrism here) that Muslim
readers will cease to read the Qurʾān in hagiographic terms—that is, as part of the
life of the prophet, which has always been the case in the Islamic tradition since
the seventh century. Instead, situating the Qurʾān “historically [emphasis hers] as
a document of ‘community formation’ within a sectarian milieu’, a landscape of
debate, of arguments fought out between diverse groups, Christians, Jews, and
pagans alike”11 will give it a European stamp, lend it an authentic “voice,” and make
it “recognizable as a European legacy.”12
But if the Qurʾān did not offer itself as a linguistic rival to the seventh-century
Meccan society, with all its orators and poets, then what do we make of the entire
corpus of Jāhilī poetry and of āyāt al-taḥaddī (challenge verses in the Qurʾān, such
as 10:38, 11:13, 52:34)? What do we make of prophetic hagiography, not necessarily
4    Introduction

the Sīra, but the biographical references to Muḥammad in the Qurʾān? What do
we do with asbāb al-nuzūl (promptings of revelations) and the iʿjāz tradition?
What do we do the work of al-Jāḥiẓ? What do we make of the inner-Islamic exege-
sis, when just a terse reading of postclassical scholars like al-Khaṭṭābī, al-Rummānī,
al-Bāqillānī, and al-Jurjānī would show how the balāgha (rhetorical eloquence/
distinctiveness) of the Qurʾān is not merely a ninth-century theological inven-
tion but a culmination of literary thought and a theorization of a stylistic mode
that offered itself to a culture deeply immersed in its own poetic achievements?
In this very context, the Qurʾān presents itself as serving a dualistic function to
this very culture. First, it acts in a manner that lends itself to ordinary human
self-perception both linguistically, within the familiar tradition of Quraysh’s finely
tuned dialect of classical Arabic, especially in its earlier phases, and anthropologi-
cally, within the defined sociocultural framework of the seventh-century Arabian
Peninsula. Many verses in the Qurʾān (e.g., 44:58, 26:195) emphasize the clarity
of its Arabic as well as the accessibility of its content. Secondly, the Qurʾān does
not shy away from underscoring and celebrating its rhetorical distinctiveness, of
claiming itself both as unparalleled and as inimitable by its own community. Yet,
whereas this textual dualism takes place within a determined linguistic and cul-
tural milieu, ignoring this all-assertive dialectical mode and its rhetorical power is
bound to continue reducing the cognitive perception of the Qurʾān text to a banal
historical generality and, consequently, to a lack of common ground not only with
Muslim readers but also with global scholarship on Islam, including linguists, phi-
lologists, rhetoricians, as well as literary and cultural critics.
If Muslim readers, or more specifically European Muslim readers, were to infer
something from Neuwirth’s book, it would be that a scholar of Qurʾānic studies
has surgically identified a malady in Western Europe’s approach to the Qurʾān.
To cure this malady, she offers a treatment, via self-critique, of an accumulated
heritage of historical biases bent on othering and excluding Islam. Neuwirth’s
treatment comes from history, an offering of an alternative history, or rather, a
different viewing of European history as a space for confronting one’s own prej-
udices and repositioning the place of Islam in Europe. Late antiquity comes to
Neuwirth’s mind as a perfect remedy: a remedial transitional space that bridges
the quintessentially European (the founding legacy of Western Europe) with the
quintessentially Qurʾānic (the founding text of Islam), all the while prioritiz-
ing a way of reading that is at once remediating and perpetuating our forgetting.
Nothing could put an end to old acrimonies or wipe away chronic hostilities
better than realizing that Islam and the West have more in common than any-
one could have ever thought. In this “shared heritage,” the entangled histories of
Mediterranean studies (long before modernity/globalization) would happily link
Europe to Africa to Asia, and Judaism to Christianity to Islam, and the “gehört
der Islam zu Deutschland/Europa?” (does Islam belong to Germany/Europe?)
debate will finally be laid to rest. What does such a remedy defer and forget as it
 Introduction    5

selectively heals and remembers? What histories, told by whom, are lost in such a
narrative cut?
As much as it is a remedy and an offering, late antiquity is also a scapegoat and a
sacrifice. The political unconscious of the return to late antiquity reveals a deep layer
of scholarly concern. There is a desire for a new discourse and a need for stopping
the persistent othering of Islam—even and especially the insidious othering that
occurs through hierarchy-maintaining forms of inclusion—that is often practiced
by a systematic network active on numerous sociopolitical levels, including the
very field of Qurʾānic studies.13 This othering was as true in precolonial and
colonial metanarratives of the European nation-states as it is true today, and it is
particularly evident in the burgeoning of publication industries and a revitalized
academic press market focused on Islam in the aftermath of 9/11 in what Manuel
Castells aptly identifies as the “new geopolitics” of the “informationalism” con-
comitant with “the rise of the network society.”14 Many Euro-American scholars
of the Qurʾān will admit that both the literary interpretations of the Qurʾān have
been silenced in their field and the less inclusive scholarship on Islam has been
put into place and practiced uncritically for decades. Muslim readers would be
eager to learn why this is the case—why ancient Arabic culture, Arabic sources in
general, the Qurʾān and its literary significations continue to be entombed and
marginalized, even after the argument against the authenticity of pre-Islamic
literature was laid to rest years ago. As a postcolonial Muslim reader myself, I
would even ask harder questions about what always gets sacrificed in the relation-
ship between self and other. Such questions matter because the unchallenged and
impressionable tone of approaches to the Qurʾān as a text of late antiquity may
itself not have the same intent, and indeed may obscure the fact that the concept
of the political at work in most Western narratives of historical “formations” or
“reformations” of other cultures has always been contingent on the authority of a
dominant theory of knowledge.
The scope of Euro-American revisionism may offer no space for the local and
the indigenous. In addition, Arab-Muslim texts—those of exegetes, biographers,
and historians—have received little to no value in addressing their own tradition,
often dismissed as too “faith-based” to gain admission into the skeptical mind of the
Western historian. But rather than question the futility of searching for historical
origins in all religions, we run the risk of dissolving indigenous histories into global
melting pots in order to nurse the fragile sensibilities of an idea of Europe and of a
“Europeanness” that refuses to respond to the other unless that response proceeds
through colossal epistemological oversight, which, if corrected, would allow Europe
to see that the other was never really an “other” after all, and that Europe, when it
comes to Islam, has always been an ever-expanded and gratified self.
This is precisely the moment when the staging of history, of late antiquity in
this instance, could turn into a dialectic: on the one hand, it would seek to course-
correct and expand the horizons of Europe’s perception of Islam, thus fixing the
6    Introduction

one operating lung of Qurʾānic studies; on the other, it would continue, albeit
unwittingly, to submerge the other in the very act of acknowledging its absence. In
the case of Islam, the other is not just a scripture, but a language, a culture, a skin
color, a heritage, and a literature. Even if we were to assume that this Denkraum
was always already there, obfuscated by nationalist and separatist inventions of
history, could this historical Aufklärung restore the second lung to Qurʾānic stud-
ies? If Islam were no longer the other of Europe, then what would become of it?
What would happen to the other after the disappearance of its otherness? What
would be the fate of its accumulated excisions and erasures, its “negative theology,”
and its silenced traditions? What would the Muslim readers expect if the study of
the Qurʾān were to reemerge as an empirical boomerang in Western historical lit-
erature? If a deeper look into the thicket of late antiquity would reveal a “European
Qurʾān,” so to speak, how would this new identity reimagine the Qurʾān’s Arabic-
ity, with all its variegated fabrics of aesthetic weight and literary merit?
A point that might be obvious for the critically minded scholar of the Qurʾān is
still worth emphasizing: historians have an academic responsibility to let the chips
of their research fall where they may, even if the findings are to the displeasure of
Muslim readers. Some Muslims readers may tend to accept uncritically certain
versions of their sacred past, but this is not binding for historians who must fol-
low a well-defined method and arrive at conclusions supported by evidence, be it
tangible or conceptual. The issue is not the findings, but the very method employed
in reaching those findings. The challenge in repositioning the Western academy’s
hardened epistemological lines indeed lies in the fact that scholarship on the
Qurʾān in the West is often conducted by dedicated and well-trained scholars who
may not see or even understand the need for a “second lung” outside a dominant
brand of scholarship. They follow the footsteps of their mentors and advisors in
applying sophisticated historical methodologies to continue to examine the same
issues that have shaped the field for the last hundred years: debunking Muslims
sources; finding alternative theories to the genesis of Islam in lieu of traditional
Muslim accounts; rewriting Islam’s early history; revising the life of Muḥammad;
reshuffling the history of the compilation of the Qurʾān; rearranging chronologi-
cal order of suwar (chapters of the Qurʾān); relocating the Qurʾān’s aʿjamī (non-
Arabic) vocabulary; and, most famously, analyzing the Qurʾān with biblical lens.
Two methods I want to problematize briefly are “source studies” and the his-
torical-critical method. Recent scholarship that underscores the Arabicity of the
Qurʾān continues to be sidelined if not effectively colonized by the Western acad-
emy’s obsession with extra-peninsular “source studies.”15 Source studies proceed
through locating non-Arabic influential texts outside the Qurʾān’s first commu-
nity or positing, à la Gerald Hawting, that the Qurʾān was addressing an imagi-
nary community. One example of this method is Bronwen Neil’s seminal article
on John of Damascus and Theophanes the Confessor as the earliest known non-
Muslim “historians” of Islam. In this article, Neil cautions against what she calls
 Introduction    7

“the dyothelite and iconophile biases” of Syriac authors.16 Neil admits that histori-
ans are fortunate to have in De haeresibus and the Chronographia two exceptional
witnesses to early Greek understandings of Islam. But she pulls no punches in
underscoring the completely different genres and perspectives of these two texts.
“The differences between them,” concludes Neil, “should alert us to the dangers of
characterizing early Islam on the basis of evidence provided by Greek Christians,
even if they were near contemporaries of the events they sought to understand
and represent.”17 The second example comes from two twenty-first century edited
volumes on the Qurʾān: Jane Dammen McAuliffe’s The Cambridge Companion to
the Qurʾān and Andrew Rippin’s The Blackwell Companion to the Qurʾan.18 None
of these studies of the Qurʾān makes the slightest reference to the internal dynam-
ics of the Qurʾān’s literary language or to pre-Islamic poetry as a significant pre-
history to the text.19
A further example of a work that effectively deconstructs the historical-critical
method is Herbert Schneidau’s book on the Bible and Western tradition. The last
chapter of Schneidau’s book deconstructs the structural dilemmas involved in
twentieth-century historical positivism: “It congratulates itself on being liberated
from theologization, while its very notions of ‘reality’ and ‘truth’ are, fairly obvi-
ously, covert theologization.”20 Yet from a disciplinary point of view, these issues in
the field of Qurʾānic studies are not, as I explain in this work, simply extraneous
or mythological details that it is a historian’s privilege to ignore or to dismiss but
rather fundamental limitations that return to take their toll on a methodology that
has been sacralized for far too long. This methodology merely suspends the liter-
ary and linguistic ontology of the Qurʾān text for the sake of extrapeninsular and
European epistemological postulates, while reinforcing the old self/other dichot-
omy that was at the root of the fallacies of classical orientalism. What is perhaps
only now becoming clear, at least as we deduce it from Neuwirth’s call, is that it is
high time we confronted the intellectual harm that has resulted from the willful
entombment of the other and replaced it with a new philosophy of inclusivity. But
instead of thawing the other in the self, I would make a call for renewed respon-
sible thought, which would celebrate the authentic heritages of alien traditions.
Additionally, there is a grave problem of reductionism in studying the heritage of
Islam, a reductionism exercised on language and resources. This explains the one-
lunged approach to Qurʾānic studies and the dearth of a dialogue between the two
camps. How can Muslim readers be asked to engage in a historical method that
consistently dehumanizes them and marginalizes the Qurʾān’s preformative tra-
dition and local language, while expecting them to learn the “language” of this
method’s historical-critical reading? If Muslim readers were to adopt this imposed
“language” in approaching their own scripture, then the West, once again, is dic-
tating the rules of the game, owning the terrain, and imposing its own norms and
values on that dialogue. Having a sense of conviction in writing historical research
matters, but it is just as important that this writing come from an ethical position
8    Introduction

of fairness to the other. Writing with the conviction that the results of historical-
critical research on Islam are not influenced by ideologies or political worldviews,
and assuming that one’s findings come from a place of objective investigation will
never resolve the divide in the East-West academic approaches to the Qurʾān.
I am suggesting that religion does not yield itself to a closed off historical total-
ity. No historical method can strip it off its linguistic, rhetorical, traditional, and
conceptual referents. The only true history is a history that perpetually questions
itself. What we now have instead, and what the field of Qurʾānic studies needs to
overcome, is a type of knowledge entitled by hegemonic political and historical
discourses to lay claim to what is an “original” and what is a “false” source of Islam’s
history. If the field cannot overcome this epistemology, it will descend into a Hades
of academic troopers too preoccupied with their own telescopic approaches to
history to see the blind spots. Ideology is exactly the belief that we are using the
right critical tools to debunk a historical myth and engage in a criticism of a myth,
unaware that our own “historical methods,” so to speak, have their own mythical
history, a history that darkly and deeply exposes the fallacy of its own criticism—
that is, the myth of guarding a fundamentalist “strategic” truth and perpetuating a
deep state of epistemological sovereignty over the other.
One objective of this book is to rethink the current methodology in the pro-
duction of scholarship on the Qurʾān in the Euro-American academy. It also
makes a call for situating the future of Qurʾānic studies within a functional code of
knowledge. Such a future will necessitate relinquishing the tools of the historical-
critical method that have accompanied the field since the nineteenth century.
Historical positivism does not operate from scientifically verified facts, but rather
from a scientism—namely, a postulate that there is a clear and straightforward
access to the past against which we must measure our thought. This is not to say
that historical positivism has not corrected certain methodological errors. But it
tends to assume that only the thinking and the scholarship of a certain strand of
historians has somehow been usefully guided by the application of this standard,
while Muslim scholarship and Arab-Muslim sources are dismissed as tainted
with “faith” and superstition.
In order for a “second lung” to function at all, it would need the support of
other systems—different scholarly tools, different academic training, and different
linguistic and critical approaches to the Qurʾān. How, then, should one under-
stand the place of the Qurʾān in history? The answer to this question is not vague:
by engaging fully with the text itself, examining its historical eventfulness, analyz-
ing its literary, phonological and syntactical codes, and probing its pre-formative
native literature, namely, the enormous tradition of pre-Islamic poetry. One
does not expect here a full rounded analysis of, say, Masāʾil Nāfiʿ ibn al-Azraq
(Questions of Nāfiʿ ibn al-Azraq),21 or Lughāt al-Qabāʾil al-Wārida fī al-Qurʾān
(Tribal dialects in the Qurʾān),22 or even Sirr Sinā ʿ-t- al-Iʿrāb (Genesis of [Ara-
bic] phonemes).23 The idea is to examine the largely unstudied local environment
 Introduction    9

of the Qurʾān and explore possible correlations between its Meccan and Medi-
nan themes as well as the social habits and manners of pre-Islamic Arabs. Despite
the obvious historical, geographical, and linguistic correspondences between the
Qurʾān and pre-Islamic Arabic literature, this aspect is hardly ever approached in
Euro-American scholarship on the Qurʾān.
A critically engaged exegesis of pre-Islamic poetry would reveal that pre-
Qurʾānic Arabs were nomadic communities with their own sets of beliefs.24 Even
though the belief in a certain “earthly” eternity was common among them, they may
have not necessarily envisioned a life after death in the manner, say, in which the
Qurʾān portrays it, which is also radically different from the manner in which both
Judaism and Christianity depict the hereafter. Pre-Islamic Arabs had communal
vices that ranged from tijāra-t-al-raqīq (slave trade) to ẓulm (social inequities/
injustices) to shuḥḥ (avarice) to ʿunsuriyya (racialism/racism), vices that were nor-
malized and accepted among pre-Islamic Arabs but that the Qurʾān, with its strong
penchant for social justice, vehemently criticizes. But pre-Islamic poetry also cele-
brates virtues that include muruwwa (chivalry, virtue), fakhr (pride, mostly tribal),
ḥamāsa (warrior spirit of heroism) shajāʿa (courage/gallantry), karam (generos-
ity/benevolence), ḥaqq al-ḍayf (right of guest/hospitality), ḥaqq al-jār (right of
neighbor), and wafāʾ (loyalty/fulfilment of promise), traits that Islam was soon to
overturn and integrate into more wholistic and socially cohesive values. It does not
take long to see these habits represented in pre-Islamic poetry and interpellated in
the Qurʾān. Nor does it take long to see how the Qurʾān enters into focused dia-
logues with this community, both in the Meccan and Medinan periods, valorizing
social justice, acknowledging the literary and poetic sensibility of pagan Arabs, but
also critiquing and distinguishing itself from it. In verse after verse, the Qurʾān
confirms the spiritual tendencies of pre-Islamic Arabs, confronts their polytheistic
propensities, and offers a monotheistic alternative to a folk tradition with an enor-
mous appetite for divinity. This dialogic tension, which is clearly articulated in the
Qurʾān, is crucial for explaining the tectonic shift in ideals and the revolutionary
transformation of social relationships in the first Muslim community as it moved
from a society loyal to tribal and blood solidarity to an umma regulated by an
overpowering oral authority.
To understand the Qurʾān’s oral authority, which for secular criticism remains
one of history’s most compelling linguistic invitations, not only is it necessary to
learn of its rhetorical power but it is also important to dwell on its thematic con-
sistency. For how can one really assess a text that emphatically challenges its own
community to bring forth something like it in content and in form when one does
not know how that language works or what it looks like? And how can one begin
to evaluate—much less enjoy—the masterpieces of ancient Arabic literature and
the overshadowing balāgha of the Qurʾān without having the basic understand-
ing of its composite language and central themes? Reliance on the written and
translated words of the Qurʾān certainly has its use, but it must not be the only
10    Introduction

way of approaching the text. Certainly there is a distinction between a scholarly

demand of studying a text in its original language and methodological nativism.
No graduate student would be allowed to write a dissertation on Hegel’s Phenom-
enology of Spirit without possessing a reading knowledge of German, and no such
dissertation would pass its defense without some knowledge of Protestantism and
the broader social/religious context from which Hegel’s book emerged. Further, it
is no secret that even the most celebrated and “enlightened” European translations
of the Qurʾān—including that of the seventeenth-century orientalist Ludovico
Marracci (d. 1700), in which he relied on major tafsīr (explication) sources like
Itqān–continue to cause confusion and misunderstanding about the Qurʾān and
its message.25 Even a competent, integral, and content-oriented modern translation
like that of Marmaduke Pickthall (d. 1930) will always irretrievably fail to capture
the full significations of the original text. This does not mean that the Qurʾān is
not “translatable.” It certainly is. But the constitutive orality of the text—the intri-
cate relationship between its parts and the beauty of its language,” whose sound,
to use Annemarie Schimmel’s words, “defines the space in which the Muslim
lives” and “moves people even when they don’t understand the word”—demands a
level of engagement from a scholar fully conscious of the text’s literary power and
rhetorical eloquence.26
To be clear, this book is not a vote for resurrecting the late dogma of iʿjāz
al-Qurʾān, which is yet to be taken seriously in Western scholarship anyway. Nor
is it a vote for denigrating varied theoretical positions on the Qurʾān, or for excep-
tionalism, for that matter. One must not conflate the linguistically unique with
the theologically exceptional. The Qurʾān specifically states that Muḥammad is
one among many prophets who preceded him,27 and that his call for monotheism
is not at all exceptional, rather an iteration of a long chain of historical pleas for
the one God, enjoined to Noah, Abraham, Moses, and Jesus.28 If anything, Euro-
American scholarship has telescoped various historical revisions into the genesis
of the Qurʾān, which can only accentuate a more profound perpetuity of “Western
exceptionalism” in probing Islam’s past. This is pertinent to the literary argument
because my intention is also to give the simplest academic explanation of how
a seventh-century Arabian audience would have understood the language of the
Qurʾān as it was directly addressed to them, a basic matter that was complicated,
diverted, and redirected by the field of Qurʾānic studies.
As I explain in this study, late antiquity promises an overhaul of traditional
approaches to the Christian West and a free hybridity of religiocultural exchanges.
It nurses Syriac Christianity and embraces Judaism, Manicheanism, Zoroastrian-
ism, Neoplatonism, and Islam as collective participants in a powerful overflow
of the God idea. For all these reasons, it could be exciting because it offers Euro-
pean readers something new. But for the same reasons, it could also be eclipsing
because Muslim readers may fear that it may offer them nothing new, especially if
 Introduction    11

it “includes” Islamic heritage as an ancillary to Europe’s own grand and expansive

historical narrative, an “inclusion” already undergirded by a discourse that serves
to control the history of the other. In balance, the epistemic space of late antiq-
uity promises to bring equity among the three Abrahamic religions, treating Islam
on equal footing with Judaism and Christianity. This indeed is a welcome turn,
no doubt, especially when it has been rare in current Euro-American scholarship
to read the Qurʾān as authentic rather than as a derivative byproduct. But what
guarantees the Muslim readers, whom Neuwirth genuinely hopes to include, that
positioning the Qurʾān within Europe’s own narratives of historiography is not yet
another variation on the old theme of erasing their own heritage? It is no secret
that the field of Qurʾānic studies is confronting an enormous academic divide,
which has certainly been anticipated since the 1970s, but which has until today
become almost irremediable. Neuwirth has tried to start a conversation between
those opposing poles, but her argument for the Arabicity of the Qurʾān, though
acknowledged, has still fallen flat.
Such well-intended postulates are also faithful to the exigencies and dictates of
a long-standing historical tradition that interpreted the Qurʾān (mostly in trans-
lation) from the perspective of Western canonical exegesis. It is not surprising
that many eminent Western scholars of the Qurʾān today hail from the tradition
of biblical criticism. There is nothing wrong with applying the tools of one’s aca-
demic training in a certain religious tradition to another, especially if this other
intentionally draws on and makes reference to it—in fact, I am deeply in favor of
such methodological crossings when they proceed through a reflexive attention
to the histories and hierarchies in which they are always already situated. How-
ever, one must not stop there. While such scholarship is itself faithful in project-
ing a European comparative understanding of the Qurʾān, the production of such
understanding has yet to connect with, and not just passingly acknowledge, what
Islamic linguistic and rhetorical scholarship of the Qurʾān has established about it
over the last fourteen centuries. This connection, in my view, is an indispensable
condition for securing a minimal understanding of the Qurʾān text and its rich
tradition. At this juncture in our global history, a literary and rhetorical reading of
the text of the Qurʾān—one that goes outside all canonized readings—would shed
light on long-neglected corners in Qurʾānic studies, precisely because this read-
ing will pay attention to what the Qurʾān has to say linguistically, figuratively, and
rhetorically, but also socially, politically, and culturally, about itself and the organic
environment in which it emerged.
This book is thus written in the same spirit of bridging the East-West polar-
ity in Qurʾānic studies. It argues that the field of Qurʾānic studies in the West
may have reached a saturation juncture of academic reification and historical self-
adoration, to a point that makes it difficult to repudiate its tools for the sake of a
precarious and uncharted alternative. It further argues that the historical-critical
12    Introduction

method did not simply trap the academic potential of Qurʾānic studies in a dark
corner but became itself entangled in its own compulsion toward exclusivism and
hegemony. In the same vein, this book calls for, and exercises, a literary and lin-
guistic approach to the text of the Qurʾān as a material reality and as an occur-
rence that must be treated dialectically—the Qurʾān as an oral text that can be
celebrated just as much as it has been met with silence, apprehension, and anxiety.
To a great extent, the Qurʾān actually celebrates and performs a comparative the-
ology extraordinaire and in no way simply eschews the monotheistic ethos outside
its geographical contours. This rich spirit of comparativity that I expound in this
book has even allowed classical Muslim philosophers to find affinities and inspira-
tion in European thought, which is at any rate hard to define when we think that,
for instance, the Corpus Aristotelicum owes most of its survival and recovery to
classical and medieval Arab-Muslim authors and translators. In turn, this book
celebrates those intellectual crossings and complications while raising questions
about power and how power preconditions historical inquiry.
The primary goal of this book is to respond to a history, or rather, to a Euro-
centric method of approaching the history of the Qurʾān. Usually these responses
tend to offer a history of their own, a counterhistory, so to speak. While there is
some history in this book, readers will soon discover that my intellectual input
shifts with intentionality from the historical to the linguistic and from the applica-
tions of methods to the investigation of language and the intricacies of reading.
The goal is to be aware how often scholarship is governed by a received version
of critical history rather than by a reading of the work itself. Therefore, I start this
study by inviting the reader to see through the processes and assumptions of the
historical-critical method whereby the modern contemporary study of the Qurʾān
emerged in Euro-American academia. Given the new wave of scholarship on the
Qurʾān as a late antique text, I am aware that my critique would raise eyebrows in
the midst of the pervasive idea that to read the Qurʾān in its late antique context
is to contextualize it, situate it, and absorb it into a more enlightening global nar-
rative. My contention is that until today such an absorption remains inadequate to
both the content and the form of the Qurʾān. Not only does it reduce the sociolin-
guistic and literary relations on which the Qurʾān is based to that of a mere search
for mutual affinities and parallelisms in the vast span of late antique times, but it
taxonomizes the text by pulling it into a formative historicity that serves a meta-
narrative of domination. A practical approach is to read the Qurʾān’s text inter-
nally, through a kind of lens that is now posited for studies of the Global South and
interruptions afforded by critical theory, not necessarily a critical theory whose
anchor is internal to the tradition.
In the first few chapters, I expose how the post-World War II period led to
the formation of an academic network on Islam that was responding to its own
historical moment. I compare American and European approaches, placing both
 Introduction    13

in a broader context of geopolitics. Next, I interrogate the purposes for which the
scholarly concept of late antiquity has been posited, how Qurʾānic studies has
been made to fit within its mold, and how—given this framework—approaches to
the Qurʾān in modern and contemporary scholarship are more a reflection of the
framework and less that of the Qurʾān’s local historical environment. The remain-
ing chapters engage more directly with placing the Qurʾān in its own social and
literary contexts, focusing primarily on the linguistic and literary connections and
disconnections between pre-Islamic poetry and the Qurʾān, as well as the Qurʾān’s
distinct aesthetic and rhetorical modes. The point is not to go through the body of
pre-Islamic poetry and the Qurʾān with a fine-tooth comb to track reiterations
of the former in the latter, since other scholars have already explored this venue
and arrived at varied conclusions.29 It is, rather, to hold them in the linguistic and
tropological tensions of what remains an intricate discursive relationship between
them. While pre-Qurʾānic Arabic literature offers an understanding of the liter-
ary tropes and figural language of the Qurʾān, it also includes rich sociopolitical
and cultural associations inherent to that very tradition, some of which, like wine
drinking, hunting, tribal wars, slavery, and the status of women, appear in the
Qurʾān as well as in pre-Islamic poetry. There is a dire need for vigorous studies
that situate the Qurʾān within this neglected local code of knowledge.
The challenge these studies would pose for current Euro-American scholar-
ship of the Qurʾān is that it will be a novel and, dare I say, risky departure from
the safe methodical and systemic tacklings to which the text has been subjected
for decades. It is highly risky, to be sure, for junior scholars deeply tied to the
academic field and the market demands of Qurʾānic studies in Euro-American
academic institutions to simply dehegemonize themselves and opt out of the chan-
neled course of scholarly expectations, because such desertion of the canon will
mean the flight from “the field,” the loss of a job or a grant, a rejection of a publi-
cation, or even worse, a denial of a dissertation. I cite a concrete example of this
ostracization in chapter 1. I believe it is honest to say that this departure is feared
because it destabilizes what has become a comfortable Euro-Americanization of
Qurʾānic studies in Western universities. Yet, such a liberation of Qurʾānic stud-
ies is precisely the place where new scholarship can be a transformative departure
from the reified monopolies of standardization.
I am arguing, then, that Islam’s core book has become the other of Euro-
American scholarship in the field of Qurʾānic studies. To refuse a robust engage-
ment with this foundational text—and worse, to train students without sufficient
proficiency in classical Arabic or regional intellectual history to study the Qurʾān
in depth—is a sleight of hand that also dispenses with the field’s need to recognize
the Qurʾān as a living text. The irony is that for a field whose central text is per-
haps the most widely circulated book in the Global South today, Qurʾānic studies
has yet to take up the basic insights of postcolonial theory. What remains most
14    Introduction

urgently needed is a profound decolonization of the academic studies of Islam

in the West. I begin this undertaking in this book. I will go so far as to argue
that decolonial and critical theory must never discount religion, especially that of
postcolonial states. In fact, religion lies at the heart of contemporary decolonial
debates. And to the question “Is critique secular?” the answer is a categorical “No.”
Critique is never just secular, and religion is always critique.
 1

Remapping Qurʾānic Studies

Histories and Methods

It is an illustration of the rule, and not an exception to it, that Cambridge Univer-
sity rejected Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s PhD dissertation because of its inclusive
treatment of Muslims in India and its Marxist critique of the British Raj.1 Smith,
the most influential scholar of Islam and comparative religion of the last century,
was an unyielding critic of intellectual colonialism. In approaching the intricate
history of Islam, he did not subscribe to historical revisionism or, for that mat-
ter, to any other so-called method.2 He did not see Islam as an alien object that
scholars needed an authorized method to approach. Rather, he studied Islam as an
intimate subject, as a fresh source for religious thought. For Smith, a combination
of critique and comparison was the only way to avoid flying too close to the sun via
intellectual hubris. “Interdisciplinary studies,” he maintained, “are the ladder to get
out of the hole into which the true scholar never falls.”3
Like national borders, disciplinary boundaries are not always a thing so much
as a series of practices for managing difference. There is not always a gate, but
there is much gatekeeping. To start with, Smith calls attention to the politics of a
renewed ʿasabiyya, a group solidarity or mode of turf protection that character-
izes the network of Euro-American scholarship on Islam today. We only know
of Smith’s case because he persevered after what must have been a soul-crushing
rejection of his thesis. He went on to become one of the most distinguished pro-
fessors of Islam and comparative religion in the world—assuming numerous aca-
demic posts but spending most of his career at Harvard (1964–73, 1978–84)—until
he died in 2000. The records of Smith’s case notwithstanding, we cannot be sure
of how many other junior scholars of Islam have dared to think differently and
have, throughout the years, been denied their degrees or, more likely, been told
to change topics or methods at Cambridge, Oxford, or the University of London’s
15
16    Remapping Qurʾānic Studies

School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), as well as at other bastions of

scholarship on Islam. To understand the case of Cambridge’s rejection of Smith’s
path-breaking scholarship, we have to understand the institutional landscape, his-
torical and contemporary, of the field in which Smith wrote.
The academic field of Qurʾānic studies in the West was born at a peculiar
moment in European history. The attempt to fill a knowledge gap of Islam grew
out of a global turning point and a cultural crisis. Regardless of Europe’s ideo-
logical predispositions toward Islam—many European scholars demonstrated a
familiarity with the Qurʾān that was much more sophisticated than that of scho­
lars in the United States, where the needs for public diplomacy and civilizational
change loomed large after the fog of two world wars, of decolonization, and of a
nascent world order. The need to understand foreign cultures, especially cultures
unknown to study in the United States, became increasingly urgent. Europe, which
was already undergoing its own set of cultural and intellectual crises, was the obvi-
ous supplier of what was needed. At that time in the United States, only a few
departments had ancient Near East civilization programs. The most prominent
were Columbia, Chicago, Yale, and Princeton. Although Princeton established the
Department of Oriental Arabic and Literatures as early as 1927, and launched its
first program in Arabic and Islamic studies under the heroic efforts of its pioneer
historian, Philip Hatti (1886–1979), it still needed a specialized scholar in Islam
and particularly in the Qurʾān to complement its strong Bible studies program.4
In the 1940s and 1950s, prominent American universities began to invite Euro-
pean secular academics to give lectures or to teach in the field of Islamic studies in
the United States. When the first official conference on Islam took place at the Uni-
versity of Chicago in 1942, it had the title “The Near East: Problems and Prospects.”
Ever since that conference, up to and including the present, the word “problem”
has become the cognate word for Islam in US politics and academia.5 This despite
moderates such as H. A. R. Gibb, who wrote at a time when many scholars did
not see a “problem” with the colonization of Muslim nations and the resultant rise
of militant dictatorships. Indeed, there was “a common conviction,” Gibb wrote,
“that these problems stem only partially from external causes, but mainly from
factors within Middle Eastern society itself,” and “it is not only by careful study
that the West can help,” he went on.6 “If the Middle Eastern countries must work
out their own solutions,” Gibb concluded, “the Western countries alone can relieve
the psychological tensions which complicate their task.”7
But the West would continue to study Islam and the Islamicate world by way of
problematization.8 The opening of new positions in Near Eastern studies, and the
continuing migration of European scholars to the United States, marked a palpable
shift in academic centers of power by the 1950s. Established European professors
were appointed to open programs and spearheaded new projects in the then-
infant fields of Arabic and Islamic studies. Before Gibb moved from Oxford to
accept his new position as the James Richard Jewett Professor of Arabic at Harvard
 Remapping Qurʾānic Studies    17

in 1955, the United States had no academic infrastructure for studying Islam or the
Middle East; nor was Europe deeply invested in its knowledge of the pre-Islamic
Arabian Peninsula or classical Arabic. The question of “deep” knowledge haunts
Qurʾānic studies to the present day, perhaps precisely to the extent that Islam
remains a “problem” to think through.
In considering the history of European-informed scholarship on the Qurʾān,
one cannot emphasize enough the significance of Theodor Nöldeke’s 1860’s doc-
toral dissertation, “Geschichte des Qorān,” and its lasting impact on shaping West-
ern scholarship on the origins of the Qurʾān over the last century and until today.
Nöldeke’s work was important enough to merit the republication, between 1909
and 1938, of a second enlarged edition in three coedited volumes by his succes-
sors Friedrich Schwally, Gotthelf Bergsträßer, and Otto Pretzl. Nöldeke’s work thus
became the cornerstone for writing a positivist history of the Qurʾān and critiqu-
ing, with others, both the authenticity and reliability of the immense archive of
Muslim sources. More importantly, at least until the early 1970s and before the rise
of the overtly “censorious” historical thought of John Wansbrough and Patricia
Crone, as I explain below, Nöldeke’s work still established the intellectual frame-
work for all academic research on the origins of Islam, at times extending and at
times challenging existing research on the text of the Qurʾān (Blachère) or the life
of the Prophet (Guillaume, Watt).9
What must be historically recorded is that the few decades following World
War II were the time when the humanities in Europe, especially in Germany,
engulfed in post-Auschwitz guilt, sought to make amends to its criminal othering
and persecution of Jews. But if anything, the Historikerstreit (historians’ dispute of
the 1980s) has exposed Germany’s moral failure to heed the historical lessons of the
Holocaust and learn to interrogate its own categorical prejudice against the other.
It is in the name of the historical-critical method, which I discuss in detail in the
following chapter, that Germany “othered” and divided human beings into two
categories: Aryans (the Germanic people), whom it considered “genetically supe-
rior”; and the “inferior races,” which included Jews, Slavs, Roma, Sinti, as well as
Africans, Arabs, Turks, and Asians who hailed from Muslim lands.10
The first wave of European scholars of Arabic and Islam appointed in the United
States included senior orientalists such as Gustav von Grunebaum at Chicago
(1942), then UCLA (1957), George Lenczowski at Berkeley (1952), and Gibb at Har-
vard (1955). This wave constituted a strong bedrock and powerful network of Euro-
American scholarship on Islam in America and triggered a tradition of subsequent
waves. In this new European exodus to America, well-established universities such
as Oxford, Cambridge, and SOAS continued to be the “safe” exportation hub of
orientalists in American institutions. Joseph Schacht (who taught Islamic law at
Oxford from 1946 to 1954) assumed a position at Columbia University from 1957
to 1969; Bernard Lewis joined Princeton in 1974. In 1986, Lewis’s student, Michael
Cook, was appointed Cleveland E. Dodge Professor of Near Eastern Studies at
18    Remapping Qurʾānic Studies

Princeton. In 1997, another student of Lewis, Patricia Crone, was appointed to

the Princeton’s Institute of Advanced Studies as the Andrew W. Mellon Professor
of Islamic History. Both Cook and Crone were students of John Wansbrough, the
Harvard-educated revisionist, whose unflattering argument against the sources of
Islam is even further misrepresented and taken out context in their work.11
To be fair, Wansbrough came into Qurʾānic studies with a strong background and
training in biblical criticism. In early twentieth-century Europe, biblical criticism
underwent a seismic bifurcation, with clashing views on Christian historiography.
These clashes resulted in some scholars turning attention away from biographers
and historiographers to genres and communities. Academic endeavor to restore
the Bible’s scriptural significance began at the hands of Karl Barth (1886–1968),
whose systemic theology allowed for a shifting of emphasis from the historical
Jesus towards the message of the New Testament.12 Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976)
followed Barth’s footprints in critiquing liberal theology and espousing an exis-
tential interpretation of the New Testament. Bultmann’s work—which left a tre-
mendous impact on Wansbrough’s approach to theological history in general,13
and guided his understanding of the Qurʾān text in particular—deemphasizes, if
it does not blatantly dismiss, historical analysis of the life of Jesus and of the New
Testament because of the belief that earliest Christian literature exhibited little to
no interest in specific locations or geographies.14
This reorientation of the theological discourse toward the “thatness” instead
of the “whatness” of Jesus allowed Wansbrough to embrace a similar approach
toward the Qurʾān—namely, what matters is that the Qurʾān exists, not what is
written about it or what happened throughout or after the life of Muḥammad.
And just as the Bible is not a book of history, so too the Qurʾān, Wansbrough
contends,15 (perhaps following a hint from Bultmann’s critique of Christian histo-
riography and his focus on kerygma)16 is not a book of history but rather a book of
“scriptural authority.”17 Wansbrough makes this point clear in his preface:

All such efforts at historical reconstruction (wie es eigentlich gewesen) tend to be

reductive, and here one senses the specter of that (possibly very real) dichotomy
in early Christian history: Jerusalem Urgemeinde opposed to Hellenistic kerygma
(Bultmann). The basic problem associated with that opposition, whether social or
doctrinal, seems in retrospect to reflect disputes upon eschatology, much as the
development of Rabbinic Judaism has been defined as reaction to or residue from
extreme expressions of eschatological belief/activity.18

Wansbrough thus comes from a tradition that considers it demeaning and point-
less to study the Bible and, by extension, the Qurʾān as books of history. Like
Bultmann, Wansbrough is suspicious of tradition in general precisely because “it
is quite impossible to ignore the presence of Nachdichtung in traditionist literary
forms” and because “tradition implies, and actively involves, historicization.”19 In
other words, the writing of history to Wansbrough is the writing of literature about
 Remapping Qurʾānic Studies    19

literature. “History, like poetry,” he maintains, “is mimetic and produces as many
necessary truths as it contains fortuitous facts (Lessing).”20 Wansbrough argues
that historiographies surrounding the Qurʾān and the first Muslim community
starting roughly from 800 AD became too easily acceptable in the Islamic tradi-
tion. He questions therefore asbāb al-nuzūl, tafsīr, and sīra literatures as belated
compositions that are “pressed into the service of salvation history.”21 His training
in biblical criticism drives him to conclude that the so-called source “histories” of
all religion, including Islam, are constructed ex post facto and projected as views
formed amid intense polemics and ideological wars.
In other words, to Wansbrough, while the Qurʾān itself exists as a tangible
material and a textual reality, a history of Islam proper does not really exist; nor
could a historical approach to Islam prove or disprove anything. And since the
writing of history is itself the writing of literature about literature, the only tex-
tual reality is literature itself, where religion has the potential of reaching high
forms of literary representation. Wansbrough calls this literary representation
“mythopoeic”—that is, “artistic reimagining of mythological narratives.”22 Wans-
brough derives this definition from Bultmann, who defines myth as “an expression
of man’s conviction that the origin and purpose of the world in which he lives
are to be sought not within it but beyond it—that is beyond the world of known
and tangible reality, a realm that is perpetually dominated and menaced by those
mysterious powers which are its source and energy. Myth is also an expression of
man’s awareness that he is not the lord of his own being.”23 Even though he argues
that Islam evolved gradually from sectarian forms of Judaism over a period of
150 years in the aftermath of the Arab conquest around the middle of the seventh
century,24 Wansbrough still considers it a unique expression of the same literary
mythopoeic monotheism that informs both the Torah and the Gospels. Yet much
of what has been written on Wansbrough ignores or fails to understand or consider
such formative precepts of his own intellectual thought. The fact that Wansbrough
himself makes so few concessions to his readers and uses technical language acces-
sible only to very few scholars familiar with his methodology is largely to blame for
this misunderstanding.
Bultmannian as it is, and deep in its quasi-Biblical dehistoricization of the
origins of Islam as a solution to the question of origins of Islam, Wansbrough’s
comparative venture into the Qurʾān is neither useful nor precise. It is true that
Western scholarship on the hagiography of Muḥammad has learned not to trust
sīra or ḥadīth literatures, as did some highly regarded classical Muslim scholars.
But historically, there is more material available for learning about Muḥammad
than former prophets. “The evidence about Jesus,” argues Marshall Hodgson, “is
almost exclusively contained in the four Gospels and in a letter by Paul. The more
they are analyzed, the less dependable the Gospels prove to be . . . As to the per-
sonal spirituality of Jesus we have only the thinnest evidence.”25 To be fair, I do not
agree with Hodgson’s argument against the historicity of Jesus. It is neither fair
20    Remapping Qurʾānic Studies

nor productive to argue that there is “enough evidence to allow scholarship . . . to

be based on academic principles” in one (Islam) but not the other (Christianity).”
After all, there is a decent scholarly consensus that Jesus existed and was executed.
And the authentic letters of Paul are at least a very early second-hand source
of information. In the case of Muḥammad, there are also several sources about
his life, in which the Qurʾān itself is a direct and primary evidence. These sources
range from Muslim to non-Muslim material from the sixth to seventh centuries
AD, enough evidence to allow scholarship on Muḥammad to be based on objec-
tive academic principles.26
Although not a proponent of the German School per se, Wansbrough argues
that the Qurʾān and the biography of Muḥammad are material, or rather “litera-
ture,” controversially and belatedly constructed ex post facto (over the span of
three centuries) and formed against a background of other sectarian groups—
namely, the rabbinic Judaism of Iraq. This is a mistake superimposed on an old
orientalist error. The mistake is the intellectual hubris of snubbing the Qurʾān as a
cultural text symbolic of the social, political, and literary significations of its own
time and place. And the old error is the unyielding reification of the conceptual
gap between the self and the other, in which the self paralyzes and distorts the
thinking of the other about its own time and place, as boldly as it alienates it from
its own logos.
And so it was, at a time of intellectual turmoil in post-Vietnam War America,
the study of the Qurʾān made an uneasy debut in the academic halls of US uni-
versities, with scholars and ideas mostly imported from Europe, and with West-
ern academics entrusted with launching and leading programs that would set the
course on how to ideologically approach, define, and teach Islam. US academe,
in turn, divided Islamic studies, and the Middle East, into subdisciplines that
included anthropology, economics, history, and sociology.27 Each of these narrow
professional settings approached Islam and, by default, the Qurʾān as an object
of analysis from its own specialized standpoint, creating in the process its own
disciplinary turfs and boundaries. After more than fifty years, the field of Qurʾānic
studies split into a diversity of experimental and methodological projects that not
only gave rise to chaos,28 but also rendered the Qurʾān text irredeemably othered
and locked into a web of subdisciplinary specializations, a free-floating object that
has almost nothing to do with the cognate Arabic text of the Qurʾān Muslim and
informed non-Muslim readers the world over are familiar with, not to speak of the
interactive, multifaceted lived reality of the historical or contemporary Muslim
world. One cannot, then, emphasize enough that the epistemological framework
and ideological dispositions of this Euro-American network of Islamic studies
has been engendered with specific “problems” in mind. A strong sense of affilia-
tion and unanimity grew among the adherents of this institutional network to a
point that it became intolerant of disagreement, criticism, or alternative approaches.
That is, Qurʾānic studies remains characterized by ʿasabiyya.
 Remapping Qurʾānic Studies    21

The theoretical bedrock and empirical ramifications of this new ʿasabiyya are
not only perversely visible—we see them manifested in scores of publications on
the origins of Islam—but utterly lacking a theologia civilis, or what Emmanuel Levi-
nas once described as an imperative ethico-religious relationship to the other.29 At
stake here is the positionality of the history of Islam, in topographical and thematic
terms. This is not to point blame at the ʿasabiyya well-established scholarship on
the Qurʾān. After all, this type of scholarship prepares and trains scholars to disen-
gage not only from faith-based Arabic sources but from direct textual and analyti-
cal readings of the Qurʾān text in its original Arabic, therefore siding with what is
academically “right.” Yet that which is academically “right” is also a parochial right,
informed by its virtue as overbearing partiality toward Eurocentric ascendency
and the establishment of epistemological hegemony. In that provincial sense of
the right, non-faith-based sources basically translate into non-Muslim sources, a
presupposition that manifests a gross trivialization of the sources of “faith” in these
so called “non-faith” sources of the “self ” versus the unreliable accounts voiced by
the other. Erasing the other in the name of “method” is not a discourse of objectiv-
ity, but a sugar-coated subjectivity predicated on silencing this other, a realization
Muslim readers have to reckon with when they cannot recognize themselves or
their own scripture and tradition in the very scholarship that should be in conver-
sation with them. Even if the main goal has always been academically grounded
in the sense that it would lead to some rational and scientific understanding of
the past, or a “shared heritage,” one would never commit the mistake of conflating
(selected) history with that sought-after understanding. There is no such thing as
an “objective” source or a traceable true history of religious language, precisely
because it is largely iconic, a point that William Montgomery Watt underscored
decades ago.30
Since the middle of the nineteenth century, the rise of colonialism, which fed
off the frantic energies of Europe’s industrial modernity, led not only to the emer-
gence of theories of racial supremacy but also to militant thought and combat-
ive ideology against everything the colonies stood for—the peoples, the lands,
the cultures, and the traditions. This ideological militarization soon became the
modus operandum of European scholarship on the history of Islam. But to view
the demonization of Islam solely as a Eurocentric phenomenon only truncates
our understanding of the ways in which this ideology we witness in the Euro-
American academy is deeply indebted to European colonialism and, with it, to the
underpinnings of racial and cultural superiority, resulting in a consistent stream
of “high culture” scholarship that has methodically “researched” Islam—for the
entirety of the twentieth century—as oppositional to the West and as a threat to
modernity, globalization, and world peace.
For centuries, the presence of the Qurʾān in Europe and, by extension, in the
United States, given the above history of prestigious US universities, has been
reduced to an ardent revisionism of its origins, aided by flawed and truncated
22    Remapping Qurʾānic Studies

translations shelved with caution in large European or American libraries and

accompanied by Christian apologetic commentaries. Robust European academic
interest in the study of Islam’s past did not take place before the 1833, the year
Abraham Geiger published Was hat Mohammed aus dem Judenthume aufgenom-
men?31 This epoch coincided with the age of colonialism in Europe and the mad
“Scramble for Africa.”32 To say the least, these times were not conducive to dispas-
sionate and unbiased scholarship on Arabs, or on Islam and its origins. This was
also a philosophical epoch from which emerged the foundations of “high theory,”
which justified even slavery in a complex Hegelian dialectic. The usurpation of
innocent people’s lands and resources was a military and economic competition
among European states. It is not a coincidence that the height of European colo-
nialism in the Muslim world was coterminous with Germany becoming a hub for
scholarship on the Qurʾān in the nineteenth century. Although the 1919’s Treaty
of Versailles forced Germany to give up its colonies, German academics still ben-
efited from a perverse culture of imperialism.33 German scholarship on the Qurʾān
profited from European colonization of African and Asian countries through
uninhibited acquisition of manuscripts and accessible roaming of Arab-Muslim
lands. Culturally and philosophically, Germany harbored a troubled xenopho-
bia against Turkey, an anxious fascination with Muslim culture, and an academic
obsession with rearranging Islam’s past.34
When a postcolonial self-critique of Western imperialism began to take shape
in the second half of the twentieth century,35 the one field that escaped the scythe of
this long-overdue deconstructive turn in European thought was that of Qurʾānic
studies, especially in Germany. Even Edward Said’s Orientalism, with its enor-
mously broad critique of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European scholar-
ship on the “Orient” (mainly French and British), failed to include it, a failing for
which Said reproached himself.36 We see scholastic humility exercised in many
humanistic fields, but it remains rare in Euro-American scholarship in the field of
Islamic and Qurʾānic studies. In fact, the opposite holds. Qurʾānic studies is the
only field that has attracted some scholars who loathe their subject matter more
than any other area of knowledge I have come to know, save Holocaust studies.
It therefore matters significantly to interrogate the current push for reposi-
tioning the origins of Islam and to radically historicize its intellectual premises.
Even though the Qurʾān rightly insists that it is not poetry, pre-Islamic poetry and
prose were the only literary genres germane to its emergence, and they remain
the only resources for understanding its meaning and significations. Over the last
four decades, only a handful of scholars of classical Arabic routinely entertained
the literary and rhetorical dynamics of the Qurʾān in relationship to pre-Islamic
Arabic poetry.37 But outside this circle of Arabists, the field of Qurʾānic studies in
the West has continued the positivist historical turn advanced in Hagarism. Yet to
claim that the Qurʾān is a “product” or an “intertext” of late antiquity would not
only resurrect Wansbrough’s radical method; it would continue to authorize the
 Remapping Qurʾānic Studies    23

die-hard approach to the text according to an imperative of sovereignty. A self-

critical sovereignty is still a sovereignty. The movement from Cronian othering to
Neuwirthian “spacing” and inclusivity, while redeeming, continues to perpetuate
the shallowing of the Qurʾān’s Arabic cultural and literary tradition.
There are certainly valid historical reasons as to why a robust dialogue with the
Arabicity of the Qurʾān has rarely been engaged or deemed worthy of study in
the West: the sorrowful lack of proficiency in classical Arabic is one; the uncom-
fortable anti-trinitarian tone of the Qurʾān is another; the post-Enlightenment
fascination with history as a “scientific” discipline capable of objective and non-
ideological findings about the past is a third; add to this the public and academic
demonization of Islam as Europe’s archenemy for centuries. It is not an under-
statement to say that the normative illusion of the historical-critical method has
long enjoyed the benefit of allowing Western readers to measure the complexity
of a properly positivist assessment of the Qurʾān against those of Muslim inter-
pretive methods—the semantic, the semiotic, the syntactic, the phonological, the
ethical, the aesthetic, and so on. The latter are mostly written in Arabic or non-
European languages and are often dubbed apologetic or subacademic. The endur-
ing academic authority of the historical-critical method derives not only from a
deep commitment to and continuous refinement of old ideas of the “self,” but also
from the loyal ʿasabiyya of a complex academic superstructure. In the spirit of this
“trusted” academic tradition, a direct and text-based rhetorical engagement with
the Qurʾān would come across as a distraction—one that disrupts such apparently
objective and highly refined academic practice. While this ʿasabiyya may not nece­
ssarily be premeditated, there is an undeniable scholarly inertia when it comes to
Arabic sources. Not only do scholars fail to achieve the competency to read origi-
nal Arabic sources but, unsurprisingly, they tend to go for the low-hanging fruit,
the stories of Jesus, Mary, Joseph, the seven sleepers, and so on that are familiar
in biblical texts, and latch onto them as a way of explaining this challenging text.
Devin Stewart is right to argue that “specialists in various subfields in Islamic
Studies have biases that make it difficult for them to write objectively and insight-
fully about other subfields.”38 But he is also keenly aware that “a great deal of schol-
arship in the academy is shoddy work,” a shoddiness caused for the large part by
linguistic incompetency. It is no surprise that Stewart starts his “Theses for the
Improvement of Islamic Studies” with the clarion call: “For God’s sake, learn Ara-
bic.”39 Stewart’s twenty-seven well-conceived theses are worth posting on doors of
every graduate seminar in Islamic studies. I too would argue for the priority
of superior proficiency in classical Arabic as a prerequisite, given the Qurʾān’s
semantic and rhetorical richness. I contend that only the language of the Qurʾān
offers a theoretically sound and intellectually compelling solution to the disarray
of the field of Qurʾānic studies discussed above. Even though, to Stewart’s point,
“fundamental ideological differences will remain, no matter how much histori-
cal detail is added to the picture,”40 solid proficiency in Arabic will still make it
24    Remapping Qurʾānic Studies

difficult for these ideologies to hold, since only the text of the Qurʾān gives us in its
own language a fair account of the essential history of its sociocultural and stylistic
setting, which, like the transplant of a second lung, will bring it to life and allow
it to speak for itself but also to alien cultures that have systematically silenced it.
Yet the call for improving Islamic studies, and in particular for proficiency
in Arabic, still raises the important question of whether certain scholars of the
Qurʾān have failed to do so or if the issue is far graver than the problem of mere
linguistic proficiency would indicate. In other words, inasmuch as there is a cor-
relation between Western scholars learning Arabic and the quality of their work,
the harsh reality is that linguistic competency alone, no matter how refined, is
not going to stop a scholar from operating within a colonial mentality. Decolo-
nized understanding of the Qurʾān can only be achieved if one views the other as
belonging to a category different from one’s own, to be sure, but a category that
is not necessarily combative or threatening,41 and only if more attention is paid
to the text at hand, to what it says, not what it refuses to say, nor what one wants
it to say—not by way of the convoluted past of late antiquity, or the nitpickings
of biblical criticism, or even the moot debates about the Qurʾān’s origins. These
methods may still claim their academic usefulness and relevance, but only if they
are reframed and retold from within an ethic of comparativity, one that does not
“embrace” the other as an extension of the self but that listens to and includes the
other as an equal participant in the immense and unfinished project of humanism.
There is no question that the Qurʾān is a dialectical text: it offers both a con-
tinuity of Abrahamic monotheism and a rupture breaking through rituals and
practices not only of the peninsular society in which it emerged but also of the
world of late antiquity. While it continues perennial themes, ideas, and narratives
of monotheism known to the world of late antiquity, and even of classical antiq-
uity writ large, the Qurʾān still shattered fundamental understandings of that very
monotheism and disrupted the multiple and complex milieus that constituted late
and classical antiquity. Understandably, the choice between continuity and rup-
ture is critical because it is also a choice of deciding beginnings and endings. This
choice cannot simply be justified by historical evidence or late antiquity “material,”
so to speak, because it is in the nature of the choice to organize and select its own
evidence and material. We have seen time and time again how critical choices
themselves can be reconstructed as facts that generate their own causalities. This
book is a result of this very tension, which confirms not only the temporality of
historical thought in Euro-American approaches to the Qurʾān but also contem-
porary trends to colonial guilt and self-critique without changing scholarly habits,
such as the committed learning of Arabic, that would demonstrate genuine episte-
mological respect for a subject. It is, in fact, “natural” for the Euro-American acad-
emy to be where it is now. Islam has for more than a millennium been perceived
as radically oppositional to the West. This is precisely the perception that informs
Neuwirth’s argument for a remedy that allows the field to look forward only if
 Remapping Qurʾānic Studies    25

it first looked backward. But how far backward in the expanse of late antiquity
can one look? Since medieval times, Muslims have emerged as the strangers from
another space, οἱ Σαρακηνοί, or desert-dwelling camel riders who spoke an unin-
telligible language and followed deviant practices, and whose seemingly human
appearances belied malevolent traits and inferior levels of intelligence. And if
Islam were the hackneyed other of Western history, then the Qurʾān would effort-
lessly assume the status of its archetype.
The point is not so much that the Qurʾān is a cause of “anxiety” because it is
problematic. Rather, it is framed as problematic because it became normalized as
the other, the alien, and the unfamiliar in public discourses. And while the late
antiquity thesis of embracing the Qurʾān as quintessentially European is a much
more progressive approach than the dismissive one adopted, say, in Hagarism, one
must at the very least raise questions about whether this new paradigm has truly
overcome the positivistic and revisionist tendencies of Crone’s and Cook’s studies,
or whether in the process of overemphasizing foreign influences or “intertexts” of
late antique times on the Qurʾān, it has, directly or inadvertently, uprooted the
text’s native context.
In the end, the purpose of offering a genealogy of Euro-American scholarship
on the Qurʾān is not to provide a critique of the Euro-American academy per
se. Rather, the goal is to de-universalize the academy’s claims to historical certi-
tude and highlight it for the whole world to see. The Qurʾān is not a fixed entity;
nor is it for that reason a mobile object whose geographical contours and themes
could be stretched for political correctness. The Qurʾān, in the words of Wilfred
Cantwell Smith, is a “subject”42—that is, a living source of engagement that contin-
ues to lend insight and discernment outside the forbidding field of Euro-American
Qurʾānic studies.
 2

What Is Late Antiquity and What Does

the Qurʾān Have to Do With It?

The 1972 discovery of the most important document regarding the Qurʾān history
at the Great Mosque of Sanʿāʾ proved beyond dispute that the text was transmit-
ted semi-orally before 650 AD, thus silencing all faulty orientalist speculations
about its historical time and location. This transmission took place, as Behnam
Sadeghi and Mohsen Goudarzi effectively demonstrate, “most likely via hearers
who wrote down a text that was directed by the Prophet.”1 Yet, Euro-American
scholarship, which has largely focused on reconstructing the Qurʾān’s textual and
contextual history outside its cognate sources, has been slow in recovering from
this shock. In the medias res of the chaos in the field of Qurʾānic studies today, two
main interrelated strategies of exclusion stand out: opposition and avoidance. The
first, initiated by John Wansbrough in the 1970s, has typically been an approach in
which a scholar extends an act of unwarranted intellectual generosity in order to
prove how a certain historical period, or an Arabic or Islamic source, is “problem-
atic” and thus unreliable for objective scholarship on Islam.2 The second approach
avoids reference to Arabic and Islamic sources altogether under the pretext of per-
petuating a non-Arabic origin (mostly Syriac) or historical repositioning of the
Qurʾān as a rearticulation of the biblical tradition, a “cross-section” of late antique
times, or both. It follows, at least by implication for these approaches, that any
peninsular Arabic sources about the literary traditions and social habits of pre-
Islamic Arabs, or about the customs and practices of Arabs and early Muslims
immediately before and during the life of the Prophet, or even in the early decades
of Islam, do not apply.3
In opposition to these exclusivist trends, a new school that ties the Qurʾān to
late antique times has emerged with the prospect of “including” the Qurʾān and
breaking away with the methodological foibles of exclusivist scholarship. This
26
 What Is Late Antiquity     27

“inclusion” entails an annexation of the Qurʾān into the same domain that consti-
tuted biblical history. Regardless of the Qurʾān’s origins, which this school seeks
to resituate, late antiquarians maintain that the text should be integrated as part of
the biblical tradition and studied on equal footing with the Torah and the Chris-
tian Bible.4 For centuries, this school maintains, the Qurʾān established itself as
a textus receptus—a received text, a commanding sealed corpus, committed to
memory, informed by and informing cultural traditions of the Islamic world and
beyond. Since the findings of Sadeghi and Goudarzi were published more than
a decade ago, it is possible that this new school materialized as a response to the
discovery of the Sanʿāʾ palimpsest (Sanʿāʾ1), a critical reassessment of the field’s
exclusivism, or perhaps a modification and redirection of its force. After all, Patri-
cia Crone and Michael Cook in Hagarism, for instance, did ask credible questions,
but they manufactured misguided answers. By the mid-1990s, numerous essays
and books carrying the names “Islam” and “late antiquity” in the same title began
to be published. Both Princeton University Press and Princeton’s Darwin Press
embraced the initiative quite enthusiastically.5
As I argued earlier, the most prominent claims on the Qurʾān as a late antique
text to this point come from Angelika Neuwirth, whose work provides the most
elaborate model of late antiquarian approaches to the Qurʾān known in the West-
ern academy.6 Now that Wansbrough’s and Crone’s hypotheses regarding the
belated accumulation of the Qurʾān have become passé, Neuwirth’s approach
comes across as a break with the parochial theologocentrism of her Euro-American
predecessors. She positions the Qurʾān as part of the shared cultures that pro-
duced Jewish and Christian texts in the larger framework of late antiquity. She
emphasizes that her approach to late antiquity treats it not as a historical period
but as a “an epistemic space” in which polytheists, Jews, and Christians approached
their variegated antiquities with inventive exegetical interpretations.7 In this larger
context, Neuwirth advances the Qurʾān as a response to, or, more precisely, as a
commentary on the rampant debates regarding divinity that were typical of late
antiquity. To Neuwirth, the Qurʾān draws on rhetorical devices characteristic of
Hellenistic culture that engage with and offer fresh theological premises for the
textus receptus of late antiquity, which include Halakhic and Haggadic traditions
of Judaism, as well as the writings of the early church fathers, while claiming its
own place amid established Jewish and Christian traditions.8
More importantly, Neuwirth seeks to carve an epistemological space for the
Qurʾān between two opposing poles: a traditional Muslim and non-Muslim
approach that reads the Qurʾān as a primordially Arabic text through the lens of
the Prophet’s biography; and an archeological Western approach that focuses on
“source texts” and relies heavily on the historical-critical method to uphold the
perception of the Qurʾān’s “secondarity”—namely, its unoriginality and its sub-
stantial dependence on a biblical and postbiblical tradition. A major difference
between the traditional and the archeological approach to the Qurʾān is that the
28    What Is Late Antiquity

former approaches the Qurʾān as a radical break with the past and a correction
to the course of Abrahamic monotheism,9 whereas the latter seeks to establish
direct connections with and continuities between the contents of the Qurʾān and
the biblical intertexts that served as prerequisites for the Qurʾān’s raison d’être. In
this context, it is important to emphasize that Neuwirth’s project of connecting
Qurʾānic content and form with the debates of late antiquity texts seeks to dis-
pense not with the historical-critical method, which Neuwirth clearly adopts and
defends, but with the “traditional” applications of this method that, according to
Neuwirth, “rarely contended . . . with illuminating the Qurʾan historically.”10
In this act of historical reillumination of the Qurʾān, proponents of the late
antiquity thesis seek to find ties and connections between epistemes of text-based,
oral, ascetic, and sermon-centered cultures that became mutually influential from
the first to the seventh century AD. Further, they attempt to explore the rise of
Islam within this much broader historical background by integrating it into the
philosophical, artistic, and legislative framework of that period. The task is colos-
sal: for “late antiquity” as a concept to make sense in the context of Islamic studies
writ large, it must be defined as referring to the interactions between Judaism,
Christianity, and paganism (including Neoplatonism)11 in the first six centuries
AD. In the East, this Judeo-Christian-pagan compound, with its intense debate
over the nature of human and divine realms and how they relate to each other
stretches geographically from Egypt, Syria, Anatolia, and Mesopotamia in the
north to Ethiopia and southern Arabia in the south. The moment a late antique
Denkraum à la Neuwirth is adopted, Mecca and the Arab dominions would no
longer be at the periphery, but squarely in the middle. After all, Mecca was a cen-
ter where the trade routes of this Afro-Asian dominion converged—to Yemen, to
Syria and across the Red Sea to Ethiopia. It is possible that thick epistemological
dialogues and debates would take place and travel alongside traders. If Ethiopia
and southern Arabia are not integrated into this proposed space, the subsump-
tion of the Qurʾān under the rubric “late antiquity” would fail to make sense not
only historically and geographically but also epistemologically. Indeed, how do we
explain the geographical references to these regions in the Qurʾān, or, for that rea-
son, the sīra narrative of Muḥammad’s advocacy for Christian Ethiopia as a refuge
and haven for persecuted Muslim migrants?
This question invites the inference that “late antiquity” is more than the sum of
its Neuwirthian parts. In the history of Qurʾānic studies in the West, the term “late
antiquity” constitutes a relatively new European approach, situating the origins of
Islam within a larger geographical-historical context of the cultures of the Near
East, including Jewish, Christian, pagan, and syncretic traditions, that preceded
it. This approach is both bold and creative. While benign in that it eschews fla-
grant claims that the Qurʾān is derivative or plagiarized, it still challenges Muslim
historical narratives of the genesis of Islam, which present it as a break with exist-
ing Jāhilī (pre-Islamic) tradition in sixth- and seventh-century Mecca. Proponents
 What Is Late Antiquity     29

of late antiquity contend that such periodization is informative and enlightening

precisely because it avoids the accusations of direct textual plagiarism from Jewish
or Christian texts advanced by old orientalists and their contemporary devotees.
These proponents propose instead a study of the Qurʾān as a key text that draws
on narratives and figures from the biblical tradition in an intriguing and vigorous
manner. Neuwirth’s venture, considered the first full-fledged study to connect the
Qurʾān to this larger context, was welcomed with applause and commendation.
Praised by Deutschlandradio Kultur as a book that will “re-organize all the myths
and misunderstandings that have crept into interpretations of the Koran over the
course of the centuries on the part of Muslims,” and commended by Andrew Rip-
pin as “unrivalled by any other work that has appeared for probably the past 100
years, in its overall scope, analytical depth, unified vision and intellectual rigor,”
Neuwirth’s argument that the Qurʾān is a product of so-called late antiquity is thus
positioned to make an impact on studies of the Qurʾān. But what exactly is, or was,
“late antiquity”? And what does the Qurʾān have to do with it?
Traditionally, the term “late antiquity” comes out of classical studies and it
refers to the end of the classical period. “Late antiquity,” as a term, has therefore
only made sense historically within the confines of the Roman Empire and as the
later epochs of the Greek-and Latin-speaking world. For centuries of active his-
torical scholarship, “late antiquity” has thus been understood and researched as a
temporal marker referring to a limited geography. The Roman Empire used Greek
administratively in the East in a very small part of the extreme north of the Arabic-
speaking world. Since “late antiquity” does not make sense outside this context,
and since most of the Arabic-speaking world has historically been marked outside
the Roman Empire, while in tangential relationship with it, it is useful to under-
stand precisely how Islam became included within the thicket of “late antiquity.”
As the liberation philosopher Enrique Dussel puts it, “Chronology has its geopoli-
tics.”12 It is therefore fair, for the sake of Neuwirth’s “Muslim readers,” to pose a few
questions. If the historical investigations of “continuity” versus “discontinuity” in
the genesis of Islam have to submit to a new recharting of the contours of such his-
tory, how can we assess the validity of Neuwirth’s remapping of this space beyond
the existing structures of Eurocentric historiographic boundaries? Is the historical
past, especially that of Western Europe’s most “contested” religion, considered a
progression toward an ostensible goal? Or is it, rather, a recounting of an intel-
ligible totality? To ask the question more directly, if the history of Islam’s origin is
a matter of compulsive scholarship that constitutes itself in relationship to ongo-
ing debates, documents, and historical contexts of Europe’s understanding of “late
antiquity,” what makes the judgment of such theoretical history veritable? What
makes it relative or constructed? And for whom?
Before addressing the relationship between the Qurʾān and late antiquity
more fully, I would first like to take a detour and examine the origins of “late
antiquity”—that is, the origins of the term in Western historical discourses. One
30    What Is Late Antiquity

must acknowledge that any serious probing of origins in general should situate
this old-age conundrum of continuity and discontinuity more squarely. “What
is found at the historical beginning of things,” Michel Foucault reminds us, “is
not the inviolable identity of their origin; it is the dissension of other things. It
is disparity.”13 In this disparity, one must always be reminded that the notion of
historical (dis)continuity of the Qurʾān derives its momentum and meaning not
from late antiquity per se, but from present discourses and ideologies.14 Historical
revisionism, as we have seen, has an unflattering history of tempting the historian
to identify an object and to fabricate the context. The history of Islam in the West
has always been imbricated in Europe’s own historical development and cultural
heritage—at least since the seventh century—an involvement whose multiple var-
iegations continue to demand further examination.15 As Mark Bevir has put it,
“Historians cannot access the past and secure facts apart from the context of their
present concepts and theories. The past only ever appears in our present beliefs;
it is never given at a distance.”16 These protracted and complex projections onto
the past have spilled over and permeated intellectual discourses in Europe about
biblical history since the eighteenth century, and about Islam since the nineteenth.
Regardless of their philosophical underpinnings, most of these methods have, in
the process, succumbed to the pressure of a present cultural moment, often trust-
ing a thin linearity when it comes to views of a “real” history of Islam—that is, of
the idea of being able to determine, decidedly, what Islam really is, or how it really
was, or where and what it emerged from.
As a representative of a historical period that “includes” Islam, the term “late
antiquity” was coined only fifty years ago, as it was first used by Peter Brown in
the title of his influential book The World of Late Antiquity: AD 150–750. Since
Brown’s book became the founding text of subsequent research in the category
of “late antiquity and the Qurʾān,” it is incumbent on us to provide a prehistory of
his thesis. Brown’s book is written primarily as a reaction to a dominant scholarly
consensus regarding the decline and fall of the Roman Empire and the collapse of
Hellenism, going against the grain of established thought and classical authors,
including manuscripts by Latin thinkers chronicling the fall of the Roman Empire
(such as Sallust, Livy, and Tacitus), and continuing all the way up to the mid-
twentieth-century scholarships of Idris Bell, Ward-Perkins, and Will Durant.17 The
collapse of the Roman Empire could be summarized in the words of Will Durant’s
important 1944 book, Caesar and Christ: “A great civilization is not conquered
from without until it has destroyed itself within. The essential causes of Rome’s
decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her
bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars.”18 Brown’s thesis
is based on offering a contrarian hypothesis to Durant’s statement—namely, that
Rome never actually fell but rather transmuted into something else, something
better than its original elf. Brown’s Rome is not an empire of “decline and fall,” as
most historians have credibly argued, but one of “change and continuity.”19
 What Is Late Antiquity     31

Yet, as though to complicate Brown’s ambitious thesis, Theodor Mommsen,

many years before, called Islam “der Henker des Hellenismus”—that is, “the execu-
tioner of Hellenism.”20 Before Brown published his study, H. Idris Bell, the eminent
papyrologist of Oxford and a scholar of Roman Egypt, traced the decline of Rome
and the decay of Hellenism in his well-known book of 1948, Egypt From Alexander
The Great to the Arab Conquest: A Study in the Diffusion and Decay of Hellenism. In
this important study, Bell provides a fascinating, evidence-based account of both
how antiquity ended and how Islam irrefutably ushered in the beginning of new
era. Bell’s account concludes with the following statement:

The story of Hellenistic Egypt was at an end, and the country whose gaze has been
turned by the victories of Alexander from the East and the past to the West and
the future, had returned to the Oriental world of which it had formed a part. But the
world, whether Eastern or Western, was very different from that which Alexander
knew. The oracle of Ammon was silent. The great temples of Egypt were abandoned
or turned into Coptic monasteries. In the Christian churches and monasteries of
Europe and Asia men debated subtle points of a theology constructed by Greek
thought out of the teaching and life and death of a Jewish prophet, and already
from the minaret of many a mosque in Arabia and in the neighbouring lands
sounded the cry of the Muezzin, Allahu akbar; la illah illa’ lllah, “God is great, there
is no god but God.”21

Contrary to Bell’s account and, before that, to Durant’s, Brown’s thesis on the con-
tinuity of “late antiquity” appears rosy and extrapolative. While his book focuses
on cultural and religious transformations, it does not explain how the Qurʾān is
a late antique text. Furthermore, it neither addresses socioeconomic changes nor
does it provide evidence to substantiate claims for cultural continuities. To crown
it all, the book does not address the seismic shifts in religious discourses from
paganism to Judaism to Christianity to Islam, not to mention the political vio-
lence, religious dissensions, or economic hardships that permeated antiquity. In
short, Brown’s book speaks to none of the convoluted circumstances, the socioeco-
nomic factors, the state finance, the aristocratic identities, the peasant societies,
the legal and military affairs, the rural settlement, or the harsh taxation systems
that led to the fall of the Roman Empire, issues that Chris Wickham brilliantly and
patiently examines and documents in his important evidentiary work, Framing the
Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400–800.22
In this context, it is useful to draw attention to the famous “Pirennean contro-
versy” of 1922.23 This was when Henri Pirenne, the Belgian historian of the Middle
Ages, made the forceful claim, which had gone uncontested for fifty years, that
the event of Islam brought an end to antiquity. This argument did little to help the
relationship between Islam and the West; if anything, it worsened it. I bring up
this argument here to better contextualize Brown’s call for a continuity thesis. It
is crucial to point out that a decade before Brown embarked on his continuity
32    What Is Late Antiquity

thesis of late antiquity, Henri Pirenne had argued with clear evidence that it was
not the Germanic invasion but Islam and the Arab conquest that were responsible
for a break in continuity in Mediterranean civilization.24 And so for decades in
Euro-American scholarship, Islam was seen, à la Theodor Mommsen, as the exe-
cutioner of Hellenism but also, at the same time, as the archenemy of Christianity.
To be sure, throughout much of the twentieth century, there was a widespread
lack of opposition in Western European thought to the collapse, disintegration,
or diffusion of the classical ancient world order.The debate was rather about how
this collapse happened, whether it took place from within the empire or whether
there were external forces, such as a causal relationship between the expansion of
Islam and the downfall of the traditional order in Western Europe. In fact, one
of the main forces behind this decline was believed to be the general maritime
insecurity prevailing in the Mediterranean because of the ceaseless warfare involv-
ing Byzantine and Muslim fleets. In support of Pirenne’s thesis, Eliyahu Ashtor,
another prominent contemporary historian of the Middle Ages, introduced evi-
dence pointing to the rapid decadence of Syrian and Egyptian coastal towns in
the wake of Arab victory.25 A third well-known historian of the period, Andrew
Ehrenkreutz, concludes that it is high time Pirennean polemicists admitted to the
probability that the roots of Rome’s decline “may be found in the progressive and
constructive economic policy of the Arab conquers.”26
What Brown’s book does in relationship to this prehistory of discontinuity is
offer a radically alternative narrative of how the Mediterranean world was trans-
formed from classical paganism to a medieval Christian civilization during the
period from 150 AD to 750 AD. It does not do anything else. In fact, to Brown,
Europe entered medievalism when Christianity moved from the peasant cottages
to courts and palaces around 700 AD. But this is also the same time Islam came to
establish itself as a religion in the eastern Mediterranean and North Africa, a new
wave that has created a cultural discontinuity, or, as Brown himself admits, “a divi-
sion” between East and West, a division that still exists to this day.
Despite their differing viewpoints on this crucial era in European history, both
Bell and Durant agree with Brown that Islam is not part of antiquity or late antiq-
uity as much as it is a marker of its end. Oddly enough, for Brown—who does
not believe in endings and who views early Byzantines, Sasanians, and Umayy-
ads as constituting a single historical phase—Islam is the sign of the expiration of
late antiquity, or what he calls “the most rapid crisis in the religious history
of the Late Antique period.”27 To add to the confusion, Brown still acknowledges
that Muḥammad’s Mecca shielded itself from Near Eastern cultures as well as
Western civilization:
Yet for its foreign contacts, Mecca kept out of the maelstrom of Near Eastern Civili-
zation. Its elder statesmen pursued a canny policy of neutrality. Its inhabitants held
aloof from Christians, Jews and Persians. They were still held back by the fully devel-
oped style of life which they shared with the nomadic Bedouins. They were as proud
 What Is Late Antiquity     33

of it as they were of the resources of their own language—a language formed by epic
poetry, and ideally suited to a tribal environment; it was a style of life hallowed by
custom and by the lack of any viable alternative for that harsh land.28

In his brief reference to Islam, Brown remarks that when Muḥammad died in 632
AD, he had transformed the whole Arabian Peninsula into a land of peace and that
Islam emerged with a message of unity to make all the hearts of the people of the
peninsula one, perhaps in reference to the Qurʾānic verse: “And He brought their
hearts together” (Q.8:63).29 Brown is right. The ethical value of the Qurʾān made
Muslims on par with God-fearing Jews and Christians and provided the illiterate
Arab tribesman with a unique foundation for a literary culture that would soon
rival existing monotheistic traditions. Yet, the focus in the concluding chapter of
Brown’s book is neither the message of Muḥammad nor its Qurʾānic principles,
but rather the rapid rise of dynasties and the swift expansion of Islamic civiliza-
tion into Mesopotamian Asia and the shores of the Mediterranean that created, in
his view, “a division between East and West, which has been blurred throughout
the Late Antique period by the confrontation of Byzantium and Persia along the
Fertile Crescent.”30
The deficiencies of Brown’s integration of Islam into late antiquity are blatantly
obvious to both trained classicists and informed readers. Brown’s thesis has been
sharply criticized for its heavy illustrations that occupy more than one hundred
pages of a pithy 203-page text and for its sketchy summary of six hundred years of
complex history.31 Nothing is more damning than Brown’s careless redrawing
of the ecclesiastical map of late antiquity. Alexander Murray, for instance, finds
Brown’s mapping of the “world” of late antiquity to be quite disturbing. “On the
end-map Constantinople is exactly in the middle. Even Mesopotamia is far from
the eastern edge, which is taken by Kabul.” Not only this, but “China is mentioned
seven times in the index,” contends Murry, while “the West gets correspondingly
lighter emphasis.”32 These playful geographical shifts are deliberate enough to cre-
ate alterations in abstract notions and currents of intellectual thought. Constanti-
nople, while self-styled as the Eastern Roman Empire, was not substantively Rome.
Its sociopolitical and historical conditions were shaped quite differently, as were
those of Egypt and Syria, for that matter, yet Brown decidedly throws a larger blan-
ket for late antiquity that not only decenters Rome and Hippo, but goes all the way
to encompass the Fertile Crescent, Mesopotamia, and Iran, the “Castle of the Near
East.” Changing the geographical mapping of late antiquity is bound, in turn, to
change its chronology and to cause seismic shifts in the weight of historical events.
This is a hugely erroneous yet astutely imaginative undertaking: for how else could
he show that the end of the Roman Empire in the West was barely an event at all,
or even an “end” to begin with? Worse still, Brown never explains what counts as
Mediterranean or why his version of the Mediterranean is somehow broken into
two seas (excluding northern Spain, northern Italy, and Gaul). He does not tell us
34    What Is Late Antiquity

why Africa is included in the “eastern Mediterranean” in this peculiar division33

or why Italy belongs to what he calls “a different world” south of the Apennines
than the world to which it belongs in the north.34 Nor does he explain why there
could not have been a better time in world history for Christianity to thrive at the
shores of the Mediterranean with a “radical communal appeal,”35 whereas Islam
has been met with the opposite results.36
In the confused logic of Brown’s late antiquity, Islam cannot be a continuity of
something that has already been there, in Rome and Hippo, and at the same time
function as a rupture and a rapid discontinuity. This contradiction proves that
Brown’s argument is largely defective. But this is not new. Revisionist histories
depend to a large degree on the intellectual climate and the ideological context
in which they are produced. If humanism, the key word of the educated milieus
of 1970s academic circles in America, could bring together Roman traditions and
Christianity as an optimistic harmonious continuity of the idea of the West, so
be it. It is obvious from Brown’s contradictory thesis that it certainly could not do
the same for Islam. So once again, the Arab conquest and the drastic urban change
in Asia Minor that came with it, which were seen as the absolute non-West, are
now begrudgingly admitted into the sphere of the West through the crafty act of
stretching the historiographical boundaries of late antiquity.
While it is hard to know for how long the Brownian paradigm of late antiq-
uity will continue to structuralize the field Qurʾānic studies, one could make an
educated guess. It is likely to remain in vogue as long as it is allowed to do so,
despite the fact that Brown’s “smooth” theory of continuity is excessively over-
done, especially when it comes to Islam’s origins. Averil Cameron has forcefully
pointed out that late antiquity is itself a muddled “Anglo-centric phenomenon.”37
I would argue that for the Muslim readers invoked in Neuwirth’s study, this phe-
nomenon, in addition to being “muddled,” is terrifying enough to raise the red flag
of Eurocentrism.
All this is to affirm the arbitrary nature of Brown’s theory and the unquestion-
able fact that The World of Late Antiquity is written within the framework of a
historical debate and a particular method of rethinking history that has little to do
with the Qurʾān or the rise of Islam. Yet, in its integrative authority to “include”
Islam, this “method” has dialectically managed to bury the peninsular prehistory
and early history of Islam in the icy tomb of “otherness.” One could only conclude
that Brown’s World of Late Antiquity is at best a colonial fantasy, an imaginary
conquest of the past, and another variation on the familiar theme of violating the
boundaries and intellectual heritages of alien cultures and traditions. It is a cross-
ing gone too far, but it is also a crossing that is all too familiar, one that has long
established itself in Western historical scholarship on the origins of Islam. Thanks
to Brown, the thesis that Islam is part of The World of Late Antiquity has inadver-
tently given a new life to a decaying discipline, one that has been struggling to
survive after it has long outlived its pertinence.
 What Is Late Antiquity     35

Thanks to Brown’s thesis, it did not take long for a renewed evaluation of the
emergence of Islam within the continuous shifts in Europe’s Late Antique para-
digms. Michael Cook’s and Patricia Crone’s Hagarism was, in fact, the first of many
such attempts. When the Hagarism thesis received scathing criticism in the late
1970s, many scholars argued that the history of Islam’s origins had been deliber-
ately and unfairly distorted in comparison, say, to historical revisionisms of simi-
lar religious traditions like Judaism and Christianity. Hagarism consists of three
parts: “Whence Islam?,” “Whither Antiquity?,” and “The Collision.” Cook and
Crone go on to argue that Muslim sources treating the genesis of their religion
and Muḥammad’s faith are unreliable, concocted ex post facto, include only theo-
logical material, and have little to no historical value. This argument, the reader
finds out, is the rationale behind their writing of Hagarism. In order to set histori-
cal records straight, Cook and Crone decided “to step outside the Islamic tradition
altogether and start again.”38 The first part, “Whence Islam?,” is at best sugarcoated
and could have been titled “F— All Arab/Muslim Sources.”
The logic is simple: Why trust Muslims to say anything meaningful about their
own faith, or even take anything they say at face value? On logical grounds, the
argument makes sense. Generally accepted narratives of Islam’s origins did not
rely on contemporary documents but on sources compiled by Muslims years after
Islam. Cook and Crone justify their argument by citing the usual suspects (Geiger,
Goldziher, Schacht, Noth), who find problems with Islam’s origins. But the alter-
native they offer is not less problematic. Cook and Crone sought to reconstruct
Islam’s origins from Greek and Syriac sources contemporary with Muḥammad.
According to their findings, invaders from the Arabian Peninsula sought to
reclaim Syro-Palestine early in the seventh century based on the pretext that the
Arabs, as children of Abraham though his concubine Hagar, who begat his son
Ismael, had an ancestral right to Palestine and the holy city of Jerusalem, and that
Mecca, their native holy city, was just a temporary asylum. They also concluded
that Muḥammad had lived longer than Muslim sources recount, until the begin-
ning of the conquest of Syria, directly succeeded by ‘Omar, because there was no
Caliph Abū Bakr.
Furthermore, Cook and Crone surmised that Islam was a theopolitical move-
ment and that Muḥammad was influenced by the Jews whom the Byzantines
expelled from Edessa and who joined forces with the Arabs to reclaim the Holy
Land. This, in addition to a “discovery” that Petra, not Mecca, was the original cen-
ter for Mohammad’s movement. With their “discoveries,” Cook and Crone opened
up a Pandora’s box of world antiquity, demanding that all scholars of early Islam
not only jettison those “false” Arabic Islamic sources but also arm themselves
for a fierce battle of historical verification. And now, thanks to Cook and Crone,
history—Eurocentric history, that is—is wearing its neat laboratory coat and ready
to debunk the grand Muslim conspiracy theory of historical falsifications. The new
historians of early Islam must now be versed in the Armenian, Coptic, Greek,
36    What Is Late Antiquity

Pahlavi, Samaritan, and Syriac languages and must search every corner of late
antiquity to find the “true” origins of Islam in whichever form they can be found,
including coins, papyri, relics, monuments, inscriptions, and any kind of evidence
available in sermons, liturgies, theological manuscripts, or literary works. In the
lack of genuine proficiency in the very language of the Qurʾān, the ironic question
remains: Who can claim to master this late antique past with all its languages? And
what do these languages have to say “objectively” about Islam?
In Part Two, “Whither Antiquity,” they use the word “antiquity” for the first
time to refer to Islam’s origins, a claim that neither Gibbon nor Brown, the polar
opposites of those advancing the late antiquity thesis and who have their own
problems with Islam, could have dreamt up. In this chapter, Crone and Cook
ask a direct question: How does the cultural confrontation between primitive
Arabs and highly civilized Byzantium and other civilizations in the Near East of
the seventh and eighth centuries lead to the emergence of Muslim civilization?
Crone and Cook fail to substantiate both their generalized claim about how cul-
tural traditions emerge and their flimsy hypothesis that Islam emerged out of a
certain hybridization of complex cultural materials. Part Three, “The Collision,”
is an extension of Part Two. The main goal of this part is to disprove that the
Jāhilī period as recorded in pre-Islamic Arabic poetry is a genuine and authen-
tic background of Islam. Crone and Cook seek to situate Islam’s origins in the
larger historical framework of late antiquity. Oddly enough, they easily accept
non-Muslim sources without any of the scrutiny they use to dismiss the entire
corpus of Arabic-Islamic sources. Why, we might ask, should seventh-century
Greek and Syriac writers, who viewed Islam as the anti-Christ, be regarded as bet-
ter informed about the so-called facts and as more credible sources for recount-
ing them than Muslim sources?
My point is that Cook and Crone’s hypothesis is not an anomaly that will disap-
pear with an apology and a retraction. Rather, it is a symptom of a deeper malady.
Hagarism was applauded by some historians not because it was based on concrete
evidence. In fact, the opposite holds. It was admired because it created a histori-
cal plot appealing to the extreme ideological imagination of the Euro-American
academy in the 1970s. The book constructed the most scandalous narrative on
the origins of Islam to date, one that offers the strongest testimony of the fanciful
premises of the historical-critical method in charting the history of the other. And
although Crone and Cook belatedly withdrew their thesis, and Crone herself, in
her subsequent publications, seems to have distanced herself from the extremism
of Hagarism, the legacy of this work continues to reverberate across the field of
Qurʾānic studies. Might there also be a dialectical benefit?
In a three-decade-belated review of the book, Fred Donner remarks that in
Hagarism there are “important lessons on method” that need to be “absorbed”
and that it compelled “historians of Islamic origins to behave truly as historians,
and subject their sources to rigorous criticism.”39 Even though Hagarism includes
 What Is Late Antiquity     37

a central thesis that is dreadfully flawed, as well as supporting evidence that is not
only insufficient but also appallingly inconsistent, Donner still praises the book
as “positive, valuable, and long overdue in a field that was so hidebound that it
often resisted looking at the real evidence.”40 There may after all be a silver lining
to Hagarism in that it makes the task of historians more difficult and holds them
accountable to ethical and impartial academic thought. And speaking of impar-
tiality, the systematic delegitimization of Muslim voices for the sake of objective
research in the post-Hagarism Western academy continues to invite difficult ques-
tions. What kinds of methodologies, research tools, or modes of scholarship are
given access to prestigious (and widely circulated) publications on Islam in the
West? What brand of scholars are allowed to speak with authority on the Qurʾān?
What are the prerequisites of scholarship on the Qurʾān, and what scholarly ven-
ues and disciplinary or interdisciplinary settings are capable of assimilating, con-
solidating, or interpreting the Qurʾān and its variegated discourses for a Western
audience? If an entire discourse of scholarship on the Qurʾān remains the prisoner
of ‘asabiyya, of ripping the other of its right to speak and understand itself, it will
be virtually impossible to know how such scholarship could ever become aware
of its own deficiencies, let alone critique its protracted apparatus through which
we have learned to see a completely different “reality” of Islam’s past than the one
broadly acceptable outside of this elite machinery.
But most importantly, if Crone and Cook have aborted their attempt to rei-
magine Islam’s past, then why has Brown’s continuity thesis remained “applicable”
to the field of Qurʾānic studies after this (successful) failure of Hagarism? Is it
because it still carries hope for a more sanguine alternative in a field that has deni-
grated the subject of its study for centuries? Or is it because the futile insistence
on the objectivity of extrapeninsular sources, as opposed to Muslim sources, now
seems antediluvian, so to speak, with an overextended continuity thesis that will
most definitely signal the death knell of Qurʾānic studies in the West? Could it
be because Hagarism never really died but continued to be “positive, valuable,
and long overdue,” to echo Donner’s eccentric praise of the book? Does Hagarism
continue to act like an iceberg informing Euro-American historical thought on
the origins of Islam? It is hard to find satisfying answers to these questions. What
we know for a fact is that by the time Brown’s The World of Late Antiquity was
published, the old orientalist model that thrived on historical revisionism in min-
ing the sources of the Qurʾān had fallen out of fashion, and for a good reason.
In addition, dehistoricized theological approaches of Biblicism left the educated
reader confused and hungry for more historical equity and balanced context.
In short, it was becoming pronouncedly clear, especially for a global readership
of Islam and world history, that denying the immediate context in which Islam
evolved any agency to speak for itself simply belies historical facts and benefits
only a few zealots for the cause of the historical-critical method. It was becoming
even clearer that orientalist approaches were based on strawman assumptions that
38    What Is Late Antiquity

monotheistic religions before Islam were in some way more developed and more
established than an imposing new religion was.
Cryptic and sketchy in its musings on the place of Islam in late antiquity, Brown’s
book was controversial enough to draw the attention of the Euro-American field
of Qurʾānic studies, which immediately espoused the thesis, as we have seen in
the case Crone and Cook, in a manner that seeks to view the Qurʾān’s origins with
“fresh” eyes, so to speak.41 To be fair, Brown’s thesis still has something to offer
the embattled field of Qurʾānic studies: a model that promises to be both more
historically grounded and more epistemologically nuanced—at least in its appear-
ance—than the good old orientalist approach, with its blatant biases and adverse
stereotypes. Even though Brown does not say that Islam is part of late antiquity,
he nonetheless believes in continuities. His colonial remapping includes Islam in
the complex world of late antique social formations. This “outlet” is all the field
of Qurʾānic studies in the West has been looking for. It gives it a ticket out of the
prison house of binary oppositions, one in which it trapped itself for at least two
centuries. Brown’s flexible continuity thesis for the unmastered past of late antiq-
uity has now paradoxically become the new “mastered” present of Qurʾānic stud-
ies. Brown’s continuity thesis dissolved the barriers and shifted the debate about
antiquity from clear partitions between chronological periods toward more subtle
expositions of relationships and interactions among various communities of faith,
thus opening the door for a new approach and for renewed investigations of the
origins of Islam at a deciding historical moment in the field of Qurʾānic studies.
The Brownian shift in the historical thought of the Euro-American academy led to the
discovery of late antiquity as a new horizon for engaging with Islam’s origins.
Such renewed interest alone makes Neuwirth’s annexation of Islam into Euro-
pean Late Antiquity both urgent and timely. After all, this is the claim Hegel made
almost two hundred years ago, when he included Islam in the medieval Germanic
fourth stage of world history: “[T]he old age of the Geist in its complete ripeness, in
which Geist returns to unity with itself, but as Geist.”42 In Hegel, Islam becomes the
West in the unique Hegelian sense of the West—the self-consciousness of Geist.
Hegel even calls Islam “the enlightenment of the oriental world.”43 In the Brown-
ian paradigm of late antiquity, this Hegelian “enlightenment” that is Islam may no
longer be just of the oriental world, or even in the oriental world as Hegel thought,
but may render the peninsular geography of early Islam peripheral, by opening
the possibility for expanding boundaries and overturning the traditional catego-
ries of the late Roman Empire. This, and the claims of detecting traces of Hel-
lenistic culture within the Arabic language, is all Neuwirth and late antiquarians
would need in order to make the Qurʾān an integral part of the religious history
of the West.44 This “integration” is already yielding important reconsiderations
for European Muslims who would no longer be perceived as the “others” of the
West, at least not historically or epistemologically. Dialectically, however, it would
also mean that the Qurʾān would risk losing its Arabicity and, to echo Neuwirth,
 What Is Late Antiquity     39

it would risk losing the intimate discursive codes within which the text operated
and gained its status as the most revolutionary literary event of the Arabic lan-
guage par excellence.

T H E QU R ʾ Ā N A N D T H E L AT E A N T IQ UA R IA N S :
A C O N T I N U I T Y T H E SI S ?

The relationship between the Qurʾān and late antiquity has thus gone through
two extreme changes in the twentieth century. From the start of the century, pass-
ing through the “Pirennean Controversy” of the 1920s, up until 1971, Islam was
studied as the kiss of death for late antiquity, a line of separation and division,
and a boundary between a familiar self and an unfriendly, distant other—a line
emphatically drawn in the sand between the so-called “culture” and “anarchy” of
two worlds. In the immediate aftermath of Brown’s The World of Late Antiquity,
the infinite distance that once separated the two worlds disappeared, the boundar-
ies were blurred, and the closer the “ein europäischer Zugang” came to this bound-
ary, the more confidently it would want to assert itself, to interpret, to interrogate,
to define, and to claim Islam, not as an entity of affection, or as an amicable or
friendly extension of the self, but as an entity of ownership and custodial authority,
so to speak. To be sure, there is nothing new about the attempts to include Islam
as part of the long late antiquity, except that perhaps earlier attempts like that of
Crone and Cook were more hostile. What is new, however, is the categorical claim
that the Qurʾān—and by extension Islam—is now, at least conceptually, part of
Europe, constituted via Europe, and has for long been wrongly mistreated as the
other of Europe. In other words, long late antiquity can now afford to claim Islam
back to its European self, so to speak.
In this context, Hugh Kennedy’s short entry on “Islam” in the volume on Late
Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World, edited by Brown, among others,
serves as an example of the late antiquity thesis of continuity. Like Brown, Ken-
nedy builds an argument against the grain, in defiance of “great monuments of
scholarship, like A. H. M. Jones’s Later Roman Empire and the New Cambridge
Ancient History,” two works that “take it as axiomatic that the coming of Islam in
the early seventh-century marked a change so complete that there was no advan-
tage in pursuing the topics that had been discussed into the new era.”45 Inspired in
part by, and perhaps written as a prelude to, Sidney Griffith’s study of the Christian
Arabic tradition of the ninth century, Kennedy’s article does not deal with the
Qurʾān’s commentary on Christianity per se, or with Muḥammad’s interactions
with the Christian communities of his close surroundings or beyond (e.g., Abys-
sinia) but rather with what he characterizes is a “gradual and multifaceted” transi-
tion of the world of antiquity into the dynasties of early Islam, especially Muslim
Syria.46 “Early Islamic society,” writes Kennedy, “built on and developed in the
Late Antique legacy.”47 However, Kennedy does not explain how this happened or
40    What Is Late Antiquity

provide supporting evidence for this vague “gradual transition.” Given its focused
bibliography, as well as its adoption of the Cronian method of dismissing Mus-
lim sources, Kennedy’s article does not cite any examples from the Qurʾān or the
Islamic tradition or include a single Arabic reference on Islam from that period.
The article lacks both interest in and awareness of the classical texts of its main the-
sis. Further, it does not reference medieval Arab-Islamic scholarship on the topic
and fails to explain how the Qurʾān “built on” the late antique legacy. The result
is a hollowed “continuity thesis” of late antiquity into seventh-century Arabia that
has little to no support, especially when there is compelling evidence in medieval
Europe and Islam that chronicles the drastic changes and discontinuities in official
languages and major transformations in identity politics,48 social conditions, edu-
cation,49 military development,50 and religious practices.51
A much more sophisticated and rigorous examination of Islam in late antiquity
is to be found in Aaron Hughes’s article “Religion without Religion: Integrating
Islamic Origins into Religious Studies.” In this provocative article, Hughes wel-
comes the study of Islam’s origins under the umbrella of late antiquity. Sickened
by the vicious orientalism the field has sunk into, Hughes makes a reasonable plea
for Islam to be studied on equal footing with Judaism and Christianity, urging
that such inclusion should be left to the specialists in the field of religious studies
in order to avoid setbacks, pitfalls, or lapses into the historical errors and gener-
alizations of older orientalism. “Instead of seeing the birth of Islam as a unidi-
rectional and transformative force that enters world history in the early seventh
century,” contends Hughes in a Spinozan spirit, “we must be attentive to it as a
point of arrival or the culmination—and not merely the sum—of an interlocking
set of political, social, intellectual, and religious trends of the Hellenistic and Late
Antique periods . . . The origins of Islam, then, are no different from the origins of
other Western monotheisms: they are clouded in mystery, and are about human
ingenuity and worldmaking in the midst of rapid change.”52 In the footnote to his
statement, Hughes emphasizes that Ernest Renan was categorically wrong when
he argued that “Islam was born in the full light of history.”53
Hughes’s insightful and sanguine plea for inclusivity in treating Islam as an
expression of late antique times is reasonable and timely, especially in light of
increasing interest in the Abrahamic tradition and its connection to the period.54
It is not every day that a Western scholar connects Islam to human ingenuity in
the same sentence. But where would Hughes’s sympathetic and inclusive vision
of historical equity fit within Brown’s paradoxical paradigm? This is an important
question because Brown, who happens to be the very originator of the late antiq-
uity thesis on the Qurʾān, sees Islam not only as a break but also as an event that
brought an end to late antiquity. Brown did not perceive the arrival of Islam in
Egypt with the Muslim army of ʿAmr ibn al-ʿĀs in 640/642 AD as a token of inclu-
sivity, let alone continuity or culmination of anything. He neither saw Islam as a
smooth transition nor took the Muslim “conquest” with a grain of salt, as he did,
 What Is Late Antiquity     41

say, the Mediterranean’s conversion to Christianity. A historian who contradicts

himself usually says two things, and both of them should matter. Brown refuses
to see Islam’s invasion of Egypt as anything more than a conquest—a rupture and
an abrupt discontinuity in the traditional sense of the term. This cold reception
makes one wonder: How many other historians of this long late antiquity are going
to play down the idea of rupture, emphasize endurance over change, and see Islam
as a product rather than as a revisionary event, however equivocal that might be?
And why do scholars have to take sides and choose between the two?
The forced continuity with which Brown includes Islam at the transmuting
point of late antiquity is celebrated in Neuwirth’s work.55 Despite Cook and Crone’s
speculative venture into Islam’s past, or perhaps because of it, Neuwirth contin-
ues to probe the terra incognita of Brown’s continuity thesis, but to her credit,
she does so from a different position. In an earlier essay on the same topic, Neu-
wirth acknowledges that “the task of positioning the Qurʾān in Late Antiquity still
waits to be accomplished.”56 Staying true to her words, and ultimately espousing
Brown’s continuity thesis, which is supportive of and central to her project, Neu-
wirth gives her book the perfect subtitle of “Ein europäischer Zugang” (A Euro-
pean approach). In the singular form, “Zugang” connotes access or admission. In
that sense, to translate the title as a “European access” to Islam would not be too
far-fetched. Connotatively, “Zugang” implies a viewpoint (like Perspektive) and a
movement (like Herangehensweise/Annäherung), as well as an option or a pos-
sibility (Eingang zu/Tor zu/access to). In the context of Neuwirth’s argument, the
rich connotations of a European perspective on Islam (from a remote place and
without movement) and a European movement/going to/approaching (Annäher-
ung zu) Islam, seem quite telling.57 In other words, the idea is to see the Qurʾān as
neither a hypocritical mimesis nor an illegitimate son of biblical origins, but as a
genuine inheritor and an active participant in the very legacy of Abrahamic mono-
theism of late antiquity. To Neuwirth, long late antiquity has afforded this apolo-
getic admission of Islam into Europe by way of the Roman Empire. “Read together
with the writings of Late Antique rhetoricians, the church fathers, and the rabbis,
all of whom are commonly claimed as part of the European legacy,” writes Neu-
wirth, “the Qurʾān actually becomes a text that is familiar to us—or it would be, if
our own intellectual preconceptions did not skew our perceptions.”58
So far, so good. But if a historian of Islam begins by interrogating the origins
of the Qurʾān, examining not the present-day text Muslims read the world over,
but rather the formative process of the Qurʾān, such a historian might at least
consider situating the text within the discursive codes of its original language and
the symbolic representations of this text as a document of its own time that is
intimately in dialogue with its intended audience. One does not need a Bakhtin-
ian theory to see that the Qurʾān is radically dialogical and in constant conversa-
tions with the seventh-century Meccan and Medinan communities, communities
with deep pride in their tribal codes and the poetic exploits of their language,
42    What Is Late Antiquity

for which regular poetry contexts were held. While the Qurʾān includes an obvi-
ous “intratextuality” that invites comparative inquiry with biblical studies, these
intertextualities are commentative and interpretive rather than constitutive,
which makes it hard to agree with Neuwirth that this relationship “justifies the
urgency of a serious analysis of the structure of the text that is to be informed by
biblical studies.”59 The Qurʾān is not just a transcript of an ongoing debate or a cul-
tural translation of this particular “space” of interaction. In fact, most of the dia-
logical interactions with the Qurʾān’s intended audience concern matters germane
to the seventh-century Meccan and Medinan communities, including piety, social
laws and ethics, aesthetics, and other social matters such as marriage, divorce,
adultery, enactments related to children, inheritance, murder, commercial con-
tracts, debts, usuary, food, wine, games, and so on. It is true, to some extent, that
the Qurʾān enters into a “dialogue” with other religions—although it is hard to
understand this dialogue in pure philosophical terms, given that dialogues are
mutual inquiries based on the principle of sharing ideas at the same time and
place to arrive at a better understanding of that which needs to be understood. In
addition to its biblical references, there is a far much larger and more dominant
“intertextuality” in the Qurʾān that is best understood in the text’s intent to form
a just community of believers through a highly emphasized linguistic prophetic
discourse known to and practiced by that very community.
This is the case whether one seeks to examine the moment when the Arabic
language of the Qurʾān differentiates itself from the conventional ritualistic poetry
or prose of pagan Arabia, or whether the investigation is of larger sociohistori-
cal contexts outside the Arabian Peninsula that may or may not have influenced
its religious cultures, including the long late antiquity of Europe (via Rome and
Hippo) and the eastern Mediterranean. Although Neuwirth dedicates a fraction of
her book to the relationship between the Qurʾān and the Arabic language, in par-
ticular to pre-Islamic poetry, she acknowledges the obvious illogicality that “while
the relationship of the Qurʾān to the neighboring monotheistic traditions across
various language barriers has been a central critical interest since the beginnings
of Qurʾān research, the highly developed and extensively transmitted literature in
the Qurʾan’s own language, ancient Arabic poetry, has rarely been contextualized
with the Qurʾan.”60 This is a sobering acknowledgement. If the Arabic tradition of
the Qurʾān were indeed part of late antiquity, as Neuwirth claims, what would be
a better place for the European reader than a study of the Arabicity of the Qurʾān?
Neuwirth’s peripheral treatment of the Qurʾān’s Arabic language and of ancient
Arabic poetry in her own book reveals a methodological inconsistency.
Neuwirth is a committed practitioner of the historical-critical approach to the
Qurʾān, to which she has dedicated her book,61 and which she continues to defend
even though she acknowledges that it is “an approach that is being questioned
from various perspectives in recent times.”62 It is not hard to see why the historical-
critical method has outlived its use.63 It is no secret that this method has informed
 What Is Late Antiquity     43

the German School’s framework of inquiry into the origins of Islam since the Hei-
delberg orientalist Gustav Weil’s work, Mohammed der Prophet, sein Leben und
seine Lehre in 1843.64 This practice is clearly enveloped in the historical-critical
method or what is also known as “high criticism” or “historical criticism,” a his-
torical approach originally adopted in studying the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament)
and the New Testament. This approach draws on numerous fields, including his-
tory, geography, anthropology, archaeology, and antique literature in order to
reconstruct the historical setting within which biblical texts were produced.
Today, new approaches in reception theory and synchronic Bible readings
argue for reintegrating the Bible into its internal liturgical and theological tradition
instead of into “external” contexts. These approaches have effectively displaced the
now defunct historical-critical method. Nevertheless, Neuwirth somehow insists
that the Qurʾān does not qualify for this luxury and must continue to be studied
in light of the historical-critical method. Her reasoning is that “Qurʾān research,
unlike this new direction of biblical studies, is not faced with the task of recon-
necting the Qurʾān to its traditional exegetical context.”65 Why not? And why is it
acceptable for a historical method specifically designed to deconstruct the Bible,
a method that has now not only outlived its value but has also proved to have sig-
nificant shortcomings, to continue to be the arbiter of a text it was never meant to
interrogate?66 Speaking of “Qurʾān research” and the assignments of its tasks, why
is it so difficult to see that the biblical bias in this very research ultimately discloses
not the meaning of the Qurʾān but how the canon of Qurʾānic studies is shaped in
Euro-American academia?
Neuwirth is fully aware that there are mainly two opposite camps when it
comes to the study of the Qurʾān: the biblical and the Arabian. Neuwirth’s argu-
ment for the historical-critical method as the only valid approach for includ-
ing the Qurʾān under the rubric “late antiquity” is based on an unsubstantiated
assumption that the contents and imagery67 of the early, middle, and late Meccan
sūras have strong affinities with biblical psalms, or what she calls “psalmic piety,”68
while maintaining “poetic” local features present in pre-Islamic poetry, whatever
that means. Neuwirth bases her assumption on what she surmises in the Meccan
sūras to be a representation of Muslims as the rightful inheritors of the Banī Isrāʾil
(Israelites), especially in reference to Jerusalem.69 In other words, the presump-
tion that the Qurʾān appropriates the biblical tradition and reshapes it according
to its own existing Arabic “poetic” codes becomes Neuwirth’s justification for the
application of the historical-critical method. I argue in the following chapter that
this deduction is drawn too sharply, given the dense complexity of the relation-
ship between ancient Arabic poetry and the Qurʾān, which has sorely remained
understudied in the Western academy. “Almost perversely,” emphasizes Thomas
Bauer, “Qurʾanic scholars (in the West) do not show much enthusiasm about the
existence of this literature.”70 But this is how Neuwirth interprets the Qurʾān’s ear-
liest sūras—namely, as a reproduction, or rather, a “reinterpretation” of the biblical
44    What Is Late Antiquity

landscape into Arabia, which, in her scheme, would necessitate an annexation of

late antique elaborations on scriptural traditions.71 In other words, Neuwirth softly
resurrects Crone’s old orientalist thesis that there was a prominent Jewish com-
munity in the Hijaz able to influence the literary evolution of the Qurʾān and the
permeation of foundational narratives such as Abraham’s “anachronistic” erection
of the Kaaba in the spirit of constructing Mecca as a new qibla in lieu of al-Masjid
al-Aqsá of Jerusalem.72
All this is to say that Neuwirth’s “new” integration of the Qurʾān under “late
antiquity” is not a new approach, but a sympathetic restoration of an older method,
one that singles out verses and sūras to support a particular theoretical position
and to advance an entire epistemology. She dismisses Gustav von Grunebaum’s
argument for the “Arabicity” of the Qurʾān and considers it both “problematic” and
“impaired” for the latter to contend that “from an Arabic standpoint, the teach-
ing of Muhammad [signifies] unmistakable progress towards greater religious and
intellectual maturity,” and that the Arabs were the intended “receivers of the teach-
ings of Muhammad.”73 She argues that von Grunebaum’s logic is flawed because it
excises the Arabs, “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
one hand and the putative pure ‘Arabs’ on the other.”74 It is hard to see a flaw in von
Grunebaum’s logic other than that it does not fit Neuwirth’s categorical construct.
In fact, the Qurʾān supports von Grunebaum’s argument in repeatedly asserting
that that text’s geographical positionality is coterminous with its Arabicity as a
mode of intelligibility, and underscoring that its local intelligibility does not neces-
sarily trump the universal appeal of its message:
‫َك ُقُْرْ آًنًا ََع ََرِبًِّي�ًا ِّلُِتُن ِِذ ََر ُأُ ََّم ْاْلُقُ ََر ٰٰى ََو ََم ْْن َحَْوْ َلََهَا‬ َ ِ‫وَك َٰٰذ� ِل‬
َ ‫َك َأَْوْ ََح ْْيَنَا ِإَِلَ ْْي‬ َ
And so We have revealed to you an Arabic Qurʾān, so you may warn the Mother of
villages and everyone around it. (42:7)75
Not only this. Neuwirth has decided, through a misreading of James Montgom-
ery76 and an uncritical adoption of Michael Zwettler’s Eurocentrist theory on the
oral composition of classical Arabic poetry,77 that the discourse of pre-Islamic
Arabic poetry also falls under the blanket of late antiquity.78 Even though she bela-
boringly insists that late antiquity is an epistemic space not to be misunderstood
as a political chronological period, it is hard to deny the fact that the term has a
definitive historical framework, which extends from early Roman imperial times
and describes the time of transition from classical antiquity to the Middle Ages in
Europe. Sooner or later, one has to come to terms with the fact that the comfort
of the historical-critical method has consisted in lending a starry-eyed totaliza-
tion that gives the impression that an intricate web of themes, styles, ideas, and
events has in its overall totality come together over an accumulation of centuries
to offer a holistic understanding of a certain period or epoch in history. Such an
 What Is Late Antiquity     45

understanding is diagnostically essentialist, in the sense in which we have seen

Hegel condemn the totalizing operations of historicism. Not only Hegel, but Spi-
noza, who is often credited as the first philosopher to have launched the field of
historical criticism of the Bible, sounds a grim warning about its limitations and
difficulties, speaking of “the method’s capacity to guide us towards a full and cer-
tain knowledge of the sacred books” when most of it “is unknown to us.”79
There is a notable difference between the approach of Western historians to the
Qurʾān and that of philologists and literary critics, a gap Neuwirth has sought to
bridge. On balance, European historians are growing more frequently ambivalent
toward the stretched theories regarding Islam’s origins that they inherited from
the last generation of revisionist historians—for example, Cook and Crone’s the-
sis on Islam as Jewish sect80 or Christoph Luxenberg’s unscholarly obsession with
its Christian borrowings.81 Many well-informed historians tend to use or propose
historical theories of Islam’s past with caution and inclusivity.82 By contrast, lit-
erary critics are bound to consider the Qurʾān in relation to an existing body
of literature, mostly pre-Islamic Arabic literature, which, according to al-Jāḥiẓ,
emerged between 150 and 200 years prior to Islam and continued well into the
early years of Qurʾānic revelation. For these reasons, discussions between his-
torians and littérateurs often arrive at an insuperable impasse. One must tread
carefully, then, on the terra incognita of late antiquity’s “conversations” with the
Qurʾān, lest these conversations carry an unconscious bias or a latent continuity
thesis of Cook and Crone’s kind. For what else could Cook and Crone’s venture
be other than a dangerous scheme to disperse the Qurʾān in the labyrinths of
late antiquity and dilute its origins in a melting pot of cultural forces within an
allegedly Hellenized Middle East?
A suitable example of a study attentive to these literary/historical intercon-
nections between the humanities and the social sciences can be found in Hol-
ger Zellentin’s recently edited volume, The Qurʾān’s Reformation of Judaism and
Christianity. Zellentin begins the volume with the acknowledgment that it is high
time the West moved away from treating the Qurʾān as the scripture of a minority
and toward a more inclusive treatment of it as part of Europe’s legacy. Accord-
ing to Zellentin, this movement is historical in every sense, stemming from the
West’s realization that it needs to reposition itself toward the Qurʾān from within
its own historical context. “We have come to recognize that the Scripture of Islam
should be understood not only as the foundational document of the Islamic com-
munity,” argues Zellentin, “but also in dialogue with the world of Late Antiquity,
whose transition into the Middle Ages was expedited by the rise of the Islamic
community itself.”83 This invitation to redirect the course of Qurʾānic studies more
inwardly toward Europe feels like a fresh reset button in a field that has systemati-
cally been hostile to Islam. Authors cited in Zellentin’s volume, especially Walid
Saleh and Angelika Neuwirth, are aware of this history and know that they are
writing against a grain so selective in its pursuit of the origins of Islam.
46    What Is Late Antiquity

Still, while Zellentin’s volume does not shy away from engaging with the
sources of the Qurʾān’s origins, it does so in a manner that appears more nuanced,
more benign, and more equitable than former dismissive “Western” approaches.
“In contrast to the comparatist efforts of the religious polemicists of past and pres-
ent,” contends Zellentin, “many contemporary scholars have largely digested the
lessons of postcolonialism in as far as they tend not seek to establish the superior-
ity of anyone tradition over the other.”84 Zellentin invokes Dominick LaCapra’s
seminal article on the topic of rethinking intellectual history. LaCapra is a distinct
scholar who bridges intellectual history and literary representations, and is thus
an appropriate choice to cement Zellentin’s repositioning of the West’s historical
attitude toward Islam with an epiphany of sorts, an overdue realization that “the
Qurʾan’s value as a canonical text . . . resists common assumptions, and allows for
an especially compelling conversation with Islamic Scripture.”85 It makes sense
for Zellentin to invoke LaCapra in calling for confronting one’s own ideologi-
cal biases and repairing the damage caused by older orientalism—perhaps in
an implicit reference to Crone and Wansbrough—when he acknowledges the
unpleasant past of Western scholarship on the Qurʾān.
Elsewhere, Zellentin emphasizes the need to embrace the Qurʾān as a primary
text and “a key source reference for Arabian culture.”86 However, there is a stark
contradiction in his argument. On the one hand, Zellentin wants to exonerate
the Qurʾān from the “derivation spell” cast upon it by the older orientalists and
to honor its historical value “regardless of it religious significance,” namely, as a
document with “a wealth of information about its intended audience” and which
“allows for a genuine glimpse into Late Antique Arabia.”87 On the other hand, Zel-
lentin treats “Late Antique Arabia” as an indisputable historical given and falls
back to an essentialist theory of “influence,” recasting the Qurʾān as a text that
belongs “to the category of monotheism and its history from the Hebrew Bible,
throughout Late Antique Judaism and Christianity,”88 thus risking, yet again,
silencing the Qurʾān’s Arabicity, its informative pre-Islamic poetic corpus, and its
sociolinguistic specificity.
The invocation of LaCapra could not have been more timely, for all the reasons
Zellentin mentions. In fact, LaCapra touches a sore nerve in intellectual history,
one that, dialectically enough, interrogates the validity of the very project of late
antiquity that Zellentin represents. “The belief in pure interpretation,” contends
LaCapra, “is itself a bid for absolute transcendence that denies both the finite
nature of understanding and the need to confront critically what Freud discussed
in terms of “transference.”89 What this means for late antiquity as a new venture
for investigating the Qurʾān is that it finds itself in danger of projecting itself onto
the other. When it comes to the relationship between the Qurʾān and late antiq-
uity, the Euro-American academy’s excessive denigration of the genesis of the text
to external, non-Arab origins is based on an unmistakable case of “attribution
bias”—namely, an alarming self-identification with these origins.90 Usually, this
 What Is Late Antiquity     47

is not necessarily harmful. But variations on the Brownian theme of a continuous

and unending late Antiquity have to come face to face with the fact that while
the Qurʾān comments on and invites comparison with Judaism and Christianity,
there remains no clear-cut historical evidence to support the hypothesis that it is
“shaped” by external forces outside Muḥammad’s Meccan society, linguistically,
philologically, or socially.
Nor can the field articulate a clear delineation or a trace for any of the themes
of late antiquity in the Qurʾān that are not already germane to its immediate con-
text in the Arabian Peninsula; even notions such as asceticism, revelation, mir-
acles, and prophecies had already existed in the collective consciousness of the
Arabian Peninsula before Islam. If anything, just a cursory reading of pre-Islamic
Poetry would situate the Qurʾān thematically and linguistically at the heart of
the seventh-century Arabian Peninsula. The linguistic organicity, the communal
dialogue, and the social context of the Qurʾān’s revelation all play a substantial
part in this relationship. There is a sharp irony between the confirmed state of the
field’s indiscernibility when it comes to the distinction between what is “native”
and what is “foreign,” or what Zellentin characterizes as “the ultimate unknow-
ability of much of pre‐Islamic Arabic culture and religion,” and the degree of cer-
titude and inevitability with which he embeds the Qurʾān into the fabric of late
antiquity. Here, again, LaCapra is useful. “Historiography would be an exercise in
narcissistic infatuation,” maintains LaCapra, “if it amounted to a willful projec-
tion of present concerns upon the past. The notion of ‘creative misreading’ is itself
mis-leading when it legitimates one-sided, subjectivist aggression that ignores the
ways in which texts may actually challenge the interpreter and lead him to change
his mind.”91
Treating the Qurʾān as a text of late antiquity is enveloped in postcolonial
guilt. The unending late antiquity tsunami of Peter Brown and its ramifications
threaten to drown something linguistically organic to its people. The problem here
is not that the Qurʾān includes a universal message or narrates stories from the
Old Testament, or even continues themes of codes from late antique times. It does.
But notions of piety, social justice, and high moral codes do not necessarily have
to come from Europe to receive a stamp of originality. It is almost as if LaCapra
predicted the late antiquity thesis, and in particular Peter Brown’s fanciful version,
on Islam when he wrote that historiography “is not an autonomous hermeneu-
tic undertaking that moves on the level of pure meaning to establish a ‘fusion of
horizons’ assuring authoritative continuity with the past.”92 If anything, the issue
of late antiquity, which promises to bring some unity of theory and practice, serves
instead to dramatize the ambivalence and uncertainty of the Euro-American acad-
emy’s position regarding Islam’s origins. In this well-intended attempt to locate a
privileged space within the self to include the other, we risk defaulting back into
the trap of “revisionism,” the return of a historical boomerang thought to have
been vanquished after the onslaught of Hagarism.
48    What Is Late Antiquity

This risk brings back the urgent question of a proper approach to the study of
the Qurʾān in the West. This question is owing as much to the collapse of one’s own
inclinations and presuppositions as it is to any conscious and learned awareness of
the textual weight of the Qurʾān in the world outside the narrow prisms of schol-
arly and academic ‘aṣabiyya. One may, therefore, as a practitioner of the larger
field of the humanities, acknowledge the crucial need to liberate the Qurʾānic text
from the cancerous growth of ideologies, both Eastern and Western, that have
beset it since the seventh century. I use the word “text” here deliberately—not in
the reductive way that may be meant to resurrect old debates on the text-ness of the
Qurʾān, which a scholar like Naṣr Ḥāmid Abū Zayd had to endure, but precisely
in order not to reduce the Qurʾān to one governable discipline or “method” over
the other. The idea is to turn one’s attention to the presence of the Qurʾān, its mes-
sage, its rhetorical power, not solely and rigidly to how it came to be, but to what
it is and what it does. One is compelled to ask: How long can scholarship on Islam
in the West afford to lapse into a collective “defense mechanism” of “transference,”
to echo LaCapra, and how long before it starts to transcend the obsession with
searching for its image in alien texts?
It has become increasingly evident that “interpretive findings” of late antiquity,
no matter how stretched or hyperbolic they might be, have become the modus
operandi of recent and current publications on the Qurʾān. Forcefully armed with
Brown’s “continuity thesis,” the negative authority of Crone’s Hagarism, and Garth
Fowden’s notion of “maturation,”93 late antiquarians have one clear goal: to restore
the Qurʾān, scripturally and prophetically, to what one might venture to call ”oper-
ation millennium.” In this operation millennium, the thousand-year span between
Aristotle and Muḥammad is a fair game, despite the fact that Muḥammad lived in a
remote place, far outside the fringes of Aristotle’s sphere of influence, and may
have not heard of him. This is not to say that the work and ideas of Aristotle did
not travel far or did not leave indelible impacts on Islam’s cultures and civiliza-
tion. Yet, there is in the late antiquarian theses regarding the Qurʾān a trouble-
some assertion of historical totalization. The comparatist in me would normally
embrace all forms and themes of textual affinities across time and space, and the
influence of Aristotle and the peripatetic school is undoubtedly far-reaching in
Islamic philosophy, but I will argue that the imperatives here carry with them
pernicious consequences.
Let me illustrate this paradox with an example from Edward Gibbon’s History
of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. In chapter 33 of this multivolume
work, Gibbon discusses Q.18 (Sūra-t- al-Kahf, the Chapter of the Cave); he refers
to the story of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus. Gibbon argues that this “insipid
legend” must have traveled from late antique Christianity to the land of Islam.
To Gibbon, the story of the seven sleepers was originally a narrative about the
emergence of Christianity as a victorious religion in the aftermath of a dark era
of persecution. In other words, the story of the seven sleepers accurately enough
 What Is Late Antiquity     49

preceded Islam and may have well been narrated and circulated by Syriac bish-
ops prior to Islam. There is nothing new about this. The Qurʾān refers to parts of
this narrative in the Chapter of the Cave, named after the place in which the sleep-
ers stayed. The story of the sleepers, however, constitutes only seventeen verses
(Q.18: 9–26) of the sūra’s 110 verses. Because the Qurʾān incorporates the nar-
rative of the sleepers of the Cave, Gibbon assumes that Muḥammad must have
stolen the tale “when he drove his camels to the fairs of Syria” and recast it “as a
divine revelation into the Qurʾan.” Furthermore, relying exclusively on Marracci’s
polemical translation and commentary on the Qurʾān, Gibbon concludes, sarcas-
tically, that “Mahomet has not shown much taste or ingenuity,” even when ”he has
invented the dog (Al Rakim) of the Seven Sleepers; the respect of the sun, who
altered his course twice a day that he might not shine into the cavern; and the care
of God himself, who preserved their bodies from putrefaction by turning them to
the right and left.”94 What Gibbon’s thesis leaves out is a system of allegorical inter-
pretation whereby the story of the sleepers, whose account comes as a verification
test for Muḥammad’s prophethood,95 is radically transformed in its Qurʾānic con-
text to respond to local communal interrogations and redirect the story from the
quibble of historical details to the ultimate moral lessons that need to be drawn
from it. Moreover, Gibbon omits the need for a serious interrogation of the verac-
ity and cohesion of that “first millennium,” which he employs uncritically as a
period in the history of monotheism. This is how Gibbon drags Muḥammad into
the declining world of the Roman Empire. This is also how he declares Islam
as the end of late antiquity—by mocking Muḥammad’s character and presenting
his prophethood as a debt to Syriac Christianity.
But given the rowdy orientalism of Gibbon’s age, one would not have expected
him to write favorably about the Qurʾān. It is, rather, the recycling of Gibbon in
modern scholarship that is alarming. In writing Before and after Muhammad, Garth
Fowden states that he has “come to a better appreciation of Edward Gibbon,”96 not
because of his unapologetic Eurocentrism, his firm belief that European civiliza-
tion is the pinnacle of human achievement, or because of his unflinching sup-
port of the “discontinuity thesis” on the fall of the Roman Empire, which Fowden
rejects, but because Fowden sees Gibbon as “setting an agenda that today seems
more valid than ever.”97 Gibbon, who flagrantly accuses Muḥammad of plagiarism,
has an “agenda” that inspires Fowden to write a history that includes Islam in a
European millennium, the longest periodization the human mind could ever con-
ceive. Is it likely that Fowden did not know or simply ignored this troubling aspect
of Gibbon’s scholarship? It is precisely in learning to confront the monstrosity of
one’s own tradition that the hope of dismantling this machinery of systematic oth-
ering and bringing it face to face with what it cannot grasp without succumbing to
the larger of metanarrative of Euro-American ʿaṣabiyya lies.
When Michel Foucault spoke of “periodization” and when Frederic Jameson
cautioned critics to “always historicize,” they did not have in mind any period
50    What Is Late Antiquity

longer than a hundred years, let alone a thousand years. Yet Fowden’s work has
inspired many. It is probably the driving force behind Aziz al-Azmeh’s long-
winded study on the topic; it also features prominently in Neuwirth’s thesis on late
antiquity. This is how Europe is making amends and reimagining its relationship
to Islam. This is how the Euro-American academy overcomes its long-guarded
western-Mediterranean and Byzantine turfs and jumps well beyond its boundaries
to intellectually colonize the Qurʾān in an unending stretch of a grand narrative
that spans a millennium: a wild subordination of history to a cosmetic surgery
and a decadent feast for the Eurocentric historians of the Qurʾān. To be fair, incor-
porating Islam under “late antiquity” remains a colossal task and a difficult argu-
ment to make or even accept in contemporary Europe, precisely because it entails
an extension in the teleology of Abrahamic monotheism,98 with the hopeful pre-
sumption that Islam would still be treated as equal to and not as derivative from
both Judaism and Christianity. This will in turn entail a different reading of the
Qurʾān as a complement to and a commentary on both Judaism and Christianity.
In the other direction, this incorporation will necessitate a radical retooling of
Christian theology, which will have to accept Islam, and not Christianity, as the
latest update of Abrahamic monotheism. This development is bound to “turn tra-
ditional patristics on its head,” to use Averil Cameron’s fitting words, “by making
Islam, not Christianity, the end point.”99
But my point in citing these examples is to emphasize an important fact: the
appeal of late antiquity as framework for research has already opened a portal
between two kinds of academics: the “new” historians who see late antiquity as a
fait accompli periodization that opens up boundaries and geographies to include
Islam; and the Hagarism-infused historian who is uninterested in the traditional
Muslim argument that the Qurʾān ushers in a new age and insists instead that the
text is an iconoclastic myriad of repetitive modes recast from previous religious
and cultural traditions.100 While the latter brand of historians are free to locate
sources for the Qurʾān wherever they please, they have no qualms in boasting that
the practical advantage of studying Islam as “a child of Late Antiquity,” is that “it
widens the scope of their [late antiquarians] field to include a new geographical
region, a new religious phenomenon and a greater span of time.”101
Stewart warns against exactly such a maddened rush into what he charac-
terizes as a “quantum leap” in present publications on the Qurʾān, leading to
a state of “confusion” and “a feverish activity” that “has produced no grand con-
sensus” in a field that continues to appear “chaotic, even to insiders.”102 Cameron
also calls this trend “the explosion of Late Antiquity” and cautions that scholars
will eventually have to face “the challenge to be aware and to try to take account
of the immensely complex context with which we are now presented.”103 In this
vein, a question that was asked before must be asked again: Does the late antiquity
thesis run the risk of participating in a different uprooting of Islam? Is it a radi-
cal departure from the crass orientalism that still haunts the field, or is it a return
 What Is Late Antiquity     51

under a different name, of another metanarrative, another constructed historical

category designed to control the event of Islam, its Arabicity and sociolinguistic
particularity? Even at this point, it is hopeful to imagine that a productive and
decisive position in the field of Qurʾānic studies is still possible, one that, while
admitting the messiness and complexity of history, and while grateful to the efforts
and methodical approaches of their predecessors, is unafraid to leave behind the
carved gods of Eurocentrism and embrace fresh approaches outside the façades
of the “objective” method and the convenient metanarratives of authenticity and
epigonality. Today, the chaos and disarray in this field warrant an urgent interven-
tion and an ethical response to what Emmanuel Levinas not so long ago character-
ized as “the face of the other.”
There is no denying that until today, and despite its fundamental drawbacks,
the historical-critical study of scripture and biblical texts still rules the academy,104
especially in terms of what gets transmitted to nonspecialists. Scholars who are not
operating within an explicitly theological Jewish or Christian perspective often
have almost the same attitude toward the Bible as Western scholars have toward
the Qurʾān. Almost! They do not come at it with the same Eurocentrism and colo-
nialist mentality. So, it is almost as if Western scholarship on the Qurʾān some-
times takes the same condescension toward the biblical text and amplifies it with
all of the colonialist and postcolonialist hostility and appropriation. It is almost a
form of intersectionality, except that, in the case of Islam, it is a combination of
derision toward religion and derision toward a culture.
While the ghost of “continuity,” as I have argued elsewhere,105 never fades away
but lurks like a receding telos, such a telos may take many different faces and could
even mutate within fluctuating contexts and epistemologies. Appropriations of
history for the service of the present are neither new nor appropriate, but as “old as
Babylon and [as] evil as Hell,” to borrow Edward Abbey’s words. In fact, Nietzsche,
who once expressed a desire to live among Muslims in order to deconstruct better
Europe’s crisis in values—so that his “eye and judgement for all things European
will be sharpened”—summed up these tendencies to appropriate history quite elo-
quently in the following statement:

If a man who wants to do something great has need of the past at all, he appropriates
it by means of monumental history; he, on the other hand, who likes to persist in the
familiar and the revered of old, tends the past as an antiquarian historian; and only
he who is oppressed by a present need, and who wants to throw off this burden at any
cost, has need of critical history, that is to say, a history that judges and condemns.106

This statement plays at the heart of the crisis of current Euro-American scholar-
ship on the Qurʾān. Nietzsche’s reference to “critical history” is a history that rec-
ognizes the misdeeds of the past and endeavors to liberate people from dominant
forms of ideological representations of events. Critical history provides a context
in which the historian is irked by a present need to search history maliciously,
52    What Is Late Antiquity

twisting facts and drawing cryptic conclusions precisely in order to make a par-
tisan statement on that history. It is crucial, therefore, that interpretations of
history, especially of histories that belong to cultural and linguistic traditions dif-
ferent from one’s own, should include the historian’s own cultural, intellectual, and
ideological position vis-à-vis the multiple imbrications of these events outside the
historian’s familiar grounds. If we follow Nietzsche’s hint, when the call for reas-
sessing history is in the service of a present need, then the reassessment of that
history will always be “critical”—that is, it will serve the immediate fulfillment of
a desire, a desire to contest the study of the prehistory of the Qurʾān as a replace-
ment of the study of the Qurʾān itself. The current postmodern direction of the
humanities offers a unique opportunity to rethink Qurʾānic studies in a different
light. There surely is a way to see approaches to the Qurʾān as something other
than an allegory of an epistemological colonization emanating from a strong cul-
tural desire to reappropriate the other. Or, is there still a lingering conviction that
texts of alien cultures are innately subordinate to what the Eurocentric former US
Secretary of Education William Bennett has referred to as “the great tradition the
world has seen . . . the great books and civilization of the West . . . great, texts, great
minds, great ideas”?107 If this is indeed the case, then the study of the Qurʾān in
Euro-American academia demands a new look at ourselves, not just a look inward,
but a Nietzschian look from the outside in, to see if we have become, consciously
or not, the very ghostly embodiments of those older ideologies we denounce
the most.
 3

Intelligence versus Power

Rhetorical Dynamics in Pre-Islamic Poetry
and the Qurʾān

Literature begins where history ends. This statement is not necessarily a claim for
the supremacy of one discipline over another. Rather, it allows us the opportu-
nity to engage a tradition that includes volumes of Arabic literature prior to the
Qurʾān. Examination of this tradition does not necessarily imply that reading
ancient Arabic literary texts has to be exclusively literary. Nor does it proclaim
that the basis of the difference between the treatment of Western and non-Western
texts is only an institutional one in which some texts deserve more aesthetic appre-
ciation than others. By studying the Arabic prehistory of the Qurʾān as well as the
Qurʾān in relation to its cognate literature, one is bound to better understand their
linguistic and aesthetic specificities. In this chapter I seek to investigate the shared
characteristics of pre-Islamic literature and the Qurʾān. In pre-Islamic poetry, as
well as the Qurʾān, these specificities are measured through a highly aesthetic lan-
guage that represents deeply held communal values. The link between aesthetics
and ethics will be the subject of a separate chapter, but it is worth introducing the
connection here as I begin to contextualize the sociolinguistic dynamics between
pre-Islamic poetry and the Qurʾān. The basic argument of this chapter is that if
one is seeking to understand the context in which the Qurʾān came forth, how
could one not study contemporaneous and pre-Islamic Arabic poetry? The ques-
tion of the relationship between pre-Islamic poetry and the Qurʾān still feels
fraught to many given the complexity of the topic. In this chapter, while I argue for a
connection between the two, lexically, syntactically, and imagistically, I do so while
cautioning against derivativeness, precisely because of the discursive distinction of
each. While the idea that the Qurʾān is “the most beautiful of speech” may fall flat
to non-Arabic speakers and even appear to be merely self-flattery to non-Muslims,

53
54    Intelligence versus Power

who rarely take this claim seriously, it is important to note that the power of
the Qurʾān does not consist solely in that speech.
To begin with, the Qurʾān consists of the same language that constitutes the
very source of its value, the same language ancient Arab poets used to express
their emotions, describe their surroundings, exalt their tribes, and lampoon their
enemies. The nexus between pre-Islamic poetry and the Qurʾān received heated
critical attention in the last century, which witnessed the emergence of a now long-
retracted presumption that pre-Islamic poetry did not precede the Qurʾān but
appeared after it. The English orientalist David Samuel Margoliouth (1858–1940)
was the first to propose the hypothesis in 1925, followed by the Egyptian intel-
lectual Ṭāhā Ḥusayn in 1926, who was exposed to Margoliouth’s work during his
graduate studies in Europe. But the argument that poems of pre-Islamic Arab
peninsula were forgeries of later times has long been defeated to the point that
is now absurd to hold on to such a notion.1 In the last century, Theodor Nöldeke
confirmed that Arabs lived in the Arabian Peninsula and composed poetry at least
several centuries before the advent of Islam. Nöldeke treated pre-Islamic poems as
authentic relics of the pre-Islamic past and referenced them in his research.2 Even
Margoliouth rescinded his own “inauthenticity thesis” years later.3
In a similar yet less sophisticated fashion, Ḥusayn, who harbored immense
fascination with fin du siècle orientalist scholarship on the Qurʾān, read Margo-
liouth’s postulate and applied it uncritically to his own work in the mid-1920s.
To a fault, Ḥusayn admired theories of historical determinism without under-
standing that such theories are already based on false postulates, especially the
postulate that pre-Islamic poetry may not have been produced in the historical era
in which it is supposedly set. Here is Ḥusayn’s thesis:

The first thing in this study that you will find shocking is that I have come to doubt
the value of pre-Islamic poetry as a verifiable historical document and persist in
my doubts, or say my doubts persist. I started to research, examine, read, and
think until I concluded with near certitude that the larger majority of what we call
pre-Islamic poetry has nothing to do with pre-Islamic times. Those poems were
counterfeited in the aftermath of Islam. Those poems are more Islamic than they are
pre-Islamic, representing the lives, attitudes and dispositions of Muslim communi-
ties more than any other time prior to it. I have almost no doubt that what is left
of pre-Islamic poetry is an insignificant sum which does not amount to much and
which cannot be deemed reliable in portraying a correct and complete picture of the
pre-Islamic era.4

Ḥusayn’s rationale is based on a Margoliouth-inspired conclusion that “it is incon-

ceivable that Judaism and Christianity, two great religions of pre-Islamic Arabia,
would exist and spread among the Arabs without any major references to them in
pre-Islamic poetry.”5 While it is not accurate to assume that there was no mono-
theistic poetry in pre-Islamic Arabia,6 it is likely that much of this poetry may not
 Intelligence versus Power    55

have survived the fierce and mundane competitions of Sūq ʿUkāẓ poetry contests,
where poets had to be absolutely original and where the emphasis was primar-
ily on worldly and secular themes. Additionally, Judaism and Christianity were
minority religions in a predominantly polytheistic society. Composing poetry in
devotion to Judaism or Christianity in these notable mufākharāt (contests) may
have looked like bringing a sword to a gun fight. Even a brief reading demonstrates
how the agency of pre-Islamic poetry in the Meccan community was almost exclu-
sively secular, celebrating tribal and ancestral supremacy, worldly gains, power,
pride, sexual exploits, and other godless themes.7
Repulsed by Margoliouth’s postulates, A. J. Arberry condemns them as an act
of sophistry: “the sophistry—I hesitate to say dishonesty—of certain Professor
Margoliouth’s arguments is only too apparent, quite unworthy of a man who was
undoubtedly one of the greatest erudites of his generation.”8 In a similar fashion,
H. A. R. Gibb dismisses Margoliouth’s thesis, and subsequently Ḥusayn’s, on the
account of its improbability. “It would be as impossible to ‘reconstruct’ the poetry
of Jahiliyya from the poetry of the Umayyad period,” contends Gibb, “as it would
be to ‘reconstruct’ Elizabethan from Caroline drama.”9 Since then, few scholars
have engaged pre-Islamic poetry more methodically. Jaroslav Stetkevych’s mag-
isterial work, Muhammad and the Golden Bough: Reconstructing Arabian Myth,
studies the rich relationship between the Qurʾān and the tradition of ancient Ara-
bic. Stetkevych reconstructs the story of the destruction of Thamūd, the ancient
Arab tribe of North Arabia mentioned repeatedly in the Qurʾān. He connects the
narrative and the non-Qurʾānic story of the Prophet Muḥammad’s discovery of a
golden bough at the site the people of Thamūd thought had been demolished by
an act of divine wrath.
This textual interviewing of ancient Arabic tradition shows the extent to which
the relationship between the Qurʾān and pre-Islamic narratives opens up new
and much needed horizons for critical, philological, and mythological insights
into the intricate connections between the literary and the social in the fabrics of
pre- and post-Qurʾānic Arab communities.10 In this context, Suzanne Stetkevych
brings fresh structuralist analysis and meaningfulness to the understanding of the
pre-Islamic Arabic qaṣīda, especially its major motifs and their relationship to
the Qurʾān. In her path-breaking work, The Mute Immortals Speak: Pre-Islamic
Poetry and the Poetics of Ritual, S. Stetkevych investigates local elements that carry
Arabic poetics to superior aesthetic horizons. For example, the she-camel, who
plays an essential role in the motif of raḥīl (passage, departure) in pre-Islamic
Arabic poetry, is, for S. Stetkevych, “the preeminent symbol of culture, the ‘staff of
life.’ The she-camel provided not only transport for men and goods but also hair
for tents and food in the form of meat, milk, and blood (drunk from a slit vein in
times of dearth).”11 Moreover, camels were the barometer of wealth, measuring
the value of human life, blood price or bride price, and so on. S. Stetkevych, who
has successfully redefined our understanding of the pre-Islamic ode, brilliantly
56    Intelligence versus Power

links the social value of camels, with their germane and innately rich symbolism of
“fecundity and prosperity, a sign of divine blessing,” to the narrative of the prophet
Ṣāliḥ and the she-camel in the Qurʾān, as a proof of his prophecy, thus deepening
the innate ties between the text and context of the Qurʾān, on the one hand, and the
indigenous social prehistory of the Arabian Peninsula, on the other.12
Outside this small circle of literary Arabists, however, the relationship between
pre-Islamic literature and the Qurʾān continues to be a neglected topic.13 An obvi-
ous and important reason for this negligence is linguistic incompetence, a term that
can serve to remind us of the inherent difficulty of the Arabic language. Both native
and nonnative learners of Arabic know that it takes decades, if not one’s entire
life, to master classical Arabic, the only veritable access to any reliable scholarship
on the Qurʾān in its original language. When we speak of the Arabic language of
the Qurʾān, we also speak of the way in which its grammatologies, phono­logy,
homophonies, ambiguities, polysemes, synonymies, antinomies, denotations,
connotations, and associations work within the text: in short, a whole material gal-
axy of this immaterial space we call Arabic. And this is just one component. While
meaningfully high in significations, the Arabic words of the Qurʾān do not alone
make basic units of meaning. Arabic syntax and sentences do. But again, they do
not do so in or for themselves; rather, as ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī (d.1078/1081)
emphasizes, they do so as naẓm—namely, as elements in a more complex signify-
ing system, whose multiple mechanisms, including binary oppositions and figura-
tions, come together to organize relationally that cluster of themes we call maʿná
(meaning/signification).14
The linguistic difficulty of Arabic might explain why the push to situate the
Qurʾān within the historical context of late antiquity has remained peculiarly
dismissive of ancient Arabic literature. It simply does not make sense to dis-
miss a corpus that lends deep and direct insight into understanding the Qurʾān,
not just aesthetically or sociolinguistically, but also thematically. This dismissal
is ironic given the fact that close readings of antique literary texts have consis-
tently been applied to the Hebrew Bible. Popular publication venues, such as the
series Texte aus der Umwelt des Alten Testaments (Texts from the World of
the Old Testament) are dedicated exactly for that purpose. “Given the degree
to which Western scholars value a critical historical approach,” writes Bauer,
“it seems odd that so much of contemporary research into the history of the Qurʾān
seems to be able to get by without any real or serious critical consideration of
the texts contemporary with it.”15 In exposing the inexplicable neglect of ancient
Arabic literature as a primary source for studying the Qurʾān, Bauer maintains that
understanding pre-Islamic Arabic poetry not only leads to more responsible and
nuanced translations of the Qurʾān into European languages, but is bound to cor-
rect methodological approaches toward the Qurʾān and its formative tradition.16
The practice of excluding ancient Arabic literature or Arabic sources in gen-
eral still remains a sore source of discomfort for the field, especially when it is
no longer disputable that the tradition of Arabic poetry has its roots in the
 Intelligence versus Power    57

pre-Islamic era and has to a large extent accurately survived in the available writ-
ten Muslim sources.17 In an essay on “The Nature of Arab Unity Before Islam,” von
Grunebaum relies on pre-Islamic literary works to make an important distinc-
tion between pre-Islamic ʿArab al-Shamāl (Northern Arabs) and al-Badw (Bed-
ouin), one in which “the Northern Arabs constituted a Kulturnation rather than
a Staatsnation.”18 These two terms, which von Grunebaum borrows from Fried-
rich Meinecke’s early examinations of nationalism in Germany,19 in reality differ-
entiate between two forms of European nation-states. It is difficult to agree that
pre-Islamic Bedouins were a Staatsnation avant la lettre, even though some South
Arabian communities, such as the Ghassanid and the Lakhmid principalities,
which were sometimes referred to as ʿArab al-Furs wa-ʿArab al-Yūnān (Arabs of
Persia and Arabs of Greece), grew as dependencies of larger non-Arab political
structures surrounding them. If we agree with this anachronistic adoption of the
term “nations” to describe pre-Islamic tribal communities, or even see these com-
munities as microcosmic variations on Meinecke’s categories, then von Grune-
baum may be drawing a meaningful analogy in classifying pre-Islamic urban
settlements like Mecca, al-Ṭāʾif, and Yathrib as a Kulturnation. A “cultural nation,”
in the sense von Grunebaum applies the term, characterizes elusive large com-
munities with a social structure unaffected by political shifts and unidentifiable by
one single individual tribe or a specific political unit, though still subscribing to
“a concept of the ideal Arab.”20 This ideal Arab, and its adjective “Arabic,” argues von
Grunebaum, is traceable to the Qurʾān and pre-Islamic prose, but not articulated
much in pre-Islamic Arabic poetry.21
Von Grunebaum’s keen interest in classical Arabic stems from his preoccupa-
tion with universal facts, and in particular with how pre-Islamic poetry offers its
vocabulary and textual content “a description of the mental structure, or in other
ways, psychological truth” of pre-Islamic Arabs.22
The reference to poetry is a key discovery in von Grunebaum’s argument that
has allowed him to make a strong case for preventing a misunderstanding that pre-
Islamic Arabs constituted a holistic “Arabic” unity.23 When pre-Islamic Northern
Arabs distinguished themselves from the Southern Arabs,24 they did so in terms of
differences in habitat, language varieties, and social and religious practices. “The
notorious antagonism between the Northern and Southern Arabs, Qays and Kalb,
Muḍar and Qaḥṭān,” argues von Grunebaum, “occurred within the ‘Northern’ area
of pre-Islamic history and cultural integration.”25
In a more focused study of pre-Islamic Arabic poetry as a document of early
Christian figurations of creation, Kirill Dmitriev discovers in a poem by the Chris-
tian pre-Islamic poet ʿAdī Ibn Zayd al-ʿIbādī significant affinities with the Qurʾān
text.26 Dmitriev concludes that despite the lexical affinities between ‘Adī ibn Zayd’s
poem and the Qurʾān, “the Qurʾān is very selective in its adoption of biblical
tradition” and “unlike the Bible, the Qurʾānic stories of creation and paradise are
not comprehensive chronological reports, but are evoked in a number of sepa-
rate passages with clear hermeneutical implications.”27 What is remarkable for
58    Intelligence versus Power

our purposes in Dmitriev’s argument is not the affirmation that the Qurʾān has a
“striking admonitory intention”28 or that it is “less concerned with the narration of
history than with presenting its ethically relevant message,”29 but the Qurʾān’s con-
scious communicative tone. “The Qurʾānic message,” emphasizes Dmitriev, “does
not unfold in a silent vacuum . . . it does not explain something absolutely new to
its audience but tries instead to draw out the moral of something already known.”30
This heightened dialogical attentiveness to its intended listeners makes it indis-
pensable, even for proponents of the historical-critical method, to understand the
Qurʾān without studying pre-Islamic Arabic poetry.31
Yet despite all this, classical Arabic literature has remained peripheral to Western
historians of the Qurʾān, even Western historians of the Bible. It could well be argued
that the historians of the Qurʾān are not the same as the historians of the Bible, but
what is at stake is the determining forces of historical categories when it comes to
the inclusion or exclusion of literature. As we have seen from the examples above,
the field of Arabic literature does not have a “problem” with the classical sources
of Arabic literature. On the contrary, classical Arabic literature, which includes the
pre-Islamic, is a cornerstone in the foundation of Arabic belles lettres. Since the early
decade of the twentieth century, classical Arabic literature has received pointed
attention from scholars of Arabic all over the world, in the Arabic speaking world
(especially in Egypt, Lebanon, and Iraq), in Europe, and in the Americas. Even today,
classical Arabic poetry is approached in terms of its biographical, historical, socio-
economic, phonological, semantic, aesthetic, and psychoanalytical significations.
Our engagement with it thus comes from a strong position of responsibility toward
it, and more so toward its future status in world history and literature, in order to
create a space for de-othering pre-Islamic Arabic literature so it can transform what
we understand or what we think we understand about its history and our own.
When it comes to the relationship between pre-Islamic Arabic literature and
the Qurʾān, the literary and linguistic manifestations of these texts not only fur-
nish the ground for understanding the Qurʾān, but they are what makes this
understanding possible. Pre-Islamic Arabic literature is not an oral emblem or an
enclosed hermetic space. True, all poems are governed by a structure of musical-
ity, meter, and rhyme scheme, but they also differ in style, tone, manner, empha-
sis, argument, and signature. Above all, they are unique in that they respond to a
particular situation—to celebrations, calamities, or even other poems. In so doing,
they call for other responses and intimately remind us of what is literary about the
practice we call literature.
To understand this level of rhetoric in the pre-Islamic Arabic literary tradi-
tion, one must see that the logic of balāgha rests on the harmony between the
multiple possibilities that an utterance in-classical Arabic could afford to offer
and the distinct articulations of this utterance, say, in the Qurʾān. And this is just
on the semantic level of lexicons, which, in this case, unravels the depths of mor-
phological signification in the language of pre-Islamic poetry vis-a-vis the language
of the Qurʾān. In this context, Bauer is right. The language of the Qurʾān must
 Intelligence versus Power    59

establish itself as unique and distinct from the language of poetry. “Any attempt to
make the language more like that of contemporary poetic expression,” writes Bauer
convincingly, “would have blurred the differences between poetic and prophetic
speech.”32 However, it is difficult to accept Bauer’s statement that “the Quran is the
complete antithesis of contemporary poetry.”33 It is true that a balance has to
be established between the two discourses. One must emphasize, however, that the
distinction between the aesthetics of poetry and that of the Qurʾān is by no means
antithetical. It is much more complex and much more intricate than mere antith-
esis and therefore entails patient linguistic exegesis to reflect on the two discourses
and to carefully explain the juxtaposition.
I argue that the Qurʾān is an opening after the tropological discourse of pre-
Islamic poetry had already triumphantly tested the limits of the rhetorical bril-
liance of the Arabic language. I further argue that the language of the Qurʾān
creates a portal that opens a passage from one level of rhetoric to another, or
even a pushing of rhetorical language to a completely different horizon. It would
therefore be hard to embrace views that position both pre-Islamic poetry and the
Qurʾān as one wholistic discourse. Richard Serrano, for instance, argues that
the Qurʾān and poetry “are two sides of a single intertextured Qurʾāno-Arabic
discourse.”34 Linguistically and rhetorically, this is a difficult case to make as such;
it is an even more difficult case to make for pre-Islamic poetry. But, to Serrano’s
point, both the Qurʾān and poetry lexically draw on a sociolinguistic and literary
heritage of Ayyām al-ʿArab (chronicles of the Arabs), which explains why there is
a certain continuity of the pre-Arabic poetic tradition well into the Umayyad and
even ʿAbbasid dynasties, as well as a substantial reliance of postclassical tafsīr
and commentary on the latter in order to explain the former.
Despite its obvious doctrinal biases, we learn to learn from the tradition of
Iʿjāz al-Qurʾān. While it is undeniable that the tradition of Iʿjāz al-Qurʾān carries
inherent doctrinal biases, it is important to acknowledge that we can still glean
valuable insights from it. Moreover, when we shift our focus to postclassical Arabic
literary Iʿjāz theorists and critics, we find that they have a wealth of knowledge
and perspectives to enrich the field of literary aesthetics. Postclassical Arabic lit-
erary theorists and critics have much to offer the field of literary aesthetics. At
their hands, Arabic literary criticism became one of the earliest world traditions to
establish a sophisticated system of tropes and literary terms to highlight the affini-
ties between poetry, prose, and the Qurʾān. This is how Abū al-Ḥasan al-Rummānī
(909–94), one of the earliest scholars to categorize and theorize aesthetic imag-
ery, arrives at the conclusion that the Qurʾān is nāqiḍ lil-ʿāda (that which inter-
rupts/contradicts existing norms).35 The linguistic and rhetorical relationship
between pre-Islamic Arabic poetry and the Qurʾān is exactly that: a relationship of
interruption. I define this relationship or rather juxtaposition as a passage from
rhetorical intelligence to rhetorical power. Let me explain this further: intelligence
and power are not antithetical to each other. There is a power of intelligence, since
intelligence has its own power. But there is also power that is not commanded by
60    Intelligence versus Power

intelligence, so they are not polar opposites, nor should they exclude one another.
Nor is this relationship even “a negation of poetry” as Bauer claims,36 since neither
is a progression or a regression from the other. While there are clear thematic diver-
gences, the relationship is simply one of transformation, which can be explained by
juxtaposing some examples of the use of the term layl (night) in both pre-Islamic
Arabic and the Qurʾān. The night is indeed a perversive motif in classical Arabic.37
It would be easy to find hundreds of poetic passages describing layl in pre-Islamic
poetry as well as manifold references to it in the Qurʾān. In comparing the function
of the night in Jāhilī poetry and the Qurʾān, I would therefore limit myself to a few
illuminating examples from Imruʾ al-Qays and al-Nābigha al-Dhubyānī.
In pre-Islamic classical Arabic, ‫ ليل‬denotes “night” or “evening.” The classical
lexicographer Ibn Manẓūr defines ‫ ليل‬as follows:

، . . . ‫ والليل ظالم والنهار ضياء‬،‫ الليل ضد النهار‬، . . . ‫ ومبدؤه من غروب الشمس‬،‫الليل عقيب النهار‬
، . . . ً‫ قيل هي أشد ليالي الشهر ظلمًة‬،‫ صعبة‬،‫ شديدة‬،‫ وليلة ليالء وليلى طويلة‬، . . . ‫والليل اسم لكل ليلة‬
38
”‫ أرادوا به الكثرة‬. . . ‫يُل والئل وملّيّل‬ ٌ ‫ول‬
ُ ‫يٌل أل‬

The night is that which immediately follows daytime. It begins at sunset . . . the night
is the opposite of the day. The night is darkness and the day is light. The night is the
name for every layla, laylāʾ, laylá (evening, night). These names refer to long and
harsh nights, said to be the darkest night in a month . . . adjectives like layl mulayyil,
lā ʾil, or alīl are meant to indicate plenitude of night.

In pre-Islamic poetic parlance, significations of layl turn the term into a fierce
competition in aesthetic virtuosity among poets. Regardless of the authenticity of
feelings, the aesthetic of the night is lodged in the form of the ode, even though
that form shields itself against the monotony of symmetry through prosodic
meters. In this metered contest, two poets, Imruʾ al-Qays (d. 500) and al-Nābigha
al-Dhubyānī (d. 604), stand out at the top of this aesthetic ladder. Imruʾ al-Qays’s
celebrated lines of layl are perhaps some of the earliest and most pioneering exam-
ples of pathetic fallacy known to world literature.39 In this fallacy of natural sub-
jectivity, layl participates in a complex simile. The poet sees the night as waves of a
sea that have accumulated a darkness:

‫ُموِم ِلَِيَ ْْبَتَلي‬

ِ ‫بأنواِع الُه‬
ِ ّ‫َعَلّي‬ ُ‫حِر َأَرخى ُسُدوَلَُه‬
ِ َ‫وِج الَب‬ ٍ َ‫ََوَل‬
ِ ‫يٍل ََك ََم‬
‫وأردَفَ أعجا ًًزا وناء ِبَِك َْْلَك َِِل‬ ‫لُت له لّمّ ا تمّطّى بُصُلِبِه‬
ُ ُ‫َفَُق‬

‫بصبح وما اإلصبا ُُح منك بأمثل‬ ‫أال أيها الليل الطوي ُُل أال انجلي‬
40
‫مغار الفتل شدت بيذبل‬ ‫بكل‬ ُ‫َك من ليْلْ كأَّنَ نجومُه‬
َ ‫فيا ل‬

A night like waves of the sea laid its drapes on me/with sorts of sorrow to test me.
I said to it, when it stretched its spine/ stressed its buttocks, and pressed its chest,
 Intelligence versus Power    61

“O lingering night, dissipate/with a morning, a morning which won’t be any better

O what a night whose stars are hauled/with all tight ropes to mount Yadhbul.”

Imruʾ al-Qays paints a portrait of his personal affliction, one in which the night
becomes the objective correlative of a general mood of despondency. In this com-
plex image, the night resembles the accumulated waves of the sea that keep flow-
ing darkness mixed with sadness in his direction. The night is as motionless as a
picture with painted waves on a painted ocean. The stars are tied to rocks in an
image of reverse anchorage where they act like ships on a sea. The implication
is that the night is long and not going anywhere. The poet/persona is no longer
able to speak directly about his sadness and has thus cast it onto the elements—
speaking his pain through nature, through a painfully unending night. The poem’s
pathetic fallacy is itself an element of intention. In Imruʾ al-Qays’s ode, meaning is
constituted by the relation to the night as the most effective means for the aesthetic
articulation of suffering.
Al-Nābigha must have known of al-Qays’s ode and must have marveled at this
unrivaled depiction of the night. Poets who come after other poets have achieved the
highest degree of rhetorical brilliance are always haunted by this after-ness. Afraid of
being derivative in contests of originality, they possess a vaulting desire to equal or
surpass the previous work. Al-Nābigha lived affluently at the court of the Lakhmid
Arab kings of al-Ḥīra. Known for his poetic genius (from which the Arabic word
nābigha derives), he was pursued by many kings in order that he commemorate their
heroic exploits in his poetry, an assignment not unfamiliar to most classical Arabic
poets of pre-Islam and classical Islam. Soon, al-Nābigha got himself caught between
the Scylla and Charybdis of two rival kings, ʿAmr ibn al-Ḥārith, king of the Ghassa-
nids, and al-Nuʿmān, king of the Lakhmids. When al-Nābigha’s tribe lost a battle to
the Ghassanids, he rushed to compose a “night” poem in praise of ʿAmr ibn al-Ḥārith
and his soldiers in order to seek refuge in Shām and prevent more bloodshed:

ُ
ِ ‫وليل أقاسيه َبَ ِِطيء الكـواك‬
‫ـِب‬ ِ�‫لينِي ِلِـَهَ ٍٍّم يـا ُأ ََمْيْمَـَُةُ َنَاصـٍِب‬
ِ ‫ِِك‬
‫وليَس الذي يرعى النجو ََم بآيب‬
َ ٍ ‫قلُت ليس ب ُُم ْْن‬
‫قٍض‬ ُ ‫تطا ََو ََل حتى‬

‫تضاعف فيه الحزُنُ من كل جانب‬ ‫عازَب َهَ ِِّمه‬

َ ‫َص ْْد ٍٍر أراح الليل‬
َ ‫ب‬
................... ...................

‫يُر َأَشاِئِب‬
ُ ‫َكَتاِئُِبُ ِِمن ََغّسّاَنَ ََغ‬ ‫قيَل َقَد ََغَزَت‬ ِ ‫قُت َلَُهُ ِبِالَن‬
َ ‫َصِر ِإِذ‬ ُ ِ‫ََوِث‬

‫ِب‬ ِ ّ‫ُصّف‬
ِ ‫اِح نا ََر الُح‬
ِ ‫ُباِح‬ ُ ‫ََوتوِقِ ُُد ِبِال‬ ُ‫سُجُه‬ ّ ِ‫َتَُقُ َّّد ال ََسلوِق‬
ُ َ‫َّي ال ُُمضاَعََفَ َن‬
41

let me attend to a sadness, Umayma / And suffer a night of slow-moving stars

persisting till I thought it were unending / and the shepherd of the stars is sleepless
A chest, which the night should distance from daily cares / holds a sadness swelling
from all sides.
62    Intelligence versus Power

......................................
I was certain he would win once it was said / pure-blooded forces of Ghassan invaded
[their swords] shattered the double layers of their Seleucid armor / and lightened—
when they stroke their enemy’s helmets—the taillights of fireflies.

The antithesis between the gloomy opening of the qasīda (where the sluggish-
ness of a starry night in the manner of Imruʾ al-Qays evokes pain in the poet’s
heart) and the exciting sword blazes in the Ghassanid-led battlefield scene creates
a powerful dramatic shift. To be sure, the lines on the night at the beginning of the
poem is conventional in nasīb and other love poetry and may not necessarily form
a thematic correlation with the battle scene. Still, the semantic associations of the
night in the poem connotes a symbiotic relationship hard to ignore. Poetry often
connotes more than it denotes. The light of the fireflies is only visible at night, and
while the references to lightning bugs is figurative—namely, as a tashbīh (simile/
comparison) for the sparks made by the swords, it still creates an antithesis to the
idleness of the starry night at the opening of the poem. Even though there is no
direct reference to the battle taking place at night, the light of the “night” fireflies
suggests a nocturnal warfare. Moreover, the contrast between stasis and move-
ment—that is, the heavy-hearted condition of the poet in a static night versus
the action on the battlefield, not only signifies a palpable praise of the Ghassa-
nid soldiers, but it also suggests an incomparable and superior military quality in
warfare. In a unique hyperbole, we see the flashings of Ghassanid swords—when
they tear trough the chain mail armor and clash with the helmets of their enemy—
flickering across the battlefield like fireflies dancing in the night sky. The impli-
cation, and the praise attached to it, is far from vague: al-Nābigha invests in a
remarkably exaggerated figurations of a “night” trope to hail ʿAmr ibn al-Ḥārith
and his squad of Ghassanid soldiers as superior and unrivaled masters of warfare.
Yet, when the poem reached the ears of the Lakhmid king al-Nuʿmān ibn al-
Mundhir, the archenemy of the Ghassanids, who also happened to be a generous
patron for al-Nābigha, it did not take long for the poet to fall out of grace. When
al-Nābigha finally decided to return to al-Ḥīra, he knew he must have offended
King al-Nuʿmān too grievously to warrant a pardon. The only way out, the only
way a poet of al-Nābigha’s caliber would know how to dig himself out of this poetic
mishap, was poetry itself. But this time, not only his poetry, but the trope of layl
had to be different from itself. What this meant was that the poet had to rival not
only the poetic brilliance of al-Qays but his own poeticity; he had to engineer a
life-saving poem that would dwarf his own hyperbolic trope in his panegyric to
ʿAmr ibn al-Ḥārith and his Ghassanid soldiers. This was one of the rare occa-
sions in the tradition of Arabic poetry where a poet’s life hinged on the aesthetic,
indeed on a specific “re-aestheticization” of his own poetic trope of the night. Just
as Odysseus was able to clad himself in lofty words to cover his nakedness when
 Intelligence versus Power    63

he washed up onto the island of Skheria and faced King Alkinoos’s daughter, Nau-
sicaa, so too did al-Nābigha have to find the right image to win back his life and
regain amnesty from a wrathful king. This is when the signification of layl reaches
a new height. In this “forgive-me-please” poem, al-Nābigha brings back the night
trope, uses it against itself, cancels his own image of triumphant Ghassanids and
delineates a poetic mood that mixes fear with desire and power with hope
and regret. Al-Nābigha’s poetry, it seems, is a free art that does not need to defend
itself against the rebuke that it causes to others; it simply meets this rebuke with
another as it affirms its subsidiary relation to power. Certainly this holds true for
the production of all pre-Islamic poetry, where a poet could start a poem that he
might or might not complete, allowing it to survive as a fragment, or, as is the case
with al-Nābigha, could compose a poem that is blatantly dialectical with another
of his own making, either because he is frightened and bored, or because he detests
being accused of repetition or lack of originality. Unlike the Qurʾān, pre-Islamic
poetry has the power to compliment mortal enemies and harbor its own opposite
without losing the value of its aesthetic imagination:

ُ
‫خلُت أَّنّ المنتأى عنك واس ُُع‬ ْ
‫وإْن‬ ‫كالليِل الذي هو ُُم ْْد ِِركي‬
ِ ‫فإَّنّك‬
42
ُ ‫َك نـوا‬
‫زُع‬ ّ
َ ‫تـمُّد بها أي ٍـٍد إليـ‬ ‫حباٍل متين ٍٍة‬
ٍ ‫خــطاطــيُفُ ُحُـْجْ ـٌنٌ في‬

You are like the night that will overtake me / and I thought the distance from you
was vast enough
Curved hooks in strong ropes/ extended by hands drawing toward you.

Interestingly enough, al-Nābigha describes himself as if caught in a deep well,

like a bucket to be hauled up. The power dynamic in these poetic lines high-
lights a deep antithesis between a helpless and chased persona (the poet) and
an all-mighty king whose domain is the night, who is the night, thus portraying
a state of helplessness and inescapability. The sense of fear that overwhelms
the poet reflects panic and anxiety, especially in the certainty that the king will
eventually capture him. The inevitability evoked in the predicate mudrikī sinks
deep in pre-Islamic poetry but also in Qurʾānic diction, where the word is asso-
ciated with dismay, defenselessness, and surrender, as in the moment when the
Israelites reached the end of the shore and could see the pharaoh closing in
on them with no way out, just before Moses applies his staff to split open the
Red Sea:

43
َ‫اِن َقَا ََل َأَْصْ ََحاُبُ ُُمو ََس ٰٰى ِإَِّنّا َلَ ُُم ْْد ََر ُُكوَن‬
ِ ‫َفََلَ َّّما َتَ ََرا ََءى ْاْل ََج ْْم ََع‬

When the two groups could see one another, the companions of Moses said, “We are
certainly captured.”
64    Intelligence versus Power

Or with “death,”44 as when the pharaoh becomes certain that the water will over-
take him and he is soon to drown:
45
‫َْت ِبِ ِِهۦ َبَُنُ ٓٓو ْْا ِإِ ْْسَٰٓر�� ٓ ِِءي ََل ََوَأََن َ۠۠ا ِِمَنَ ْٱْل ُُم ْْسِلِ ِِمين‬ ٓ ‫نُت َأََّنّ �ُهُ آآَل ِإِ َٰٰل�َهَ ِإِاَّلا ٱَّلّ ِِذ‬
ْ ‫ٓى ََءا ََمَن‬ ُ ‫ََحَّتّٰٓى� ٓ ِإِ ََذآ َأَ ْْد ََر ََكُهُ ْٱْل ََغ ََر‬
ُ ‫ُق َقَا ََل ََءا ََم‬

When drowning began to overtake him, he said, “I believe that there is no god except
the one whom the children of Israel believe in, and I am among the submitters.”

In recasting the night trope, the mighty king al-Nuʿmān, who has a reputation for
slaying poets in cold blood, is likened to the night that is sure to come and over-
take the poet no matter where he might be hiding. This pathetic fallacy points to
the ineluctability of capture but also to the supernatural power of the king. It is as if
al-Nābigha’s poetry is in dialogue with itself: if he has previously praised ʿAmr ibn
al-Ḥārith and his Ghassanid soldiers as the masters of the night combat, he is now
praising king al-Nuʿmān as the night incarnate, the night whose power and domin-
ion are unavoidable. In this well-thought apologetics, layl is at once a vehicle for the
king’s supernatural authority and the poet’s vulnerability, enveloped in deep hope that
the poem is aesthetically intelligent enough to please the king and merit his pardon.
Layl then as a signifier in pre-Islamic poetry becomes a sign of history, not the
progressive or influential “history” in the periodizational or late antiquarian sense,
but history in a materialist sense, a textual history—that is, where semantic signi-
fications mark an event in language. There is history from the moment poets like
al-Qays and al-Nābigha created tropes from words like layl and compelled the emer-
gence of a language of balāgha out of a language of everyday use. Thanks to pre-
Islamic poetry, layl will simply never be the same since its denotative continuity is
disrupted with a new discourse of rhetorical intelligence. This disruption does not
mean that layl would not continue to be used to refer to a common “night,” but that
the tropological “night” in pre-Islamic poetry has now added to our cognition of layl
a new dimension that, while not negating the performative use of layl in everyday
language, would still demand to be recognized as the highest achievement in the tro-
pological system of pre-Islamic Arabic aesthetics, an achievement that would make
it difficult, if not impossible, to improve on. These figurations are unequaled not
because the voice of the poet speaks “the night,” but because, through their language,
the poems impersonate what is unspeakable in the language of nature.
The aesthetics of layl in the Qurʾān carry the same significations we find in
Imruʾ al-Qays and al-Nābigha but are also markedly different from their figura-
tions in pre-Islamic poetry. In the Qurʾān, layl transforms from a rhetoric of intel-
ligence to a rhetoric of power. It is true that the semantic interconnections between
layl and mudrikī invoked in al-Nābigha continue to retain their same performative
functions in the Qurʾān, as in the following example from Qurʾān 36:

‫اِرۚ ۚ ََو ُُك ۭ �ٌّۭل ِفِى َفََلَ ٍۢۢك� َيَ ْْسَبَُحُون‬ ُ ِ‫َك ْٱْلَقَ ََم ََر ََواَلا ٱَّلّ ْْي ُُل ََساِب‬
ِ َ‫ُق ٱلَّنَّه‬ َ ‫اَلا ٱل َّّش ْْمُسُ َيَ ۢۢنَبَ ِِغى َلََهَآ َأَن ُتُ ْْد ِِر‬
Neither it is for the sun to overtake the moon nor is it for the night to surpass the day.
Each swims in an orbit of its own. (36:40)
 Intelligence versus Power    65

But the Qurʾān comes into its own by distinguishing the significations of its
language from that of the preexisting discourse, a discourse that also claims for
itself the right to be highly rhetorical. As we see in the examples of al-Qays and
al-Nābigha, the rhetoric of pre-Islamic poetry avows a self-affirming mortal
human nature. Depictions of mortality in pre-Islamic Arabic poetry, which
I address in more detail shortly, demonstrate that the two discourses of poetry
and the Qurʾān are separated by an unsurpassable void. At the very moment when
the Qurʾān reaches a fulfillment of itself, it lays out a totality of an incommensu-
rable mode of object perception. The reference to layl in the Qurʾān confirms this
discursive separability.
Take, for instance, the layl in Qurʾān 36:40, which indicates the common
understanding of the night—namely, as a recurring period of darkness enveloping
the earth every twenty-four hours. Yet the Qurʾānic night is also a negative aes-
thetic, a personification without agency, always passivized, constantly controlled.
Or, if there is agency, it is a divine and creationist one. The night in Qurʾān 36:40
is not a projection of sadness, or a scene for military prowess, or even an image of
a terrifying king. The Qurʾān owns the night. Suddenly, we are witnessing a figu-
rative metamorphosis whereby layl transforms into a phenomenon functioning
within an orbit that owes its existence to a metaphysical being. In the Qurʾān, layl
becomes a manifestation of divine order and a sign of a preordained creation that
cannot act on its own. What thus marks the discontinuity between pre-Islamic
poetry and the Qurʾān is not an “antithesis” between two conceptual understand-
ings of the night. The positionality of the Qurʾānic layl does not emerge from a
discourse of poetic talent keen on the use of a word to project sadness or fear, or to
create a mythical simile of a mighty king. It is, rather, a difference between rhetori-
cal intelligence and rhetorical power. Whereas poetic intelligence functions from
within gifted yet anthropologically determined limits, the rhetorical power of
Qurʾānic language renounces the overshadowing motive of self-assertion. It con-
ceives of referents like layl in a completely different relationship, one that severs
all tropological projections with human life. This does not mean that the Qurʾān
does not compare humans to elements of nature, but it is always a figuration predi-
cated on deeds. Al-Rummānī identifies this type of comparison in terms of tashbīh
balāgha (rhetorical simile), where the deeds of unbelievers are likened to a mirage
in Qurʾān 24: 39:

‫ فمن ذلك قوله تعالى {والذين كفروا أعمالهم كسراب بقيعة‬. . . ‫فتشبيه البالغة كتشبيه أعمال الكفار بالسراب‬
،‫ فهذا بيان قد أخرج ماال تقع عليه الحاسة إلى ما تقع عليه‬.}ً‫يحسبه الظمآن ما ًًء حتى إذا جا ََءه لم يجده شيئًا‬
46
.‫وقد اجتمعا في بطالن المتوهم مع شدة الحاجة وعظم الفاقة‬

An example of a rhetorical simile is when the deeds of unbelievers are likened to

a mirage, as when God says, may He be exalted, says: “those who disbelieve, their
deeds are like a mirage in a vast desert which a thirsty man would mistake for water
but when he reaches it, he will find nothing.” This type of rhetorical eloquence likens
what is not perceived by the senses to what the senses can indeed perceive, thus
66    Intelligence versus Power

bringing the two parts of the simile together to portray the falsehood of the pre-
sumption despite the dire need and the great lack.

But it turns out, even though al-Rummānī stops shy of including the following
verse, that 24.39 and 24:40 are interlocked in a dual allegorical act of two similes of
the wasted deeds of unbelievers. The second simile that follows the mirage simile
further intensifies the allegorical relationship between unbelievers and their zero-
sum deeds. The trope of deeds thus moves from desert to sea, complementing the
trope of a false vision of water (mirage) with another of blindness in a dark night at
sea, thus doubling its depiction of unbelievers as having sight without insight and
as living in blindness without light:

‫ٍْض ِإِ ََذا َأَ ْْخ ََر ََج َيَ ََدُهُ َلَ ْْم‬ َ ْ‫ُضَهَا َفَْو‬
ٍ ‫َق َبَْع‬ ُ ‫اٌت َبَ ْْع‬ ٍ ‫َأَْوْ ََكُظُُلُ ََما‬
ٌ ‫ٍت ِفِي َبَْحْ ٍٍر ُّلِّّجٍّّيّ َيَ ْْغَشَاُهُ ََمْوْ ٌٌج ِّمّ ن َفَْوْ ِقِ ِِه ََمْوْ ٌٌج ِّمّ ن َفَْوْ ِقِ ِِه ََس ََحاٌبٌ ۚ ُظُُلُ ََم‬
ّ َ ُ َ �‫ُهَّللا‬ ّ
ٍ ‫َيَ ََك ْْد َيَ ََراَهَا ۗ ََو ََمن َّل ْْم َيَْجْ ََع ِِل ُ َلُهُ ُنوًرًا َفَ ََما َلُهُ ِِمن ُّن‬
‫وٍر‬

Or [their deeds are] like layers of darkness in a deep sea, with waves piling on top of
waves, topped by dark clouds. Darkness upon darkness! If he stretches out his hand,
he can hardly see it. And whoever God does not bless with light shall have no light!
(24:40).

Here the night is not mentioned by name but is implied in the atmospheric spirit
of the verse. Readers of Imruʾ al-Qays’s poetry would sense a similar piling and
accumulation of darkness in this verse, except that the absent night in not lik-
ened to the waves of the sea. Instead, the night collaborates with the sea and the
clouds to produce a condition of pitch blackness. The darkness [of the night] in
Qurʾān 24:40 is juxtaposed to the brightness of the day in the preceding verse
(24:39). In other words, the extended rhetorical simile, as al-Rummānī calls it,
brings together an optimal degree of visibility that leads to a false form of seeing
and an ultimate darkness that makes such seeing impossible. Deep water makes it
difficult for the light to penetrate it, thus resulting in darkness. This darkness is
not only already enhanced by night but also intensified by accumulated waves and
thick clouds. This powerful comparative simile, according to which the deeds
of unbelievers are just as misguided as those following illusionary mirages in
the desert or vainly trying to make their way through impenetrable darkness in the
sea as portrayed in 24:39–40, produces a shattering depiction of loss and blind-
ness. Neither can a desert mirage slake an unbeliever’s thirst nor can a condition
of pitch blackness allow one to find the light in a sea darkly. The allegorical, inter-
versal oscillation between two illusions, the illusion of seeing and the illusion of
blindness, is not brought forth to evoke an emotional state of sadness or dejec-
tion, but to drive home an eschatological trope that doubly approximates the total
failing of the unethical deeds of unbelievers. In other words, there is no pathetic
 Intelligence versus Power    67

fallacy in the Qurʾān, no room for nature that mimics human emotions. The night
does not embody our cares, nor does it incarnate the worst of our fears. This aban-
donment is itself a radical break, a discontinuity based on the belief that there is
something else to the night, something more serious than bemoaning the depar-
ture of the beloved’s encampment and something worse than being captured or
killed by a livid king. This thematic distance from mortal life fundamentally dis-
tinguishes the Qurʾān from poetry. Not only this. On the level of form, while both
pre-Islamic poetry and the Qurʾān are historically conditioned to manifest an aes-
thetic inherently oral in nature—another complex and immense issue difficult to
get into here—the Qurʾān does not think of itself as poetry; nor is it thought of
as poetry by the learned community of its contemporary audience.47 Nor again is
aesthetic appreciation of language limited to the poetic. This is certainly not the
case with the Arabic tradition. While some, as the Qurʾān mentions, may have
hurriedly called it “poetry” and labeled Muḥammad as a “poet” to play down the
text’s communal appeal, this labeling was conceived of in contempt and ridicule.
Al-Jurjānī reminds us that the contemporary community of Muḥammad knew
quite well that he was not a poet and that the Qurʾān was not poetry:
ً‫ إن الناس يجتمعون غدًا‬:‫أما داللة األقوال فكثيرة منها حديث ابن المغيرة روي أنه جاء حتى أتى قريشًا ً فقال‬
:‫ فقال‬،‫ وقد فشا أمر هذا الرجل في الناس فهم سائلوكم عنه فماذا تردون عليهم؟ فقالوا مجنون يختنق‬،‫بالموسم‬
،‫ و قد رووا الشعر‬،‫ هم العرب‬:‫ قال‬.‫ نقول هو شاعر‬:‫يأتونه فيكلمونه فيجدونه صحيحًا ً عادال فيكذبونكم! قالوا‬
48
.‫ فيكذبونكم‬،‫ وقوله ليس يشبه الشعر‬،‫وفيهم الشعراء‬

Narrative evidence [of the Qurʾān’s inimitability] abounds. Among the stories is the
account of Ibn al-Mughīra. It was narrated that he went to the tribe of Quraysh and
informed them that there would be a gathering of people at the [pilgrimage] festival
the next day, while news of this man [Muḥammad] had spread fast. He told them that
people would ask about him, and inquired what they would see when people asked
about him. They said, “we would say he is mad and manic.” “But they would come and
talk to him,” he replied, “and when they would judge him to be sound and fair, then
they would call you liars.” They said, “we would say then that he is a poet.” “They are the
Arabs,” he answered, “they recite poetry and they have poets living among them.
Whatever he says does not resemble poetry, and then they would call you liars.”

Unlike al-Khaṭṭābī (d. 996/998) and al-Jurjānī, al-Bāqillānī (d. 1013) polarizes
the relationship between pre-Islamic poetry and the Qurʾān, rendering the for-
mer antithetical to the latter.49 Over the last one hundred years of literary theory,
we have seen radicalism like that of al-Bāqillānī’s occur over and again—that is,
when a new school of thought delegitimizes the older one, which it thoroughly
interrupts. Al-Bāqillānī’s mistake is similar in that he tried to open a space for
the aesthetics of the Qurʾān in the Arabic canon, but thought to do so at the
expense of denigrating pre-Islamic poetry. Criticizing pre-Islamic poetry puts
al-Bāqillānī in the same paradoxical situation occupied by his own critique, a posi-
tion by which radicals take on the presumption that they are somehow against the
68    Intelligence versus Power

mundane, whereas it is the concept of the mundane as an aesthetic category and a

poetic choice that is thereby under discussion. Still, the flare of religious fanaticism
in al-Bāqillānī’s criticism of Imruʾ al-Qays and of pre-Islamic poetry writ large is
useful for understanding radical theology’s strategies of containment. Exposing
this logic will at least help deconstruct the concepts that seek to demonize a lite­
rary aesthetics without which any appreciation of the Qurʾān’s own aesthetics
is inconceivable.
It is therefore crucial to emphasize that the Qurʾān does not necessarily trivial-
ize poetry, but it aestheticizes language in a different discourse. When experiencing
the reference to layl in Imruʾ al-Qays and al-Nābigha, the audience can sense the
pathetic fallacy in the element of nature. But the Qurʾān invites its contemporary
audience to engage with the statement, “there is more to life and death than a
king chasing a prodigal poet in the desert.” Al-Nābigha’s plight may merit one’s
taʿāṭuf (empathy) and may instill some sense of shafaqa (pity) and rajāʾ(hope),
but it does not instill khawf (fear) or rahba (terror) in the reader’s mind or heart.
A reader of Imruʾ al-Qays will marvel at his poetic genius, identify with his suf-
ferings, and sympathize with the loss of his beloved and his kingship. The same
reader will see in the Qurʾān a different use of language, a calling for abandon-
ment, a ridicule of self-preservation, and a redefinition of survival. In other words,
the Qurʾān asks its audience to be unconditionally pious and to consider that
much more is at stake, that one’s whole existence hangs in the balance, whereas
a loss of ḥabība (beloved) or diyār (dwelling/encampment) or even fortune and
status can always be reconciled somehow. The discourse of power in the Qurʾān
is all-encompassing and is also terrifying, whereas the loss of the lover, or the
disruption of happiness, evokes sadness and empathy that are a part of our human
existence. What distinguishes a rhetoric of power from a rhetoric of intelligence
(or poetic talent) is the sense of awe the former instills in its receiver.
There is, to be sure, a noticeable absence of transcendental anxiety in pre-
Islamic poetry. Neither infinity nor eternity—in the sense of infinite or endless
time after death—seems to bother the poets. In the Qurʾān, however, the entire
rahba, the unease that accompanies its enveloping awe, arises not necessarily
from the failure to stand up to the direct rhetorical taḥaddī (challenge) it poses
to its audience, or even from the ṣarfa or rather ṣarf al-himam ʿan al-muʿāraḍa
(turning their ambitions away, or distracting them, from emulation),50 but rather
from the incapacity of the classical poetic mind, with all its imaginative talent,
to tap into a mimetic poetics that rivals the magnitude of this Qurʾānic rahba.
The closest English equivalent to rahba that I could think of is fear, or terror, or
something in between, which is reminiscent of what Edmund Burke describes
as a state where the pleasurable experience of the “beautiful” comes into stark
opposition with the fearful experience of the “sublime,” causing pain at the same
time that it causes pleasure:
 Intelligence versus Power    69

But if the sublime is built on terror, or some passion like it, which has pain for its object,
it is previously proper to inquire how any species of delight can be derived from a cause
so apparently contrary to it. I say delight, because, as I have often remarked, it is very
evidently different in its cause, and in its own nature, from actual and positive pleasure.51

Pleasure and fear are the signatures of the Qurʾān, a text that strikes a perfect
balance between waʿd wa waʿīd (promise and warning). In fact, the Arabic lan-
guage of pre-Islam instilled a strong sense of poetic imagination, one that pre-
pared the Qurʾān’s first audience to grasp the enormity of its figurative power.
Take, for instance, a verse from Sūra-t- al-Aʿrāf (7:46), which depicts a futuristic
purgatory scene unmatched in any language. In this bone-chilling scene, some
unidentified people are standing on al-Aʿrāf (mounts, or a purgatory of sorts)
at the boundary between heaven and hell; their eschatological destiny remains
undecided. But they are still temporarily able to see both the spaces of heaven
and hell (separated by a seal) from a high vintage point, and to view with awe
both the pleasures of the people of heaven and the unimaginable torture of the
people of hell:

‫اَلاٌم ََعَلَ ْْي ُُك ْْمۚ ۚ َلَ ْْم‬ َ ‫ِْرُفُوَنَ ُُك ا�اًّل ِبِ ِِسي ََماُهُ ْْمۚ ۚ ََوَنَاَدَْوْ ا َأَْصْ ََح‬
ٌ ‫اَب ْاْل ََجَّنّ ِِة َأَن ََس‬ ِ ‫ََوَبَ ْْيَنَُهُ ََما ِِح ََجاٌبٌ ۚ ۚ ََو ََعَلَى اَأْل� َ ْْع ََر‬
ِ ‫اِف ِِر ََجا ٌٌل َيَْع‬
ْ َ‫َيَ ْْد ُُخُلُوَهَا ََوُهُ ْْم َي‬
َ‫ْط ََمُعُوَن‬

There is a barrier between them. And on the mounts there are men who recognize
the people of both abodes by their appearances. They would call for the people of
heaven and say, “Peace be upon you!” They had not entered it [heaven], but they so
desperately desire to. (7:46)

Readers of this verse could only ponder on this “imaginative visualization” in all
its beauty and terror. Knowledge in the form of recognition heightens the desire
for salvation. But the language of the Qurʾān makes the contrast startling. Knowl-
edge or recognition is primarily linguistic and from this world, but the entire scene
is eerily eschatological. This knowledge in yaʿrifūn (they know) is a future in the
past, a representation of something that is yet to come, a belated “aha” moment
after death. The implication is that knowledge acts as a transit between two worlds,
and only through linguistic imagination can such a recognition be made possible:
an imagination of a future moment that could still be saved by whoever reads
or listens to the verses in the present tense before it is too late. Whereas self-
preservation in its pre-Islamic representations is of the order of the real, its con-
creteness is shattered by the terrifying recognition emphasized in the Qurʾān:
ّ‫ُوِل َتَ ََر ٰٰى َأَ ْْعُيَُنَُهُ ْْم َتَِفِيُضُ ِِمَنَ ال َّّد ْْم ِِع ِِم َّّما ََع ََرُفُوا ِِمَنَ ْاْل ََحِّق‬
ِ ‫نِز ََل ِإَِلَى ال َّّرُس‬ُ
ِ ‫ََوِإِ ََذا ََس ِِمُعُوا ََما ُأ‬
When they heard what was revealed to the messenger, you would see their eyes over-
flowing with tears for recognizing the truth. (5:83)
70    Intelligence versus Power

This is a landmark in the aesthetic transformation from the “before” to the “after”
in the language of the Qurʾān. Even though what the Qurʾān presents is purely
structural and purely tropological, because it is an act of language after all, its
language is so familiar yet so aesthetically defamiliarized that it substitutes for
a tangible reality a highly evocative imaginary scene. As we see in this example,
salvation must always be imaginary instead of being real, and the knowledge of it,
that is, the knowing by way of “seeing” and facially recognizing and distinguishing
between the people of hell and the people of heaven, in the end relates solely to a
linguistic reality with a careful, yet highly haunting, economy of words. The result
is a chiasmus of embedded sentences and pronouns (7:46), an inversed grammati-
cal enmeshment of a verse that oscillates between two spaces and between third-
and second-person pronouns, yet still holds a powerful linguistic imaginary that
bridges a yet-to-come “real” experience. This linguistic passage to imagination,
this link to the afterworld, is what allows the audience of the Qurʾān to concep-
tualize the dangers and calamities of what is now depicted as a transient world by
recognizing, through imagination, that death may not be the end. But this imag-
inative leap into a metaphysical anagnorisis, so to speak, could not be possible
without the linguistic preparedness in the background of the secular poetic world
like that of Imruʾ al-Qays and al-Nābigha.
The stylistic visuals of al-Aʿrāf setting begin with portraying a mise en scene
of separation, an impenetrable barrier set between heaven and hell, then move
to show the yet to be accounted for, the people lost in between heaven and hell,
the ones who have now come to know and recognize what the people of heaven
and the people of hell look like. The verse ends with the al-Aʿrāf people stranded
on the mount between heaven and hell, while offering a yearning peace-greeting
to the dwellers of heaven, and expressing a deep wish to join them. There is noth-
ing “poetic” here in the pre-Islamic sense of the word, just a fearful and symmetri-
cal aesthetics expressing a most terrifying uncertainty.
Iʿjāz, or the defiantly incapacitating quality of the Qurʾān, thus lends itself to
this oscillation between the beautiful and the sublime as a discourse of rhetorical
power aware of a preexisting discourse of poetic talent. The psychology of rahba
depicted in Qurʾān 7:46 allows the reader/listener to exquisitely imagine how ter-
rifying it would be to be on the Aʿrāf, to witness both pain and pleasure without
experiencing either of them, and without knowing his or her own destiny. Evi-
dently, there is always the choice to eschew this interpolating rhetoric altogether
and dismiss it as imaginary (8:29). After all, not all the Arabs of Muḥammad’s
time became Muslims, but all the people who lived around him were Arabs who
spoke and understood classical Arabic. For the first Muslim community, an Ara-
bic-speaking community, this rahba brings about a sense of self-preservation and
produces in the body something analogous to what the experience could be. The
Qurʾān describes this affect eloquently in 39:23. In this verse the fearful pious
would start to shudder and tremble with rahba as the language transports them to
 Intelligence versus Power    71

that terrifying space without actually being there. And for a brief while, in the act
of reading or listening, the imagination of terror is replaced with a feeling of real
terror, and the trope becomes tangible:

ِ‫ِث ِِك َٰٰت�ًبًا ُّّمَت ََٰٰش� ِبًِهًا َّّمَثَاِنِ ََى َتَ ْْق ََش ِِعُّرّ ِِم ْْنُهُ ُُجُلُو ُُد ٱَّلّ ِِذيَنَ َيَ ْْخ ََشْوْ َنَ ََرَّبُّهُ ْْم ُثُ َّّم َتَِلِيُنُ ُُجُلُو ُُدُهُ ْْم ََوُقُُلُوُبُُهُ ْْم ِإَِلَ ٰٰى ِِذ ْْك ِِر ٱ �ِهَّلل‬
ِ ‫ٱُهَّلل� ُ َنَ َّّز ََل َأَْحْ َسََنَ ٱ ْْل ََح ِِدي‬

God has revealed the best/the most beautiful of speech—a book of perfect consis-
tency—which causes the skins of those who fear their lord to shudder and then their
skin and their hearts will soften for the mention of God. (39.23)

Aḥsan al-ḥadīth (the best/most beautiful of speech) in Qurʾān 39:23 takes us back
full circle to that discourse of difference. As I point out in the following chapter, not
only is the Qurʾān aware of pre-Islamic poetry, but its relationship to language—as
well as to listeners/readers through that very language—is always determined by a
competition in expressiveness. Aḥsan means best and most beautiful at the same
time. It is a comparative that brings an awareness of something else other than the
Qurʾān, something that is linguistically “good” and “beautiful,” but it is also some-
thing that the Qurʾān has to transcend and surpass in matchless betterment and
beauty, in order to be worthy of asserting itself as God’s eternal words. This com-
petition is not just on the level of language, but on the level of scriptures as well. In
fact, the Qurʾān intentionally utilizes prolepsis in many of its sūras, most notably
in 12:3 and 29:48. It is as if the Qurʾān knows that the accusation of plagiarism will
be leveled against it, and insists that this is an Arabic revelation to a prophet who
previously didn’t know aḥsan al-qaṣaṣ “the best of stories.” One can also see this in
29:48, as I will show in chapter six. It matters for the Qurʾān to outperform both
Judaism and Christianity in depicting heaven in terms far more attractive and hell
in terms far more graphic than its parent scriptures.52
In this declaration of transcendence, the Qurʾān points to the limits of lan-
guage. Language characterizes the Qurʾān as a discourse of rhetorical power par
excellence, one that cannot come second to or fall beneath any other possible
rhetorical representations in the Arabic language. The Qurʾān declares that it
not only speaks well, but does so better than any other possibilities of speech
available in the effable world of classical Arabic. This competitiveness is a defin-
ing characteristic of the Qurʾān. In addition to its scriptural implications, the
idea of aḥsan al-ḥadīth, contrary to the desire for creating a startling rhetorical
image, radically distinguishes the Qurʾān from the use of language in the poetic
sense. This distinction is what creates a status of absolutely irreducible differ-
ence, a difference between a concern with the totality of the world and a concern
with a particular human experience and condition. But it is also a difference
predicated on a distinction from all preceding poetry and scripture,53 without
which one may never come to know or even appreciate that difference. In other
words, if the Qurʾān is rooted in difference, one must safely assume that, espe-
cially in the case of poetry, it would demand that its reader face its difference
72    Intelligence versus Power

from such discourse through a rigorous practice of linguistic comparison and

conceptual philological distinction. This is itself the demand al-Jurjānī would
advance in his defense of poetry, leading to the birth of the discipline of rhetoric
in the field of Arabic literary criticism.
The literary tradition that preceded the Qurʾān, Ibn Qutayba tells us, was poetry
of the loftiest sense. Ibn Qutayba reminds us that the word ḥasan was already used
to describe the poetic talent of the pre-Islamic poet Ṭarafa ibn al-ʿAbd (543–69),
who was renowned for his shiʿr ḥasan (good/beautiful poetry). Ṭarafa did not
live long, but his poetry left everlasting imprints on searching for meaning in life
and articulating a human existential crisis. His ode brings together all the usual
themes of pre-Islamic times. It begins with the patterned convention of al-wuqūf
ʿalá al-aṭlāl wa bukāʾ al-diyār:

‫شِم في ظا ِِه ِِر الَيَ ِِد‬

ِ ‫َتَلو ُُح َكَباقي ال ََو‬ ‫ِلَِخَوَلََةَ َأَطال ٌٌل ِبُِبُرَقَ ِِة َثَه ََم ِِد‬
54
‫َيَقولوَنَ ال َتَهِلِك َأَس ًًى ََوَتَ ََج َِّلَِد‬ َ ‫ُُوقوًفًا ِبِها‬
‫َصحبي ََعَلََّيَ ََمطَّيَُهُم‬

There are traces of Khawla on the pebbled lands of Thahmad / They appear like the
fading tattoo on the back of a hand.
There, my friends halted their mounts to look after me / Saying “don’t let grief kill
you; have some fortitude.”

By now, we are familiar with the formulaic structure of the pre-Islamic ode. It
starts with a memory of a lost beloved whose departure breaks the poet’s heart
and prompts his friends to console him. Nonetheless, the patterned aesthetic of
the qaṣīda excels in matching the meaning to its empirical manifestation. We are
meant to feel and sympathize with the poet’s dejected condition despite the for-
mulaic nature of the poem. Poetic talent, as well as its rhetoric of intelligence, is,
above all, a contract between meaning and comprehending this meaning through
the linguistic vehicle that carries it in its totality: the language that speaks loss, nos-
talgia, anxiety, doubt, love—and speaks them all beautifully. Ṭarafa writes poetry
about the tribe that excised him, poetry that questions existence and the mean-
ing of life. His poetry is not seeking an answer to resolve a crisis. It is, rather, a
poetry that knows the answer and is aware of the impossibility of eternity and
the unavoidable tragedy of death. Ṭarafa’s ode tells us that death is not something
chosen by us; we are thrown into it, that to fear death is to live a life of cowardice.
In a strong and uncanny Heideggerian moment avant la lettre, Ṭarafa reconciles
that death is “freedom towards death,”55 that there is freedom in holding on to the
idea that we are best at “being” in embracing “not being,” and that to be fully alive
we would want to exit from life willingly:

‫ِت هل أنت مخلدي؟‬ ْ

َ ‫وأْن أش‬
ِ ‫هَد اللذا‬ ‫أاَلا أُّيَّهَذا الزاجري أحض ََر الوغى‬
56 ْ
‫ملكْت يدي‬ ‫فــدعني أبــا ِِدُرُها بما‬ ‫فـــَع منَّيّتي‬ ْ
َ ‫فـــإْن كنـــَتَ ال تستطي ُُع د‬
 Intelligence versus Power    73

Hey you, who blame me for going to war / and indulging in pleasures, can you
make me live forever?
If you cannot stop my death / then let me advance to it with all that I have.

The Qurʾān addresses the question of eternity and resurrection in many of its
verses. Here are a few examples from 6:29 and 45:24, respectively:

ْ ‫ََوَقَاُلُوا ِإِ ْْن ِِه ََي ِإِاَّلا ََحَيَاُتَُنَا ال‬

َ‫ُّدُْنَيَا ََو ََما َنَْحْ ُنُ ِبِ ََم ْْبُعُوِثِيَن‬
And they said this is the only life we have and we won’t be resurrected.

َ ِ‫وُت ََوَنَْحْ َيَا ََو ََما ُيُ ْْهِلِ ُُكَنَآ ِإِاَّلا ٱل َّّد ْْه ُُرۚ ۚ ََو ََما َلَُهُم ِبِ َٰٰذ� ِل‬
َ‫َك ِِم ْْن ِِع ْْل ٍٍمۖ ۖ ِإِ ْْن ُهُ ْْم ِإِاَّلا َيَُظُُّنّوَن‬ ْ ُ‫ََوَقَاُل‬
ُ ‫وْا ََما ِِه ََى ِإِاَّلا ََحَيَاُتَُنَا ٱل ُّّد ْْنَيَا َنَ ُُم‬

And they said this is the only life we have, we die and we live and only time makes us
perish, but they have no knowledge, they are just taking a guess.

These verses suggest that it is only after the linguistic mediation of pre-Islamic
poetry that a deeper contextual understanding of the Qurʾān becomes possible.
The Qurʾān knows, and Ṭarafa’s poem confirms, that it speaks to a community
headstrong in its belief that no resurrection awaits the dead and there is noth-
ing beyond this worldly life. Ṭarafa’s image thus reignites a classical distinction
between pre- and post-Qurʾānic concepts of death and resurrection, which is of
value in understanding the dialogical tension in the early Muslim community
prevalent in the Qurʾān.57 After all, Ṭarafa may not be alone. The positioning of
the biological subject in an environment to which he remains irrevocably bound
is, in Ṭarafa’s poetic imagination, opposed to a realm of metaphysical knowledge.
There was, to be sure, a certain belief in resurrection in pre-Islamic Arabia, a belief
that, as Jawād ʿAlī reminds us, was never positioned as paramount or signifi-
cant.58 Semantically, al-mawt (death) implies sukūn (silence) in classical Arabic.
To say someone is dead is to say someone has become silent.59 This understand-
ing should not contradict the widespread motif of “living” after death as ḥadīth/
aḥādīth (story/stories), which Geert Jan van Gelder excellently examines,60 and
which the Qurʾān references as a moral lesson for posterity. Rather, pre-Islamic
Arabs believed in the immortality of memory but not the resurrection of the body.
Death is thus the silence of the body after al-rūḥ (spirit/soul) has departed it, a
phenomenon that bewildered pre-Islamic Arabs—hence the burning question to
Muḥammad, “wa yasʾalūnaka ʿani al-rūḥi” (they ask you about the spirit/soul)
(17:85). Quoting Shaddād ibn al-Aswad in the aftermath of the Battle of Badr as
he mocks the prophet’s talk on resurrection, the nineteenth-century Iraqi exegete
Maḥmūd Shukrī al-Ālūsī (1802–54) states that pre-Islamic Arabs considered it
absurd to believe humans returned from the dead:
‫من ال ِِّشيزي تزين بالسنام‬ ‫يِب َبَ ْْدر‬ ِ ‫وماذا بالَقَل‬
ِ ‫يِب قل‬

‫من الَقَينات والَشَْرْ ب الكرام‬ ‫يِب َبَ ْْد ٍٍر‬ ِ ‫وماذا بالَقَل‬
ِ ‫يِب قل‬
74    Intelligence versus Power

‫فهل لي بعد قومي من سالم‬ ‫تحيينا السالمة أم بكر‬

61
‫وهاِم‬
ِ ‫وكيف حياُةُ أصدا ِِء‬ ‫يحدثنا الرسول بأن سنحيا‬

What of the Qalīb, well of Badr / of the platters of Shīzá wood-holding camel-hump fat?
What of the Qalīb, well of Badr / of singing women and noble drinkers?
Umm Bakr bids us a peace greeting / How can I have peace after my people (were
killed)?
The messenger tells us we would live / But how can ghosts and wraiths live again?62

In crude anthropological terms, pre-Islamic Arabs positioned their own subjec-

tivity against the knowledge of the unknown. They were le sujet supposé savoir of
their own time, “the subject [who] is supposed to know,” who is the bearer and
generator of the knowledge of his own existence and who was disinclined to take
a step into the abstract. Pre-Islamic Arabs accepted inkār al-baʿth (the denial of
resurrection) and even mocked folkloric and fairytales that men turn into birds
when they die.63 What Ṭarafa’s ode affirms is not that he lacks knowledge of the
world and its abstract totality—the Qurʾān provides such a totality and does so in
a manner that claims knowledge to itself: “qāla in labithtum illā qalīlan law anna-
kum kuntum taʿlamūn” (23:114) (He said you had been [on earth] but for a brief
time, if only you had knowledge). The Ṭarafian poetic formula, by contrast, articu-
lates a gap between experience and abstraction, a gap that the poet is disinclined
to even attempt to bridge. The ironic question Ṭarafa poses is therefore profoundly
disheartening yet deeply rhetorical. It seeks no answer. The empirical moment that
materializes itself in facing danger and “initiating” an advance toward death is
nowhere present in the Qurʾān. And the appearance of figurative language in the
Qurʾān, as we have seen it in the extended rhetorical simile of 23:39–40, has to
do with a completely different act, the act of juxtaposing the empirical and the
conceptual. In the tender tropes of the pre-Islamic qaṣīda, there is no place for
the conceptual. The poet speaks as one among the tested and experienced few, and
poetry is the only theology there is.
Conventional aesthetics would commend the poem for its well-kept archetypal
features. What has been lost since that time—and what does not come back in
the Qurʾān, at least not explicitly—is the suppressed ethos of the human condi-
tion. The total alienation we hear in somber lines such as “ufridtu ifrāda al-baʿīri
al-muʿabbadi” (I was excised [from my clan] like tainted camel, coated in tar)
represents this human condition in which the second person’s voice (anta) of a
nomadic desert community whispers counsel to a persona that feels as discarded
as a diseased camel. To Ṭarafa, there is no meaning in a life that is constantly
threated by death. As the heart of a poet has fully hardened, the counsel from
his fellow man becomes absurd. The double interjection “alā ayyuhādhā” (Hey,
you) does not have an equivalent in English. Its untranslatability signifies a deter-
mined rebellion against conceptual knowledge, a rebellion raised by a poet who
 Intelligence versus Power    75

defiantly translates his own repression and alienation into the truth claim of an
artistic medium. The pre-Islamic ode genre, whose aesthetic structure compels
it to observe and celebrate communal values, becomes in Ṭarafa the opposite of
itself, an epitome of singularity and human alienation. The poem challenges tribal
wisdom because, in representing a state of utter isolation, it eclipses the compli-
ance this conventional wisdom expects from a supposedly conforming member
of the tribe. There is an unresolved dialectic in the relationship between form and
content in Ṭarafa’s poem. Although he cannot abandon the ode’s technical
and formal conventionality, he still sacrifices its thematic conformity for the sake
of a different kind of aesthetic sensibility—that is, the power to own one’s own fate.
At other moments, this sensibility bears witness to a hedonistic content
through a powerful forcing of pleasure. The nihilistic meaning of life in these lines
is enhanced in the very moment of disavowing life. To speak of the issue in a man-
ner reminiscent of Roland Barthes, all art is enveloped in sadness and death. The
more Ṭarafa’s ode touches the core of the human condition, the more heightened
the dejection that emanates from it. Ṭarafa’s suppressed feeling of “Oh, if only
we do not perish” brings to the fore the most painful and unresolved existential
dilemma. Compared to this melancholy, the Qurʾān is a hopeful text, hopeful in
the sense that it opens up a heavenly possibility, or rather a realm of eternity and
a felicity relegated to a future promise, a reverse image of longing for a pleasure
yet to come. But what radiates woefully in Ṭarafa is this vulnerable element of a
pragmatic universal truth, a secular revelation of mortality where living in abso-
lute danger and in absolute pleasure looks death in the eye and makes it appear as
if life were preying on death, and not vice versa. There is nothing in these lines that
does not belong to this world and nothing that could not be taken away from this
world at a price less than death.
 4

Poetic Paganism
and the Monotheistic Aesthetic

In the previous chapter, I argued thar the Qurʾān is not antithetical to pre-Islamic
poetry. Rather, pre-Islamic Arabic is the linguistic native vehicle of the Qurʾān. In
this chapter, I further elaborate the argument that a rhetorical literary analysis of
the Qurʾān is neither reductionist nor peripheral. The Qurʾān not only includes
literary aesthetics, but it also offers a social aesthetic that manifests itself in liter-
ary forms, content, contextual settings germane to the historical, political, and
socioeconomic values leading up to the first Muslim community. In other words,
the Qurʾān is a value-transforming and value-creating text. Rhetorical examina-
tion of the Qurʾān involves an investigation of the dialogic tension inherent in the
linguistic expressions that represent modes, conflicts, alliances, and oppositions at
the literary as well as social and political levels of the Meccan and Medinan societ-
ies in seventh-century Arabia.
Interrogation of the Qurʾān’s content and rhetoric thus has a bearing on the
philosophical views as well as the economic structure and social values of seventh-
century Arabia. For example, in the early Meccan period (e.g., 83; 102; 104; 107), the
Qurʾān explicitly condemns greed, trade fraud, money-mongering, avarice, apa-
thy to the poor, and mockery of the deprived, among other forms of social injus-
tices. Such injustices were the common law of the Meccan society. But the Qurʾān
does this using rhetorical language and syntax familiar to its intended audience.
The Qurʾān critiques the economic structure of its own society as well as its reli-
gious and social habits.1 These accepted elements of the society created the ways in
which people lived and the literature that mirrored their way of life. As we see
in the examples of Ṭarafa and al-Nābigha, as well as the Qurʾān, the ideology of
pre-Islamic Mecca represents a complex relationship of individuals to the practical
conditions of their existence. The Qurʾān’s historical value as a seventh-century
76
 Poetic Paganism and the Monotheistic Aesthetic     77

scripture lies not in its relationship to former monotheistic scriptures, although it

does refer to biblical narratives and events knowable to the collective conscious-
ness of the time, sometimes in endorsement and sometimes in disagreement. But
the very the heart of the Qurʾān is a rhetoric of Arabicity—that is, a rhetoric that
adheres to the linguistic rules of the Arabic language and is in intertextual dia-
logue with its own tradition of ancient Arabic poetry. This rhetoric engenders a
critique of what it perceives as false views of the world not only in terms of divin-
ity but also in terms of social relationships between the rich and the poor and the
rulers and the ruled. Examining the rhetorical properties in the works of poets
like Ṭarafa and al-Nābigha, among many others, allows us to see how their poetry,
despite its discursive difference from the Qurʾān, is tied to the rhetorical forms
and themes of the Qurʾān. After all, the task of pre-Islamic poets, no matter how
agonized or dejected they might be, was primarily aesthetic. They sought to be
concrete and imagistic in their poetical works and to make sure that their respec-
tive poems would stand tall, that the lines would have no broken meters, and
that the imagery would be creative. For example, we have seen how the “rhetoric
of death” in Ṭarafa gives perpetuity to a passing life, not by wanting to save it from
death, but by wanting to crush it under its wheels. Understating how al-Nābigha
had to excel in his own poetic talent to save his life and how Ṭarafa rushed into a
fated pattern of mortal heroism is crucial for understanding the Qurʾān. Investi-
gating how pre-Islamic poets depict the malaise of their harshly led lives through
a carefully structured and metered ode, a hedonistic aesthetics of sorts, makes the
understanding of the relationship between poetry, the community, and the Qurʾān
even more compelling.
Likewise, the real and the concrete of the Qurʾān’s text is its own language. In
fact, the Qurʾān does not have any material reality outside the Arabic language,
and more specifically outside the orality of the Arabic language. For the sake of all
pre-Qurʾānic poets who took Arabic aesthetics to heights envied by their succes-
sors, it is important here not to eschew altogether the historical engagement with
the Qurʾān, but rather to slow it down, to take it all the way in, to immerse it in this
rhetorical “materiality” of pre-Qurʾānic and Qurʾānic Arabia so thoroughly that
when we emerge on the other side, we would have a material history, especially for
the literary and cultural historian, that we can debate, and with which we can gen-
erally agree. Reading pre-Islamic poets and examining the aesthetic properties of
the Arabic language of the Qurʾān does not mean one has to replace one discipline
with another or jettison the historian for the literary critic. But instead of suspend-
ing the relative autonomy of specialized disciplines, it is crucial for the study of the
Qurʾān to arrive at a transformational ethical space where disciplines transcend
their specializations and converge on the material ground of the Qurʾān text itself.
Above all, the Qurʾān is an oral text,2 one that is meant not just to be read but
to be heard, and to be heard with others.3 This fundamental oral/aural anchor-
age means that the Qurʾān is always already part of a community of readers and
78    Poetic Paganism and the Monotheistic Aesthetic

listeners—hence its ethical authority, its ability to engage current values and create
future values. To be able to hear the Qurʾān properly requires superior proficiency
and knowledge not only of classical Arabic, but also and more importantly, of
ancient pre-Islamic Arabic.4 This grim conclusion also means that a great majority
of Muslims today are not able to hear the Qurʾān properly, and that only a small
number of specialized Arabists, whether Arab or non-Arab, whether Muslim or
non-Muslim, will qualify as proper hearers of the Qurʾān. This “proper hearing”
models a kind of ethics, especially for the Western historian, where one does not
need to feel the need to sacrifice the acoustic encounter with aesthetic orality for
the sake of applying a calculated disciplinary methodology to “study” the Qurʾān
while bypassing a language and a history that are not his own.
To be sure, there are no parallel texts that have the same aesthetic condition of
the Qurʾān as an oral text in the Western canon, nor are there parallel intertex-
tualities like the ones between pre-Islamic poetry and the Qurʾān. The Qurʾān’s
oral rhythm is of such substantive importance that attempts to examine it under
scripted models of European aesthetics is already a doomed project.
The source of the Qurʾān’s resistance to such normative scriptural aesthetics is
that materialized scripted approaches tend to lead to the dismissal and denigra-
tion of the written text meant to transcribe its orality. The Qurʾān itself makes this
admonition against the rushed perseveration of it explicitly clear:
5
َ ‫آِن ِِم ْْن َقَْب ِِْل َأَ ْْن ُيُ ْْق‬
َ ‫َضى ِإَِلَ ْْي‬
ُ‫َك ََوْحْ ُيُُه‬ ِ ْ‫ََواَلا َتَ ْْع ََجْلْ ِبِ ْاْلُقُْر‬
6
ُ‫ ُثَُّمَ ِإَِّنَ ََعَلَ ْْيَنَا َبََيَاَنَُه‬. ُ‫ َفَِإِ ََذا َقَ ََر ْْأَنَاُهُ فاتبع ُقُْرْ آَنَُه‬. ُ‫ ِإَِّنَ ََعَلَ ْْيَنَا ََج ْْم ََعُهُ ََوُقُْرْ آَنَُه‬. ‫َك ِلَِتَ ْْع ََج ََل ِبِ ِِه‬ ْ ‫َالَ ُتُ ََحِّر‬
َ َ‫ِْك ِبِ ِِه ِلِ ََساَن‬

Do not rush the Qurʾān before its completely delivered to you

Do not move your tongue with it to rush it. It is upon Us to make it whole and
recitable. So once We have recited it, you must adhere to its recitation. Then it is
upon Us to make it clear.

In the case of Arabic, and especially the Qurʾān, Euro-American understandings

of aesthetics as a theory of the beautiful can be unproductive and limited precisely
because the normative characteristics of the concept of beauty remain inadequate
to the full content of Arabic aesthetics, especially its orality. Hegel’s famous claim
that beauty is “the sensuous appearance [or manifestation] of the idea”7 makes it
difficult to locate this appearance or manifestation in ancient languages or even in
nature.8 There is no place for oral aesthetics in Hegel’s figure-focused conception
of beauty, even though in Western tradition the dialectical relationship between
beauty and phone (voice) is as old as the Odyssey. One should not forget that we are
dealing with an oral tradition, not with the figura, or the written or scripted system
that has become its correlate. Incidentally, this is exactly the argument van Gelder
makes for all of classical Arabic poetry in Sound and Sense—that is, its oral/aural
dimension is too often ignored and neglected.9 Even the writing of the Qurʾān
 Poetic Paganism and the Monotheistic Aesthetic     79

suggests that it is only after the mediation of Iʿjāz that a certain appreciation
of the acoustic becomes possible, but that mediation itself involves orality, as any
transcription of the Qurʾān in essence has no existence without voice.
However, this has been the problem Europe has always had with Arabic: its
difficulty, its untranslatability, its unassimilability, indeed its “un-aesthetic-ness.”
But absence of parallelism does not mean that literary tools could not be used to
approach the text. Yet, a tool is not a method and there is no one universal or global
standard to assess the aesthetics of texts. Take, for instance, the remarks of Thomas
Babington Macaulay, who was a member of the British Parliament and a renowned
historian in the nineteenth century. Macaulay served on the British Supreme Coun-
cil for India between 1834 and 1838. In a debate on allocating government funds in
the colonies, Macaulay has the following to say about Arabic and Sanskrit languages:

The whole question seems to me to be, which language is the best worth knowing?
I have no knowledge of either Sanskrit or Arabic. I have read translations of the
most celebrated Arabic and Sanskrit works. I am quite ready to take the Oriental
learning at the valuation of the Orientalists themselves. I have never found one
among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was
worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. The intrinsic superiority of
the Western literature is, indeed, fully admitted by those members of the Com-
mittee who support the Oriental plan of education . . . It is said that the Sanskrit
and Arabic are the languages in which the sacred books of a hundred millions of
people are written, and that they are, on that account, entitled to peculiar encour-
agement. Assuredly it is the duty of the British government in India to be not only
tolerant, but neutral on all religious questions. But to encourage the study of a
literature admitted to be of small intrinsic value only because that literature incul-
cates the most serious errors on the most important subjects, is a course hardly
reconcilable with reason, with morality, or even with that very neutrality which
ought, as we all agree, to be sacredly preserved. It is confessed that a language is
barren of useful knowledge. We are told to teach it because it is fruitful of mon-
strous superstitions. We are to teach false history, false astronomy, false medicine,
because we find them in company with a false religion.10

There is in Macaulay’s address a clear Eurocentric antipathy toward Sanskrit and

Arabic. But why this resurrection of a nineteenth-century orientalist account now?
Because the roots of the anti-aesthetic are deep and far-reaching in historical dis-
courses and, in particular, in the scholarship of the Euro-American academy on the
Qurʾān, which is characteristically undergirded by these anti-aesthetic accounts
as they have developed since colonial times.11 This is the same epistemic space
that informs Reynold Nicholson’s approach to classical Arabic, which resulted in a
book that became the core required text for training generations of specialists in
the field of Arabic literature in the English-speaking world in the twentieth cen-
tury. But if Nicholson fails in his assessment of classical Arabic poetry,12 then one
80    Poetic Paganism and the Monotheistic Aesthetic

cannot expect him to have any meaningful understanding of the Qurʾān.13 In A

Literary History of the Arabs, Nicholson writes:

European scholars, with the exception of von Hammer, have been far from shar-
ing this enthusiasm [for al-Mutanabbi], as may be seen by referring to what has
been said on the subject by Reiske, De Sacy, Bohlen, Brockelmann, and others. No
doubt, according to our canons of taste, Mutanabbi stands immeasurably below
the famous Pre-Islamic bards, and in a later age must yield the palm to Abu Nuwas
and Abu ‘l-’Atahiya. Lovers of poetry, as the term is understood in Europe, can-
not derive much aesthetic pleasure from his writings, but, on the contrary, will
be disgusted by the beauties hardly less than by the faults which Arabian critics
attribute to him.14

To his credit, Nicholson, perhaps with tongue firmly in cheek, ameliorates his “dis-
gust” by deferring to the judgment of the native speaker when it comes to the
assessment of Arabic aesthetics. Nicholson refers to the native speaker of Ara-
bic as the “born oriental” who “is able to appreciate Mutanabbi at his full worth,”
counseling his camp of European lovers of poetry to “try to realize the oriental
point of view and put aside, as far as possible, our preconceptions of what consti-
tutes good poetry and good taste.”15 Not only does the work of many remarkable
Western scholars of Arabic and Islam belie Nicholson’s prejudiced statement, but
Nicholson’s framing of aesthetics is itself epistemologically peripheral. He surren-
ders without reservation to the sensibilities of his European audiences. His book
is peppered with comparative aesthetics, a framework in which “the longest of the
muʿallaqāt, the so-called ‘Long Poems,’ is considerably shorter than Gray’s Elegy,
and an Arabian Homer or Chaucer must have condescended to prose.”16 Though
condescending in tone, this critical exercise is itself enriching, except that Nich-
olson’s comparative thought process is hierarchical rather than deferential, a pris-
oner of its own norms of poetic aesthetics “as the term is understood in Europe.”17
Clearly some “outlandish” classical Arabic gibberish like that of al-Mutanabbī’s
poetry would appear “disgusting” through Nicholson’s Eurocentric lenses.
Al-Mutanabbī (d. 965 AD) lived and composed poetry in the tenth century, that
is, three hundred years after the Qurʾān. To pit al-Mutanabbī against “pre-Islamic
bards” in an aesthetical context, as does Nicholson, is to pretend that the Qurʾān
never happened and to fail to see the change in the socioeconomic conditions in
post- Qurʾānic communities and the enormity of the task of composing poetry
after the Qurʾān. This “afterness” is crucial for understanding the quantum leap in
Arabic aesthetics in the aftermath of the Qurʾān. It opens up further historical and
literary inquiries about what it means for a literary genre to “precede” or “follow”
a discourse of rhetorical power and whether or not the Qurʾān in the aftermath of
pre-Islamic poetry or even poetry in the aftermath of the Qurʾān signifies a sharp
severance, or, subliminally, recasts its precursor in further enhancement of the
aesthetics of that very tradition.
 Poetic Paganism and the Monotheistic Aesthetic     81

The examples from Macaulay and Nicholson are not isolated incidents or
exceptional oddities but signs of a more serious problem and a confirmation of
an irreparably condescending Eurocentric approach toward the aesthetical tradi-
tion of the other, an approach that has continued to characterize contemporary
Euro-American thought on the status of Arabic in world literature. Both Macau-
lay’s imperialistic hubris and Nicholson’s aesthetic bias manufactured, in their own
respective categorizations, bizarrely paradoxical views to bear on Arabic (and, in
Macaulay’s case, Sanskrit) literatures to Euro-American universities: on the one
hand, they assume that all Arabic literature must be valued according to a univer-
sal code of rational thought, and must be paraphrased, argued with, and quickly
situated in a hierarchy based on a European “ideal” of aesthetic judgement. Their
views carry within them the deadly epistemological germs of the discourses that
shaped them and the discourses they inspired.
For the sake of clarity, let us take a quick detour and offer an example of the
Qurʾān’s influence on the late classical poet of the ‘Abbasid era, Ḥabīb ibn Aws
al-Ṭā’ī (known as Abū Tammām). This example will help illustrate the point
and shed light on some of the aesthetic complexities involved in the making of
classical Arabic poetry after the Qurʾān. One of the most celebrated poets
of the Arabic language, Abū Tammām (d. 845–46) was a Syrian-born Christian
who converted to Islam and reached the pinnacle of his poetic career under
the rule of the al-Muʿtaṣim (833–42). An unforeseeable event at the height of
Abū Tammām’s fame almost cost his career. As he was giving a panegyric in
honor of the caliph’s son, Prince Aḥmad Ibn al-Muʿtaṣim, the Kufa-born phi-
losopher and polymath Yūsuf Yaʿqūb Ibn Isḥāq al-Kindī, who happened to be
among the audience, did not seem to appreciate the “praise similes” he heard in
the poem. Abū Tammām began to liken Prince Aḥmad to remarkable figures
in Arab-Islamic history:

‫حاِس‬
ِ ِ‫يمٍة وِن‬
ٍ ‫رَم ش‬
َ ‫فيه وأك‬ ‫أ ْْبَلَْيَْتَ هذا المج ََد أ ْْب ََع ََد غاي ٍٍة‬
18
‫إياِس‬
ِ ‫في ِِح ِلِم أْحْ َنََفَ في ذكا ِِء‬ ‫حاتٍم‬
ٍ ‫حِة‬ِ ‫عمٍرو في سما‬
ٍ ‫إقداِم‬
ِ

You have accomplished this glory at its highest reach / its noblest quality and its purity.
The mettle of ʿAmr, the tolerance of Ḥātim / the equanimity of Aḥnaf and the
acumen of Iyās.

At this moment al-Kindī insultingly interrupted him, objecting that “The prince
is above those whom you liken him to.”19 Taken aback by the unexpected insult,
Abū Tammām remained silent for a moment, but then ventured the following two
verses on the spot, which had not been part of his prepared ode:

‫والباِس‬
ِ ‫مثًالً ََشُرُودًاً في الَّنََدَى‬ ُ‫َضْرْ بي َلَه ََم ْْن ُُدوَنَُه‬
َ ‫ال تنكروا‬

ِ ‫مثًالً من ال ِِم ْْشَكَا ِِة والّنّْب‬

‫ْراِس‬ ِ ُ‫رَب األقَّلَ ِلُِن‬
ِ ِ‫وِره‬ َ ‫َض‬َ ‫فاُهللُ َقَ ْْد‬
20
82    Poetic Paganism and the Monotheistic Aesthetic

Do not reproach me for citing exemplars / that are less than him, who is matchless
in bounty and mettle.
For God has given less for his own light / an example of the niche and the lantern.

This poetic act of quick wittedness won Abū Tammām the immediate com-
mendation of his audience, including al-Kindī. On this particular occasion, Abū
Tammām would not have been able to compose brilliant poetic lines on the spot
without committing the language and imagery of the Qurʾān to heart. Al-Kindī
was so moved by Abū Tammām’s immediate response that he demanded the poet
be granted whatever reward he asked for, because, according to al-Kindī, a
poet with such an extraordinary aesthetic talent like Abū Tammām’s “won’t live
long . . . he is a man whose intellect is rapidly consuming his body.”21
Very few poems in the Arabic tradition bring together such great poetic talent
with the architectural employment of the Qurʾān. The allegorical complexity of the
lines alone makes them one of the most eccentric and impressive improvisations
in the history of Arabic literature. This improvisation invites the larger question of
the connections between Arabic literature, Qurʾānic authority, and the limits
of rhetorical language. In particular, this improvisation invites a deeper interro-
gation of the relationship between oral tradition and individual talent, as well as
the depths, influences, and commanding presence of the Qurʾān in Arabic poet-
ics. If what we call al-qarīḥa al-shiʿriyya (poetic talent/afflatus) is the “raw” gift
a poet enjoys, in the manner in which such a gift gets “cooked” and molded into
poetic expressions and cultural themes, these expressions will always be linked to
an unspoken aesthetics of intelligence. Before the Qurʾān, this unspoken aesthe­
tics of intelligence was itself the tradition of the classical Arabic qasīda, especially
its glorious examples in the Golden Odes. After the Qurʾān, Arabic poetry con-
tinued to be enhanced, or impeded, by the former’s textual authority as a sublime
discourse of rhetorical power.
It is impossible to know what could have taken place in Abū Tammām’s mind
during this moment of awkward silence following al-Kindī’s insult, what scores of
poetic tropes he could envisaged, or what hundreds of Qurʾānic verses could have
run through his mind. Whatever it was, he was able find an escape in these two
Qurʾān-inspired lines. He performed three acts of poetic intelligence simultane-
ously: he evoked the most fitting Qurʾānic verse to the occasion; he employed it in
a manner that did not reduce him to a mere imitator; and he managed to mold the
freshly composed tropes into baḥr al-kāmil (al-kāmil metre) of his panegyric, with
a poetic talent “as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s
wings,” to quote Ernest Hemingway’s description of F. Scott Fitzgerald.22
If the most accomplished of classical Arabic authors are those whose poetic
intelligence is tested to the point of delivering striking lines, on the spot, from the
looming disgrace of mediocrity, it is safe to argue that intimate oral knowledge of
pre-Islamic Arabic and the Qurʾān is a fundamental prerequisite for Arabic poetic
 Poetic Paganism and the Monotheistic Aesthetic     83

genius post-Islam. In this particular case, the spontaneous recall of the Qurʾān
not only offers the potential to bring about poetry interconnected with sacred lan-
guage but also to transform it by this interconnection. To be sure, almost every
post-Islamic Arab poet either committed the Qurʾān to memory or had a deep
familiarity with its verses and imagery. The Qurʾān includes a rhythmic quality
and aesthetic beauty in its sajʿ (rhyme and rhythmic assonance) that makes it easy
to memorize with regular practice. Yet learning the Qurʾān by heart and being
sufficiently quick-witted to produce powerful and compelling lines on the spot a la
Abū Tammām is almost an impossible task, not to mention putting those lines in
sync with the poem’s main theme and rhyme scheme. The verse that Abū Tammām
beckons in his poem comes from the Qurʾānic chapter al-Nūr (The Light), named
after the verses that describe the light of God:
ٌ‫ُّزَُجا ََجُةُ َكََأََّنََهَا ََكْوْ َكٌَبٌ ُُدِّرِ ٌّي‬
َ ‫وِر ِِه ََك ِِم ْْشَكَا ٍٍة ِفِيَهَا ِِمْصْ َبَا ٌٌح ْاْل ِِمْصْ َبَا ُُح ِفِي ُُز ََجا ََج ٍٍة ال‬
ِ ُ‫ِض ََمَثَ ُُل ُن‬ ِ ْ‫ِت ََواألْر‬ ِ ‫ُهَّللا� ُ ُنُو ُُر الَّسَ ََما ََوا‬
ٍ ُ‫ُِضي ُُء ََوَلَْوْ َلَ ْْم َتَ ْْم ََس ْْسُهُ َنَا ٌٌر ُنُو ٌٌر ََعَلَى ُن‬
‫وٍر َيَ ْْه ِِدي‬ ِ ‫َّيٍَة َيََكَا ُُد ََز ْْيُتَُهَا ُي‬ ٍ ِ‫ُيُوَقَ ُُد ِِم ْْن ََش ََج ََر ٍٍة ُُمَبَا ََر ََك ٍٍة ََز ْْيُتُوَنَ ٍٍة ال َشَْرْ ِق‬
ٍ ِ‫َّيٍَة ََوال َغَْرْ ِب‬
‫يٌم‬ ْ ‫اِس ََوُهَّللا� ُ ِبِ ُُكِّلِ َش‬
ٌ ِ‫َْي ٍٍء ََعِل‬ ِ َ‫وِر ِِه ََم ْْن َيََشَا ُُء ََوَيَْضْ ِِرُبُ ُهَّللا� ُ األ ْْمَثَا ََل ِلِلَّن‬
ِ ُ‫ُهَّللا� ُ ِلُِن‬
God is the light of heavens and earth. The example of his light is like a niche inside of
which is a lamp, the lamp is in a glass, the glass is as if it were a bright planet lit from a
blessed tree, an olive, neither easterly nor western, whose oil almost glows even when
untouched by fire. Light upon light. God guides to his light whom he wills. And God
gives examples to people. And God knows everything. (24:35)

Abū Tammām must have known that offering what his fellow Muslim audience
believed to be the inimitable words of God would silence his detractors. And he
chose the perfect example for it: a verse from the Qurʾān that presents an extended
simile of God, lesser than himself, to approximate the magnitude of his divine
light to humans; a simile of a simile, so to speak, one that could only capture a
fracture or a glimpse of divine light, so humans could come to understand, though
not completely comprehend, the incomparable light that is divinity itself. The
association is clear. If the Qurʾān brings in a reduced simile to approximate
the brightness of God’s light, then certainly a poet can use archetypal models of
Arab bravery, lenience, and charity to approximate the magnificence of Prince
Aḥmad. Abū Tammām, who understands the supreme authority of the Qurʾān
text, knows that al-Kindī cannot dispute this level of poetic intelligence.
Nor does the poetic intelligence of Abū Tammām stop there. The genius of this
particular Qurʾān-inspired moment remains unrivalled. In the “afterness” of the
Qurʾān, it would be impossible for an Arab poet to imitate or steal from it without
being caught, given the authority and popularity of the text. We see this inspira-
tion represented in many instances of post-Qurʾānic classical Arabic. Little did
Nicholson know that al-Mutanabbī in this context would fall under the rubric
of the “mature poets” who must enhance their poetic talent in the afterness of
the Qurʾān. The Qurʾān has thus been a dialectical presence for all poets who
came after it precisely because it cannot be ignored at the same time it cannot
84    Poetic Paganism and the Monotheistic Aesthetic

be matched. Mainly because of the quality of its balāgha as well as the religious
authority it has acquired, the gravitational pull of the Qurʾān’s aesthetic power
makes it comparable to none, enveloping content and form in a manner that could
only astound and overwhelm anyone who listens to it. The following lines from
one of al-Mutanabbī’s poem are an excellent example of this type of dialectical
relationship to the Qurʾān. Al-Mutanabbī refers to prophetic figures from the
Qurʾān economically and imagistically (because he knows that his listeners know
who he is talking about) to express his deep sense of distress, loss, and emotional
alienation from the people around him:23

‫المسيِح بيَنَ اليهو ِِد‬

ِ ِ ‫ إَّالَ ََك ُُم‬. . . ‫بأرِض َنَْحْ َلَة‬
‫قاِم‬ ِ ‫ما ُُمقامي‬
..........
24
‫ٍح في َثَ ُُمو ِِد‬ ٍ ُ‫أنا في ُأ‬
َ ‫ َغَريٌبٌ ََك‬. . . ُ‫َّمٍَة تدا ََرَكَها ُهللا‬
ٍ ِ‫َصاِل‬

My stay in the land of Naḥla /Is very much like the stay of the messiah among the Jews.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ..
I live among a people, may God handle them / as an outsider like Ṣāliḥ among
Thamūd.

This pregnant example of Qurʾān-inspired poeticity is meant to show that there is

an ethical imperative to rethink the canonicity of the aesthetic in Western scholar-
ship on the Qurʾān, an imperative that should not only be premised on counter-
balancing the othering of the text’s Arabicity but on exposing the causes of this
othering. The insistence on a Eurocentric marginalization of Arabic aesthetics
is still widespread in the Euro-American academy. It remains questionable in its
attribution bias to the origins of the Qurʾān. To judge from recent publications,
the wind of Qurʾānic Studies is not blowing in the direction of the Arabicity and
rhetoricity of the Qurʾān. We do not read much about the Qurʾān’s literary con-
nection to pre-Islamic poetry or the social aesthetics of the time, but we keep hear-
ing a great deal about the “external” context and influence—that is, late antiquity—
to which the Qurʾān’s language refers. The emphasis now is not on the structural
analysis or the linguistic or verbal status of the Qurʾān, a property that is so easily
dismissible, but on the “inter-texts” between the language of the Qurʾān and these
grand categories that are said to constitute it. One of the most controversial among
these categories coincides with the new approach to late antiquity. This approach
does not ask what Arabic words of the Qurʾān mean or even how they mean, but
rather what existing late antique epistemic categories the text must have drawn
from, thus emboldening the historical-critical discourse to bypass the literary
dimensions and aesthetic significations of the Arabic language. In this approach,
what we call aesthetics is screened through specific geographical and institutional
settings that translate the other into tailored perceptions and judgements.
 Poetic Paganism and the Monotheistic Aesthetic     85

In what follows, I would like to provide a few further examples of these aes-
thetic moments that materialize in the Qurʾān’s rhetorical power in its dialogic
interaction with the social context we see represented in pre-Islamic poetry. The
relationship between the world and the text of the Qurʾān is an ever-inclusive
category involving religious and cultural practices, economy, politics, law, gender,
ethnicity, sex, marriage, divorce, death, inheritance, and so on. This category is
enveloped in a specific rhetoric of Arabicity that reflects the totality of how one
understands the first Muslim community and interprets the Qurʾān. Even the sto-
ries of prophets from centuries past are brought in with such rhetorical authority
to teach a moral lesson to the present community—or, as the Qurʾān puts it:
ْ ‫يَل ُُكِّلّ َش‬
�‫َْى ٍۢۢء‬ َ ‫ِص‬ َ ‫ِبۗ ۗ ََما ََكاَنَ ََح ِِديًثًا ُيُ ْْفَتَ ََر ٰٰى ََو َٰٰل� ِِكن َتَْصْ ِِدي‬
ِ ‫َق ٱَّلّ ِِذى َبَْيَْنَ َيَ ََد ْْي ِِه ََوَتَ ْْف‬ ِ �‫ِص ِِه ْْم ِِع ْْب ََرٌةٌ ُأِّل� ُْوْ ِلِى ٱَأْل� َ ْْل َٰٰب‬
ِ ‫َص‬ َ َ‫َلََقَ ْْد ََكاَنَ ِفِى َق‬
25
َ‫ََوُهًُدًى ََو ََرْحْ ََمًةً ِّلَّقَْوْ ٍۢۢم� ُي ُْْؤ ِِمُنُوَن‬
In their stories there is a lesson for the mindful ones. This narrative is not a myth, but
a validation of previous revelations, an explication of everything, in guidance and
mercy for those who believe.

In the Qurʾānic accounts of Moses, for example, one hears a story of resistance to
a despotic regime signified by defiance and exodus. In another example, a clear
message of gender, ethnicity, morality, and class emerges from the story of Mary
(Maryam). Mary is seen as an outsider in her community, with her honor and
chastity questionable by her people.26 Even though the Qurʾān blesses and exoner-
ates Mary, granting her a voice and the status of being the only woman whose name
is mentioned in the Qurʾān with a full sūra (Sūra-t-Maryam [19]) dedicated to
her, her vocal agency practically disappears from its narrative after giving birth
to Jesus.27 Other passing references to Mary in the Qurʾān emphasize her chastity
(e.g., 66.12), denounce in the strongest terms the false accusations leveled against
her (e.g., 4:156), and present her legacy and that of Jesus as a sign and a miracle
from God (23:50). If anything, references to biblical figures and prophets serve to
provide a thought space for readers of and listeners to the Qurʾān to reflect on the
totality that the text brings forward. But stories of prophets are just one aspect of
the Qurʾān. In fact, a considerable part of the Qurʾān highlights tensions between
established tribal customs and the nascent allegiances to Muḥammad. The more
one reads the Qurʾān, the more it appears deconstructive of the textual authority
and customary practices of seventh-century Arabia.
In its communal address, the Qurʾān represents what James Joyce would call
“the most commonplace, the deadest among the living,”28 even nameless victims,
such as a female child killed alive (81:8), a blind man seeking learning (80:2), and
a poor divorced wife pleading for counsel (58:1). These examples show how the
Qurʾān enmeshes itself in the fabric of its constitutive social reality and becomes
a historical sign of the socioeconomic conditions in which it appeared. Compared
to the language pre-Islamic poets used, especially in its philosophical musings and
86    Poetic Paganism and the Monotheistic Aesthetic

ecological depictions of nomad life, the language of the Qurʾān oscillates between
apocalyptic and quotidian, and it does so in a manner that is not incomprehen-
sible to its contemporary listeners and readers. This audience lived at times that
oddly combined tribal solidarity with secular individualism; we see this especially
clearly in the environmental depictions of nomadic life we see in pre-Islamic
poetry.29 This is why the move from tribal and blood solidarity to social solidarity
is at the core of the Qurʾān’s sociolinguistic aesthetics. Pre-Islamic poets gained
their distinction through the abandonment of hackneyed language and speech as
particular attributes of common language among their own people. But what does
this abandonment of hackneyed language and speech consist of, and, more impor-
tantly, what does it signify for our understanding of the relationship between pre-
Islamic poetry and the Qurʾān?
Precisely because aesthetics is concerned with what Ibn Qutayba describes as
ḥusn al-lafẓ wa jawda-t-al-maʿná (the beauty of wording/expression in language
and the quality of meaning),30 there are irreducible distinctions and expectations
from poetry as art, namely, as a rhymed and perfected expression of human thought
and feelings. In Arabic, the contrast of lafẓ with maʿná is more or less equivalent to
that between form and content. Poetry’s relationship to its object, sometimes fate-
ful if the poet is directed to lampoon an enemy of the tribe or praise a tribesman,
is always determined by the challenges of linguistic expression and always pushed
to avoid the triteness we have seen al-Kindī accuse Abū Tammām of. Ibn Qutayba’s
definition reminds us why from its incipiency, pre-Islamic poetry is concerned with
uniqueness, newness, and the possibilities and limits of language. Reflection on its
own language has been an integral part of the self-understanding and self-evaluation
of pre-Islamic poetry. This reflection characterizes the poetic enterprise as one that
cannot be subjected to any of the possible types of redundancies or repetitions that
characterize prose or ordinary speech. Composed in a language whose etymological
infrastructure makes it quite symmetrical and balanced, pre-Islamic odes owe their
existence to the unique system of tri-consonantal roots of Arabic.
For instance, the opening line of ʿAntara’s ode includes the verb ghādara, which
I cite below, a verb that means “to leave behind” or “to abandon.” The word is
derived from the Arabic root Gh/D/R, where Gh sound is only one consonant in
Arabic. Many Arabic words and variations on the same root could still be formed,
following a specific pattern of analogical derivation, and they would still retain the
same or a similar denotation. For instance, mughādara means departure; ghadr
means treachery—that is, departure from loyalty/abandonment of morals;
ghadīr means “stream,” that is, departing or running water, and so on. The ancient
Arabic ode runs from fifteen to one hundred lines, consisting of highly rhythmic
patterns that follow specific meters. Each poetic verse includes two evenly metered
half-lines (hemistichs) and maintains a single meter throughout, with every line
ending in the same sound. Highly organized, with a measured thematic and
acoustic unity throughout, the ode both accomplishes and exhibits an aesthetics. It
is a museum of words, itself a powerful poetical and communal force.
 Poetic Paganism and the Monotheistic Aesthetic     87

In fact, there is a unique Arabic verb specified for composing poetry:

yuqarriḍ al-shiʿr. Form I in Arabic verbs is used with the same meaning: qaraḍa
yaqriḍu, qarḍ al-shiʿr. The basic sense of the root Q/ R/ Ḍ is “cutting, gnawing, trim-
ming,” and qarīḍ means “cut to shape,” which is an apt description of composing
metrical rhymed verse. In Asās al-balāgha, al-Zamakhsharī defines the root Q/
R/ Ḍ as follows: qaraḍa l-shāʿir wa-lahū qarīd ḥasan, li-anna al-shiʿr kalām dhū
taqāṭīʿ.31 The complexity and talent involved in taqrīḍ al-shiʿr32 (i.e., the mental
effort of cutting, trimming, and polishing poetry in one’s mind) makes it almost
impossible to compose a classical ode today. Even the most erudite of Arabic read-
ers might miss the subtleties and brilliant imagery at work in these pre-Islamic
odes. The ode of ʿAntara ibn Shaddād, for instance, imperceptibly critiques the
reversal of values, slavery, and racial discrimination at the same time that it beau-
tifully contrasts blackness with whiteness, brokenness with wholeness, outsiders
with tribe members, and wandering with rootedness. ʿAntara is at once a lover and
a warrior, a man of fierce action and beautiful words who uses all elements in his
surrounding environment, including sound imagery, animal imagery (e.g., horses,
camels, and ostriches), and place symbolism to create new and fresh figures of
speech. The goal is for the ode to pass the test of originality and gain fame among
contemporaries by making itself rhetorically incomparable.
ʿAntara’s ode, which begins with the anguished statement of poetic anxiety
revealing his concern that his predecessors left nothing rhetorically startling or
new for him to say, reminds us of the fierceness of these poetic contests and the
constant strife for uniqueness and originality:
33
َ ‫َِر ْْفَتَ الدا ََر بع ََد‬
‫تَوُّه ِِّم‬ ِ ‫أم هْلْ َع‬ ‫َّدَِم‬ ْ ‫هْلْ غاد ََر الُّشُ عرا ُُء‬
ِ ‫مْن ُُمت ََر‬

Have the poets left any speech to patch / Or have you recognized the home after
much doubt?

It is the search for something new that irks the mind of the pre-Islamic poet, and
all artists for that reason. Theodor Adorno describes this quest for newness as a
desire for something already there but not yet revealed. “The relation to the new
is modeled on a child at the piano,” writes Adorno, “searching for a chord never
previously heard.”34 Knowing that the chord has always been there, “given in the
keyboard,” is the best image one could conjure for the composition of poetry. This
constant search for the chord of a new poem, then, a chord that never ceases to
exist, makes the new, in Adorno’s language, “a longing for the new, not the new
itself.”35 This is what makes the new worth searching for. There is no alternative
for this quest if the goal is to achieve poetic glory. Poets risk losing everything
when they borrow from or echo other poets, or when they “patch” metaphors
or images that have already been used before. That is why in composing an ode,
a poet must be fiercely prepared, committing to memory every possible line of
poetry that has been said before and managing, not only to avoid it, but to surpass
it in talent and beauty. The fear is always that of derivativeness and banality, of
88    Poetic Paganism and the Monotheistic Aesthetic

striking a familiar chord and of saying what has been said before, a fear of failing
to be original, as Kaʿb ibn Zuhayr warns:
36
‫أو معادا من لفظنا مكرورا‬ ‫ما أرانا نقول إّالّ معارا‬
I do not see us say anything but borrowed utterances / Or retold copies of our
speech.

It is also a fear of replicating emotions verbatim in the same manner of former

poets, as Imruʾ al-Qays concedes:
37
ِ ‫نبكي الديار كما بكى ابُنُ ِِخ‬
‫ذاِم‬ ‫عوجا على الطلل المحيل ألننا‬
Turning towards the year-old ruin because we / / bemoan the homes as did Ibn
Khidhām.
In the above example, Imruʾ al-Qays acknowledges the formulaic nature of pre-
Islamic poetry, submitting that there is nothing necessarily wrong in crying over
deserted ruins like those left by the obscure poet Ibn Khidhām. In fact, the tradition
is rife with echoing and borrowing among other forms of “friendly emulation.” Yet,
if themes and emotions are part and parcel of classical Arabic poetry, it is “how”
these emotions are expressed that marks the difference between poets. Such lyri-
cal anxieties and obsession with “newness” in formal expressions prompted many
pre-Islamic poets to strive to be the voices of their community. They were the ones
who recorded, aesthetically through the art of poetry, the heritages of their respec-
tive tribes we have today. They had critical social roles to fill, such as singing the
praises of their warriors and chieftains, lampooning their enemies, and support-
ing their allies. Their poetry spoke of wars and divided tribalisms, and their works
explored various subgenres like hijāʾ (invective and ridicule), fakhr (vaunting or
boasting [tribal] pride), rithāʾ (elegy), and ḥamāsa (zeal, fervor, valor, bravery,
fighting spirit, heroism). Their poems thrived on themes of love, longing, and
dejection, but also on those of hunting, irreverent masculinities, erotic pauses,
self-laudations, tribal vanities, and ancestral pomposity. Like the entire corpus of
ancient Arabic literature, the pre-Islamic qaṣīda was an offspring of an intrepid
way of life, a tribal desert society that settled in with or carried along its own ethos
and values wherever it went. Poetry came into life to document and commemorate
these values, and by its ceremonial role to allow the pre-Islamic Arabs of those
distant epochs to feel love and to confront conflicts and death in a desert geogra-
phy that was constantly unforgiving.
Challenging indigenous Arab perspectives, Peter Brown has once provoca-
tively called the desert a “myth” and even labeled it as “one of the most abiding
creations of late antiquity, a myth of liberating precision.”38 In Brown’s view, the
desert of late antiquity was “a clear ecological frontier, delimit-[ing] the towering
presence of the ‘the world’ from which the Christians must be set free . . . . a bru-
tally clear boundary, already heavy with immemorial associations.”39 Understand-
ably, Brown is making a reference here to the Desert Fathers and their expressions
 Poetic Paganism and the Monotheistic Aesthetic     89

of sexual renunciation and asceticism in the late Roman (early Christian) world.
But the desert of pre-Islamic Arabic and the Qurʾān is the complete opposite.
It is neither metropolis nor a town. The desert is the competing and punitive
real pre-Islamic Arabs had to grapple with. It is the harsh Ṣaḥrāʾ al-Lubayn40 of
dried wells that haunts the opening lines of Zuhayr Abī Sulmá’s elegy, the great
flood that devastates Imruʾ al-Qays’s world, engulfing everything in its path (wa
Taymāʾa lam yatruk bi-hā jidhʿi nakhlatin),41 and the scorching sarābin biqī ʿatin
of the Qurʾān. The desert, as it permeates the space of pre-Islamic poetry and
the Qurʾān, is not simply the extra-epistemic space of Brown’s late antique times.
Beyond being a mere backdrop for divine encounters, like those in the Old Testa-
ment with Abraham and Moses or the New Testament’s depiction of Jesus being
tempted by the devil, it holds a richer, more complex identity. It is neither the
“imaginary space” beyond the metropolis nor the nonworldly and uninhabitable
vastness that late antiquity imagined it to be. The desert in pre-Islamic Arabic
poetry and the Qurʾān is, in every sense, the competing space of the “other.” It
stands as the space that Western articulations of late antiquity overlooked or cov-
ered over. This is a fragment that versions of late Antiquity could not subsume,
particularly in Brown’s interpretation, which painted the desert as an imaginary
place and overlooked its reality as a tangible, inhabited region. Here, real people
cultivated profound, human-all-too-human traditions, encompassing not only
ideas of transcendence and received divinity but also a tapestry of life experiences
and cultural narratives. It’s a realm where the human and the divine coalesce,
offering a more nuanced and authentic understanding of the desert’s role and
significance in these ancient texts.
All these characteristics bring to life a landscape and a map that extends from
tents and seasonal encampments vulnerable to the caprices of a harsh desert weather,
tribal rivalries, and fierce battlefields, with detailed references to the topographies,
meteorologies, and social customs of the inhabitants of the Arabian peninsula. Poets
portray nomadic ways of life and itinerant travels for sources of water and cultivable
lands. The emotional trigger that often characterizes pre-Islamic odes is the nostal-
gia the poet has for the beloved who moved away with her tribe from her encamp-
ment to inhabit a new one in distant lands. Just like the ancient Japanese haiku, a
deep sense of sadness is often associated with a radical change in seasons in pre-
Islamic Arabic poetry. The desert landscape, as well as elements such as rain, thun-
der, floodings, clouds, the vegetation of the otherwise barren landscape, and even
the passage of day and night in the single revolution of the sun all come together to
project a mood of dejection and chagrin in the pre-Islamic Arabic ‫قصيدة‬. The poets
describe both domesticated animals such as horses, donkeys, camels, and dogs, and
untamed creatures like ostriches, lions, snakes, wolves, hyenas, and birds of prey.
In the same context, we have come to see how pre-Islamic poets engage in deep
philosophical questions about the meaning of life. Pre-Islamic Arabia developed
a strong resignation to chance, randomness, and acts of fate while harboring a
90    Poetic Paganism and the Monotheistic Aesthetic

refusal to see a purpose of life, though not necessarily a purpose in life. The poetry
of Maymūn Ibn Qays al-Aʿshá (570–625) provides perhaps the best verses that
depict these musings on chance and life’s absurdities when reflecting on his own
personal relationship to his beloved, Hurayra:

‫يَرها الرج ُُل‬

َ ‫ِّلَّق غ‬
َ ‫وُع‬ ُ ‫غيري‬ ً‫َضًا ً وُعُِّلّقت رجًال‬
َ ‫ُُعِّلّقُتُها ََع ََر‬
ٌ ‫ََومن بني عِّمّها مْي‬
‫ٌْت بها ََوه ُُل‬ ‫ََو ُُعِّلَّقَ ْْتُهُ فتاٌةٌ ما يحاوُلُها‬

‫مَع الحُّبّ حٌّبّ ُُكُّلّه تب ُُل‬

َ ‫فاجت‬ ‫وُعِّلَّقَ ْْتِنِي ُأُ ََخ ْْي ََرى ما ُتُالئمُنُي‬
ُ
42
‫وداٍن ومخبو ٌٌل ومختب ُُل‬
ٍ ‫نا ٍٍء‬ ‫رٌم يهذي بصاحِبِه‬ ْ ‫فكُّلّنا‬
ٌ ‫مْغ‬

I fell for her by accident, but she fell for another man / the man fell for another
woman.
Another woman fell for the man, but he was not interested / though her cousin was
madly in love with her.
A woman fell for me, but she did not suit me / love comes wholesale, love-madness.
Each of us in pain raving about his beloved / distant, close, lovesick, crazed.

Al-Aʿshá ‘s lines reflect on unrequited love and disintegrated personal relation-

ships, resulting in emotional inference that there could be no meaning to life and
that human existence is a painful absurdity. In other words, accident and chance
are the basis for human connections, resulting in a corporal community lacking
mutual love and emotional balance. We have already seen a glimpse of this in
Ṭarafa’s ode, whose striking line on the defiance of death offers less of a rhetori-
cal question about “eternity” than an anagnorisis of the futility and randomness
of life. This realization is expressed in Ṭarafa’s powerful use of the word manūn
(pl. manāyā) in its poignant attributive genitive case of maniyyatī, enveloped in
a rhetorical question, a question which refuses to say what it is really questioning.
The word maniyyatī does not exactly translate as “death,” but as the random acts of
fate that might cause it, the haphazard events or vicissitudes of fortune that bring
about a sense of deep anxiety about the uncertainty of it all. Or, as the mukhaḍram
(a poet whose lifetime straddled the Jāhiliyya and the Islamic age) knight/poet
Abū Dhuʾayb al-Hudhalī (d. 649) puts it:

‫قديمًا ً فُتُبلينا المنوُنُ وما ُنُبلي‬ ‫َك خطوٌبٌ قد تمَّلَت شباَبَنا‬

َ ‫فِتِل‬

‫الِجِّبِل‬
ِ ‫َِس‬ِ ‫ ويستمتعن باَألََن‬،‫ََجهارا‬ ‫ََمنايا ُيَُقَِّرّْبْن الُحُتوف ألهلها‬
43

These are vicissitudes that have taken our adolescence / Acts of fate that finish us
when we can’t fight back.
Acts of fate advancing deaths to its people / Openly, and enjoying taking the lives of
mortals.
 Poetic Paganism and the Monotheistic Aesthetic     91

The Qurʾān uses the same root to convey a similar meaning in a negative “death
wish” Muḥammad’s detractors inflict upon him:

ِ ُ‫َْب ْٱْل ََمُن‬

‫وِن‬ َ ‫َأَ ْْم َيَُقُوُلُوَنَ َشَا ِِع ٌٌر َّنَّتَ ََرَّبُّصُ ِبِ ِِه ََرْي‬

Or they would say: “[He is] a poet; we shall wait and see what fate’s uncertainty/
vicissitude does with him.” (52:30)

In this Meccan verse, which represents Muḥammad’s early call of Islam, the wish
(by his detractors) for random acts of death to overtake him before his message
prevails is linked to his supposed poethood. The idea, since they are convinced he
is a “deluded mortal,” is to humiliate him by reducing him to a poet and by wait-
ing out his so-called “prophetic affectations” until death, under whatever circum-
stances, overtakes him and blasts him into oblivion:

ِ ‫ِإِ ْْن َٰٰه� ََذٓا ِإِاَّلا َقَْوْ ُُل ْٱْلَبََش‬

‫َِر‬

This is nothing but the saying of mortals. (74:25)

In other words, in the logic of poetic Arabia, poeticity equals secularity and mor-
tality, and if Muḥammad is merely mortal, it must follow that what he is saying
would be nothing other than poetry or, at best poetic, and there is nothing divine
about it. In all these examples, death is depicted by pre-Islamic Arabs as always a
matter of chance: References to manūn/manāyā exemplify a preoccupation with
death or with a death-anxiety syndrome that brings not just the end of life but a
pragmatic philosophy of the world we inhabit. Sixth- and seventh-century Arabia
saw death, then, as a matter of fact, a lurking inevitability masked in chance,
a game played by those mischievous acts of fate. Ṭarafa knows the game so well that
he opted to take the lead and happen upon death instead of waiting for death to
happen upon him. Zuhayr ibn Abī Sulmá (520–609) turns manāyā into a Russian
Roulette avant la lettre, a lethal game of chance and a matter of hit and miss:
44
‫ُتُ ِِم ْْتُهُ ََو ََم ْْن ُتُخطئ ُيُ ََعَّمَْرْ َفََيَ ْْه ََر ِِم‬ ‫ُْت ْاْل ََمنايا َخَبَطَ عشوا ََء من ُتُصب‬
ُ ‫ََرَأَْي‬

I saw the clumsy randomness of the acts of fate, whoever they hit dies / and who-
ever they miss lives and grows old.

Zuhayr’s line relays a form of personification, which, far from being prearranged
and methodical, is depicted as an inevitably recurrent event and unmediated by any
poetic anesthetization. Death not only comes randomly, irrespective of one’s age
or status, but it also appears as a performance of luck on a ground of sheer indif-
ference, one that promises no resolution to any of life’s unsettling inconsistencies.
Zuhyar’s metaphor of death is so commanding that it not only showcases the aes-
thetic superiority of the poetic over the commonplace in this fearful depiction of
death as an arbitrary hitman, but it also almost makes it blasphemous to question
92    Poetic Paganism and the Monotheistic Aesthetic

its authority. The reason for this command is because its claim is a powerful one,
precisely because it envisions death as it appears to be: random and indiscrimi-
nate in its occurrence. This claim is achieved by a basic logic of observation and
deduction that forms the phenomenological ground of the linguistic system that
allows for the aesthetic to evolve as a category of the beautiful. Zuhayr’s trope
brings about a disquieting feeling of the constant proximity of death and of life
itself as an exercise in ceaseless peril. However, as is the case with Ṭarafa, Zuhayr’s
understanding of the perils of death, his imaginative poeticization of its unpredict-
ability, and his use of a figure of speech to personify it, is what allows the listener/
reader to cope with this constant threat. The personification of the haphazard and
blind blows of death (khabṭ ʿashwāʾ), a Beethovenian “fate knocking at the door,”
so to speak, does not in any way mitigate the empirical moment of undergoing or
surviving death. What it does, however, is depict the vulnerability of our collective
humanity in the face of death, in the coming into life itself as a material significa-
tion of a random suqūṭ/saqṭ (loss or fall), as Imruʾ al-Qays puts it exquisitely in the
opening line of his ode:

ِ ْ‫قِط الِّلّوى بيَنَ الَّدّخول فَحَْو‬

‫مِل‬
45
ِ ‫بِس‬
ِ ‫قفا نبك من ِِذكرى حبيب ومنزل‬

Stop, you two, so we could mourn the memory of a beloved and an abode / at the
tip of the coiled sands between al-Dakhūl and Ḥawmal.

It would be impossible to understand, explicate, interpret, or even translate the

Qurʾān without this fundamental context of pre-Islamic poetry. The Qurʾān
comes into the world of the seventh-century Arabian Peninsula aware of itself
as a metaphysical category of rhetorical power interrogating a phenomenologi-
cal category of rhetorical intelligence. It is rare to see metaphysics deconstruct
phenomenology, but this is the aesthetic pattern that exactly corresponds to the
Qurʾān’s dialogic critique of pre-Islamic Arabia’s poetic philosophy, including
that of life and death. It is exemplified in the poetical works that predate the text
by a hundred years.46 The key to this critique of pre-Islamic reason, which is itself
a recurrent motif throughout the Qurʾān,47 is the aesthetic mode of delivering
“new” and differing news, especially about the predictability and deliberateness of
death,48 of faith, and of the promise of paradise.49 The insistence that there is some-
thing worse, or better, that lies beyond corporeal death, and the aesthetic elabora-
tion of this “beyond,” radically distinguishes the Qurʾān from poetry and allows
it to establish its own authoritative difference. This insistence makes of the Qurʾān,
to recall Adorno’s piano metaphor, the very utopia of the Arabic language. “What
takes itself to be utopian,” contends Adorno, “remains the negation of what exists
and is obedient to it.”50 The Qurʾān’s continuity of the linguistic pattern we see
exemplified in Ṭarafa’s ironic question, “hal anta mukhallidī?” (can you make me
live forever) is indicative of its “obedience” to the rules of classical Arabic already
established in pre-Islamic poetry. This continuity also explains the insistence of
 Poetic Paganism and the Monotheistic Aesthetic     93

the Qurʾān, in the very context of its relationship to the language of poetry in the
chapter of the Poets, that it is revealed bi-lisānin ʿarabiyyin mubīnin (in a clear/
clarifying Arabic tongue).51 More importantly, this continuity is indicative of the
Qurʾān’s awareness of a common audience deeply immersed in understanding
the difference between a syntax that allows Ṭarafa to ask his yes-or-no ques-
tion and a rhetoric that negates the very prospect of expecting an answer to his
question. After all, we are dealing with a community and a world, as Walid Saleh
reminds us, “in which the reality of death was the only certitude and the only pre-
dictable element in human life.”52
But Saleh’s topic is not merely about death and dying; it is resurrection and
after-world existence as such. Expectedly, when it comes to notions of death
and resurrection in the Qurʾān, there is always the question of the sources. Saleh
solves this source problem—which concerns notions of mortality, accountability,
and immortality (such as heaven and hell)—by stating that they do not come from
one source. Perhaps because he is not working closely with the same historico-
philosophical Arabic poetic corpus that preceded the Qurʾān,53 Saleh chooses to
focus on the Qurʾān text54 and to regard those sources as universally “shattered”
(to use a Foucauldian term) in the multiplicity of religio-ideological customs and
“collective heritage from late antiquity,” while still cautioning that “on its own,
this world is coherent and constructed according to the Qurʾān’s internal logic.”55
Indeed, Saleh, who predicates his discussion of the Qurʾān’s paradise and hell
verses on “a summation of late antiquity’s world”56 identifies clear points of depar-
ture from traditional societies of late antiquity in the Arabic depiction of mortal-
ity as a definition of humanity, which he considers “a gulf that truly separated
the pagan Arabs and any society of late antiquity, whether Christian or Jewish.”57
On the level of rhetoric alone, the mockery embedded in Ṭarafa’s question about
the certainty and predictability of his own death speaks forcefully to Saleh’s point.
Ṭarafa provides a precise example of using the structure of Arabic grammar to
generate a sentence with a double-entendre, one that simultaneously declares and
negates its own speech act.58 This rhetorical mode of questioning only works and is
only identifiable where there is a familiar and recognizable extratextuality behind
the crude linguistic field of classical Arabic. Otherwise, it will be impossible to
determine grammatically or rhetorically which of the two meanings is intended in
Ṭarafa’s lines and, subsequently, in the Qurʾān.
To see how this rhetorical question functions in the Qurʾān, let us consider the
following Meccan verses that utilize the same rhetorical mode, but only in decon-
structing the dominant pre-Islamic belief in chance and the randomness of death.
What we have here is a questioning of the rhetorical questioning:
59
‫ََوَقَاُلُ ٓٓو ْْا َأَ ِِء ََذا ُُكَّنّا ِِع َٰٰظ� ًًما ََو ُُر َٰٰف�ًتًا َأَ ِِءَّنّا َلَ ََم ْْبُعُوُثُوَنَ َخ َْْلًقًا ََج ِِديًدًا؟‬

They said, “If we were to turn into bones and ashes, would we really be resurrected
anew?”
94    Poetic Paganism and the Monotheistic Aesthetic

60
‫ُّت َلََسَْوْ َفَ ُأُ ْْخ ََر ُُج ََحًّي�ّا؟‬
ّ ‫نَٰس� ُنُ َأَ ِِء ََذا ََما ِِم‬
ٰ ِ �‫ََوَيَُقُو ُُل ٱِإْل‬

A human would ask, “If I were I to die, would I really be raised alive again?”
61 ٰ ‫ََوَيَُقُوُلُوَنَ ََمَت َٰٰى َٰٰه� ََذا ْٱْل ََو ْْع ُُد ِإِن ُُكنُتُ ْْم‬
َ‫َٰص� ِِدِقِيَن‬

They would say, “When would this promise ever come to pass, if you were truthful?”

In these examples we see how the Qurʾān “obeys” to the letter the structure and
intentions of its preceding corpus, showing how a well-established syntactic pat-
tern generates a sentence that has at least two meanings. One is not talking here
about the realm of metaphor where one meaning is literal and the other figura-
tive, but about a question that is and is not a question at the same time, and, more
importantly, about a question that is not suspended or unresolved. In other words,
the “disbelievers” in 17:49 are not genuinely asking, questioning, or seeking a con-
firmation about their resurrection after death. The very sarcasm they display in
what al-Jurjānī refers to as hamza-t-al-taqrīr wa-al-inkār wā-al-tawbīkh (the inter-
rogative particle for affirmation, negation, and reproach) cancels and mocks the
question. The syntactic use of the interrogative particle ‫ ء‬is already indicative of
their sarcastic inkār mode of disapproval and denial. This is an excellent example
of how rhetoric suspends logic in classical Arabic. This rhetorical suspension is
not something the Qurʾān invented or imported from late antiquity. When its lan-
guage concomitantly confirms and denies the power of its own rhetorical mode,
the Qurʾān enters into a superior rhetorical dialogue with the very community of
its constitutive language:

،‫ ولها مذهب آخر‬.‫ وتوبيخ لفاعله عليه‬،‫ وإنكار له ِلِ ََم كان‬،‫بفعٍل قد كان‬ ٍ ‫واعلم أن “الهمزة” فيما ذكرنا تقري ٌٌر‬
ٓ
‫ ومثاله قوله تعالى ( َأََفََأَْصْ َفَ ٰٰى ُُك ْْم ََرُّبّ ُُكم ِبِ ْٱْلَبَِنِيَنَ ََوٱَّتّ ََخ ََذ ِِمَنَ ْٱْل ََمَٰٓل�� ِئِ ََك ِِة ِإِ َٰٰن�ًثًاۚ ۚ ِإَِّنّ ُُك ْْم‬.‫وهو أن يكون إنكار الفعل من أصله‬
‫ فهذا ِِر ٌٌد على‬.) َ‫ ََما َلَ ُُك ْْم ََكْيَْفَ َتَْحْ ُُك ُُموَن‬. َ‫ِت ََعَلَى ْاْلَبَِنِيَن‬ ِ ‫يًما) وقوله عز وجل (َأَْصْ َطََفَى ْاْلَبََنَا‬ ِ ‫َلََتَُقُوُلُوَنَ َقَْوْ اًلا َع‬
ً ‫َِظ‬
‫ وإذا ُقُِّدّم االسم في هذا صار االنكار في‬.‫المشركين وتكذيب لهم في قولهم ما يؤدى إلي هذا الجهل العظيم‬
‫ أنكرت‬،”‫ لست ممن يحسن مثله‬، َ‫ “أأنت قلت هذا الشعر؟ كذبَت‬:ً‫ ومثاله قولك للرجل قد انتحل شعرًا‬.‫الفاعل‬
62
.‫أن يكون القائل ولم تنكر الشعر‬

Know that the hamza in the aforementioned is an affirmation of an action that took
place and a denial of it for what it was, and at the same time a reproach for its agent.
It has another usage, that is, the denial of the action itself, as in when God, may
he be exalted, says, “Has your lord favored you with sons and taken angels as his
females? Verily, you are saying something grievous.” or when he, in all his magnifi-
cence and glory, says, “Has he favored daughters over sons? What is wrong with you
and with how you judge?” This is a response to the associators and a denial of what
they say, which reflects great ignorance. If the noun/agent precedes the verb in this
mode, then the denial is of agency. An example of this is when you say to a man who
falsely attributes poetry to himself, “Did you really compose this poetry? You are a
liar. This poetry is too good to be composed by you,” thus denying his agency as the
author of said poetry but not the poetry itself.
 Poetic Paganism and the Monotheistic Aesthetic     95

In this context, al-Jurjānī positions both pre-Islamic poetry and the Qurʾān in a
rhetorical and grammatical continuum, with a deep conviction that the language
of ancient Arabic constitutes the text of the Qurʾān in the first place. He is aware
that the language of the Qurʾān may differ discursively, and in degree, from pre-
Islamic poetry, but it is not a difference in kind:
‫حٍد‬
ٍ ‫أْن كان على‬ْ ‫ هي‬،‫ وبانت وبهرت‬،‫وذاك أنا إذا كنا نعلم أن الجهة التي منها قامت الحجة بالقرآن وظهرت‬
‫ وكان محاال أن يعرف كونه‬،‫ ومنتهيا إلى غاية ال ُيُط ََمح إليها بالفكر‬،‫من الفصاحة تقصر عنه قوى البشر‬
‫ وقد استشهد العلماء لغريب القرآن‬. . . .‫ إَّالَ من ََعَرََفَ الشعر الذي هو ديوان العرب وعنوان األدب‬،‫كذلك‬
63
.‫ ثم لم يعبهم ذلك‬،‫ وفيها ذكر الفعل القبيح‬،‫وإعرابه بأبيات فيها الفحش‬

This is because the position from which the Qurʾān distinguishes and demonstrates
its mesmerizing authority comes from a degree of eloquence inimitable by humans
and arriving at a telos unthinkable to their minds. It is impossible for anyone to
understand the Qurʾān’s power unless this person is versed in poetry, the Dīwān of
the Arabs and the discourse of their literary heritage.

A linguistic utopia, to echo Adorno, is predicated on a dialectic of adherence (or

obedience) and negation. The Qurʾān’s adherence to the grammar and rheto-
ric of Arabic for the sake of communicability and clarity of its message, which I
address in fuller details in a following chapter, dialectically forces “the negation
of what exists,” a negation that combines a shock of “newness” and a challenge
for imitability, simultaneously. Not only does the Qurʾān establish itself as some-
thing new and different from poetry, but, in what is known as Āyāt al-Taḥaddī
(Verses of Challenge), it emphatically declares itself as forever irreproducible by
anyone, poets or nonpoets alike. The confrontational tone in the following verses
positions the Qurʾān as an aesthetic manifestation that is simultaneously inter-
nal to the linguistic tradition of Arabic and external to the modus operandi that
produces poetry:
64
َ ‫ُوِن ِهَّللا� ِ ِإِن ُُكنُتُ ْْم‬
َ‫َصا ِِدِقِيَن‬ ْ ‫ِّمَّّما َنَ َّّز ْْلَنَا ََعَلَ ٰٰى ََع ْْب ِِدَنَا َفَْأُْتُوا ِبُِسُو ََر ٍٍة ِّمّ ن‬
ِ ‫ِّمّْثِلِ ِِه ََوا ْْدُعُوا ُُشَهََدَا ََء ُُكم ِّمّ ن ُد‬ ّ ‫ٍب‬ ٍ ‫ََوِإِن ُُكنُتُ ْْم ِفِي ََر ْْي‬
65
َ ‫ُوِن ِهَّللا� ِ ِإِن ُُكنُتُ ْْم‬
َ‫َصا ِِدِقِيَن‬ ِ ‫ٍت ََوا ْْدُعُوا ََم ِِن ا ْْسَتََطَ ْْعُتُم ِّمّ ن ُد‬ ْ ‫َأَ ْْم َيَُقُوُلُوَنَ ا ْْفَتَ ََراُهُ ُقُْلْ َفَْأُْتُوا ِبِ ََع ْْش ِِر ُُس ََو ٍٍر‬
ٍ ‫ِّمّْثِلِ ِِه ُُم ْْفَتَ ََرَيَا‬
66
‫ٍْض َظَ ِِهيًرًا‬ ُ ‫آِن اَلا َيَْأُْتُوَنَ ِبِ ِِم ْْثِلِ ِِه ََوَلَْوْ ََكاَنَ َبَ ْْع‬
ٍ ‫ُضُهُ ْْم ِلَِبَْع‬
ْ
ِ ْ‫ِت اِإْل� ِ نُسُ ََو ْاْل ِِجُّنّ ََعَلَ ٰٰى َأَن َيَْأُتُوا ِبِ ِِم ْْث ِِل َٰٰه� ََذا ْاْلُقُْر‬
ِ ‫ُقُل َّلِّئِ ِِن اْجْ َتَ ََم ََع‬

And if you are in doubt of what we have descended unto our servant, then bring
forth a sūra like it and call your ungodly witnesses if you were telling the truth.
Or would they say: “he made it up.” Say: “bring forth ten made-up sūras like it, and
call out to whom you can other than God if you were telling the truth.”
Say, “if humans and jinn were to collaborate in producing something like this Qurʾān,
they would not produce anything like it, even if they backed one another.”

Because the Qurʾān cannot rely on any ethos or objective realities expressed in
these poems, it has to produce its own system of knowledge, its own supremacy,
96    Poetic Paganism and the Monotheistic Aesthetic

so to speak. Saleh understands this tension very well. “The Qurʾān speaks to
humanity triumphantly,” he says, doing so in a tone “based on the presumption
that it knows human beings better than they know themselves.”67 This knowability,
however, is only achievable through the pretext of pre-Islamic poetry, as al-Jurjānī
notes, since the Qurʾān’s aesthetic eloquence would be impossible to asses, com-
prehend, or appreciate “except by those who know poetry, the very dīwān of the
Arabs and the signature of their literature.”68 These accounts alone would make
the valorization of historical categories occur at the expense of aesthetic rigor, or
any claim for reducing the Arabicity of the Qurʾān as a self-enclosed totality of
epistemic “intertexts,” an exercise in dogmatism. Once again, (Arab) aesthetics are
not a self-enclosed totality awaiting the defensive Western literary critic, a la Nich-
olson, to denigrate it in comparison to his own tradition. The nexus between social
and linguistic habits of the Arab community, their art, and their oral aesthetics
is built into the structure of pre-Islamic poetry and the Qurʾān, not in the dog-
matic sense that aesthetics are concerned with matching poetic meters with tribal
politics as their main focus, but in the much deeper sense that, here again, the
discursive passage from a rhetoric of intelligence (pre-Islamic poetry) to a rhetoric
of power (the Qurʾān) must include communal aesthetics as the one and only pre-
requisite for such a passage to take place and be understood in the first place. How
Qurʾānic oral aesthetics are articulated is not a simple matter to research, but this
is nonetheless a topic that continues to be dismissed in Euro-American scholar-
ship.69 A truly meaningful reflection on the Qurʾān can therefore only be achieved
through the practice of aesthetic thought, accessible exclusively by engaging with
the literary figurations and tropes of its formative language. This is because tropes
do not just adorn language; they unlock its deepest layers, revealing the profound
truths and wisdom embedded within.
 5

Adab and the Ethical Authority

of the Qurʾān

“The dialogue of thinking with poetry is long. It has barely begun.”1 This com-
manding statement by Martin Heidegger invites us to reevaluate the connection
between pre-Islamic poetry and the Qurʾān. This connection remains under scru-
tiny, often through rigid, antiquated norms that have long questioned poetry’s
historical validity as a source. Returning again to the nature of the comparative
itself, and judging from recent scholarly tendencies, we see that there appears to
be a compulsive avoidance of “thinking with poetry” in Euro-American scholar-
ship on the Qurʾān.2 This is not to say that a comparative approach to the Qurʾān
bypassing pre-Islamic poetry and focusing on the Bible, or on the broader epis-
temic space of late antiquity, is untenable. On the contrary, these sources remain a
meaningful part of Islamic religious heritage, and such studies undoubtedly have
the appeal of connecting epistemological dots, especially by putting scriptures in a
larger context and casting a different light on their subject matter. Additionally, as
the latest variation on the theme of Abrahamic monotheism, the Qurʾān in many
cases, as I exemplify in this chapter, self-evidently invites comparison with the
Torah and gospels, and at times even compels these comparisons to take place as
a way of understanding and interpreting the scripture. Yet, Heidegger’s statement
is highly relevant in its application to the current state of affairs in Qurʾānic stud-
ies. Pre-Islamic poetry is conditional for understanding the Qurʾān, not only as a
syntactic and semantic prerequisite for making sense of the scripture, as al-Jurjānī,
for instance, would see it, but also as a literary corpus that invites us to step beyond
the conventional framing of this relationship as “antithetical” or of the Qurʾān as a
scripture that derives its ethical paradigm from elsewhere and is only interested in
eclipsing rather than entering into genuine dialogue with its local context.

97
98    Adab and the Ethical Authority of the Qurʾān

This chapter is devoted to reading verses from pre-Islamic poetry and the
Qurʾān, noting the dialogue and the numerous ethical negotiations that can
be seen clearly thereby. But before I address these communal/ethical dialogues
available in pre-Islamic sources, it is important to recall that a fundamental his-
torical/ethical issue in understanding the Qurʾān has lain in the mess of prob-
lematizing Islamo-Arabic sources. Many have thus offered either an Islamicist
faith-based apologia or an obverse periodization of a sort (a continuity under
the rubric of “late antiquity”) whose authenticity and reliability are hardly
questioned. In this case, the issue of weighing and deciding sources raises two
crucial questions. Is the Qurʾān’s ethical authority—namely, the human bur-
den of moral responsibility, its critique of social inequalities, its codification of
sexuality, its sympathy for the poor and the deprived, its emphasis on sustain-
able communal justice, and the accompanying complex baggage of account-
ability, sin, guilt, and conscience that come with all religious discourses—dras-
tically different from its pre-Islamic environment? Or are such ethics indeed
an imported and adapted byproduct of moral practices and codes in ancient
Rome, the biblical tradition, or the classical late antique world more than they
are a reflection of the Qurʾān’s sociolinguistic structure? The second question
has to do with the constitution of ethical authority as such: Where does it come
from? How does one learn to trace it objectively to its so-called origins? What
verification tools does one need to successfully locate or point from afar to the
origins of such ethics?
Answering these questions will offer a valuable lesson for interrogating the
theoretical applicability of late antiquity as an “inventory” for ethics in the Qurʾān
and for “understanding” Islam in the West today. If “history is what hurts,” as Fred-
ric Jameson famously reminds us, then the denial of genuine historical thinking
would always be at risk of carrying its own germs of self-critique. Peter Brown
himself, in fact, offers a valuable insight into this dilemma. In an essay on the par-
allels and contrasts between late antiquity and Islam, which he wrote in the after-
math of The World of Late Antiquity, Brown acknowledges “quite frankly” that “as
a non-Islamicist but a layman, I am concerned not simply to garner a rich crop of
acceptable interdisciplinary insights and erudition.”3 To be sure, Brown still holds
tightly to the conviction that “Graeco-Roman civilization . . . was a culture that
aimed at realizing a single human ideal from which all valid human achievements
were held to radiate.”4 Yet, his reconsideration that “the deeper we enter into the
common ground between late antique paideia and Islamic adab, the more sympa-
thy we gain for the refusal of men in great classical civilizations to put their faith
in any safeguard other than the patient and intimate grooming of the behavior
of their elites, and for the faith that such grooming can happen, can be seen to
happen, and can be repeated in every generation.”5 Key to Brown’s argument is
the word “sympathy,” which not only suggests the specificity of his approach to
the difference between late antiquity and Islam (with a crooked detour through
early medieval Christian celibacy); it also explains how self-critique of seemingly
 Adab and the Ethical Authority of the Qurʾān    99

unavoidable historical categorizations, if there were to be any, would still fall back
in the face of the other:
Yet, no sooner have we entered with sympathy into this common concern than the
difference between Islam and the Graeco-Roman world springs to the eye. Though
often brought to bear on men of deep religious belief, Hellenistic and late-antique
paideia contained no religious code and imposed no religious sanction whatsoever.
The sanctions imposed were those brought to bear by purely human significant
others in the society. Ultimately, a man was brought to heel by the sense of shame,
by reminders of the antithesis of aischron and kalon, and by the revulsion felt by
the refined soul for those unrefined elements of raw human nature that betrayed
themselves in breaches of decorum, aschemosyne. “My lord, you forget yourself ”—
aschemoneis hegemon—is the ultimate put-down placed in the mouth of a Christian
martyr confronting an ill-tempered Roman governor. Late antique paideia only
brings us half the way to the Islamic product of adab, as adab is defined by Georges
Anawati: “un vrai code de savoir-vivre ou se melent Jes exigences d’un homme ‘bien
eleve’ mais en meme temps soucieux de bien se comporter ‘en presence de Dieu.’”6

While Brown does not go so far as to admit that any type of unwritten laws of
moral conduct and ethics could be transferrable anywhere in the globe from one
generation to the next through inherited ancestral and tribal customs, his “after-
thought” statement confirms what we already know about Greek paideia: that it
is in essence a process of anamnesis, where humans are educated into their genu-
ine humanity, at least according to Werner Jaeger, through mos maiorum—that is,
through the rich wisdom of ancestorial heritage aimed to develop a person into
maturity.7 Not only does mos maiorum have a “religious” component to it, but
it can on occasion generate resemblances among other cultures. If, according to
Brown, late antique paideia provides only “half the way” to the Islamic product of
adab, one wonders not merely about the second half of that way, but about how
that “first half ” came to be and how paideia traveled in Brown’s fluid world of late
antiquity and found its way to pre-Islamic and then Qurʾānic Arabia. Could an
argument be made that because xenia—the great concept of Greek hospitality and
the guest-host relationship—was first celebrated in Homer’s Odyssey, must all eth-
ics of human hospitality trickle down from “the rugged land of Ithaca, too cramped
for driving horses” to the desert sands of the Arabian peninsula, where ancient
Arabs cleverly adapted it into their own al-karam wa-wājib al-ḍiyāfa (generosity
and moral duty towards guests)? Or would we go even further back and wonder
who taught Homer the art of xenia in the first place? Abraham?8 Or is xenia itself
an innate human virtue that emanates spontaneously in the world under different
names? It would seem implicit in Brown’s description that what previously passed
under the so-called influence or “continuity” of late antiquity is at least a phantasm
to the degree that it has no historical evidence to support its precedence over other
cultures, especially oral and preliterate communities in general.
A strong ethic of ḍiyāfa (hospitality) did indeed permeate pre-Islamic Ara-
bia. Before the Qurʾān, pre-Islamic poets such as ʿAmr ibn Kulthūm, Imruʾ
100    Adab and the Ethical Authority of the Qurʾān

al-Qays, Ṭarafa, Zuhayr, Mālik ibn Ḥarīm al-Hamdānī, and Umayya ibn Abī
al-Ṣalt, to refer but to a few examples, composed poetry that thematized clear
ethical imperatives in reference to the guest-host relationship, among other vir-
tues such as al-murū ʾa, al-shajā ʿa, al-karam, al-amāna, al-ṣidq, al-wafā ʾ, and
al- ʿiffa (virtue, bravery, generosity, trust, truthfulness, loyalty, and chastity).
These poets were the mouthpieces of their clans, boasting tribal virtues in addi-
tion to other exploits like honor, pride, love, female beauty, mettle in battles,
hero­ism, camel nomadism, and praise of family and friends as well as mockery of
foes and adversaries. Poetic contests were so fierce that even a cursory read-
ing of any of the Muʿallaqāt would bring the tension of these ethical rivalries
back to life. Many of these ethical tenets survived in the Qurʾān as many were
filtered out. Why would Brown then choose to bypass this rich pre-Qurʾānic
tradition and offer a reading of the Qurʾān, or Islam for that reason, that is so
selective and so ahistorical?
In his defense, Brown derives his argument on adab from Georges Anawati’s
post-Qurʾānic definition, which confines it to a mixed duality of bien eleve (good
upbringing) and bien comporter en presence de Dieu (behaving well in the presence
of God) and only to an understanding of adab as theogony. Anawati’s definition is
well taken, but it only addresses a fraction one of the many complex variegations
of adab, thus truncating the term from its fountain sources as well as its socio-
linguistic and ethical associations in polytheistic pre-Islamic Arabia. Pre-Islamic
Arabic happens to be the fountainhead of adab in the Arabo-Islamic tradition; its
absence from Brown’s argument makes it impossible to understand his point. In
the field of Arabic studies, what we call adab is located in a constellation of his-
torical shifts from the era of the pre-Islamic qaṣīda until now. The emergence and
codification of Arabic belles lettres has also resulted in the formation of aesthetic
and philological principles across time that eventually separated adab and distin-
guished it from nonliterary forms of human expressions.9
Still, Brown’s acknowledgment offers us an entry into what has been historically
othered and repressed in the study of the Qurʾān in the West. This is an area which
shows palpable gaps in broad categorical thinking in surrendering to an ʿaṣabiyya
that oftentimes obliges certain historians to “patch” human time and events, to
use ‘Antara’s powerful expression, as they dismiss records of genuine historical
thinking as “immaterial” or “unavailable” to them, when in reality such records
lie gravely in wait for scholars to dis-inter them. My attempt to de-other native
sources, however, is not simply a protestation against the intensely ideological dis-
missiveness inherent in the study of the Qurʾān, which continues to examine it
with Eurocentric eyes.10 It is rather an invitation to commiserate with a neglected
tradition whose dialogue with the Qurʾān is bound to broaden our understanding
of early Islam. It is also noteworthy that while the divide between Islam and Helle-
nism was reconciled in the early centuries of Islam when measured Muslim schol-
ars translated Greek manuscripts into Arabic, the Qurʾān kept a marked ethical
distance from Hellenistic thought, one which manifested itself in “a moral turn,”
 Adab and the Ethical Authority of the Qurʾān    101

as Gustave von Grunebaum puts it “to the concepts of paradise and hell, of reward
and punishment, law and freedom.”11
When Arnold Toynbee arrived at a parallel conclusion that “between the
Koran and Hellenism no fusion was possible,”12 he did not draw his conclusion too
sharply but based his findings on what he perceives to be a clear moral and thetic
disconnect between the culture of the Qurʾān and Greek-Hellenistic thought.13
Similarly, Carl Heinrich Becker states that the Qurʾān projects an anti-pagan sen-
timent unique enough to make it unhellenistisch in a predominantly Hellenized
era.14 Even Theodor Nöldeke dismisses the allegation that the Qurʾān could be a
product of late antiquity or Hellenism owing to what he considers to be an absence
of intellection and abstract thought in its scripture.15
Nöldeke’s dismissal of the Qurʾān as a product of late antiquity reminds us that
in the realm of humanism, the rise of monotheism itself signified a profound shift,
dissolving the vast and cosmic internationalism of Hellenistic polytheism. This
earlier spiritual landscape allowed for a range of divine beliefs, where choosing
to believe in one, many, or none of the gods was less contentious. Monotheism
broke through this celestial plurality, redefining the divine and the sacred, leaving
an indelible mark on the fabric of spiritual history. Embracing humanism thus
compels us to reflect on monotheism’s emergence from Akhenaton’s devotion to
the Sun as the one and only God, marking a pivotal departure from the rich tapes-
try of polytheism. This transformation itself invites a deeper, nuanced interpreta-
tion of the Qurʾān, positioning it within a broader, literary and cultural context.
It evokes memories of an era when divine multiplicity was the norm, a time prior
to the Abrahamic monotheistic paradigm that pressured scholarship into debates
over authenticity and derivation. The Qurʾān, while firmly monotheistic and criti-
cal of polytheism, encapsulates a linguistic and aesthetic legacy that transcends
its religious orthodoxy. It demands an intellectual appreciation that honors its
unique place in the annals of literary heritage, free from the binary of original
versus derivative, and without the overtones of secular nostalgia.
Yet Brown’s earlier work has managed to trigger a growing influence on the prac-
tice of Hellenizing the Qurʾān’s context in recent Euro-American scholarship, one
which often follows a methodical approach of “inclusion.” This “inclusion” is at best
dialectical. One the one hand, it embraces an ethos of “incorporating” Islam under
banners of late antiquity16 and Hellenism.17 Garth Fowden, for instance, argues that
Islam is a religion “rooted in Antiquity, even consuming it.”18 On the other hand, this
very approach betrays a colossal deficit in Arabicity and fails to capture the Qurʾān’s
strong ethical negotiations with the established customs of pre-Islamic Arabia. Such
a hurried approach to the Qurʾān cannot but arouse an anxiety of otherness. More
than the teachings of Plato and Aristotle, more than the wines of immortal Greek
gods, and more than the veiled women in the Didascalia, it is pre-Islamic poetry
(as well as the ethics and aesthetics of its constitutive communities) that is the great
absent from these debates. Brown’s argument that Hellenistic and late-antique pai-
deia was practically irreligious and imposed no theological sanctions is not only
102    Adab and the Ethical Authority of the Qurʾān

informative but crucial for understanding the ethical context of early medieval
Christianity, its promotion of clerical celibacy, and to the Qurʾān’s commentary on
the topic, a point which I address in detail toward the end of this chapter.
For now, suffice it to say that Brown’s categorical fixation on connecting the
dots between Islam and late antiquity, which has already left absent an entire
corpus of literature behind it, is itself a symptom of this imaginative Eurocen-
tric ʿaṣabiyya. This fixation not only leaves gaps in its totalizing vision, but also
suffers from theological contradictions and the absence of a fair assessment of a
history of the other. It is not without notice to observe the deep affinities between
Hellenism, the Bible, and the Qurʾān. Yet, only a thorough and in-depth read-
ing of this corpus of ancient Arabic literature will allow us to begin to grasp the
distinctiveness of the Qurʾān’s ethical intervention as a different socio-linguistic
order than the one already familiar to us in pre-Islamic Arabia. For this reason, it is
important to excavate some of the perineal ethics of pre-Islamic Arabia and assess
their relevance to the early years of the Qurʾān. Even in Islamicist scholarship,
pre-Islamic poetry is often associated with but rarely thanked for the founding of
the Qurʾān’s ethico-linguistic landscape as well as its exegetical tradition. Al-Jāḥiẓ
reminds us that the genre of ancient Arabic poetry started about 150–200 years
before the Qurʾān, thus establishing the proper Arabic register that appears in
the Qurʾān. Ibn Qutayba too confirms that ancient Arabic poets are the authority
when it comes to understanding the Qurʾān and all things Arabic:
‫يقع االحتجاج بأشعارهم في الغريب وفي النحو وفي كتاب هللا عز وجل وحديث رسول هللا‬
They [pre-Islamic Arab poets] are the authority for understanding unfamiliar vocab-
ulary, grammar, the Qurʾān and hadith.19
Pre-Islamic Arab tribes celebrated poetry as their dīwān—that is, the record of
their lives, cultural practices, genealogies, and histories. Ibn Sallām al-Jumaḥī
(d. 845/6) states that pre-Islamic poetry has ṣināʿa wa thaqāfa (a craft and a skill).20
The sixth-century Arabic literature into which Muḥammad was born consisted
thus of remarkable poetical (as well as prosaic) pieces that comprised all the
records of the Arabs, which included, to use the language of Ibn Qutayba, “useful
events, correct genealogies, fine wisdom on par with philosophers, and knowledge
in fields of equinology, astronomy, among others.”21 In addition, Muḥammad s
knowledge of pre-Islamic poetry is well documented in Arabic sources.22
On balance, the problem with the origin of the word adab is that there is
no conclusive evidence of its ethical meaning and usage either in pre-Islamic
Arabic or in the Qurʾān. It is understandable from the example I cite shortly,
according to which the Egyptian critic Shawqī Ḍayf relates adab to maʾduba
(pl. maʾādib)—namely, “a banquet, a communal meal.” But this would not be
the only time that words of seemingly identical roots come to be speculatively
connected. Another plausible theory is that adab is formed from a plural ādāb,
interpreted as aʾdāb but originally adʾāb, the plural form of daʾb, “custom, man-
ner, habit,” in what linguists would traditionally refer to as “a back formation.”
 Adab and the Ethical Authority of the Qurʾān    103

Yet this understanding too cannot be proved with concrete evidence. In its very
general ethical sense, however, adab is akin to, or at least a part of, murūʾa, a
defining pre-Islamic feature of virtue, which M. M. Bravmann carefully traces in
the study of the Jāhilī background of the Qurʾān, defining the latter as a practice
of “ethical duties of several kinds.”23 Furthermore, Bravmann shifts attention to
considerations of the important role murūʾa played “even in Islamic days,”24 thus
acknowledging Ignác Goldziher’s influential study of the word and the concept,
while debunking his long-standing theory on the categorical contrast between
“Muruwwah und [and] Din.”25 Thus, when Ḍayf cites examples from pre-Islamic
poetry to situate the root of adab in the heart of sixth-century Arabia’s ethos of
murūʾa, he does so with the understanding that adab emerges from a communal
invite for sharing food, a remarkable act of xenia at the heart of pre-Islamic cus-
toms. Food ethics thus manifested itself in bountiful acts of hospitality, originating
from offering food, where al-ādib—namely, al-dāʿī ilá al-ṭaʿām (the food-offering
host)26—offers a meal to everyone and presents a holistic communal invitation
that is unconditional and indiscriminatory, one that is performed at all times, and
especially in the harshness of winter, where food is scarce and most needed in the
deserts of Arabia. The following lines from Ṭarafa record this earliest association
of adab with the ethics of hospitality and the guest-host relationship:
ْ‫َب ِفِيَنَا َيَ ْْنَتَِقِْر‬ ِ ‫اَلا َتَ ََرى ا‬
َ ‫آلِد‬ ‫َنَْحْ ُنُ ِفِي ال ََم ْْشَتَا ِِة َنَ ْْدُعُو ال ََجَفََلَى‬
We, in the winter, invite all / you don’t see the ādib (host) among us discriminating.
There is in Ṭarafa’s line a deep sense of ethical fulfillment in performing commu-
nal acts of hospitality, which manifests itself in offering banquets to the stranger,
the orphan, and the homeless. Ṭarafa’s ethical reference finds its match in the fol-
lowing line from al-Hudhalī:
27
‫الحاِل‬
ِ ‫ََسَفَكنا ِِدما ََء الُبُ ْْد ِِن في ُتُْرْ ب ِِة‬ ‫بأرِضنا‬
ِ ُ
َ‫وُكنا إذا ما الضيُفُ ََحَّل‬
When a guest visits our land / we spill the blood of cattle in the muddy sand.
The confirmation and celebration of hospitality ethics confirms that the obligation
to offer hospitality to strangers in the Arabian Peninsula before Islam is both tribal
and communal, a collective ethic embodied in the insistent spirit of the plural
Arabic pronouns that permeate those lines: naḥnu, nad ʿū, fīnā, kunnā, bi ʾrḍinā,
safaknā (we; we invite; it is our custom; our land; we spill). Note the conditional
case in al-Hudhalī’s verse. The particle idhā in the verse’s first hemistich initiates a
conditional clause that is met with the direct and unmediated safaknā verb phrase
in the main clause of the second hemistich. This structure carries a rhetoric of
alacrity and immediacy. The language also makes this instance of hospitality con-
ditional, but conditional only on the appearance of a stranger. In other words, hos-
pitality in pre-Islamic Arabia is not only seasonal, per Ṭarafa’s verse, but ongoing.
There is no excuse for denying hospitality to anyone; even the untimely arrival of a
stranger in town is reason enough to trigger immediate hospitality. In this respect,
al-Hudhalī’s line is as Abrahamic as it could possibly be. The Qurʾān celebrates
104    Adab and the Ethical Authority of the Qurʾān

Abraham’s hospitality toward his guests with a similar linguistic code of imme-
diacy. In the following verse, the Qurʾānic verb phrase “fa-mā labitha” creates a
similar effect of speed and wholeheartedness we see in al-Hudhalī’s line :

ٍ ِ‫َث َأَن ََجا ََء ِبِ ِِعْجْ ٍٍل ََحِن‬

‫يٍذ‬ َ ِ‫اَلاٌمۖ ۖ َفَ ََما َلَِب‬ ً ‫يَم ِبِ ْاْلُبُ ْْش ََر ٰٰى َقَاُلُوا ََس‬
ٌ ‫اَلاًماۖ ۖ َقَا ََل ََس‬ َ ‫ْت ُُر ُُسُلَُنَا ِإِ ْْب ََرا ِِه‬
ْ ‫َلََقَ ْْد ََجا ََء‬

When our messengers arrived at Abraham’s with the good tidings, they said “peace”;
he said “peace,” and rushed to bring in a stone-roasted calf. (11:69)

The ethical demeanor of unhesitant swiftness to attend to strangers/guests—

without knowing who they are—sinks deep into the tribal and communal values
of pre-Islamic Arabia, a feature that makes the reception of Qurʾānic ethics of
hospitality seamless and relatable to its receiving community. There is an intimate
correlation between these sentiments and the Qurʾān’s clarion call for being hos-
pitable to the stranger and the homeless.28 So, in addition to its early manifes-
tations in Greek mythology, hospitality can in fact be traced back to Abraham’s
enthusiastic welcome of his visitors in the Old Testament (Genesis 18:1–15) and its
corresponding version in the Qurʾān (11:69–70; 15:51–52; 51: 24–27), making the
responsibility toward the stranger as quintessentially “Godly” as it is quintessen-
tially human. With the exception of the Amalekites, where the narrative is more
contentious, kindness toward strangers is a core value in the Bible’s teachings: :
“But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you,
and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.”29
Hospitality is also a key component of the ethical rhetoric and practice of pre-
Islamic Arabia, as a practical application of adab, and it seems to conform to fea-
tures in the Qurʾān. What the Qurʾān does differently, however, is co-opt this
preexisting paideia into the larger framework of its own eschatological narrative.
As a practice, then, hospitality may come down to an offer of food to strangers and
impoverished fellows who come to find themselves within one’s vicinity, but it is
crucial to see it in its Qurʾānic framework as a commendable ethical practice out-
side one’s home domain. In other words, the Qurʾān lends hospitality an intratribal
and even national mobility, evoked with respect to empathy toward the other, not
just as a local tribal act of giving food to those who come to “our” land, but of giv-
ing it outside the comfortable and the familiar, and even in circumstances when
one could not afford to give it, in fact when one would rather not give:
ْ ُ‫ ِإَِّنّ ََما ُن‬.‫يًما ََوَأَ ِِسيًرًا‬
� ‫ْط ِِع ُُم ُُك ْْم ِلِ ََوْجْ ِِه‬
‫ ِإَِّنّا‬.‫ٱِهَّللِ اَلا ُنُ ِِري ُُد ِِمن ُُك ْْم ََجَزَآ ًًء ََواَلا ُُش ُُكوًرًا‬ ً ِ‫ِّبِّهۦ ِِم ْْس ِِكيًنًا ََوَيَِت‬ ْ ‫ََوُي‬
ِ ‫ُْط ِِع ُُموَنَ ٱلَّطّ ََعا ََم ََعَلَ ٰٰى ُُح‬
‫َنََخَاُفُ ِِمن َّّرِّبَّنَا َيَْوْ ًًما ََعُبُوًسًا َقَ ْْمَطَ ِِريًرًا‬

They give food despite their love for it [my emphasis] to the homeless, the orphan,
and the incarcerated. [They say,] “We feed you for the face of God; we do not expect
from you return or thanks. We fear from our God a stressful, face-frowning day.”

From a historical viewpoint, we might note that feeding one’s enemy is an ethical
trait that derives from the Bible: “But if your enemy is hungry, feed him, and if
 Adab and the Ethical Authority of the Qurʾān    105

he is thirsty, give him a drink.”30 Further, there is much to say about the ethics
of feeding the incarcerated. The Qurʾān confirms this biblical ethics not just by
making it conditional upon request, but by giving food, without solicitation,
to the enemy of God, food that one would rather keep for oneself. According to
al-Bayḍāwī, this Qurʾānic verse makes specific reference to prisoners of war, the
usarāʾ al-kuffār (captive nonbelievers) who are categorically opposed to mono-
theistic faith and the idea of God.31 In today’s context, we might think about this
ethical call in terms of attending to fellow humans living under siege or kept in the
cages of the carceral state—how this attention plays a role in educating the food-
giver in the overarching logic of the state, its criminalization of the poor and the
disempowered, its reliance on race as a conceptual tool to divide humans, and its
refusal of any redistributive policy that would work overall against the hunger of
those experiencing homelessness, those lacking kin support, and those locked up.
To return to Brown’s point, at the heart of Qurʾānic adab there lies a call for
disciplining human desire and a high moral order of self-denial. Yet, this adab
of self-discipline is not completely alien to ancient Arabia, even though an exag-
gerated sense of personal and tribal glory often predominates pre-Islamic poetry.
However, ancient poems of glory and pride must always be read in their historical
contexts. While such poems include themes of personal glory, exaggerated pride,
tribal honor, panegyrics, and vindictive, they still carry strong overtones of com-
munal adab. Take, for instance, ʿAmr ibn Kulthūm’s long ode, which is often asso-
ciated with the series of protracted battles known as Ḥarb al-Basūs [(the Basūs
War). The war between two tribes in ancient Arabia, which is referenced in the
context of this conflict, is one of the most famous pre-Islamic Arabian wars that
was purportedly sparked by the killing of a camel belonging to a member of the
Bakr tribe by a member of the Taghlib tribe. The Basūs War is said to have lasted
for around forty years, starting in the late fifth century and continuing into the
early sixth century. ʿAmr ibn Kulthūm’s ode is said to have contributed to bringing
peace between his tribe, Taghlib, and the neighboring tribe of Bakr. In particular,
the following lines of the ode composed likely in the early part of the sixth century,
describe the gallant deeds of his tribe and portray a genealogy of the glory, nobil-
ity, and compassion toward refugees that run through his ancestors:
‫ِب اَألَ َّّوِلِ ْْيَنَـا‬
ِ ْ‫ـٍص ِفِي ُُخُطُـْو‬
ٍ ‫ِبَِنَ ْْق‬ ْ ‫َفََهَْلْ ُح‬
‫ُِّدّْثَتَ ِفِي ُُجَش ٍٍَم ِبِ ْْن َبَ ْْكـر‬

‫أَبَـا ََح َلََنَا ُُحُصُْوْ َنَ ال ََمْجْ ِِد ِِد ْْيَنَـا‬ ٍ ‫وِر ْْثَنَـا ََمْجْ ََد َع َْْلَقَ ََمَةَ ِبِ ْْن ََسْي‬
‫ْـٍف‬ ِ
‫اِخ ِِر ْْيَنَـا‬ ّ ‫ـُر‬
ِ ‫الَّذ‬ ُ ‫ُُزَهَ ْْيـرًاً ِنِ ْْع ََم ُُذ ْْخ‬ ُ‫ُت ُُمَهَ ْْل ِِهـًالً ََوال ََخ ْْي ََر ِِم ْْنـُه‬
ُ ‫ََو ِِر ْْث‬

‫اَث اَألَ ْْك ََر ِِم ْْيَنَـا‬

َ ‫ِبِ ِِه ْـْم ِنِ ْْلَنَـا ُتُ ََر‬ ً ‫ََو ََعَّتّـابًا ً ََو ُُك ْْلُثُـْوْ مًا ً ََج ِِمْيْعــًا‬

‫ِبِ ِِه ُنُْحْ ََمى ََوَنَْحْ ِِمي ال ُُملَت َِِجيَنَــا‬ ْ ‫ـَر ِِة ال ِِذي ُح‬
ُ‫ُِّدّْثَتَ ََع ْْنـُه‬ َ ُ‫ََو ََذا الُب‬
32
‫فأُّيّ ال ََمْجْ ِـِد ِإَِّالّ َقَ ْـْد ََوِلِ ْْيَنَـا‬ َ ‫ََو ِِمَّنّـا َقَ ْْبَلَـُهُ الَّسّا ِِعي ُُكَلَ ْْيـٌبٌا‬
Have you been told of any lack in Jusham ibn Bakr / When it comes to great affairs
with early tribes?
106    Adab and the Ethical Authority of the Qurʾān

We inherited the glory of ʿAlqama ibn Sayf / Who made lawful to us all forts of
glory.
I inherited from Muhalhil the goodness of Zuhayr, the best of all the renowned.
And ʿAttāb and Kulthūm as a whole / To them we owe the heritage of the noblest ones.
And Dhū al-Bura of whom you know / Who protects us and make us care for others
in need.
And from us before him comes Kulayb / What glory have we not attained?

While the ethical code of ʿAmr ibn Kulthūm’s ode gives the impression that tribal
pride and glory are the trademarks of his people, a closer look reveals that his cel-
ebration of the adab of his tribe—namely, the generosity, kindness, and protection
of strangers inherited from his ancestors—is in fact the motor of his pride. Prais-
ing high moral standards is a key element of pre-Islamic poetry. Zuhayr’s ode, to
give another example, is also dedicated to a celebration of kindness and virtue as
much as it is a criticism of vicious behavior such as cursing, avarice, and the mis-
direction of charitable deeds:

‫َّشَْت ََم ُيُ ْْشَتَم‬

ْ ‫َّتَِق ال‬
ِ َ‫ ََو ََم ْْن اَلا َي‬،ُ‫َيَِفِْرْ ُه‬ ِ ‫ََو ََم ْْن َيَْجْ ََع ِِل ال ََم ْْعُرُوَفَ ِِم ْْن ُد‬
ِ ْ‫ُوِن ِِعْر‬
‫ِض ِِه‬

‫ََعَلَى َقَْوْ ِِم ِِه ُيُ ْْسَتَ ْْغَنَ ََع ْْنُهُ ََوُي ُْْذ ََم ِِم‬ ‫ُك ََذا َفَْضْ ٍٍل فَيَ ْْبَخَْلْ ِبَِفَْضْ ِلِ ِِه‬
ُ َ‫ََو ََم ْْن َي‬
ْ ‫ِإَِلَى ُُم‬
‫ْط ََمِئِِّنِ البِّرِ اَلا َيََتَ ََج ْْم ََجم‬ ُ‫ُوِف اَلا ُي ُْْذ ََم ْْم ََو ََم ْْن ُيُ ْْه ََد َقَ ْْلُبُُه‬
ِ ‫ََو ََم ْْن ُي‬
‫ي ُُك ْْن ََح ْْم ُُدُهُ ََذ �ًّمًا ََعَلَ ْْي ِِه ََوَيَ ْْنَد َِِم‬ ‫ََو ََم ْْن َيَْجْ ََع ِِل ال ََم ْْعُرُوَفَ ِفِي ََغ ْْيرِ َِأَ ْْهِلِ ِِه‬
33
ِ َ‫ََوِإِ ْْن َخَاَلََهَا َت َْْخَفَى ََعَلَى الَّن‬
‫اِس ُتُعَلَ ِِم‬ ٍ ‫ََو ََم ْْه ََما َتَ ُُك ْْن ِِع ْْن ََد ا ْْم ِِر‬
‫ٍئ ِِم ْْن ََخِلِيَقَ ٍٍة‬

He who gives charity to protect honor / will increase his honor, and he who curses
shall be cursed.
He who is generous but dispossesses his people of his generosity / shall be dismissed
and reproached.
He who fulfills his promise cannot be reproached / and he whose heart is guided/
toward benevolence cannot falter.
He who shows charity to those who do not deserve it / his praise shall turn into
censure and he shall be regretful.
And whatever demeanor a person has / but thinks no one will notice, it shall be
revealed.

The above lines from Zuhayr indicate that pre-Islamic Arabic poetry represents the
classical corpus of adab par excellence. It could be argued that adab is the major
articulation of this genre, and that the key forms of communal relationships are
the ones that are weaved around it. In addition, the social and moral code of adab
is the chief means of distinguishing between men and tribes in ethical terms. As
it is obvious from the following lines by al-Muthaqqib al-ʿAbdī (553–87), men
who have virtue, who keep their word, who are courteous to their neighbors, who
 Adab and the Ethical Authority of the Qurʾān    107

do not backbite, and who are not hypocrites, are praiseworthy because they follow
a high moral code of adab, regardless of their social status:

‫َأَن ُتُِتَِّمَ ال ََو ْْع ََد في َشَي ٍٍء َنَ ََع ْْم‬ ‫ال َتَُقُولَّنَ ِإِ ََذا ما لم ُتُ ِِر ْْد‬

ٌ ‫وَقَب‬
‫يٌح قْوْ ُُل َالَ َبَع ََد َنَ ََع ْْم‬ َ‫ََح ََسٌنٌ َقَْوْ ُُل َنَ ََع ْْم ِِم ْْن َبَ ْْع ِِد َال‬

َ ‫َفَِبِال فا ْْبَدَأ ِإِ ََذا ِِخ ْْفَتَ ال‬

‫َّنََد ْْم‬ ٌ‫فاِح ََشٌة‬
ِ ‫ِإَِّنَ َالَ َبَ ْْع ََد َنَ ََع ْْم‬
‫ ِإَِّنَ ال ُُخ ْْلَفَ ََذ ْ�ّْم‬،‫وِل‬
ِ َ‫اِح الَق‬
ِ ‫ِبَِنَ ََج‬ ‫فِإِذا ُقُ ْْلَتَ َنَ ََع ْْم فاصبْرْ َلَها‬

‫َّتَِق الَّذَ ََّم ُيُ ََذ ْ�ّْم‬

ِ َ‫و ََمَتَى َالَ َي‬ ‫وا ْْعل ََم اَّنَ الَّذَ ََّم َنَ ْْقٌصٌ للَفََتَى‬

‫ِإَِّنَ ِِعْرْ فاَنَ الَفََتَى الحَّقَ ََك ََر ْْم‬ ُ‫ُأُ ْْك ِِرم الجا ََر وَأَْرْ َعَى ََحَّقَُه‬

‫َّضَرْم‬
ْ ِ َ‫في ُلُُحُوم الَّن‬
‫اِس كالَّسَْب ِِْع ال‬ ٍ ِ‫ال َتَ ََراِنِي ََراِتِعًا ً في ََمْجْ ِل‬
‫ٍس‬
34 ُ ‫حيَنَ َيَ ْْلقاِنِي وِإِ ْْن غْب‬
‫ُْت ََشَتَ ْْم‬ ‫اِس ََمن َيَ ْْك ِِش ُُر ِلِي‬
ِ َ‫ِإَِّنَ َشََّرَ الَّن‬

Do not say, if you do not wish/ to fulfill a promise, “yes.”

It is good to say “yes” after saying “no” / But “no” after “yes” is bad.
“No” after “yes” is scandalous / begin with “no” if you fear regret.
If you say “yes,” then commit yourself to it / carry it to a successful end, for breaking
it will get you vilified.
Know that vilification belittles a man / and he who does not keep his guard will be vilified.
I care for my neighbor and I honor his right/ a man’s true gratitude is kindness.
You won’t see me cannibalizing people in councils, biting their flesh like a voracious
beast.
The most evil of people is he who smiles / when he sees me and backbites me in my absence.

I should clarify that adhering to this moral code of al-ʿAbdī is not an easy mat-
ter since it does not entail a Brownian compliance in the theological sense of the
word—namely, the way it is clearly outlined as al- h ̣alāl wa al- h ̣arām (the reli-
giously legitimate and the religiously forbidden) in Islam. Rather, it subscribes to a
humanist code of an ethical ideal that cultivates its moral obligations from human
nature and from being in the world. Yet, at the heart of this pre-Islamic “morality”
code still lie earthly riches, even a crazed desire for amassing huge fortunes. Thus,
we see Ṭarafa reflecting on his materialistic culture by describing how a woman
not only blames him for his poverty, but equates fortune with “eternity”:

‫بغد وال ما بعده عل ُُم‬ ‫وتقول عاذلتي و ليس لها‬

35
‫َّنَ المرأ يكرب وجهه العد ُُم‬ ‫إن الثراء هو الخلود وإ‬

My blamer would say, having no / knowledge of tomorrow or after:

Wealth is eternity and / a man’s misfortune is brought by the lack of it.
108    Adab and the Ethical Authority of the Qurʾān

Another well-known poet of the pre-Islamic era, Mālik ibn Ḥarīm al-Hamdānī,36
has a different poetic view from al-ʿAbdī on the wisdom of life. To al-Hamdānī,
one is better off becoming wealthy, since life with money and richness can
change one’s fate for the better. Oddly enough, al-Hamdānī states that lack of
wealth leads to lowliness, misery, and corruption: Unlike al-ʿAbdī ‘s wise man
who is rich in morals, al-Hamdānī’s wise man is a moneyed man whose fortune
is bound to bring him praises even when he is censurable and morally unworthy:

‫َك األيا ُُم ما لسَتَ َتَعَلَ ُُم‬

َ ‫وُتُبدي ل‬ ‫ٍب‬ ُ
ٍ ‫أنبئُت واأليا ُُم ذات تجار‬

ُ ‫مَد وهو ُُم ََذ‬

‫َّمَُم‬ َ ‫وُيُثنى عليه الح‬ ‫الماِل ينف ُُع رَّبَه‬
ِ ‫بأن ثرا ََء‬

ُ ‫َيَ ِِحُّزُ كما ََحَّزَ القطي ُُع ال ُُم ََح‬

‫َّرَُم‬ ‫فِس ُُد‬
ِ ‫رِء ُُم‬
ِ ‫الماِل لل ََم‬
ِ َ ‫وأَّنَ قل‬
‫يَل‬
37
‫القوِم ال َيََتَ ََكَّلّ ُُم‬
ِ َ‫وْسَط‬
ْ ‫ويقع ُُد‬ ‫ِت المج ََد ال يستطيُعُها‬
ِ ‫رَى درجا‬
َ ‫ي‬

I learned, and time is the best teacher /—for it reveals to you what you do not know—,
That wealth benefits its owner / and allows him to be praised even when at fault.
And that lack of money degrades / and hurts like a harsh fresh whip.
He [the man without wealth] would see the grades of glory he cannot attain /
and would sit among people but cannot speak.

Al-Hamdānī is not alone in adopting a prudential view of the importance of being

well off.We continue to see in pre-Islamic poetry palpable delineations of a mate-
rialistic community that favors affluence and possessions, inhabiting an opportu-
nistic moral code whose greediness engendered taking booty in the manner of the
Vikings, an ethical laxity that had become to a large degree a predominant disposi-
tion in pre-Islamic Arabia. The following example from Ṭarafa illustrates not only
the life of lasciviousness, alcoholism, and insobriety that he led with his cronies,
but also a sense of bitterness and indignation owing to his lack of wealth. Like
al-Hamdānī, Ṭarafa contends that richness equals societal respect and admiration:

‫تصطِد‬
ِ ‫وإن تلت ِِمْسْني في الحوانيت‬ ‫فإن تبغني في حلقة القوم تلَقَني‬
ْ َ‫وإْن كنَتَ عنها ذا ِِغًنًى فاغَن‬
‫واْزَدَد‬ ْ ً‫متى تأتني أصبحك كأسًا ً رويًة‬

......

ٍ ُ‫َتَرو ُُح ََعَلَينا َبَيَنَ ُب‬

‫رٍد و ََمْجْ ََس ِِد‬ ٌ‫نداماي بيٌضٌ كالنجوم وقينٌة‬

......

‫كنُت ََع ْْم ََرو بَنَ ََمرَثَ ِِد‬

ُ ‫ولو شا ََء ربي‬ ،‫َْس بَنَ خاِلِ ٍٍد‬ ُ ‫فلو شا ََء ََربي‬
َ ‫كنُت َقَْي‬
38
‫مسّوِّد‬
ِ ‫بنوَنَ كرا ٌٌم سادٌةٌ ل‬ ‫كثيٍر وزارني‬
ٍ ُ
‫فأصبحُت ذا مال‬

If you are looking for me, find me in the folk’s gathering / and if you want to catch
me, I will be in the taverns
 Adab and the Ethical Authority of the Qurʾān    109

Whenever you visit in the morning, I’ll offer a cup of wine full to the brim / and if
you don’t need it, do without, and continue so
My drinking mates are white, like the stars, and a singing-girl / comes to us late in a
robe and revealing garment.
If my lord willed it, I could have been Qays ibn Khālid / and if lord willed it, I could
have been ʿAmr ibn Marthad.
And I would have possessed a vast fortune and received visits from / noble sons and
masters of masters.

I should add that the desire for material gain explicitly expressed in these poetical
works is bound to clash with the Qurʾān’s antimaterialistic view of the world. The
poetry of pre-Islamic Arabia paints a peculiar picture of material immortalization,
one that the Qurʾān vehemently opposes in its early Meccan sūras and beyond.
From the start, the Qurʾān takes the side of the poor and deprived, expressing
concerns over a type of people who yadduʿu al-yatīm wa-lā yaḥuḍu ʿalá ṭaʿāmi
al-miskīn (rebuff the orphan and do not urge the feeding of the homeless),39 thus
breaching even the most basic tenets of adab, which had evidently been in place as
a common custom before the Qurʾān to protect the rights of the poor and the
underprivileged in a predominantly materialistic community. This compassionate
attitude toward the disadvantaged eventually transcribes itself as one of five oblig-
atory commandments of Islam and becomes known as zakā (obligatory alms tax).
In an organic, direct response to the excessive celebration of wealth, the rise of a
greedy apathetic tribalism, and the perverse embrace of materialistic values in pre-
Islamic Mecca, some of which we see unabashedly reflected in these poems, the
Qurʾān pulls no punches in drawing on the preexisting ethos of adab in denounc-
ing every act of avarice and money-hoarding in the Meccan and Medinan commu-
nities of early Islam. It even mocks those who believe that wealth equals eternity.
And this is where the ethical turn reaches its acme: the only eternity of accumu-
lating wealth for wealth’s sake and of looking down on fellow humans, retorts the
Qurʾān unequivocally, is going to be hellfire. For instance, sūra 104 is one of
the early Meccan chapters that presents the Qurʾān’s harsh response to those who
seek to amass fortune while denigrating their fellow humans:

َ ‫ِّلُّكِّلّ ُهُ ََم ََز ٍٍة ُّّل ََم ََز ٍٍة—اَّلّ ِِذي ََج ََم ََع ََمااًلا ََو ََع َّّد ََدُهُ—َيَْحْ ََسُبُ َأََّنّ ََماَلَُهُ َأَ ْْخَلَ ََدُهُ— ََكاَّلاۖ ۖ َلَُيُنَبَ ََذَّنّ ِفِي ْاْل ُُحَطَ ََم ِِة— ََو ََما َأَ ْْد ََرا‬
‫َك‬ ُ ‫ََو ْْي ٌٌل‬
َ ‫ََما ْاْل ُُحَطَ ََمُةُ—َنَا ُُر ِهَّللا� ِ ْاْل ُُموَقَ ََدُةُ اَّلِّتِي َتََّطِّلِ ُُع ََعَلَى اَأْل� َ ْْفِئِ ََد ِِة—ِإَِّنَّهَا ََعَلَ ْْي ِِهم ُّّم ْْؤ‬
‫َص ََدٌةٌ—ِفِي ََع ََم ٍٍد ُّّم ََم َّّد ََد ٍٍة‬

Woe to every backstabber and turncoat. Who accumulates wealth and keeps count
of it. He thinks that his wealth will make him eternal. Nay! He shall be thrown into
the Ḥuṭama. And what do you know of the Ḥuṭama? It is God’s lit fire, which sees the
hearts. It is sealed upon them. In outstretched pillars. (104:1–9)

The verses begin with a divine warning, a heavenly resolve to respond with wrath
and retribution to the crime of hoarding money while being contemptuous of
the disadvantaged. This lethal combination of obsession with wealth and ridicule
110    Adab and the Ethical Authority of the Qurʾān

of humans can only lead to hell according to the Qurʾān. The Qurʾān considers
men who amass wealth and lack tolerance and compassion, men who are careless
about social equality, to be a menace to society. The reference is to those who not
only value and roll in riches but whose view of the world allows them to devalue
their fellow humans, by backbiting them, laughing at them, whether verbally or
nonverbally—that is, by cursing them, making scornful facial gestures, imitating
their disabilities, or deriding them for their poverty and squalor, as if they were
a completely different subclass or subspecies. Those who value money more than
their fellow humans and who think money will make them eternal shall only be
worthy of eternity in hell.
The Qurʾān thus brings eschatological ethics into the thick of Arabia not nec-
essarily as a difference from Hellenism as Brown would argue, although this is
always a welcome point of comparison, but as Arabia’s difference from itself, or
to be more accurate, as taking sides in the already conflicted and entangled ethi-
cal claims of pre-Islamic Arabia. This context is key. Like Hellenism, pre-Islamic
polytheistic Arabia has its versions of moral codes, including moral obligations
and failures that are all too human.
Brown argues that early medieval Christian sexual ethics and monastic disciplines
are better understood in the context of Greek and Roman civilizations, with the latter
affording more autonomy regarding sexual practices. While sexuality in pre-Islamic
Arabia is still a topic in dire need of extensive research, it is not hard to glean from
Ṭarafa’s poem that there is an unchecked subjectivity to male sexuality. Yet, there
are also complexities that involve race, status, and gender dynamics attached to pre-
Islamic sexuality. On the one hand, one could detect an implicit principle of morality
in pre-Islamic sexual ethics in al-ʿAbdī’s poem, especially in reference to honoring
the rights of his neighbor (ukrimu al-jāra wa ar ʿá ḥaqqahu) and the implication
that the wife and children of his neighbor would by default fall under that “right” of
protection from emotional or physical harm. On the other hand, poetic depictions
of sexual conquests present these incidents as a normal aspect of everyday life. The
following lines from Imruʾ al-Qays’s ode add to his strong sense of ancestral pride an
enumeration of romantic exploits and sexual conquests:

ْ ‫َفَـَأ َ ْْلـَهَ ْـْيـُتُـَهَـا َع‬

ِ ْ‫َـْن ِِذي َتَـ ََمـاِئِ َـَم ُُمـْح‬
‫ــِو ِِل‬ ‫رِض ٍٍع‬
ِ ‫وُم‬ ُ ‫ُت‬ ِ ُ‫ـِم ْـْثـُل‬
ُ ‫ـِك ُُح ْـْبـَلَـى َقَ ْـْد َطَ ََر ْْق‬ ِ َ‫َف‬
40
‫ـَحـــَّو ِِّل‬ ْ َ‫ِبِـَشَـق وَتَـْحْ ـِتِـي ِِشـُّقّـَهَـا َل‬
َ ُ‫ــْم ُي‬ ُ‫ْت َلَُه‬ َ ‫ِإِ ََذا ََمـا َبَـَكَـى ِِم ْْن َخ َْْلـِفَِهَا ا ْْن‬
ْ َ‫َص ََرَف‬

So I visited a woman, just like you, in the evening, who was pregnant and nursing /
but I distracted her from her newborn, who was hung with charms.
When he cried, she leaned back to him, extending half her body / while leaving the
other half underneath me, unstirred.

In these lines, the poetic persona is seeking to persuade his beloved to yield to his
sexual advances, a dramatic monologue akin in its corporal tone to Andrew Mar-
vell’s “To His Coy Mistress” (1681). Yet Marvell’s passionate call for sex with the
 Adab and the Ethical Authority of the Qurʾān    111

woman he so fervently desires is set against the lapse of time and physical decay.
In Imruʾs al-Qays, however, the persona demeans the “coyness” of his beloved
by stating that she is no different from other women he slept with. He congratu-
lates himself for persuading her to have sexual intercourse with him. The Arabic
world alhaytuhā implies both agency and pleasure; he boasts how the love of a
mother for her own baby is equaled by her passion for the poet, surrendering
half her body to him. Imruʾ al-Qays’s persona succeeds where Marvell’s has not.
The woman/beloved is not described as being forced, “coy,” or even disliking the
adventure. She may have enjoyed it; they may have met before; she may have
instigated the encounter; she may have been recently widowed. We will never
know, since al-maʿná fī baṭn al-shāʿir (meaning lies in the belly of the poet),
as ancient Arabs would say, and one can easily get lost in fictional speculations
about fictional affairs. What we know, what the texts allows us to see, is that the
poet casts himself as so irresistible that she, a pregnant and nursing mother, has
no choice but to succumb to his temptation. The lines delineate how the mother
lays down her baby behind her back, adorned with amulets and charms, in com-
plete submission to the poet’s sexual advances. Not only that, but even when the
baby cries and is hungry for his mother’s milk, she turns but with one half of her
body toward him while keeping the other for her lover/poet so as not to interrupt
his and her pleasure.
It is easy for a puritanical theologian such as al-Bāqillānī to interpret this for-
midable representation of masculinity, so graphic in its depiction of male sexual
exploits, in contradistinction to the righteous tone of Qurʾān’s discursive ethical
authority, where matrimonially regulated sexuality becomes the mode for protect-
ing chastity and fostering social and communal cohesions. Al-Bāqillānī sees the
flamboyant tone with which the persona depicts his encounter with a female lover
as a powerful manifestation of the social victory brought about by the Qurʾān. To
exaggerate his sexual potency and appeal, Imruʾ al-Qays’s persona reduces the
mother/lover to a sex toy. By contrast, mothers have a supreme moral status in
both the Qurʾān and the Ḥadīth. Some may deduce that a pregnant mother who is
also nursing an infant may have little desire for a whimsical sexual encounter with
a nightly lover. The phrase mithluki (the likes of you) may also be seen as loaded
with gender stereotyping and the denigration of women. “Like you” or “like your
kind” may sink deep into the ethical consciousness of pre-Islamic Arabia, repre-
senting a “blackening” of a woman’s fame and a misdeed on the part of the poet
that would run counter to the ethical turn of Islam, which embraces the virtues of
virginity and chastity, and celebrates the social triumph and institutionalization
of a debauchery-free community.
But to contradict the amateurish puritanism of al-Bāqillānī’s theological
thought, who only saw poetry as either ḥarām or ḥalāl,41 the discourse of poetry—
one cannot emphasize this enough—is not the same as religious scripture: poetry
allows for fiction and for humor (Imruʾ al-Qays is even described as impotent
in some reports). Poetry is the domain of imagination, exaggeration, linguistic
112    Adab and the Ethical Authority of the Qurʾān

play, even comedy and titillation; poets “say what they do not do,” as the Qurʾān
famously reminds us. There is nothing wrong with that, as I explain in the
following chapter.
Unlike Christianity’s adoption of celibacy as a reaction to the moral laxity of
Hellenistic Rome, the Qurʾān, while aware of clerical celibacy and monastic insti-
tutions, embraces a middle ground as a reaction to the loose sexual principles of
pre-Islamic Arabia. The Qurʾān does not attach to celibacy any major role. On the
contrary, marital union and the raising of offspring are inalienable principles of
Muslim faith. While the Qurʾān takes a firm ethical stand against human greed
and self-absorption, it also does not encourage sexual abstinence. This ethical
imperative is especially clear in Qurʾān 57. While the sūra advocates a continuity
of acts of charity and kindness familiar to the Bible,42 it presents us with an intrigu-
ing dialectic of discontinuity in Christian dogma. In one of its verses (57:27), the
sūra presents Christian dogma as a sign of divine mercy and of God’s continu-
ous intervention in the world to offer guidance and deliverance through prophets
and messengers:

ً‫ِب ا َِّلَِذيَنَ اَّتََبَُعُوُهُ ََر ْْأَفًَةً ََو ََرْحْ ََمًة‬ ِ ‫يَل ََو ََج ََع ْْلَنَا ِفِي ُقُُلُو‬ ِ ِ �‫يَسى اْب ِِْن ََمْرْ َيَ ََم ََوآَتَ ْْيَنَاُهُ اِإْل‬
َ ‫نِج‬ َ ‫اِر ِِهم ِبِ ُُر ُُسِلَِنَا ََوَقَ َّْفَْيَنَا ِبِ ِِع‬ ِ َ‫ُثَُّمَ َقَ َّْفَْيَنَا ََعَلَ ٰٰى آَث‬
‫اِن ِهَّللا� ِ َفَ ََما ََرَعَْوْ َهَا ََحَّقَ ِِرَعَاَيَِتَِهَاۖ ۖ َفَآَتَ ْْيَنَا ا َِّلَِذيَنَ آ ََمُنُوا ِِم ْْنُهُ ْْم‬ ‫َو‬ ْ‫ْض‬
ِ َ ِ َ ِ ِ ِْ َ ‫ِر‬ ‫َء‬ ‫َا‬
‫َغ‬ ‫ِت‬ ْ
‫ْب‬ ‫ا‬ ‫اَّلا‬ ‫ِإ‬ ‫ْم‬ ‫ِه‬ ْ
‫ْي‬َ ‫َل‬‫َع‬ ‫َا‬ ‫َه‬ ‫َا‬ ‫َن‬ ْ
‫ْب‬َ ‫َت‬‫َك‬َ ‫ا‬ َ ‫ََو ََر ْْهَبَاِنَِّيًَةً ا ْْبَتَ ََدُعُو‬
‫َم‬ ‫َا‬ ‫َه‬
43
َ‫اِسُقُوَن‬ َ ‫َف‬ ٌ ِ‫َأَْجْ ََرُهُ ْْمۖ ۖ ََو ََكِث‬
ِ ‫يٌر ِِّم ْْنُهُ ْْم‬

Then in their footprints we sent our messengers; we sent Jesus, son of Mary, and
gave him the Gospel, and we instilled compassion and mercy in the hearts of those
who followed him, and a monasticism they contrived. We did not prescribe [it] on/
to them except in order for them to seek the satisfaction of God, but they did not
observe it properly, so we rewarded those among them who believed, and most of
them who remained were disobedient.

This continuity serves two important functions. First, it emphasizes the decree
of divine justice—that is, the claim that God is not in the habit of abandoning
humanity or letting it lapse into depravity without sending periodical divine guid-
ance. The Qurʾān states that there has not been a span of time on earth when God
neglected to send a prophet to inform humanity of God’s existence and to invite
people to follow an ethical manual that steers them away from evil.44 This ethical
manual is often referred to in the Qurʾān as nūr (light) or hudá (guidance), in
references to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.45 This figuration of godly guidance
as “light” is crucial in Qurʾān 5746, precisely because light connotes a dissipation of
darkness in a long ethical concatenation of god-sent prophets.47 Secondly, as verse
57:27 has it, the light always reminds us it that comes from one divine source, thus
sealing the question of the oneness of God and creating an ethical continuity of
Abrahamic monotheism in harmony with the context of the Qurʾān, from Noah
to Abraham to Moses to Jesus to Muḥammad : a variation on the theme of calling
for the one God, and an extension of the line of prophets to Muḥammad—namely,
that the call of all these prophets has always been to worship one single God,
 Adab and the Ethical Authority of the Qurʾān    113

and that no prophets are excepted. They are messengers and servants of God chosen
at a time in human history, with various miracles suitable to the time, as al-Jaḥiẓ
explains,48 to draw people’s attention to God.
On the other hand, the second half of verse 57:27 brings forth a discontinuity
thesis by interrupting the Christian practice of monasticism and its associative
practice of celibacy. The first half of verse 57:27 focuses on the message of Jesus,
the son of Mary whom God has given the Gospel (ātaynāhu al-Injīl). The Qurʾān
states that God instilled an ethic of compassion and mercy (ra ʾfa wa raḥma) in the
hearts of the disciples and those who followed Jesus. So far so good. But then
comes the conjunctive ‫( و‬wa, and), which initially reads like the continuity of
the verse. The conjunctive wa is followed by the word rahbāniyya (monasticism)
immediately after the two modifiers of “compassion” and “mercy,” creating almost a
double entendre. Rāhib literally means “fearing/someone who fears.” Pious, renun-
ciant Muslims who turned from the world could sometimes be called rāhib, a term
that still carries strong implications of celibacy and sexual abstinence.49 In its later
development, Islam has come to strongly condemn celibacy. Recall, for instance,
the well-known story about ʿUthmān ibn Maẓ’ūn, who deprived himself of sexual
intercourse with women and boycotted the eating of meat. When ʿUthmān says
he wants “to be a monk [tarahhub] in the mountains,” the Prophet replies, “The
‘monkhood’ of my community is sitting in mosques waiting for the ṣalā.” This
story neatly shows that rahbāniyya/tarahhub is interpreted as an abdication of
sexual desire and abandonment of society.50At any rate, the linguistic ambiguity
in 57:27 lies specifically in the function and meaning of the conjunctive clause fol-
lowing rahbāniyya. Could the clause be read as “God has instilled compassion and
mercy and monasticism” in the hearts of the followers of Jesus, a possible reference
to the disciples but also to all guardians of Christianity in the years and centuries to
come? In other words, are monasticism and its associative celibacy of the same
category of love and compassion? Or is it a caesura, an interruption and therefore
a bidʿa (, heresy)—namely, a novelty to the original Christian dogma?
Syntactically, it might be slightly confounding to read the verse as such: “God
has planted in the hearts of Jesus’s disciples/followers compassion, mercy, and
celibacy.” The way the verse reads in Arabic does not prohibit this understanding.
However, rahbāniyya comes immediately before ibtadaʿūhā (they contrived it/
invented it/came up with it/designed it/imposed it on themselves), making the
objectival antecedent, -hā (it), at the end of the verb a direct reference to that
rahbāniyya, and thus tipping the caesura in the direction of reading the verse
as follows: “and monasticism [, which] they contrived,” a reading that counters
another—that is to say, “and monasticism that God inspired followers of Jesus to
commit themselves to in the way he inspired them to behave with compassion and
mercy.” One thing is clear. It is difficult, both semantically and syntactically, to read
the objectival suffix -hā in ibtadaʿūhā as an antecedent to “compassion, mercy
and monasticism.” In other words, devising or coming up with rahbāniyya is of a
self-imposed doctrine that God according to the Qurʾān simply did not decree, but
114    Adab and the Ethical Authority of the Qurʾān

that may have been humanly devised in the path of moral and spiritual advance-
ment and thus deemed approved by God. Yet, just as we start to think the verse
has given us a straightforward statement, we see the aporia in 57:27: “We did not
dictate/prescribe [it] on/to them except in order for them to seek the satisfaction/
approval/consent of God.” This exception is in keeping with the main tenants of
Sūra 57, which in sum is a chapter that celebrates the continuity of the light of God
through the procreation of the human race. The theological aporia here lies in the
implication that celibacy is an ethical practice premised on the understanding that
virility is on a collision course with spiritual devotion to the very God who created
the sex drive and bid humanity to multiply in the first place.
In this context, celebrating the divine will of procreation would seem to collide
with rahbāniyya, which, in its own devotional imperative as a practice of inner free-
dom and spiritual growth in the service of God, is also, paradoxically, an interrup-
tion of that very divine order, and of the celestial continuity of its ethical guidance,
which is manifest through the endurance of the human race. The adab of rahbāniyya
in 57:27 thus serves as the extreme opposite of being an active participant of a com-
munity of believers and of having takāthur fī al-amwāl wa al-awlād, the boastful
worldly practice of multiplying fortune and children referenced earlier in 57:20:
‫ُّدُْنَيَا َلَ ِِعٌبٌ ََوَلَ ْْه ٌٌو ََو ِِزيَنٌَةٌ ََوَتََفَا ُُخ ٌۢۢر� َبَ ْْيَنَ ُُك ْْم ََوَتََكَاُثُ ٌٌر ِفِى ٱَأْل� َْم َْٰٰو� ِِل ََوٱَأْل� َْوْ َٰٰل� ِِد‬
ْ ‫ٱ ْْعَلَ ُُم ٓٓو ْْا َأََّنَ ََما ْٱْل ََحَيَ ٰٰوُةُ ٱل‬
Know that this lower life is but play, entertainment, adornment, boasting among
yourselves, and multiplying wealth and children.

Historically, early Christianity, especially in the immediate aftermath of the cruci-

fixion, suffered considerably. Many believers, the Qurʾān states, were persecuted,
burned alive, chased across city borders, and so on. The reference to the “cave
people” in Qurʾān 18 is a case in point that serves as a painful reminder of the
abominable persecution of early medieval Christians, where a group of young
men ran away into the mountains and hid in a cave (most likely escaping from the
evil and hedonistic Roman emperor, Decius [249–51], known in Arabic sources
as Diqyānūs). It is nonetheless still exegetically possible to interpret 57:27 as indi-
cating that God has accepted the isolation—that is, the celibacy of those devout
men who designed it or imposed it upon themselves, circumstantially and out
of necessity—as the need to escape persecution was compelling; however, some-
how in the process the practice apostatized and it may have likely become difficult
for its adherents to uphold its standards. Or, as the Qurʾān says, “they failed to
nurse it as properly as it should be nursed, so we rewarded those among them who
believed and many of them were/are impious.” In other words, celibacy demands
that priests and nuns conduct themselves in proper rituals of purity and have the
proper qualifications of ordination. Still, the Qurʾān neither offers a complete
picture of Christian celibacy nor pronouncedly denounces it. The verse ends with
deferring the whole matter to God, who would decide whom to reward based on
the truth and sincerity of their faith.
 Adab and the Ethical Authority of the Qurʾān    115

The circumstances that engendered celibacy should not be overlooked, espe-

cially the revolting and unending Roman persecution against Christian minori-
ties. Early Christianity sought to flee to the desert to avoid such brutal oppressions,
and in this act to differentiate itself from pagan Greece, but also from Judaism,
which, like Islam, has no interest in celibacy and puts great emphasis on mar-
riage and family values as consecrated duties. This emphasis brings us back full
circle to Brown’s main argument on Islamic adab vis-à-vis paideia in relation to
late antiquity and early medieval Christianity. “The novelty of the Islamic adab,”
Brown contends, “was not its religious content, but the application to men in the
world, to non-monks, of a religious grooming that had been considered capable of
transforming only those who had withdrawn from society to give themselves over
to an alternative paideia in the miniature society of the celibate monastery, ‘as if
in another world.’”51 Brown here is alluding to some followers of Jesus who were
claimed to have deserted conjugality and family life in order to dedicate them-
selves to proclaiming the coming of the kingdom of God.52 Sūra 57 takes a side
in this debate. Because of the lack of upholding the standards of celibacy in the
proper manner suitable for its application, Sūra 57 makes reference to a certain
failing in celibacy and monasticism writ large, for reasons that are not mentioned
in the sūra, but which one might infer could be institutional (power/authority), or
personal, or both.
It is likely that Brown is not familiar with Sūra 57’s take on celibacy; but, know-
ing that the Qurʾān makes a unique seventh-century statement on the application
of celibacy, it would be injudicious to conclude that “the problem that faced the
exponent of the classical concept of adab was a very different one from that which
faced the Christian ascetic holy man,” or that “unlike the Christian holy man,
the Muslim exponent of adab could be said to stand at the ‘core’ of his culture,
realizing at their fullest intensity the ideals to which all observant Muslims sub-
scribed.”53 Despite the appealing testimonial from Ernst Gellner that “Islamic pro-
priety emanates from their essence, as it were,”54 Islamic adab emanates primarily
from the Qurʾān and, as I have tried to demonstrate, from its filtered pre-Islamic
culture. In the Qurʾān, the moral authority of the homo-Islamicus derives from
the various articulations of the dos and don’ts peppered throughout its 114 sūras.
But, to Brown’s point, over time, celibacy did create an ascetic paradigm of moral
hierarchy in early mediaeval Christianity, which chaste clergy used as a superior
moral order to control the so-called “lowly” life of the uninitiated,55 a hierarchi-
cal structure that the Qurʾān effectively nipped in the bud, but that yet somehow
survived in classical Islam under a different garb of institutional hierarchy, one in
which the religious elites and ʿulamāʾ, sans sexual abstinence, became the coun-
terparts of medieval Christianity’s celibate clergy.
 6

The Qurʾān in Context

Monotheism and the Birth of the Unmimetic

Researching early Islamic history is a colossal task, where “the earliest extant nar-
rative chronologies covering the first centuries of Islam,” as Asad Ahmed puts it,
“were compiled several decades after the events they purport to describe.”1 These
chronologies, Ahmed goes on, are “raw material comprised of oral fragments, i.e.,
decontextualized stories that were told by semi-professional storytellers in ser-
mons and religious gatherings,” thus making it difficult for the historians of early
Islam to ascertain “the reliability of sources.”2 Yet Ahmed pulls no punches in
reminding us that “over the past few decades, historians of Islam [who] have tried
to address the problem of the Arabo-Islamic sources,” relying heavily on “criticism
as developed in Old Testament and New Testament studies [,] . . . can fail at various
stumbling points,” especially in delivering “the details of provincial histories that
are so important for reconstruing the internal contours of the larger narratives that
we now possess.”3
This “failure” to which Asad calls our attention comes as a result of a mis-
take superimposed on a larger error. Continuing or discontinuing certain pre-
cepts in preexisting scriptural traditions would mean that for the Qurʾān to be
understood and appreciated by its first audience, the audience must have had at
least some broad familiarity with this biblical background. Logic dictates that the
Qurʾān would not have any appeal or leverage if this were not the case. In fact, in
its response to someone who turned his back on Muḥammad’s call, the Qurʾān
rebukes him because he should have some knowledge about biblical prophets,
especially Abraham and Moses. In this case, the Qurʾān confirms that its audience
must already have had prior knowledge of what the ṣuḥuf (scriptures) of Moses
and the faith story of Abraham entailed, thus positioning Islam in conversation
with monotheistic traditions in the public pre-Islamic domain:
116
 The Qurʾān in Context    117

.‫ُِف ُُمو ََسى‬ ُ ‫ َأَ ْْم َلَ ْْم ُيَُنََّبّْأْ ِبِ ََما ِفِي‬.‫ِب َفَُهُ ََو َيَ ََرى‬
ِ ‫ُصُح‬ ِ ‫ َأَ ِِعن ََدُهُ ِِع ْْل ُُم ْاْل ََغ ْْي‬.‫ ََوَأَ ْْعَطَى َقَِلِيال ََوَأَ ْْكَدَى‬.‫َأََفَ ََرَأَْيَْتَ اَّلّ ِِذي َتَ ََوَّلّى‬
‫اِن ِإَِّالّ ََما ََس ََعى‬ ِ َ ِ ِ َ ‫ ََوَأَن َّلّْي‬.‫اِز ََرٌةٌ ِِو ْْز ََر ُأُ ْْخ ََرى‬
‫نَس‬ ‫ِإل‬ ‫ِل‬ ‫َْس‬ ِ ‫ َأََّالّ َت َِِز ُُر ََو‬.‫يَم اَّلّ ِِذي ََوَّفّى‬
َ ‫ََوِإِ ْْب ََرا ِِه‬
Have you seen the one who turned his back? And lent so little before he stopped?
Does he have knowledge of the unseen so that he could discern? Has he not been
informed of what is in the scriptures of Moses, and of Abraham, who fulfilled [his
covenant]: that no burdened soul shall bear the burden of another, and that humans
shall be held accountable only for what they have done? (53:33–39)
In another example, the Qurʾān specifically refers to the Torah and the Gospel as
knowable scriptures to Muḥammad’s community and as an endorsement of his
own prophethood:
ِ ‫يِل َيَْأْ ُُم ُُرُهُم ِبِ ْٱْل ََم ْْعُر‬
‫ُوِف‬ ِ ِ �‫ٱ َِّلَِذيَنَ َيََّتَِبُِعُوَنَ ٱلَّرَُسُو ََل ٱلَّنَِبَِّىَ ٱُأْل� ُِّمَِّىَ ٱ َِّلَِذى َيَ ِِج ُُدوَنَُه�ُ ََم ْْكُتُوًبًا ِِعن ََدُهُ ْْم ِفِى ٱلَّتَْوْ ََر ٰٰى ِِة ََوٱِإْل‬
ِ ‫نِج‬
ٰ َ َ ِ‫ِت ََوُيُ ََحِّرِ ُُم ََعَلَ ْْي ِِه ُُم ْٱْل ََخَٰٓب�� ِٓئ‬
َ ْ �‫َْٰل‬ �‫َأْل‬
ۚ ۚ‫َض ُُع ََع ْْنُهُ ْْم ِإِْصْ ََرُهُ ْْم ََوٱ ْغ ََل ٱَّلَِتِى َكَاَنَْت ََعَل ْْي ِِه ْْم‬
ٓ ��‫ُ َٰٓل‬
َ َ‫َث ََوَي‬ ِ ‫ََوَيَ ْْنَهَ ٰٰىُهُ ْْم َع َِِن ْٱْل ُُمنَك‬
ِ �‫َِر ََوُي ُِِحُّلُ َلَُهُ ُُم ٱلَّطَِّيِ َٰٰب‬
ْ ْ ُ
َ‫َك ُه ُُم ٱْل ُُمْفِلُِحُوَن‬
َ ِ‫نِز ََل ََم ََع �ُهُۥۙ ۙ ُأْوْ ِئ‬ ُ ُ‫ُّن‬ ْ َ ْ ُ‫َفَٱ َِّلَِذيَنَ ََءا ََمُن‬
ِ ‫ٓى ُأ‬ ٓ ‫َص ُُروُهُ ََوٱَّتََبَُعُوْا ٱل و ََر ٱ َِّلَِذ‬ َ ‫َّزَُروُهُ ََوَن‬ُ ‫وْا ِبِ ِِهۦ ََو ََع‬

Those who follow the messenger, the ummī prophet, whom they find written in the
Torah and the Gospel. He instructs them to do good and forbids them from evil;
he blesses what is lawful and inhibits what is impure; he relieves them from their
burdens and the chains that restrain them. Those who believe in him, revere him,
support him, and follow the light sent down with him are the rewarded ones. (7:157)

The Qurʾān’s reference to the Torah and the Gospel in the above verse confirms
its awareness of the presence of an Abrahamic theological consciousness on the
Arabian Peninsula in the seventh century. Take, for instance, the Himyaritic
Inscriptions, which make clear reference to the monotheistic presence of Juda-
ism and Christianity in Southern Arabia (modern-day Yemen) in the sixth cen-
tury.4 This presence must have been known in some fashion to the Meccan and
Medinan communities of the early seventh-century Hijaz. It is confirmed in the
Qurʾān’s heavyhearted reference to the callous murder of Christian believers who
are thrown alive into an enormous trench with burning fuel.5 In a powerful pas-
sivation of the Arabic grammatical imperative mode qutila—to indicate that mur-
derers shall pay in kind—the Qurʾān accurses the murderers as it depicts them as
callous and insensitive in perpetrating such an unforgivable deed against innocent
believers, burning them alive while sitting and watching them die:
‫ ََوُهُ ْْم ََعَلَى ََما َيَ ْْف ََعُلُوَنَ ِبِ ْاْل ُُم ْْؤ ِِمِنِيَنَ ُُشُهُو ٌٌد‬.ٌ‫ ِإِ ْْذ ُهُ ْْم ََعَلَ ْْيَهَا ُقُُعُوٌد‬.‫ِت ْاْل ََوُقُو ِِد‬ ِ ‫ُقُِتِ ََل َأَْصْ ََحاُبُ اُأْل� ُ ْْخ ُُد‬
ِ ّ‫ الَّن‬.‫وِد‬
ِ ‫اِر ََذا‬
Accursed are the people of the trench, [who lit] the massive fire pit, sitting around it,
and witnessing what they are doing to the believers. (85:4–7)
In addition to this acute awareness of the painful history of persecuted Christians
(in the above example and in the example of the people of the cave in 18), the
people of faith described in two separate historical events as muʾminīn (believ-
ers),6 Christians are themselves some of most celebrated and finest examples of
the unwavering advocacy for God ever to be found in the Qurʾān. As such, these
exemplars of faith are not arranged chronologically, and are never mentioned for
118    The Qurʾān in Context

their own sake, but are always tied to the Qurʾān’s main themes of the absolute-
ness of God, the accountability of all humans, and the reward and punishment
in the afterlife. The Qurʾān’s reference to the aforementioned massacre confirms
the heinous animosity that must have erupted between competing beliefs in
South Arabia. It therefore matters that the Qurʾān would focus only on core and
pure monotheistic values apart from the priestly classes and confessional rituals
of Judaism and Christianity, embracing an autonomous median position amid
irreconcilable religiosities:
َ ِ‫ََو ََك َٰٰذ� ِل‬
ِ ّ‫َك ََج ََع ْْلَنَا ُُك ْْم ُأُ َّّمًةً ََو ََسًطًا ِّلَّتَ ُُكوُنُوا ُُشَهََدَا ََء ََعَلَى الَّن‬
‫اِس ََوَيَ ُُكوَنَ ال َّّرُسُو ُُل ََعَلَ ْْي ُُك ْْم ََش ِِهيًدًا‬
And so we have made you of a median community so that you may bear witness over
people and so that the messenger may bear witness over you. (2:143)
Thematic affinities between Islam and Christianity abound, and these affini-
ties have in turn led generations of theologians in medieval Europe to consider
Islam a Christian heresy. Underlying differences lie in matters of prophecy, unic-
ity, priesthood, confessionalism, and so on. The Qurʾān grants humans no access
to God’s divinity. But even when the Qurʾān categorically opposes the dogma
of the Trinity, it still consecrates and details the immaculate conception as it
embraces the existence of God, much like Christianity. Readers of the Qurʾān
will soon realize how Jesus figures as a prophet of immense status whose confir-
mation of the Torah, and whose love and devotion for God make him the ideal
precursor to Muḥammad.7 Thematically, the Qurʾān simultaneously continues
and discontinues both Judaism and Christianity. G. E. von Grunebaum contends
that “neither untaught Christians [of Mecca] could convey scant doctrinal infor-
mation, nor were the Jews of Mecca on a high enough level to transmit accurately
the contents of the Torah.”8 What this means is that although Islam stands akin
to both versions of Abrahamic monotheism, according to Grunebaum “it is an
independent creation.”9 In fact, paganism was more thoroughly widespread in the
Arabian Peninsula in the sixth century than monotheistic faiths were. It is also
historically recorded that no one single monotheism in the Arabian Peninsula
was ever systematized into a theology before Muḥammad, because tribal tradi-
tionalism, especially in Mecca, was the true “religion” of the land.10 In a narrow
sense, Mecca was a cosmopolitan society whose population formed a negligible
but palpable minority in the vast expanse of surrounding empires, with scattered
communities of faith, an overarching polytheism, and a booming trade. In fact,
the Qurʾān states that seventh-century Mecca had sustained commercial ties with
surrounding neighbors in Yemen, Syria, Persia, and Abyssinia through regular
“winter and summer trips.”11
This demonstrable commercial exchange is key. If it is true that vocabulary
has a natural tendency to travel—to start a life of its own in other languages—
then it would follow that pre-Islamic Arabic in a cross-regional trade culture
 The Qurʾān in Context    119

must have assimilated foreign words into its own vocabulary.12 This fact alone
makes it both linguistically acceptable and expected that “where the Arabs came
in contact with higher religion and higher civilization,” as Arthur Jeffery puts it,
“they borrowed religious and cultural terms.”13 I would add that they borrowed
more than just religious and cultural terms, unless by “cultural” Jeffery also
means commercial merchandize such as14 arāʾik (“adorned beds” in the Yemeni
dialect)15 and16 al-qisṭās (“scale/balance,” believed by ancient philologists as to be
derived from Greek).17
Moreover, while Jewish and Christian communities evidently existed in Ara-
bia, they did so, as Hamilton A. R. Gibb notes, “independently of the organized
churches.”18 They must have existed as “‘heretical’ offshoots,” continues Gibb, “not
only of Christianity, but also of Judaism or the Judeo-Christian,” a conclusion that
prompts Gibb to draw the reasonable analogy that “the relationship of Islam to the
official Jewish and Christian churches and doctrines via these deviant groups is
thus to some extent parallel to that between the early Christian church and ortho-
dox Judaism.”19 This relationship would ultimately explain why an Arabic vocabu-
lary of monotheism relevant to the subject matter of the Qurʾān must have existed
in pre-Islamic Mecca and coalesced with the everyday language of classical Arabic.
It also effectively clarifies the merging of an Arabized monotheistic vocabulary in
classical Arabic, especially proper nouns such as al-Injīl (the Gospel) and al-Tawrā
(Torah), as well as proper names such as Nūḥ (Noah), Ibrāhīm (Abraham), Mūsá
(Moses), ʿĪsá (Jesus), and Maryam (Mary), in addition to other cognates and loan-
words that have become part of the inflectional system of Arabic, and that Muslim
and Arab philologists, as well as exegetes, do not fail to fully accept and recog-
nize.20 Not to mention the obvious fact that the Qurʾān includes important details
about some prophets and prophecies that are entirely Arabian, yet still strongly
tied to the theme of monotheism.21 It is therefore farcical, to echo Gibb, to propose,
even as a postulate, a Jewish or Christian foundation for Islam.22 In sum, while
monotheism was not alien to Arabia, it existed both peripherally and subsumably
under a predominantly polytheistic culture. It is rather the revolutionary scale, the
confrontational tone, the Abrahamic interdisciplinarity rather than the whimsical
masculinity, and the counter-religiosity of the Qurʾān that, taken together, turned
Muḥammad into an existential threat for polytheistic Mecca.
To understand the magnitude of this scale, it matters that we situate the Qurʾān
in its immediate historical context and view it as a beginning—namely, as an oral
event that took place in the life of theology itself. In this beginning, which Mar-
shall Hodgson expertly describes as a “vision,” a “culture, and a “venture,”23 the
Qurʾān starts off the seventh century with the strong capability to bring forth a
radical transformation, responding to a preexisting set of theological and secu-
lar thought in a manner and style that are aesthetically and rhetorically challeng-
ing. As an oral text, the Qurʾān is cognizant of, yet breaks from and interpolates,
120    The Qurʾān in Context

what came before it, including the secular and individualistic ethos of pre-Islamic
poetry, replacing its exemplary force by installing itself as a new beginning. Yet a
beginning is not an origin, a fact that the Qurʾān also recognizes in offering itself
as a complement to a historical chain of monotheistic prophethood from Noah
to Abraham to Moses to Jesus to Muḥammad (42:13). This beginning, however,
distinguishes itself as a discourse that discontinues certain applications of this
monotheistic origin but that nonetheless intimates the same order of such higher
truth, namely, that of Lawḥ Maḥfūẓ (a Preserved Tablet)24 and Umm al-Kitāb (the
Mother of all Books)25, an origination that is wholly conscious of and answerable
to itself, celebrating the absence of a mysterious divine referent.
Daniel Madigan was the first to draw attention to the status of the Qurʾān and
its appositive al-kitāb as a process reflexive of God’s all-inclusive knowledge in
contradistinction to the statism imposed upon it by Western scholarship. “To say
that a people has been given the kitab,” writes Madigan, “is not to say they have
been vouchsafed some great work of reference that contains all they need to know
and act upon; rather it means that they have entered into a new mode of existence,
where the community lives in the assurance and expectation (or perhaps even
the fear) of being personally addressed by the divine authority and knowledge.”26
I will return to this connotative associations of al-kitāb later in this chapter, but
for now it should suffice to say that Madigan’s argument invites us to imagine
how the audience of the Qurʾān as kitāb not only received it as an ever-evolving
exegetical discovery, but also understood it as opening up a conversation between
humanity and divinity inasmuch as it underlines an endless continuity of divine
guidance and humans’ interactions with and translations of such guidance.
The most ethically responsible approach toward understanding the author-
ity of al-kitāb, in this Madiganian sense, is to examine it with the understanding
that both pre-Islamic poetry and the Qurʾān are original and primary sources,
sources that the Euro-American academy tends to view as mimetic or simulated,
and whose identity is almost inevitably derivative of what was already there. There
is in the Qurʾān a palpable level of sociality, coupled with an urgent intervention to
remedy social inequalities and ameliorate the daily sufferings of an impoverished
stratum of the Meccan and Medinan communities. This intervention is articulated
through specific “lexemes” and multiple levels of ongoing conversations: between
God and the angels,27 between God and the devil, between God and the com-
munity of the believers, between God and prophets, and between prophets and
their supporters as well as their detractors. Depictions of these conversations loom
as potential amthila (exemplars/role models) as well as warnings throughout the
revelation of the Qurʾān. The spirit of these multilayered conversations demand,
as we showed in the previous chapter, a translation of the ethical codes of the
seventh-century Arabian Peninsula from within a local context of morality where
a specific understanding of adab is invested with a specific ethical-theological sig-
nificance at a specific time in history. This is due not just to the history of the uses
 The Qurʾān in Context    121

to which these conversations have been put, but to the narrative perspectives the
Qurʾān employs to present them to its intended audience.
But all this may be lost on later generations as well as on scholarship that
remains disengaged from the Arabic language or from the Arabicity of the
Qurʾān and that is unaware of the meaning of such a tacitly but contextually
telling text whose highly charged language directly addresses the sociopoliti-
cal valences of the first Muslim community and its complex habits. By habits, I
am not just referring to pre-Islamic practices such al-waʾd, al-nasīʾ, al-maysir,
al-anṣāb, al-azlām, in addition to food habits and sexual customs mentioned
in pre-Islamic poetry and the Qurʾān, but also to the connotative weight of
quotidian vocabularies such as ḍīzá, ẓann, ḥukm, tabarruj, ḥamiyya, taṭayrnā,
adʿiyāʾkum, taẓāhrūn, and the subtle historical-semantic differences between
detractors and opponents of prophets—for example, al-kāfirīn, al-munāfiqīn,
al-fāsiqīn, al-mushrikīn, al-mulḥidīn, al-mujrimīn, and al-mukadhdhibīn, and
what this social division would do to a monotheistic community emerging in
the midst of deep-seated polytheism.28
Disengaging from the Arabicity of the Qurʾān has also led to the regurgitation
of obsolete issues that have beset Euro-American scholarship for decades. Take,
for instance, the date and the circumstances when the Qurʾān text became “fixed,”
receiving an authoritative written form. Because Euro-American scholarship
tends to view oral transmission (as well as Arabo-Islamic sources) as fluid and
untrusted,29 it matters to recall that the earliest alphabetical inscription of Ara-
bic, which emerged from Aramaic through Nabataean and Neo-Sinaitic alpha-
bets, is a trilingual inscription—Greek-Syriac-Arabic, dating back to 512 AD,
during which the Arabian Peninsula seemed to have been predominantly non-
literate.30 Therefore, if the Qurʾān emerged between 609/10 and 632, reliance on
writing would have been negligible, especially when Muḥammad was himself
believed to be nonliterate. There are objections in Euro-American scholarship to
this account and some scholars are even convinced that Muslim accounts of the
collection and composition of the Qurʾān are contradictory and confusing.31
This is doubtful: certainly the retentive mental capacities even of ordinary oral
poets of pre-Islam, not to speak of Homeric times, continue to surprise contem-
porary habitual literates. However, this much can be agreed upon: that reliance
on writing to preserve the Qurʾān during the life of Muḥammad was subsidiary.
Muḥammad and his companions behaved in the same manner the bardic pen-
insulars did with their oral traditions: al-ḥifẓ ʿan ẓahr qalb (learning by heart).
The Qurʾān thus was preserved orally for the most part not inaccurately until
the third caliph, ʿUthmān ibn ʿAffān (576–656), ordered the compilation of a
standard version of the Qurʾān in 651 AD, in what later came to be known as
Muṣḥaf ʿUthmān (or the Samarkand Kufic Qurʾān). From there, we can affirm
what Naṣr Ḥāmīd Abū Zayd has concluded: that the need to preserve the Qurʾān
gradually promoted a community of literacy in the aftermath of Muḥammad’s
122    The Qurʾān in Context

death in 632 AD; and that the emergence and development of the two main styles
of Arabic writing, Kūfī (Iraqi script from the city of Kufa) and naskh (Mecca-
Medina scripts) in the seventh century was coterminous with the spread of Islam
in the seventh and eighth centuries.32
At any rate, what matters historically now is that the Qurʾān is commendably
the oldest extant “book” of the Arabic language. Muslims regard it as a proclama-
tion of its own ingenuity, an oral tanzīl (sending down)33 of the direct words of
God to the Meccan-born prophet Muḥammad ibn ʿAbdullah,34 who received it
munajjam (piecemeal)35 through the medium of waḥy (inner angelic communica-
tion) over a period of twenty-three years (609/10–632). In the Qurʾān, Muḥammad
is also noted as khātam al-nabiyyīn (the last/seal) of all prophets. Following the
death of Muḥammad in 632 AD, the Qurʾān was subsequently compiled into 114
sūras (chapters) varying in length and starting from longest to shortest, with the
longest being 286 verses and the shortest being three verses. The Qurʾān does not
bear traces of any significant modifications, alterations, or revisions over time, a
fact that many Western scholars confirm.36
Recited in sajʿ (a rhythmic, strophic, alliterative, and assonant style), the Qurʾān
contains a comprehensive message that is at once global and local, at once interga-
lactic and eschatological. On the one hand, it addresses the measured movement
of the sun and the moon in orbit.37 On the other, it tackles specific events in the
life of the first Muslim community.38 In all this, it has very specific themes: the world
is created by one supreme being, Allāh (God), who has many names and who will
judge all humans for their actions. In fact, half of the Qurʾān is dedicated solely to
the description of this supreme being and all his attributes of divinity, his names,
magnificence, awe, beauty, and power. These attributes, the Qurʾān confirms, are
reminders to Muḥammad and his community to worship the one (and only) God
and to obey his commands.
Even when few of its verses make reference to Prophet Muḥammad—for exam-
ple, his ethics in wa innaka laʿalá khuluqin ʿaẓīmin,39 (you are [a prophet] of
exalted ethics), his status as al-nabiyyi al-ummiyyi40 (the ummī prophet), his attri-
butions of orphancy, lack of guidance, and poverty during his early life (yatīman,
ḍāllan, ʿāʾilan)41—the Qurʾān is still strikingly a book about God and his omni-
presence. Gary Wills reminds us that the Qurʾān is “haunted by something
omnipresent.”42 In the local context of the seventh-century Arabian Peninsula, this
omnipresent haunting bears a strong geographical affinity to the landscape of “the
Arabian desert,”43 as Wills concludes, thus making the local contextual authority of
the Qurʾān even more compelling. Although varied conceptualizations of heaven
and hell clearly resonated among ancient Greeks as well as Jewish and early Chris-
tian writers of late antiquity, it is still no coincidence that in the scorching heat of
the Arabian Peninsula, postmortem ‫( جنة‬heaven)—the eternal abode of believers
who testify to the oneness of God, and who perform good deeds and administer
 The Qurʾān in Context    123

justice on earth—would be rich in rivers, shady groves, and various kinds of drinks
and fruit trees. Conversely, unimaginable punishment in the heat of ‫( جهنم‬hellfire),
a multiplied exponentiation of the degree of heat that customarily blazes the sum-
mers of the Arabian Peninsula, is the fate of the unjust and the nonbelievers.
In the Qurʾān, preforming justice and believing in God go hand in hand. The
rhetorical eloquence of the Qurʾān’s language allows the stories the audience are
familiar with (e.g., those of Abraham, Joseph, and Moses) to serve the same pur-
pose of establishing the omnipresence of God across human time. It is not hard
to see why the Western academy has seldom engaged with the Qurʾān’s rhetorical
and aesthetic qualities. The Qurʾān addresses itself as containing both “clear” and
“ambiguous” signs and verses, making it impossible to translate the latter with any
degree of certainty:
ٌ َ‫ِب ََوُأُ ََخ ُُر ُُمَتََشَاِبَِه‬
‫اٌت‬ ِ ‫اٌت ُهَُّنَ ُأُُّمُ ْاْل ِِكَتَا‬ َ ‫َك ْاْل ِِكَت‬
ٌ َ‫َاَب ِِم ْْنُهُ آَي‬
ٌ ‫اٌت ُّمُْحْ ََك ََم‬ َ َ‫ُهُ ََو ا َِّلَِذي َأ‬
َ ‫نَز ََل ََعَلَ ْْي‬
He is the one who has sent down to you [Muḥammad] the scripture, some of
whose verses are distinct—they are the mother of the Book—and others are
undifferentiated. (3:7)

Because of these endless interpretive varieties, a linguistic feature akin to Umberto

Eco’s famous concept of infinite interpretation and unlimited semiosis, the Qurʾān
remains an arduous task for translators.44 Its naẓm (structural and linguistic com-
position), as al-Khaṭṭābī and, later, al-Jurjānī remind us, will continue to chal-
lenge even the most erudite of Arab grammarians and rhetoricians. Part of the
Qurʾān’s literary and linguistic distinctiveness is that it does not have a historical
genre, local or foreign, to belong to, yet it still manages to become the aesthetic
crown of an ancient language already complete in all its aesthetic and rhetorical
dimensions—syntactically, semantically, and phonologically. It is rare to find a text
that creates and becomes the only example of its own genre, a genre with its own
subgenres, if we were to zoom in on Meccan as opposed to Medinan sūras. Classi-
cal philologists of the Qurʾān, including al-Khaṭṭābī, al-Rummānī, and al-Jurjānī,
find this particular quality of the Qurʾān to be a key source of its inimitable power
as it perpetually challenges its audience. Although my definition of genre for the
purpose of this study is limited to the generic categorical differences that set
the Qurʾān apart from pre-Islamic poetry and prose, researching its genres, as
Devin Stewart has shown us, is a field unto itself.45 In a recent article on the topic,
Stewart offers a cumulative yet surgical analysis of the complexity of generic refer-
ences in the Qurʾān. Commenting on Karim Samji’s work on form in the Qurʾān,46
Stewart calls for a treatment of both “form” and “genre” as synonymous, convinc-
ingly arguing that technically “form in this mode of interpretation does not refer
merely to structure but rather to types of speech or literature that have recogniz-
able conventions, and they both ought to refer to specific genres, such as the curse,
the parable, or the fable.” If adopted, Stewart’s call will reshape our understandings
124    The Qurʾān in Context

of the Qurʾān subgenres and allow for more penetrative interrogations beyond
the conventional classifications of scholars like Richard Bell, who categorized the
language of the Qurʾān under the indiscriminate umbrella terms of “structure”
and “style.”47
As a literary category of artistic composition, genre itself is a social practice. We
have seen this with pre-Islamic poetry—namely, that it is an accumulative mimesis,
a literary and linguistic contract in which poets agree to follow certain formulaic
rules in their taqrīḍ (making) of poetry, with all its variegated subgenres of fakhr
(pride), ḥamāsa (zeal/momentum), madīḥ (praise/panegyric), hijāʾ (invective/
scorn/satire), rithāʾ (elegy/valediction/mourning), iʿtidhār (apology), ghazal
(love/courting), waṣf (description), and so on. Yet the Qurʾān stands out, to this
day, as an unparalleled textual event. This preeminence should not be overlooked.
Until today, the very existence of the generic conventions of poetry, prose, and
the language of soothsayers in seventh-century Hijaz fails to fully explain how the
generic autonomy of the Qurʾān came into being, how it exhibited unmatched
rhetoricity while absorbing into its formal structure a focused content conscious
of the contextual elements of the very culture it addresses.
Even when cycles of a literary genre grow out of fashion and give way to new
and exciting subgenres and forms of expression, as they tend to do, more often
than not such a “new genre” would likely reproduce itself. The Qurʾān’s linguistic
distinctiveness—which students and philologists of Arabic recognize as a unique
quality—invites one to ask whether a text could be autonomous, or how the Ara-
bic language in the instance of the Qurʾān managed to soar above its immediate
sociocultural contexts and free itself from the generic commonalities of the tra-
ditional Arabic qasīda and the nathr (prose) compositions existing before it, and
finally what kind of a text the Qurʾān is in becoming autonomous and influential
to this level, in which the conventional social and tribal functions of classical Ara-
bic literature have become so arcane as to render us all oblivious to the power and
influence that an artistic, fresh, and new text can exercise on its community from
the seventh century to the present.
For our own purposes, the more specific questions now are how the Qurʾān
is able to break out not only from the stronghold of polytheistic tribalism with
its own revered social habits and establish itself as a central scripture and as the
new law of the land, but also from the prison house of the linguistic familiarity of
its time: from shiʿr (poetry), nathr (prose), and sajʿ al-kuhhān (the rhymed prose
of soothsayers); how it pays tribute to that from which it broke away, while still
able to bring about a difference and make this difference last; how it jumpstarted
Abrahamic monotheism at a time when the latter’s heart was beating too slowly
and when al-Ḥanīfīyya (Ḥanīfism, literary “renunciatory Abrahamism,” or innate
human devotion to monotheism) was itself the “other” of Meccan polytheism. In
what follows, I try to answer these questions by focusing only on a few key stylistic
 The Qurʾān in Context    125

and rhetorical aspects, to limit ourselves, which collectively thematize the Qurʾān
as a discourse of difference.

T H E QU R ʾ Ā N ’ S D I F F E R E N C E

The Qurʾān achieves its difference using multiple textual modalities, but there
are four simultaneous modes that especially stand out in demonstrating how it
distinctively connects the moral ideal with divine authority and judgment, while
suturing them all into its discourse of Iʿjāz. First, the Qurʾān implements a radi-
cally different point of view from that of poetry; secondly, it emphatically and
pronouncedly declares its distinction from poetry; thirdly, it absorbs a long con-
catenation of prophetic tropes and narratives extant in the Old Testament, employ-
ing them differently (that is, within a multivariant reiterative structure that has the
capacity to generate and interlink several prophetic episodes into a single sūra
and tying them neatly to Muḥammad’s prophecy); and finally, it presents itself as a
unique linguistic phenomenon that cannot be equaled or surpassed.
I will expound each of these four modes and provide examples, not only in
order to concretize what may otherwise appear abstract about the language of
the Qurʾān, but also to show how a sample examination of Qurʾānic language at
work may serve as a pragmatic and realistic tool for further readings and analyses
of the Qurʾān text outside both the normative tradition of tafsīr and the blan-
ket periodization of Eurocentrism. Before going any further, however, it is worth
emphasizing that this is a literary approach, one that may have its own polemi-
cal insinuations. Examining the aesthetic dynamics of the Qurʾān with literary
eyes tends to probe the text for elements of common humanism. It tends to see
Qurʾānic representations of human figures, from prophets to foes to people men-
tioned in passing, as participants in humanism, moving across linguistic, cultural,
historical, and spiritual boundaries as they find themselves caught in searching
for meaning in the experiences they undergo rather than simply engaging with
an omniscient voice. The cadence with which the basic “things of life” are repre-
sented has a transformative literary power, a power that readers and listeners will
witness firsthand as the musical rhythm of the Qurʾān charms its audience and a
new emotive pattern of divine omniscience emerges. What the Arabic language
is witnessing in the Qurʾān is the birth of the unmimetic, the coming of a new
kind of language confidently parting ways with both the enigmatic epigrams of
soothsayers and the monosyllabic pre-Islamic qasīda with its conventional themes
of departed lovers and abandoned campsites, while carrying human thought and
imagination as far as it can reach.
By calling the Qurʾān unmimetic, I don’t mean simply that it is inimitable,
or that is not based in reality. In most cases, the Qurʾān represents reality, but it
also delineates metaphysical concepts that do not exist in the material world. Its
126    The Qurʾān in Context

melody does not offer a resolution to the representational dissonance of the Arabic
language. Not at all. Its rhythmical orality, though not poetic, is capable of painting
an image of what does not represent or imitate reality, whereas poetry, pre-Islamic
poetry that is, cannot represent things outside its material reality. The Qurʾān does
not imitate. In fact, even reference to its language is in the final analysis the nega-
tion of that language. One cannot imagine that Noah, Moses, or Jesus, for instance,
spoke Arabic, or that their sayings in the Qurʾān are direct Arabic quotations. Yet
the Arabic language of the Qurʾān still has nonmimetic elements that are only
specific to itself. Although some prophetic narratives in the Qurʾān are known to
former scriptures, the Qurʾān is capable of embroidering them on a larger canvas,
allowing their interior dialogic configurations to work in a new nonrepresenta-
tional manner. This reiterative narrative configuration is itself a direct result of
the Qurʾān’s unmimetic character, which differs remarkably from the Bible as well
as from its surrounding Arabicity. At is core, the Qurʾān is a very different text
from the Torah and the Gospels in its eschewal of narrative, which fundamentally
complicates any accusation of borrowing. In addition, the promising perpetuation
of its presence, coupled with the power of its rhetorical imagery, which reaches
beyond the mere replication of human senses, reaffirms the inevitability of its
own misreading: wa mā yaʿlamu taʾwīlahu illā Allāh Allāh (only God knows its
intended meaning).48

T H E QU R ʾ Ā N A N D P R E - I SL A M IC P O E T RY:
T H E P O I N T O F V I EW

As we saw earlier, readings of pre-Islamic Arabic poetry and the Qurʾān dem-
onstrate two different discursive modes of linguistic expressions. In poetry, there
is a transparent secularity, a point of view that is both individualistic and tribal,
embracing the ground, the ruins, the departed encampment, the rocks, and the
sand. In this point of view, a whole tradition materializes in its representation of
human losses and vulnerabilities against forces of nature, engendering sympathy.
Poetry, freed from theological concerns, can accomplish this radical autonomy,
and hence achieve its own truth. Between the two discourses in which secular-
ization renders poetry relatable and theologization renders the Qurʾān fearful,
there is always room for variation. The Qurʾān is keen on representing divine
providence as truth, but as truth that takes place in the name of concrete lived
realities and social conditions of the common people in the seventh-century Ara-
bian Peninsula. Let us take as a case in point the representation of “rain” in both
pre-Islamic poetry and the Qurʾān. In the Qurʾān, rain is a major sign of divine
providence. There are at least fifty verses that dwell on this relationship almost
compulsively,49 both to emphasize a tangible link between heaven and earth and to
present this link in theological rather than poetical terms. Representations of rain
in the Qurʾān, unlike, say, in Imruʾ al-Qays, focus on creating and maintaining a
conscious bond between divinity and humans, a phenomenology of faith, so to
 The Qurʾān in Context    127

speak, one that comes with a deep theological presupposition, at times condi-
tional, and at times unconditional, as in the following verses:
50 ْ ُ‫َْث ِِم ۢۢن َبَ ْْع ِِد ََما َقََنَُط‬
ُ‫وْا ََوَيَن ُُش ُُر ََرْحْ ََمَتَُه‬ َ ‫ََوُهُ ََو ٱ َِّلَِذى ُيَُن َِِّز ُُل ْٱْل ََغْي‬

And he is the one who sends down rain after they relinquished hope, spreading his
mercy. (42:28)
ۢ ‫ْت ََس ََحاًبًا ِثَِقَااًلا ُُس ْْق َٰٰن�ُهُ ِلَِبََلَ ٍۢۢد� َّم‬
‫ِّّيٍّۢت� َفََأَنَز َْْلَنَا ِبِ ِِه ْٱْل ََمآ ََء‬ ْ ّ‫ِّرَّٰي� ََح ُبُ ْْش ًۢۢر� ا َبَْيَْنَ َيََدَْىْ ََرْحْ ََمِتِ ِِهۖ ۖ ََحَّتّٰٓى� ٓ ِإِ ََذآ َأََقََّل‬
ٰ ‫ََوُهُ ََو ٱَّلّ ِِذى ُيُْرْ ِِس ُُل ٱل‬
ّ َ َ ُ ّ َ ْ
َ‫َك ُنْخ ِِر ُُج ٱْل ََمْوْ َت َٰٰى َل ََعَّلُك ْْم َتَذَّكُرُوَن‬ْ ُ ٰ
�‫َٰذ‬ َ
َ ِ‫ِتۚ ۚ َك ِل‬ِ �‫َفََأ َ ْْخ ََرْجْ َنَا ِبِِۦِه ِِمن ُُكِّلّ ٱلَّث ََمَٰر‬
ٰ ّ

He is the one who sends the winds carrying good news in the hands of his mercy.
When they are loaded with heavy clouds, we drive them to a barren land whereupon
we cause the water to fall down, thus producing all kinds of fruit. This is the same
manner in which we resurrect the dead, so hopefully you will remember. (7:57)

In a desert environment like the Arabian Peninsula, the belief that God won’t
abandon his creation to death or drought could not be more compelling. Fur-
thermore, by making it possible for humans to contemplate and appreciate God’s
sacred signs in nature, the theologizing power of the Qurʾān emerges to render
God, the giver of life and rain, likeable and worthy of worship. With Imruʾ al-Qays,
“the point of view” of the poet brings forth a completely different set of emotions,
such as pity, fear, and sympathy, in the face of a torrential rain storm:

‫بيِض‬
ِ ‫ُيُضي ُُء ََحِبِّيًّا ً في َشَماري ََخ‬ ‫ميِض‬
ِ ‫رٍق َأَراُهُ ََو‬
ٍ َ‫َأَ ِِعّنّي َعَلى َب‬
‫هيِض‬
ِ ‫َسيِر ال ََم‬ ِ ‫َيَنو ُُء ََكَتَعتا‬
ِ ‫ِب الَك‬ ٍ ‫ََوَيَهَدَُأُ تارا‬
ً‫ٍت ََسناُهُ ََوتا ََرًة‬

‫فيِض‬
ِ ‫َأَ ُُكٌّفّ َتََلَّقّى الَفَو ََز ِِعن ََد ال ََم‬ ‫عاٌت َكََأََّنّها‬
ٌ ‫ََوَتَخ ُُر ُُج ِِمنُهُ ال ِِم‬

‫ريِض‬
ِ ٍ ُ‫الِع َيَثُل‬
‫ٍث َفَال ََع‬ ِ ِ‫ََوَبَيَنَ ِت‬ ‫ٍج‬
ٍ ‫ضاِر‬
ِ َ‫دُت َلَُهُ ََوُصُحَبَتي َبَيَن‬
ُ ‫َقَ ََع‬
51
‫ريِض‬َ‫َفَوادي الَبَ ِِدِّيّ َفَِاِنَتَحي ِلَِأل‬ ‫َيِن َفَسا ََل ِلِواُهُما‬
ِ ‫صاَب َقَطاَت‬
َ َ‫َأ‬
ِ

Help me against this lightning which I see flashing / casting light on a thick cloud on
white mountain peaks.
Sometimes its flashes sit still and sometimes / they stagger forth again like a limping
camel with a broken foot.
The flashes dart out shining as if they were / hands of a gambler winning a game of
arrow when lots are thrown.
I had to wait it out as my fellows were stuck between Dārij / and the streams
of Yathluth and al- ʿAriḍ.
It hit Qaṭātān whose sand dunes started to collapse / then the valley of al-Badiyy,
then it moved toward Arīḍ.

While Imruʾ al-Qays’s experience of torrential rain in the desert may not necessar-
ily evoke faith, hope, or salvation as the Qurʾān does, it still makes him humanly
relatable. It is the sharing of the suffering of humans that makes literature possible:
a stranded traveler caught in a rainstorm that separates him from his companions,
128    The Qurʾān in Context

lighting up the sky and bringing down torrential rain and gushing streams of
water powerful enough to force reptiles to higher grounds and shift the topog-
raphy of his surroundings before his eyes. Imruʾ al-Qays’s point of view exposes
human helplessness against the awesome power of nature. In this all too human
portrayal of the ravages of a rainstorm, the fearful power of nature engenders a
sense of humility and prompts him to recognize his own mortality and to recall
his estranged sister, making him wish the rain could reach her so she could drink
from its water. This earth-to-sky point of view is the only technical choice Imruʾ
al-Qays has, given his earthly perspective on the lightning and his physical/visual
experience of the rainstorm while on the ground. Yet poetic imagination allows for
an emotive disparity and scenic shift in the moving reference to his sister. Here, the
poetic tableau transcends mere phenomenology and enfolds a profound empathy,
woven from the threads of memory and the longing for reunion. It crafts a poi-
gnant juxtaposition between the formidable might of nature and the tender fragil-
ity of human bonds, especially the innate yearning for sibling connection. In these
lines, the poet, unable to traverse the vast distance to his sister, seeks solace in the
communion of their spirits through verse, channeling his wish for their recon-
nection into a silent prayer that his words might bridge the gap, bringing them
together in the ethereal meeting place of poetry.:

‫يٍث في َفَضا ٍٍء َع‬

‫َريِض‬
ِ َ ‫َأَري‬
ٍ ‫َضٌةٌ ََمداِفِ ُُع ََغ‬ ٌ‫َضٌةٌ ََوَأَرٌض‬
َ ‫ِبِال ٌٌد َعَري‬
‫بيِض‬
ِ َ‫فاِصَف‬
ِ ‫َص‬ َ ‫باَب في‬ ِ ‫َيَحو ُُز‬
َ ‫الِض‬ ‫َفََأَضحى َيَُسُُّحّ الما ََء َعَن ُُكِّلّ َفَيَقَ ٍٍة‬
52
‫ريِض‬
ِ َ‫يَر الَق‬
َ ‫ََوِإِذ َبَ ُُع ََد ال ََمزا ُُر ََغ‬ َ ‫َفََأَسقي ِبِ ِِه ُأُختي‬
‫َضعيَفََةَ ِإِذ َنََأَت‬

Measureless land, fecund soil /channels of water bursting on an infinite space.

Water streaming from all of its udders, forcing lizards into barren plains.
May the water reach my sister, Ḍaʿīfa, who moved away / and is too far to visit, except
through poetry.

In the Qurʾān, however, the point of view is from the sky to the earth. Lightning
happens and rain comes down (anzalnā, we have brought down), not as a result
of an incalculable behavior of nature. Whereas Imruʾ al-Qays likens lightning to
the capricious and seemingly meaningless staggering of a hurt camel, the Qurʾān
depicts rain as a well-designed act of divine grace, bringing “life” down to earth in
the form of water:
‫اَب الِّثَّقَا ََل‬
َ ‫ُنِش ُُئ ال َّّس ََح‬ َ ْ‫ُهُ ََو اَّلّ ِِذي ُي ُِِري ُُك ُُم ْاْلَبَْر‬
ِ ‫َق ََخْوْ ًفًا ََوَطَ ََمًعًا ََوُي‬
He is the one who makes you all see the lightning in fear and hope, and he initiates
the heavy clouds. (13:12)

Imruʾ al-Qays may know that the powers that be did not cause the lightning to be
viewed only by him or the rain to fall specifically for the sake of his sister, Ḍaʿīfa,
but the Qurʾān makes this point pronouncedly clear. Rain is not just for one, but
 The Qurʾān in Context    129

for all, created and brought forth and intended as an act of heavenly hospitality,
which is meant to evoke gratitude among humankind. Yet, not all Qurʾānic rain is
good for humans; not all rain is a wish for sharing the watery bounty with a sibling;
and certainly not every low cloud brings good rain for a waste land. Some rain, like
the ones brought down on the people of ʿĀd, and Lot, comes as clouds (and winds)
of retribution and divine vengeance:
َ‫ََوَأَ ْْمَطَْرْ َنَا ََعَلَ ْْي ِِهم َّّمَطًَرًاۖ ۖ َفَ ََسآ ََء ََمَطَ ُُر ْٱْل ُُمن ََذ ِِريَن‬
And we rained down on them a shower [of brimstone], and wicked was the rain on
those who had been warned. (26:173)
‫يٌم‬ ِ ‫وْا َٰٰه� ََذا َع‬
ٌ ِ‫َاِرٌضٌ ُّّم ْْم ِِط ُُرَنَاۚ ۚ َبَْلْ ُهُ ََو ََما ٱ ْْسَتَ ْْع ََج ْْلُتُم ِبِ ِِهۖ ۖ ِِري ٌٌح ِفِيَهَا ََع ََذاٌبٌ َأَِل‬ ْ ُ‫َاِرًضًا ُّّم ْْسَتَ ْْقِبِ ََل َأَْوْ ِِدَيَِتِ ِِه ْْم َقَاُل‬
ِ ‫َفََلَ َّّما ََرَأَْوْ ُهُ َع‬
And when they saw a low, dense cloud approaching their valley, they said [rejoicing],
“this cloud is bringing us rain.” Nay, it is what you asked [your prophet, in mockery]
to hasten: a wind carrying painful punishment. (46:24)

Readers of the Qurʾān are thus brought to see these signs and the concomitant
mixtures of hope and hopelessness that seem to call into question every perceiv-
able natural phenomenon. The perspectival subjectivism that allows Imruʾ al-Qays
to internalize his encounter with the rainstorm and insert himself and his sister
into the mix of its action is transformed in the Qurʾān into a radical departure
from individualism. This postindividualistic discontinuity with the first-person
pronoun in favor of a syntactic plurality is paradoxical in the sense that its very
plurality, while imposing a collective look at the world rather than one person’s
way of interpreting it, does not exonerate ethical accountability on the individual
level. Natural phenomena have a way of bringing humanity together in empathy.
Just like Imruʾ al-Qays, himself a young king who lost his father and his own king-
ship, prays for his absent sister, so does Shakespeare’s King Lear, a stranded king in
the middle of a tempestuous rainstorm, insist that his fool get into the shelter first:
This tempest will not give me leave to ponder
On things would hurt me more. But I’ll go in.—In, boy; go first.—
You houseless poverty—
Nay, get thee in. I’ll pray, and then I’ll sleep.53

There are numerous examples in world literature that portray this common for-
mulation of empathy and subjectivity, one in which human identification with
suffering, without any divine plan for salvation or any expectations of it in a prom-
ised afterworld, becomes the most essential element of our common existence, as
humanity continues to seek meaning in and from this world, meaning that appears
in subjective, even random representations of acts of kindness, blessings, or good
wishes for fellow humans.
Yet the language of the Qurʾān, intentionally or not, decenters this subjectivity
altogether. Pre-Islamic poetry is known to be both individualistic and tribalist, and
even to such a symbolic degree that the history of pre-Islamic Arabia it represents
130    The Qurʾān in Context

is tribo-centric. The Qurʾān’s purpose is to dissolve this tribal centrality into a

shared and diverse collectivity. In this particular sense, the Qurʾān presents itself
as a solution for shattered subjectivities, one that offers a transcendence of individ-
ualism and a unification of humanity under a monotheistic ideal. This monothe-
istic ideal is cognizant of human commonalities and keen on administering social
justice and protecting the weak, the poor, and the vulnerable, who, in the context
of Muḥammad’s early stages of prophethood, appear to be victims of a fallen and
uncivil commerce-based society. With a view toward this ideal, the Qurʾān pro-
motes social justice with a deep and unrelenting egalitarian spirit. It calls for a
communal space committed to principles of equality, where everyone is required
to perform the same duties without the elitism of religious hierarchies, where zakā
(almsgiving) and iḥsān (charity) aim to close the gap of inequality between rich
and poor, and where every human, in principle, should be treated equally. This
ideal community derives its substance, first and foremost, from filtered commu-
nal conduct and moral character of al-ṣāliḥūn (good people)54 who do al-ṣāliḥāt
(good deeds),55 thus making these ethics both achievable and meaningful. In the
larger context, divine articulations of rain are thus overwhelmingly symptomatic
of the theological itinerary of the entire Qurʾān, wherein all earthly phenomena
(sky, clouds, land, wind, mountains, crops, seas, oceans, rivers, animals, humans,
birds, etc.) are signs and manifestations of the same divine intentionality.
Unlike the Qurʾān, pre-Islamic poetry is mimetic, but its mimesis is honed by
the complexity of its poetic technique, its multiple rhyme schemes, and its bal-
anced verses, where the meter of each hemistich has to work in harmony with its
figures and expressions. The emotional and linguistic effort exerted in the making
of the pre-Islamic qaṣīda is the raison d’être of its everlasting eloquence and beauty.
There are occasions when pre-Islamic poetry addresses postmortem concepts. For
instance, in his panegyric of Haram ibn Sinān, the prince and master of Banū
Dhubyān (d. 608), Zuhayr ibn Abī Sulmá concludes his poem with a sagacious
commentary on the concept of eternity. Zuhayr reminds the prince that praise-
worthy deeds do not make him eternal and that the best preparation for eternity
after death lies in leaving behind a memory of good deeds that his offspring can
emulate and commemorate him with. Eternity in pre-Islamic Arabic simply meant
a remembrance that carries through generations. The lesson for a lasting com-
memoration, which Zuhayr depicts quite poetically by repeating the Arabic root
kh/l/d, implying “eternity” twice, lies in mimesis: a compulsive emulation of the
good deed delineated through a compulsive repetition of a longing for eternity,
not life after death, but a legacy on the border of a lip, an enunciation that repeats,
persistently, that which it aspires for:

ِ ّ‫حمَد الَّن‬
‫اِس ليس بمخل ِِد‬ َ ّ‫ولكَّن‬ َ ّ‫حمٌد يخل ُُد الَّن‬
‫اَس لم يمت‬ ٌ ‫فلو كان‬

‫فأوِرث بنيك بعضها وتزود‬

ِ ً‫ٍت وارثًة‬
ٍ ‫ولكن منه باقيا‬
56
‫ولو كرهته النفس آخر موعد‬ ‫تزود إلى يوم الممات فإنه‬
 The Qurʾān in Context    131

If praised deeds make people immortal, they shall not die / but people’s praise does
not make one immortal.
It is the good deeds that leave a lasting memory of / so bequeath them to your
offspring and save some for yourself.
Save them for the day of your death, for it is, to your displeasure, your last date.
Zuhayr’s view on eternity may be secular or pragmatic, but it could also be ascetic
and penitent. Either way, unlike Shakespeare, who wastes no time in boasting
about the immortal quality of his poetry (e.g., Sonnets 18, 55), Zuhayr uses poetry
to portray a different kind of immortalization: the good deeds that live in people’s
hearts after death. In Shakespeare, eternity begins and ends in poetry. In Zuhayr,
poetry is the space of wisdom, the reminder that if a form of eternity were ever
to be granted, people have to perform good deeds and their children have to live
up to and emulate them. The Qurʾān, however, presents eternity as das Kapital of
God’s monotheistic promise, where the certainty of immortality is a central motif.
It is, however, an eternity that could go either way, unless God decides otherwise.
In hell, there is eternal torture without break,57 whereas paradise offers endless
life and wildānun mukhalladūn (eternalized offspring)58 without the corruption of
the body.59
If anything, it is evident that pre-Islamic Arabs developed a unique taste for
rhetorical brilliance and a deep appreciation for poetic genius. It is easy to con-
vict pre-Islamic poetry of a lack of religious import and deem it irrelevant, or
even antithetical to the Qurʾān, as did al-Bāqillānī. But to do so is to forget that
its very poeticity decisively establishes the fate of its signification and meaning
as a socio-aesthetic pretext to the Qurʾān. Pre-Islamic poetry is obviously not
a derivative of theology, as Țāhā Ḥusayn has duly noted in his book Fī al-Shiʿr
al-Jahilī (On Pre-Islamic poetry), nor does it have to be. But what Ḥusayn misses
is that pre-Islamic poetry is relevant and significant not because of the absence
of theology, but because it puts theology on trial and because theology, at least
in the classical Arabic tradition, does not have a monopoly on aesthetics. Unlike
the Qurʾān, Jāhilī poetry is not fully integrated and not fully cosmological, while
remaining beautiful. Jāhilī poetry is not an artwork in the Kantian sense of “pur-
poselessness,” because it wholeheartedly embraces an empirical reality, serving
a telos that is paramount for self-preservation. This is not the sort of poetry
that loses itself to subjectivity. It neither subscribes to Wordsworth’s formula of
poetry as a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings or emotions recollected
in tranquility. Nor does it adhere to T. S. Eliot’s understanding of poetry an
escape from emotions. Nor again is the Jāhilī poet like the Dutch poet Willem
Kloos, for whom art is “de allerindividueelste expressie van de allerindividueel-
ste emotie” (the most individualized expression of the most individualized emo-
tion).60 Otherwise, one would have learned nothing from Suzanne Stetkevych’s
insights into the ritualistic nature of the pre-Islamic qaṣīda. The lyrical “I” in the
poem stands for everybody, and very often the poem resembles (though Stet-
kevych would say “is”) a rite of passage from isolation to reaggregation into the
132    The Qurʾān in Context

community,61 which is no sociohistorical accident but conforms rather with

the actual state of things, a literary production sensitive not only toward every
element of nature and every emotion, but every tool of culture that enhances
and celebrates its tradition. Jāhilī poetry sacrifices the metaphysical, even the
historical, for the sake of the earthly, the singular, and the collective. When a
poem eschews eternity or refrains from espousing any teleological meaning to
life, when its expression is all too human, this expression becomes aesthetically
meaningful precisely because it is not theological.

MUḤAMMAD AND THE POETS IN THE QURʾĀN

Seventh-century Mecca was a booming trade center of northwestern Arabia and

a hub for all kinds of business, including winemaking, craftsmanship of sacred
statues, and trade in slaves.62 Recall how Ṭarafa describes his drinking buddies in
his ode: “My drinking mates are white, like the stars.” This qualification is crucial
for an understanding of the racist practices and ideologies of pre-Islamic Ara-
bia. Mecca amassed its fortune by selling all kinds of slaves. Ṭarafa boasts that
he is in the company of white people, who, by virtue of their skin color alone, are
free—meaning not owned by any master in Mecca who would tell them what to
do or where to go. Black is the color of enslavement. Just a few minutes’ worth of
reading ‘Antara’s ode would shock the reader into the racist impertinence of pre-
Islamic Mecca’s “white supremacy” avant la lettre. But in the interest of time and
space, this brief reference to Ṭarafa’s delineation of his “drinking buddies” as white
would suffice. Ṭarafa likens the whiteness of his drinking companions to the stars,
already a trope that links high power and authority with whiteness. Those white
people are free to drink and free, possibly, to sleep with the “singing girl,” who
“comes to us late in a robe and a revealing garment.” The Arabic word mujassad,
which describes the female singer’s garment, could mean a “revealing garment,”
or a “tight dress” that reveals her body. Her relationship to her white drinking
customers is that of subservience, sexualization, and servitude. The verb tarūḥu
is key, because it puts her in a position of servitude, whether in waiting on them,
singing for them, or giving herself to them. The Arabic word qīnatun is rich in
connotations. It varies in meaning between “female singer,” “dressing servant,” “a
hairdresser who keeps her hair straight and well-combed,” and “a slave woman.”
In this context, it is not hard to know what Ṭarafa had in mind with his reference
qīnatun. In the poem qayna means “a singing girl, who is a slave.” The original
sense of qayn is “artisan, craftsman” and often “smith,” but in this sense a qayna
is never a smith, of course, and always a singer (often also an instrumentalist). In
this narrow sense, she is a craftswoman, and possibly a māshiṭa (hairdresser), but
it does not seem that Ṭarafa employed her to comb his and his companions’ hair.
In this poem, she is a singer (idhā naḥnu qulnā asmiʿīna inbarat lanā . . .) and she
is obviously also a sex object (bi-jassi l-nadāmā baḍḍatu l-mutajarridī). What is
 The Qurʾān in Context    133

also clear is that she cannot be a free woman. Ṭarafa’s sexualized female singer is a
slave woman serving under the mercy, power, and capricious virility of a group of
intoxicated starry-white men.63 She is not alone. Slaves who were poor and depen-
dent on their masters for everything formed a considerable (though politically
insignificant) portion of the seventh-century Meccan population. Although the
Qurʾān does not categorically abolish slavery, social justice, equity, human dignity,
and freedom are all embedded in its ethos, making it, at least for its own historical
time, a sanctuary for the enslaved, the impoverished, and the deprived precisely
because it unequivocally states that there is no difference among humans:
ِ ّ‫َاَب ِبِ ْاْل ََحِّقّ ِلَِيَْحْ ُُك ََم َبَْيَْنَ الَّن‬
‫اِس ِفِي ََما‬ َ ‫نَز ََل ََم ََعُهُ ُُم ْاْل ِِكَت‬
َ َ‫ِّشِّريَنَ ََو ُُمن ِِذ ِِريَنَ ََوَأ‬
ِ َ‫َث ُهَّللا� ُ الَّنِّبِِّيّيَنَ ُُمَب‬ ِ ‫ََكاَنَ الَّنّاُسُ ُأُ َّّمًةً ََو‬
َ ‫اِح ََدًةً َفََبَ ََع‬
ِ ِ‫اْخَتََلَُفُوا ِف‬
‫يِه‬ ْ

Humankind was one sole nation then God sent prophets to bring forth good tidings
and to caution them, and with them he sent down the scripture in truth to decree
among humankind on the matters they disagreed on. (2:213)

Difference in color is a sign of divine grace, just like the diversity of the planet:
َ‫ٍت ِّْلّْل ََعاِلِ ِِميَن‬ َ ِ‫اْخِتِاَلاُفُ َأَ ْْل ِِسَنَِتِ ُُك ْْم ََوَأَ ْْل ََواِنِ ُُك ْْمۚ ۚ ِإَِّنّ ِفِي َٰٰذ� ِل‬
ٍ ‫َك آَلآَيَا‬ ِ ْ‫ِت ََواَأْل� َْر‬
ْ ‫ِض ََو‬ ُ ‫ََو ِِم ْْن آَيَاِتِ ِِه َخ َْْل‬
ِ ‫ُق ال َّّس ََما ََوا‬
And among his signs are the creation of the heavens and the earth and the differ-
ence of your tongues and your colors. In these are signs for the knowledgeable ones.
(30:22)

These verses have two themes in common: difference and learning. The address is
to all humankind, who have different views on life, speak different languages, and
who come in different skin colors. Thus, in seventh-century Arabia, Muḥammad,
whose character is always in sync with the terms and spirit of the Qurʾān, con-
demns in the strongest possible terms all forms of racism and racial suprem-
acy, declaring that all humans are equal before God and responsible for their
own deeds:
‫أبيَض إاَّلا‬
َ ‫ وال ألسو ََد على‬، ‫ألبيَض على أسو ََد‬
َ ‫ وال‬، ‫عربٍّي‬
ٍ ‫لعجمٍّي على‬
ٍ ‫ وال‬، ‫عجمٍّي‬
ٍ ‫لعربٍّي على‬
ٍ ‫ال فض ََل‬
64
.‫ وآد ُُم من تراب‬، ‫ الَّنَاُسُ من آد ُُم‬.‫َّتَقَوى‬
َ ‫بال‬
There is no superiority of an Arab over a non-Arab, a non-Arab over an Arab, a white
person over a black person, or a black person over white person . . . except in piety.
You all descend from Adam and Adam comes from dust.

As the first Meccan immigrants begin to settle and comingle with inhabitants
of Medina, the Qurʾān commends them as upholding the good and prohibit-
ing evil and celebrates them as an egalitarian community set against political
systems of surrounding cultures.65 Perhaps for the first time in human history, a
book prescribes the establishment of an equitable and just community, a society
without racism. But to be sure, it was still a society that did not abolish slavery,
which begs the question if it is at all possible for slavery to exist without rac-
ism. The Qurʾān does not answer this question. Rather, it vehemently condemns
134    The Qurʾān in Context

the mistreatment of women as it persistently calls for the setting free of slaves. In
other words, the Qurʾān acknowledges individual distinctions among people
in the status and degree of wealth, including the ownership of slaves, while holding
them all equally accountable under a monotheistic banner. Historical communi-
ties of Islam did uphold the institution of slavery and for centuries treated women
as a subordinate class. On balance, though, it is fair to state that the Qurʾān is the
first book in history to afford women inheritance and divorce rights as well as to
accept their testimonies as legally viable. While the Qurʾān neither bans slavery
nor puts women on an equal footing with men, embedded in its verses is the North
Star for the abolition of slavery66 and gender equality.67
This social prehistory of seventh-century Mecca and Medina is crucial for
the reception of the Qurʾān in the Arabian Peninsula. Still, the Qurʾān speaks
of a poor and desperate population of this particular society, a population
forced into labor and slavery; of families killing their offspring out of squalor,
or in fear of it; of innocent female children being buried alive; and of the injus-
tices of Jāhiliyya codes. Apart from the sympathetic portrayal of poverty in the
Qurʾān, the other notable aspect of its metanarrative is that the rich and slave-
owning class is equally portrayed as no less “impoverished” than the poor and
the slaves they are oppressing. Thus, a shared ethos of empathy and compassion
among all classes is advocated throughout the Qurʾān, founded on a common
abomination of a faceless Shayṭān (Satan) who tirelessly seeks to inflict divi-
sion, antagonism, hatred, and war among humans. This revolutionary subversive
stratagem of what superficially appears to be a conventional struggle between the
poor and the rich reflects the genuine evolution of a new form of oral author-
ity, a call for a just society in which the working class, the middle class, and the
upper class are all invited to unite and fight the temptations of a hostile and
nefarious devil.
From its early sūras, the Qurʾān sides definitively with Mecca’s poor and under-
privileged population. To reinforce its message, the early Meccan Qurʾān, or what
is known in Qurʾānic studies as Mecca I,68 includes brief and concise sūras with a
chilling eschatological and apocalyptic tone. Rich yet nebulous in their stylistic use
of language to depict heaven, hell, and prophetic narratives, these embryonic sūras
could be mistaken for what is already out there—that is, qiṭaʿ shiʿrīyya (poetic
fragments of a standard pre-Islamic form) used mostly for oracular utterances.
In general, Meccan sūras rely on similes and stylistic features familiar to the local
color and life of pre-Islamic Arabia in order to approximate the meaning of the
Qurʾān while still making it original and easy to memorize.
Thus, the terrifying destruction of the people of ʿĀd depicts them like aʿjāzu
nakhlin khāwiya (hollow palm trees trunks),69 evil doers who run away from the
call of God are likened to ḥumurun mustanfira farrat min qaswara (spooked don-
keys running away from a lion).70 Most of the Qurʾān’s language contains relat-
able and identifiable imagery of this type. This recognizable elemental imagery
is consistent with the message of the Qurʾān, since the success of the call for
 The Qurʾān in Context    135

monotheism is predicated on its appeal to the contextual linguistic and literary

sensibilities of its receivers. In this case, the Qurʾān’s early sūras are appealing
enough to be conflated with the language or soothsayers or poets, a conflation
that the Qurʾān vehemently and insistently refutes on more than one occasion.
Whether the reference is to soothsayers who spoke in cryptic ‫( سجع‬rhymed prose)
or poets who composed short pieces or longer odes, the Qurʾān makes it clear that
its content is not soothsaying or poetry and that Muḥammad is not a soothsayer
or a poet. Many of Muḥammad’s accusers during the first years of his prophethood
sought to “contain” his message by attributing it to something familiar, something
already there; some even accused him of being a literate man,71 who writes down
stories from the past:
ِ َ‫يُر اَأْل� ََّوَِلِيَنَ ا ْْكَتََتََبََهَا َفَ ِِه ََي ُتُ ْْمَلَ ٰٰى ََعَلَ ْْي ِِه ُبُ ْْك ََرًةً ََوَأ‬
‫ِصياًلا‬ ِ ‫ََوَقَاُلُوا َأَ ََس‬
ُ ‫اِط‬
And they said, “These are the written fables of ancient people which he wrote down
and which are dictated to him day and night.” (25:5)
If proven true, such accusations would immediately eliminate the seriousness of
the Qurʾān as a divine scripture and would consequently demote Muḥammad’s
claim of prophethood to the claim of a deranged soothsayer, or even a wannabe
poet who would often represent his clan, but who this time went off on an ambi-
tious tangent, lost his mind, and would eventually perish on his own. In particular,
the Qurʾān’s reference to poetry and poets is pithy, but quite resolute and firm. The
noun shiʿr (poetry) appears only once in the following verse, where the speaker
is the first person honorific “we” for God. This is one of two times God speaks
directly about the subject—rebuffing, in the this first instance, the possibility that
Muḥammad was even taught the craft of poetry and confirming the divinity, as
opposed to the “poeticity,” of the Qurʾānic message:
ٌ‫َّلَْم َٰٰن�ُهُ ٱل ِِّش ْْع ََر ََو ََما َيَ ۢۢنَبَ ِِغى َلَ �ُهُۥۚ ۚ ِإِ ْْن ُهُ ََو ِإِاَّلا ِِذ ْْك ٌٌر ََوُقُْرْ ََءاٌنٌ ُّمُِبِيٌن‬
ْ ‫ََو ََما ََع‬
And we did not teach him poetry, nor is it appropriate for him. This is a scripture and
a clear Qurʾān. (36:69)

The noun shāʿir (poet) appears four times in the following verses:
َ‫اَلاٍم َبَ ِِل ا ْْفَتَ ََراُهُ َبَْلْ ُهُ ََو َشَا ِِع ٌٌر َفَ ْْلَيَْأِْتَِنَا ِبِآَيَ ٍٍة ََك ََما ُأُْرْ ِِس ََل اَأْل� َ َّّوُلُوَن‬
ٍ ْ‫َاُث َأَْح‬
ُ ‫َبَْلْ َقَاُلُوا َأَْضْ َغ‬

Rather they said “[this scripture is nothing but] dream ramblings; or rather, he has
fabricated it; or rather, he is a poet. Let him [if he is truthful] then bring us a sign as
did the foregoing ones.” (21:5)
ْ ‫َاِر ُُك‬
ٍ ُ‫وْا آِلَِهَِتَِنَا ِلَِشَا ِِع ٍٍر َّّمْجْ ُن‬
‫وٍن‬ ِ ‫ََوَيَُقُوُلُوَنَ َأَِئَِّنّا َلََت‬
And they say, “Are we to forsake our gods for the sake of a mad poet?” (37:36)

ِ ‫ ُقُْلْ َتَ ََرَّبُّصُوا َفَِإِِّنّي ََم ََع ُُكم ِّمَّنَ ْاْل ُُمَتَ ََر‬.‫وِن‬
َ‫ِّبِّصيَن‬ ِ ُ‫َْب ْاْل ََمُن‬
َ ‫َأَ ْْم َيَُقُوُلُوَنَ َشَا ِِع ٌٌر َنََتَ ََرَّبُّصُ ِبِ ِِه ََرْي‬
Or they would say, [he is] “a poet, let us wait till he meets his fateful death.” Say “then
wait, I will wait with you as well.” (52:30–31)
136    The Qurʾān in Context

َ‫ََو ََما ُهُ ََو ِبَِقَْوْ ِِل َشَا ِِع ٍٍرۚ ۚ َقَِلِياًلا َّّما ُتُ ْْؤ ِِمُنُوَن‬

And it is not the saying of a poet; little do you believe. (69:41)

The noun shuʿarāʾ (poets) appears only once in the following verse sequence,
marking the second time God speaks directly about the subject, in denunciation
of the poets as untruthful:
َ‫ ََوَأََّنُّهُ ْْم َيَُقُوُلُوَنَ ََما اَلا َيَ ْْف ََعُلُوَن‬. َ‫يُموَن‬
ُ ‫ َأََلَ ْْم َتَ ََر َأََّنُّهُ ْْم ِفِي ُُكِّلّ ََوا ٍٍد َيَ ِِه‬. َ‫ََوال ُّّش ََع ََرا ُُء َيََّتِّبِ ُُعُهُ ُُم ْاْلَغَاُوُوَن‬
And the poets, they are followed by those who are tempted. Can’t you see that in
every valley they roam. And that they say what they do not do? (26:224–26)
The assertion that Muḥammad is not a poet is crucial for a basic understanding
of the relationship between the Qurʾān and the former’s designation as a prophet.
In other words, the Qurʾān advances an understanding that it includes a non-
mortal sublimity. Such understanding has a compelling connection to the mean-
ing that the Qurʾān’s language seeks to achieve. We see this sublimity celebrated
with vigor in apologetic discourses as well as in the Sufi tradition, where rhetorical
readings are geared toward revealing not only a ẓāhir (surface or external mean-
ing) but also a bāṭin (internal or hidden meaning). This is why the Qurʾān dis-
sociates itself so forcefully from poetry. On its own terms, it cannot be poetry and
cannot be measured against it.
In pre-Islamic poetry, the distinctive themes and tropes eventually blend into
one predictable and linear gestalt. Even the structure of the qasīda follows a preor-
dained rhetorical course of linearity. The Qurʾān’s sublimity, however, consists in
its very occupation with a theological aesthetic, one in which the word envelopes
the world and upholds a monotheistic meaning to life in the Abrahamic tradition,
for one last time. Against this verdict of sublimity, poetry stands as a reproduc-
ible art, so to speak. In this context, pre-Islamic poetry, known in Arabic literary
tradition as fann al-ʿArabīyya al-awwal (the primary art of the Arabic language),
finds itself, for the first time in its history, the subject of a negative aesthetics, a
subject that al-Bāqillānī carried too far. To be sure, something in the Qurʾān is
incompatible with the semblance and character of pre-Islamic poetry, not neces-
sarily because of the claims the Qurʾān has on the poets but because poetry comes
into being as a subjective semblance of art, a mark of the poet’s mimetic capacity
to form meaningful and symmetrically balanced verses. In other words, whereas
poetry is mimetic, the Qurʾān transcends mimesis altogether. Not only that, it
even confronts mimesis directly:
ٰ ‫ُوِن ٱِهَّلل� ِ ِإِن ُُكنُتُ ْْم‬
َ‫َٰص� ِِدِقِيَن‬ ِ ‫ُوْا ََم ِِن ٱ ْْسَتََطَ ْْعُتُم ِِّمن ُد‬ ْ ُ‫َأَ ْْم َيَُقُوُلُوَنَ ٱ ْْفَتَ ََر ٰٰىُهُۖ ۖ ُقُْلْ َفَْأُْت‬
ْ ‫وْا ِبِ ََع ْْش ِِر ُُس ََو ٍۢۢر� ِِّم ْْثِلِ ِِهۦ ُُم ْْفَتََر ََٰٰي� ٍۢۢت� ََوٱ ْْدُع‬

Or they would say he fabricated it. Say, then, bring forth ten fabricated sūras like
it and call upon [for assistance] whomever could help you besides God, if you are
truthful. (11:13)
 The Qurʾān in Context    137

Note that the verb-subject-object sentence iftarāhu (he fabricated it) in 11:13 is
synonymous with the act of making poetry and of becoming a shāʿir (a poet) in
25:5. The Qurʾān says basically that poetry is makeable and reproducible because
of its mimetic nature, whereas the Qurʾān is irreproducible. The correspondence
the Qurʾān evokes between poets and the telling of lies is uncannily Platonic. In
distinguishing itself from poetry, the Qurʾān states its condition as muʿjiz (inca-
pacitating, inimitable, irreproducible). This distinction clashes with the Qurʾān’s
claims about the poets—namely, “they say what they do not do.”72
The above condemnation brings to mind the famous Platonic dialogue about
the harmful mimesis of poetry. In the Western canon, the notion of mimesis
belongs to a long traditional chain that goes back to Plato and Aristotle, where the
use of language for purposes other than to communicate literal truth is denigrated
in the context of universal moral values.
Plato offers a critical examination of poetry, recognizing its mimetic nature
while expressing concern for its potential to do more harm than good. Rather
than outright scorn, he perceives it as a powerful medium that, without careful
scrutiny, may lead audiences away from the pursuit of truth. Plato is a pioneering
figure in linking the analysis of language to social phenomena, acknowledging
the societal implications of the spoken word. He draws a significant distinc-
tion between the imitative function of poetry and the noble quest for truth, a
higher moral endeavor. In the Republic, particularly through the allegory of the
cave, and also in dialogues like the Phaedrus, Plato discriminates between the ben-
eficial and detrimental uses of language. The latter dialogue, in particular, distin-
guishes the soul-nourishing power of eloquent rhetoric from the seductive but
deceptive charm of mere sophistry:

Socrates: when a speaker who does not know the difference between good and evil
tries to convince a people as ignorant as himself—by representing evil as in fact
good, and by a careful study of popular notions succeeds in persuading them to do
evil instead of good, what kind of harvest do you think his rhetoric will reap from
the seed he has sown?73

The Qurʾān’s concept of language, like Plato’s, is primarily an eclectic one, mak-
ing it a vehicle for delivering truth and exercising justice as a communal social
principle. In Islam, al-Ḥaqq (truth/the true one) is one of the names of God,74
an attribute that is emphatically synonymous with the Qurʾān in contradistinc-
tion to poetry. The poets in Plato’s critiques and those depicted in the Qurʾān
share a certain mimetic quality that is criticized for its potential to distort reality
rather than to illuminate it. For Plato, this is because poets can create imitations
that stray far from the world of the forms—the ultimate realm of truth—and thus
misguide their audience by appealing to emotions over reason. Similarly, the
Qurʾān cautions against those whose words are at odds with their actions,
138    The Qurʾān in Context

reflecting a reality that is corrupted by falsehoods. In both Platonic and Qurʾānic

senses, truth is seen as a divine emanation: in Platonism, it is the world of forms,
accessed through philosophical inquiry, while in the Qurʾān, truth is a revelation
from God, delivered by al-Rūḥ al-Amīn (the Trustworthy Spirit, Gabriel) to the
Prophet Muḥammad’s heart.75
Although both the Qurʾānic and Platonic frameworks view truth as a higher
reality and differ in their conceptions of the source and means of accessing this
truth, they concur on the idea that truth exists beyond the ordinary human use
of language. For Plato, language is an imitative tool that grapples with the shad-
ows of forms, where the forms themselves are the only true reality, inaccessible in
their purest form by means of physical representation. Similarly, the Qurʾān views
language as a construction through which divine truth is conveyed, albeit imper-
fectly, by human standards. The real is not fully captured by human language, as it
is an imitation of a divine reality. This presents a philosophical conundrum: lan-
guage is both inadequate for and yet indispensable to conveying truth. The origin
of language is pivotal; the truth can be transmitted through language only when
the language is divinely inspired or philosophically precise. Thus, while truth is
communicable via language, it transcends the embellishments of poetry, demand-
ing instead a form of communication that is direct and unadorned by artistic
performance.
The Qurʾān proclaims itself as coming from a completely different, unearthly,
celestial source, a “sending down” in Arabic but in a manner that must never be
confused with the contemporary discourse of poetry, which is also composed in
that very language. There is, therefore, a strong historicity at work: the Qurʾān
states that it is sent down in an inimitable Arabic to a prophet who speaks Arabic,
in a society whose mother tongue is Arabic. And even though Arabic is a com-
mon denominator between pre-Islamic poetry and the Qurʾān, the latter not only
distinguishes itself as non-poetry; it also challenges the Arabian community of the
poets to come up with something like it.
Words in the Qurʾān name objects outside themselves. God, the Qurʾān
tells us, teaches Adam the names of things and grants him the gift of language,
a gift he denies the angels,76 and a gift that could easily be abused if it were not
divinely inspired. The Qurʾān thus conceives itself as both the tenor and vehicle
of the words of God—inerrant, inimitable, and ultimately unmimetic. But because
the lexical field in the Qurʾān is the same one for poetry, one must also infer
that the Qurʾān, too, functions to create an ethos of intelligibility, given the clear
recognition that the phonology, morphology, and syntax of Arabic are the founda-
tion of a fundamental reference—namely, the belief that this language represents
the reality of a world outside its text. This “world,” in its seventh-century Arabian
peninsular context, would be made up of audiences who are ultimately respon-
sible for judging the aesthetic quality of the language they live by. In other words,
if the Qurʾān were to be deemed rhetorically muʿjiz (inimitable/paralyzing/
 The Qurʾān in Context    139

incapacitating/unmimetic), it would only be so because its language appeals to

a lofty sense of an aesthetic judgement already developed in its preformative tra-
dition, where the language of God is still sensible to the mind but in a manner
that has never materialized in language before. In other words, the Qurʾān needs
poetry in order for the former’s conceptual aesthetics distinctives to make sense.
This is why al-Khaṭṭabī categorically rejects the plea of his predecessors that Iʿjāz
is inexplicable to humans:

‫ وعن‬،‫ الفائقة في وصفها سائر البالغات‬،‫ولذلك إذا سئلوا عن تحديد هذه البالغة التي اختص بها القرآن‬
‫ قالوا إنه ال يمكننا تصويره وال تحديده بأمر‬،‫المعنى الذي يتميز به عن سائر أنواع الكالم الموصوف بالبالغة‬
‫ و إنما يعرفه العالمون به عند سماعه ضربا من المعرفة ال يمكن‬،‫ظاهر نعلم به مباينة القرآن غيره من الكالم‬
. . . ‫تحديده‬
77
.‫ وإنما هو إشكال أحيل به على إبهام‬،‫ وال يشفي من داء الجهل به‬،‫ وهذا ال يقنع في مثل هذا العلم‬:‫قلت‬

If they were asked to define this balāgha which distinguishes the Qurʾān, and which
surpasses all others, and to explain the sense in which the Qurʾān is distinct from
other expressions [in Arabic] that are described as eloquent, they would say it can-
not be depicted or defined in a clear manner that tells us exactly what the difference
is between the Qurʾān and those other linguistic expressions. They would add that
only the well-learned have access to this knowledge when they hear it—hermetic
knowledge that cannot be explained . . . I would respond by saying that this excuse is
neither acceptable for knowledge nor for the lack thereof. This is nothing but confu-
sion added to misperception.

According to al-Khaṭṭābī, then, to say that the inimitability/incapacitation of

the Qurʾān is inexplicable does not help someone to understand the Qurʾān. The
inimitable is not the opposite of the explicable. But isn’t the explicable necessar-
ily mimetic? Al-Khaṭṭābī answers this question by stating that the reason for the
Qurʾān’s unmimesis lies in a simple yet ingenious formula:
‫اعلم أن القرآن إنما صار معجزًاً ألنه جاء بأفصح األلفاظ في أحسن نظوم التأليف مضمنًا ً أصح المعاني‬
78

Know that the Qurʾān is inimitable because it blends together the most eloquent and
exact of words with the most beautiful compositions and the most accurate meaning.

Al-Jurjānī would later expand al-Khaṭṭābī’s notion of aḥsan nuẓūm al-taʾlīf and
mold it into a wholistic system of balāgha (rhetorical brilliance), faṣāḥa (elo-
quence), and bayān (clarity of expression), which comes together to constitute
naẓm, a word that does not have a single English equivalent. Naẓm is the stylis-
tic superiority and signification of the Qurʾān that combines maʿná (meaning,
ideas), alfāẓ (sounds/utterances), kalim (words), and iʿrāb (grammar/sentence
structure and case endings; etym. enunciation) into inimitable units of composi-
tion that achieve Iʿjāz.79 The aesthetic dimensions of the Qurʾān’s naẓm, which,
in the Islamic tradition, is the core of its linguistic miracle, is inevitably tied to
its distinction from poetry. This distinction led Navid Kermani to argue that the
Qurʾān is not primarily or intentionally aesthetic. “The Qurʾān,” writes Kermani,
140    The Qurʾān in Context

“is primarily and essentially concerned with communicating a non-aesthetic mes-

sage so that it is accepted, not as beautiful, but as true.”80 There is some sense to
Kermani’s argument, which restores the Qurʾān to pure religiosity by separating
what is true from what is beautiful, or by stating that the truth does not have to
be beautiful. There is, however, a further complexity to this argument. When the
English Romantic poet John Keats composed his famous lines, “‘Beauty is truth,
truth beauty,’—that is all/ Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,”81 he did not
see the judgment of the beautiful as inseparable from that of the true. Even if one
were to dismiss this Keatsian poeticity as idealist and naïve romanticism, there is
something compellingly beautiful about truth and something inherently truthful
about beauty, even if this truth is death itself, at least according to D. H. Lawrence.82
In the Qurʾān, God attributes to himself not only beauty but the uniquely super-
human ability to create things out of nothing—that is, ex nihilo—and to originate
matter through the power of the speech act of divine language:
ُ‫َض ٰٰى َأَ ْْمًرًا َفَِإَِّنَ ََما َيَُقُو ُُل َلَُهُ ُُكن َفََيَ ُُكوُن‬ ِ ْ‫ِت ََواَأْل� َْر‬
َ َ‫ِضۖ ۖ ََوِإِ ََذا َق‬ ِ ‫َبَ ِِدي ُُع الَّسَ ََما ََوا‬
He is the unique creator of heavens and earth, and when he decides a matter, he
simply says “Be” and it is. (2:117)

This creation from nothing subscribes to the Arabicity of the Qurʾān both its
rhetorical and aesthetic supremacy, per al-Khaṭṭābī, over all other expressions
known to the language, including the poetic. There is, to be sure, a remarkable
difference between the rhetorical and the aesthetic in the Qurʾān, and even when
the two have a way of becoming entangled, this difference makes the rhetorical the
realm of pure form and the aesthetic the domain of content, interpretation, and
appreciation. In German philosophical terms, which Kermani heavily cites in his
examination of the acoustic affect of the Qurʾān, it is Kant who says aesthetics can
reconcile pure and practical reason or link a priori judgement with sensuous per-
ceptions.83 It is therefore hard to agree with Kermani that the Qurʾān is “poetic”
despite itself, so to speak, or that accepting the Qurʾān’s reference to itself as non-
poetic would be like agreeing with Tolstoy’s statement that “all his later works are
unpoetic.”84By leaning on Roman Jakobson’s perspective, according to which “one
does not believe a poet who, in the name of truth, the real world, or anything else,
renounces his past in poetry or art,”85 Kermani inadvertently weakens his own
claim about the intrinsic “truth” of aesthetic experience.
Jakobson himself acknowledges the fluid and time-bound nature of poetry’s
content and concept, suggesting that “poeticity” arises when language is appreci-
ated as an entity in itself, not merely as a vehicle for representation.86 This “poeticity”
manifests itself, according to Jakobson, “when the word is felt as a word and not as
a mere representation of the object being named, when words and their composi-
tion, their meaning, their external and internal form, acquire a weight and a value
of their own instead of referring indifferently to reality.”87
 The Qurʾān in Context    141

While the words of the Qurʾān are powerful and resonant for adherents, they
still-for the most part- refer to an external reality outside them. This dualism is
indispensable for the Qurʾān, which defines itself as a “message.” Such communi-
cative or delivery principal alone puts the Qurʾān outside the Jakobsonian formula
of poeticity, which seems to suggest a purely structuralist and aesthetic reading,
or “listening” in Kermani’s case. That the Qurʾān is not “poetry” or “poetic” does
not at all mean that it is not “aesthetic.” In Arabic parlance, neither is the aesthetic
exclusively poetic nor is the poetic the only measure of the aesthetic.
It is in this specific Arabo-literary-linguistic framework, then, that the Qurʾān
stands out differently, not as poetry, poetic, or even as “poeticity,” yet still unri-
valled in its aesthetic qualities. For its effect on its intended audience, the Qurʾān
does not want to appear to be something more closely resembling an offshoot or
a byproduct of a preexisting literary discourse. It would follow that polytheistic
Meccans’ confusion of the Qurʾān with poetry or soothsaying has something to
do with the latter’s presentation of an opposing monotheistic ideal in a different
yet comparably rhymed language that “resembles” the ones they are familiar with.
Against the accusations of similitude and identicalness, the Qurʾān, by negating its
poeticity, is also saying that it is not the account of a mortal or a language crafted
in this world, but a scripture “sent down by the one who knows the secrets of the
heavens and the earth” (25:6). The moment the Qurʾān states that Muḥammad is
not a poet is also the moment it affirms that he is a “messenger of God,”88 assigned
the divine task of “notifying”89 and “reminding”90 his people that he is only a
prophet “sent to all humankind, a bringer of good tidings and a warner.”91 Where
it dissociates itself from poeticity, the Qurʾān affirms prophethood, all through
the medium of a shockingly new style and a unique genre. And while Kermani
does not go so far as to say that other types of literary and artistic production—for
example, prose or prose poetry—can also be deemed “aesthetic,” it would seem
embedded in his description that what has passed under the name of the “poetic”
is at least for the Arabic literary canon so confining (in comparison to the Euro-
pean canon he draws upon) to the degree that it has no bearing on the expansive
category of Arabic aesthetics.
In a socially symbolic fashion, a main reason for insisting that Muḥammad is
not a poet, then, is that unlike the localized tribalism mixed with capricious indi-
vidualism of pre-Islamic poetry, the Qurʾān presents itself as a sur-tribal revolu-
tionary message aspiring to disassemble the status quo and rebuild afresh. When
the Qurʾān was first heard as short sūras, some unversed Meccans thought the
sūras were poetic fragments like the ones already in oral circulation, with noth-
ing particularly special about them. This conflation, however, is rightly dismissed
in al-Jurjānī’s account of Ibn al-Mughīra’s acknowledgement that the Arabs
knew very well what is and what is not poetry and that what Muḥammad is say-
ing does not at all resemble poetry.92 To be sure, then, for the layman there are
142    The Qurʾān in Context

some overlaps and moments where the Qurʾān is initially confused with poetry.93
Although the Qurʾān is its own unique genre, it would make some sense, at least
for its very first hearers in Muḥammad’s community, to conflate it with sooth-
saying or with poetry, the only similar-sounding oral discourses out there. This
potential for overlapping emanates from the semi-oracular tone of the Qurʾān’s
early Meccan sūras, which may have led to partial confusion with the common
pronouncements of pre-Islamic kuhhān (soothsayers). However, unlike the mun-
dane and quotidian predictions of soothsayers, the Qurʾān’s predictions, with few
exceptions (e.g., 30:2–4, 48:16, 27),94 are often otherworldly. The significance of the
Qurʾān’s prophecy lies mostly in something akin to what Emmanuel Levinas refers
to as a triachrony of ethical inspiration: future and anticipation encompassing “an
unparalleled thought, thinking more than it can contain,” one that is dedicated to
“a ‘future aim’ beyond what is to come [l’a-venir].”95
Another thematic difference between the two discourses lies in the fact that pre-
Islamic poetry offers a content that is either a social history (a tribal exploit, a proud
victory) or a personal experience (a mourning lover, an outcast)—in short, an aes-
thetic experience that must be reevoked and stylized after the fact. In the Qurʾān, it
is the overarching transhistorical themes (e.g., the creation of the world, the abso-
luteness of God, the unmimetic naẓm of its language, and the creation of things
from nothing) that govern the aesthetic force that suits its occasion and context.
Still, it is reductionist to argue that the Qurʾān eclipsed the literary and cul-
tural constructions that preceded it, especially when the Qurʾān uses the same
morphemes, idiomatic expressions, and grammar known and practiced by the
Arabs of Muḥammad’s time, poets and nonpoets alike. If anything, the Qurʾān
has to make itself understood, even though it assertedly sets itself apart from the
language of the poets. Many took this assertion too Platonically, meaning that
poetry is evil, immoral, and untruthful. But the reference is to a particular brand
of pre-Islamic poets who composed slanderous poetry that defamed character and
honor, particularly poets who made a living by promoting prejudice, praising the
corrupt rich, and lampooning the innocent or the poor, as we have seen from
the above examples. In pure Platonic terms, the language of these poets does not
speak truth. In classical and postclassical Islam, many a poet used their talent to
craft poetry for political reasons, selling their words to the highest bidders among
tribes and suiting their poems to the task. In the pre-Islamic culture, as well as in
the post-Islamic polity of the caliphates, poetry was weaponized in tribal politics
and dynastic rivalries. Poets composed invective and panegyrics for those who
paid them. The Qurʾān calls these poets out precisely because of their empty rhet-
oric and untruthful sayings:

ُ ‫ََوٱل ُّّش ََع ََرآ ُُء َيََّتِّبِ ُُعُهُ ُُم ْٱْلَغَاُوَُنَ َأََلَ ْْم َتَ ََر َأََّنُّهُ ْْم ِفِى ُُكِّلّ ََوا ٍۢۢد� َيَ ِِه‬
َ‫يُموَن‬

And poets are followed by the enticed. Have you not seen that in every valley they
ramble, and they say what they do not do? (26:224–26)
 The Qurʾān in Context    143

While the Qurʾān depicts the world in terms of good and evil, it is important to
remember that it does not label all poets from the pre-Islamic era as insincere or
false. This is explicitly stated in the subsequent verse that comes right after the
rebuke of a particular type of poet:

‫إال الذين آمنوا وعملوا الصالحات وذكروا هللا كثيرا وانتصروا من بعد ما ظلموا‬

Except for those who have believed and performed righteous deeds and brought up
God frequently and who were vindicated after they were treated unjustly. (26:227)

A good example of this “exceptional” poetics is to be found in the works of Hassān

ibn Thābit, Kaʿb ibn Mālik, Kaʿb ibn Zuhayr, ʿAbd Allāh ibn Rawāḥa, and others
who composed poetry with high moral codes and ethics, advocating virtue in a
spirit that is more or less symbiotic with the general ethos of the Qurʾān. Here
again, the juxtaposition with Plato is remarkable. Not all poets are banishable from
Plato’s ideal republic. He leaves a wiggle room for dramatic poetry that represents
gods, heroes, and good men. Indeed, Plato’s Republic still admits “good poets”
engaged in “hymns about the gods and praises of good men.”96 In the context of
the Qurʾān, the poetry characterized by ethical responsibility and adherence to
high moral virtues stands as an exception to the customary critique. The idea is far
from vague, especially for the Meccans of Muḥammad’s time: ethical responsibility
soars above the mundane materialism of the mortal world. The Qurʾān makes it
clear that its moral code of virtue is what distinguishes between truth and error,
thus opening up greater possibilities not only for justice and social healing in the
seventh-century Meccan community but also for poets to continue to compose
poetry, provided that their work upholds a high ethical standard.
This is why the ethico-aesthetic revolution of the Qurʾān is both original and
formidable. The Qurʾān’s primordial orality, its aesthetic property and thematic
distinctness put it on a collision course with numerous pre-Islamic values and
practices. Like pre-Islamic poetry, the Qurʾān celebrates its own Arabicity. Yet,
unlike pre-Islamic poetry, this celebration is attached to an eschatological rhetoric,
a function Kermani aptly characterizes as “teleological, in the purist sense of the
word.”97 We see this teleology in the Qurʾān’s reference to its own sending down
in a clear Arabic tongue,98 a sending conditionally attached to balāghun mubīn
(a clear communication and conveyance of the divine message) as the only job all
prophets have.99
The message of the Qurʾān is based precisely on a steadfast conviction that this
world is not the end, but a test and a passage to al-ḥayawān (the real everlasting life
that is yet to come, as opposed to this lower world of distraction and play).100 But
unlike the Qurʾān, pre-Islamic poetry has remained grounded in the earth while
showing little interest in entertaining the supernatural or what awaits human-
ity after death, despite occasional solemn themes such as mourning, nostalgia,
dejection, unrequited love, the transience of life, melancholy, and so on. Even the
144    The Qurʾān in Context

notion of “eternity” simply meant for pre-Islamic poets having enough wealth to
live a good life and be “immortalized” in poetry or in annals that record the deeds
and history of Arabs.
With the revelation of the Qurʾān, the authority of the highly stylized pre-
Islamic poetry, which had reached a pinnacle of formal and aesthetic special-
ization by the outset of the seventh century, began to taper off. By the time the
Qurʾān emerged, pre-Islamic poetry had developed its sagas, sung its heroes,
and celebrated the aesthetic intelligence of its poets. Before long, the authority
of pre-Islamic poets, who were once the recipients of the highest recognition
as spokesmen for their tribes, slowly began to erode, giving way to a new oral
authority. Instead of professional bards and reciters carrying each newly com-
posed ode with zeal and admiration throughout the peninsula, adherents of the
new faith were committing to their hearts each new verse and each new sūra of
the Qurʾān and sharing it, enthusiastically and devotionally, with the rest of the
world. Yet, to this day, pre-Islamic Arabic poetry remains for the Arabic phi-
lologist, grammarian, and exegete the one and only immediate, and therefore,
the one and only completely authentic source for all syntactic, semantic, and
phonological significations on whose basis the text of the Qurʾān is understood
and appreciated.

MUḤAMMAD AND THE PROPHETS

In a recent study that delineates the geographical contours leading to the dawn
of Islam, Maria Dakake reminds us that “the story of the revelation of the
Qurʾān is, above all, ‘a tale of two cities,’ Mecca and Medina.”101 Dakake’s study
penetrates the rich topography of seventh-century Mecca and Medina to inves-
tigate a deep geo-theological history which, in accordance with the Qurʾān, as
well as with Ḥadīth and Sīra literatures, attaches itself to a formative narrative
that relates Abraham to the Kaaba. In a world in which geography and theology
intermingle, the story of Abraham, writes Dakake, “aligns with some aspects
of the biblical narrative of Hagar and Ishmael in Genesis but fully locates the
story in the con-text of ancient Arabia, with its itinerant, tribal inhabitants.”102
Dakake’s statement is a sobering reminder that seventh-century Mecca was not
simply a poetry salon, but a realm for the sacred with all its iterative associations.
It is within this interlaced geotheology that the Qurʾān relates Muḥammad to a
series of monotheistic prophets, even identifying their teachings with his.103 All
prophetic narratives and conversations in the Qurʾān are dramatized in order
to invite its audience to respond to its orality and participate in the events it
recounts with intentionality. The Qurʾān narrates that thousands of years of
committed monotheistic faith come to a culmination in Islam, with the discov-
ery that “Islam,” in its etymological sense—a submission of one’s face to the will
of God—has always already been there:
 The Qurʾān in Context    145

ُ ِ‫يَس ٰٰىۖ ۖ َأَ ْْن َأَِق‬

‫يُموا‬ َ ‫َّص ْْيَنَا ِبِ ِِه ِإِ ْْب ََرا ِِه‬
َ ‫يَم ََو ُُمو ََس ٰٰى ََو ِِع‬ َ ‫ِّدّيِن ََما ََوَّص ّٰٰى ِبِ ِِه ُنُوًحًا ََواَّلّ ِِذي َأَْوْ ََح ْْيَنَا ِإَِلَ ْْي‬
ّ ‫َك ََو ََما ََو‬ ِ ‫ََش ََر ََع َلَ ُُكم ِّمَّنَ ال‬
ِ ِ ‫الِّدّ يَنَ ََواَلا َتََتََفَ َّّرُقُوا‬
‫يِه‬ ‫ِف‬

He carved for you a path for faith, of that which he commended for Noah, and with
which we have inspired you [Muḥammad], and which we commended for Abraham,
and Moses, and Jesus, that you must all uphold the faith and never be divided.104

In the direction of this long path Muḥammad is inspired to uphold the same
faith.105 To experience the Qurʾān properly, thus, is to view it atavistically—as a
flashback of faith/history—and thus to be transformed (as a result of the aesthetic
orality of such transhistorical drama) from a mystified listener or reader to a poten-
tial believer, despite the obvious fact that God’s authority paradoxically allows
for very limited knowledge about such prophets and pious figures. Still, readers
and listeners identify with the pleadings of Noah, the testing of Abraham’s faith,
the maladies of Job, the exploits of Moses, the sufferings of the Children of Israel, the
ire of Jonah, the testament of Mary, and the suffering of Jesus. The human element
of these experiences could be a cause for great agony and anguish. Readers of the
Qurʾān learn that Noah lost his son when the latter refused to mount the ship.106
In his grief, Noah asks God to forgive his drowned son only to have his request
denied; God’s decisions are final and irreversible.107 To add to his pain,108 in the
middle of his arduous mission and the trials that came with his prophetic duties,
Noah suffered the betrayal of his wife, adding another personal dimension to his
struggles. Abraham loses the love and support of his father after the latter threat-
ens to stone him to death for abandoning their native gods.109 Not only this, Abra-
ham receives divine orders to slaughter his own child and is left with no choice
but to proceed.110 Lot is ordered to leave his wife behind.111 The elder brothers of
young Joseph are determined to kill him, throwing him into a dark pit and aban-
doning him to a likely death.112 The sadness of Jacob over the loss of his son Joseph
“turns his eyes white” with blindness.113 Jonah throws a fit and tries to abandon
the divine assignment altogether, a regrettable act that almost costs him his life in
the belly of a whale.114 The mother of Moses has to throw him as a baby into the
river while he is still breastfeeding, tearing her heart apart. Jesus, from his infancy,
was compelled to protect his mother’s dignity in the face of a community quick to
brand her with accusations of sexual misconduct. This act of defending her honor
foreshadows the enduring trials he would face leading to the ultimate expression
of suffering and passion upon the cross. Muḥammad’s flight from Mecca was a
critical moment of peril, as he narrowly evaded an assassination attempt by forty
tribesmen committed to ending his life. This harrowing escape was one among the
many trials he endured, reflecting the profound adversity and suffering he faced
throughout his mission.115
Humanistically enough, the Qurʾān tells us that even long after a candid bond
is established between God and his prophets, some still ask for more signs. Abra-
ham, the natural theologian whose early search for God is tied to the dictates
146    The Qurʾān in Context

of the phenomenal world, asks God to make him “see” how he raises people
from the dead:
ْ َ‫يُم ََرِّبِ َأَ ِِرِنِي ََكْيَْفَ ُتُْحْ ِيِي ْاْل ََمْوْ َت َٰٰىۖ ۖ َقَا ََل َأَ ََوَلَ ْْم ُتُ ْْؤ ِِمنۖ ۖ َقَا ََل َبََلَ ٰٰى ََو َٰٰل� ِِكن ِّلَِي‬
‫ْط ََمِئَِّنَ َقَ ْْلِبِي‬ ُ ‫ََوِإِ ْْذ َقَا ََل ِإِ ْْب ََرا ِِه‬
And Abraham said, “my Lord, let me see how you resurrect the dead.” He responds,
“Have you not believed?” Abraham replies “Aye, but only so as to calm my heart.”
(2:260).

In Islamic faith, the heart is the center of dynamic imagination—a center that,
as Henry Corbin observes, “at once produces symbols and apprehends them,”116
not simply as an intellectual practice but as an act of spiritual exegesis capable of
transforming the soul. In this particular context, the Qurʾān links the act of its
own “sending down” inextricably to the heart of Muḥammad, making the tanzīl
itself a matter of the heart.117 It is therefore important to understand Abraham’s
question as a question of the heart—that is, of the secret and innate understand-
ing that reminds us of Abraham’s and Muḥammad’s own humanity, a humanity
without which no sense of iṭmiʾnān al-qalb (the calming of the heart) could ever
be achieved. The achievement of this calming of the heart comes from the senses,
and in this case from the act of seeing. Abraham needs to “see” for himself, for his
own heart, how God resurrects the dead. This is not a cliché case where “seeing is
believing,” since Abraham is admittedly already a believer. Seeing is where belief
becomes visible to the mortal heart. This visual confirmation, which Abraham is
finally granted, synchs the belief of the soul with the belief of the heart and brings
both into harmony.
A similar request comes from Moses, as if the arsenal of signs he is given to
combat pharaoh were not enough. Moses wants his own sign. He asks God if he
could see him:
َ ‫ََوَلَ َّّما ََجا ََء ُُمو ََس ٰٰى ِلِ ِِميَقَاِتَِنَا ََوَكََّلّ ََمُهُ ََرُّبُّهُ َقَا ََل ََرِّبّ َأَ ِِرِنِي َأَنُظُْرْ ِإَِلَ ْْي‬
‫َك‬
When Moses came to scheduled time and when God spoke to him, he asked, “My
Lord, show me how I could see you.” (7:143)
While God categorically denies Moses’s desire for a “visual” of him, he is consider-
ate enough to tell Moses to “look at the mountain; if it holds out in its place, then
you will see me” (7:143). The mountain could not take it; it collapses, and that
is the end of that. Some, like Zechariah, were humble enough to ask God to give
them a sign, as an expression of gratitude and resignation to his will.118 God knows
that signs are not just for the communities to which prophets are sent, but also for
prophets themselves, so that they too know beyond doubt that he exists. In the
case of Moses, God—in line with the appeal of Abraham for signs, or what we call
miracles—decides to make matters easier for Moses and show him the signs of his
divinity right away (20:17–22).
In academic circles, the approach to the supernatural and miraculous within
religious traditions remains strictly empirical and experiential. The distinction
 The Qurʾān in Context    147

between myth and established religion is often not recognized, nor is the valor
of mythological figures like Odysseus seen differently from that of religious fig-
ures like Abraham or Moses. All are processed through the same analytical lens
of mythology. Currently, most academic institutions observe the world through a
lens of positivism, acknowledging the laws of physics that prevent the parting of
seas or walking on water, and the improbability of flying on a winged horse from
Mecca to Jerusalem. Such empirical scrutiny leads to the conclusion that proph-
ets could not possess knowledge that transcends the limitations of their historical
context. This prevalent perspective is reinforced by the dominance of postmod-
ernism in the humanities and social sciences, which fundamentally questions the
ability to know any truth rationally, casting doubt on the very possibility of access-
ing absolute truths.
It is equally hard to refuse to see things from the perspective of the other. In the
case of Noah and his fulk (vessel/ship/ark), it is easy to think that the Qurʾān’s “oth-
ers” are the ones who are asked to suddenly abandon the faith they have cherished
and embraced all their lives until that moment when a man announcing himself
as a messenger from God comes up and asks them to follow a completely differ-
ent doctrine or face retribution. After all, they are the ones who find themselves
unexpectedly being asked to make a choice between what they know and love and
what they do not know, abandon their beliefs, renounce the tradition of their own
ancestors, and adopt a new theological order. Walid Saleh rightly reminds us that
“opponents of Muḥammad did not live to tell their side of the story” and that “their
world and ideology have to be reconstructed from the Qurʾān.”119 This is indeed
the case with all God’s antagonists in the Qurʾān.
It is hard to imagine a more pressing existential choice for the opponents of
prophets. First, they would have to inquire about the truth of what they are asked
to believe in, as we have seen in the case of Noah and his people. Then they would
have to determine whether this new call for God applies to what they already know.
Ultimately, they have to make a life-defining choice: embark and possibly survive,
or remain on the ground and face drowning. As the flood unfolded, those who did
not board the Ark with Noah were unaware of their impending doom. It is likely
they never realized that Noah and everyone aboard the Ark would ultimately sur-
vive. All the Qurʾān tells us is that those who did not embark drowned. The Qurʾān
offers no voice for the disappearance of voice. Yet Noah’s abandoners become the
sacrifice of the text. They are a reminder of what vengeful destiny awaits those who
do not heed the words of God, even though theirs was a choice dictated by their
own logic, their own tribal wisdom, their own faithfulness to their local traditions
and religious beliefs, however uninspiring they might be to others. Those who sur-
vived, the last remnants of humanity, did so only because they mounted the ark,
which delivered them as God willed it. In a similar aquatic manner, Moses too was
delivered from the Nile. Over and again, the Qurʾān reminds us that God displays
his omnipotence through environmentally relatable signs.
148    The Qurʾān in Context

Unlike the scattered biographical narratives of the prophets, the Qurʾān does
not say much about the biography of Muḥammad; nor does it provide details
of his life prior to the revelation. Itself known to be the defining miracle of his
prophethood, the Qurʾān is not a book about Muḥammad as much as it is a book
through Muḥammad; it constantly apostrophizes him, addressing him in the sec-
ond person as it commands him to spread the word of God. Unlike Abraham in
the Qurʾān, Muḥammad does not destroy the statues of his polytheistic tribe only
to end up thrown into a furnace that miraculously does not burn his body before
he finds God.120 Nor does he float in a chest on the waters of the Nile River, like
baby Moses, to be washed ashore and picked up by his own future enemy,121 or split
the Red Sea as an adult to free the people of Israel from a bloodthirsty pharaoh.122
Unlike Jesus, Muḥammad is neither born miraculously,123 nor does he, like the
messiah in the Qurʾān, speak to people from the cradle, create living birds from
molded clay, heal the blind and the leper, or resurrect the dead.124
What is generally known about Muḥammad’s early biography in the Muslim
tradition is that he was born in Mecca in or around the year 570 AD. The Qurʾān
makes reference to him growing up as an orphan, unguided and impoverished.125
Other references to events in Muḥammad’s prophetic life, including social reform,
combats, debates, and so on abound in the Qurʾān and are enmeshed throughout
all its sūras.126 But a most pronounced attribute the Qurʾān gives Muḥammad is
that of an ummī prophet,127 a designation that is often translated, controversially, as
“illiterate,” thus attributing Muḥammad’s knowledge to an unsullied divine source
as opposed to teachable human sources of knowledge.128 Yet the word ummī and its
plural forms ummiyyīn/ ummiyyūn, which appear six times in the Qurʾān,129 carry
variable contextual significations that make the designation more than the sum of
mere “illiteracy.” In fact, from a purely grammatical position, the Qurʾān ascribes
to Mecca the compound noun umm al-qurá (mother of villages/towns), which, in
classical Arabic syntax, would allow for the case ending of the nisba attribution to be
attached to the first indefinite noun,130 in which case Muḥammad from umm al-qurá
would be appropriately called ummī (i.e., a Meccan) in the same manner someone
from Sub-Saharan Africa is called Sub-Saharan. However, contextually within the
Qurʾān, ummī refers either to someone who is not among ahl al-kitāb (the People of
the Book)—that is, someone who is not a Jewish or Christian (7:175) —or some-
one who is ignorant of the scriptures of Jews and Christians (3:20). Ummī is thus
quite plausibly a nisba (grammatical attribution) of umma, “nation, community,” or
rather of the plural umam, so that ummī is the equivalent of the Hebrew/Jewish
goy, “gentile,” making Muḥammad the prophet sent to the gentiles, with ummī later
misinterpreted as “illiterate.” In consistency with this understanding, the Qurʾān is
unambiguous in stating that Muḥammad is neither a scribe nor a reader of script:

َ‫َاَب ْٱْل ُُمْب ِِْطُلُوَن‬ َ ِ‫وْا ِِمن َقَ ْْبِلِِۦِه ِِمن ِِك َٰٰت� ٍۢۢب� ََواَلا َتَ ُُخُّطُُه�ُ ِبَِيَ ِِميِن‬
َ ‫َكۖ ۖ ِإِ ًًذا اَّلاْرْ َت‬ ْ ُ‫ََو ََما ُُكنَتَ َتَ ْْتُل‬

You could not read any scripts before this [Qurʾān] or write with your hand, other-
wise the beliers would have been suspicious. (29:48)
 The Qurʾān in Context    149

In the end, the crux of the matter, as Muḥammad Shahrur puts it, is that “language
for Prophet Muḥammad was primarily the language of the tongue and the ear
(speaking and listening) of his people and that he received the Qurʾān orally, that
is, it came to him unwritten as voice and was called the scripture.”131

M U Ḥ A M M A D A N D A B R A HA M

Retreat, contemplation, and reverence are enduring characteristics of the prophets

chronicled in the Qurʾān. The scripture illustrates two paths to divine discovery:
through natural theology, exemplified by intellectual and philosophical inquiry
into the nature of God, and through revelation, the direct imparting of divine
wisdom. Abraham, predating Judaism, is portrayed in the Qurʾān as a quintes-
sential figure of deep reflection and seclusion, embodying the journey of under-
standing God through contemplation of the natural world. Abraham’s quest for
the divine was marked by an unwavering pursuit, seeking signs that would lead
to God. The Qurʾān narrates to Muḥammad that Abraham engaged in a profound
journey of discovery, withdrawing into contemplation as an act of natural theol-
ogy. This pursuit was akin to searching for cosmic signs, hoping to find God’s
presence within them.
َ‫َفََلََّمَ ا ََجَّنَ ََعَلَ ْْي ِِه ال َّْلَْي ُُل ََرَأَ ٰٰى ََكْوْ ََكًبًاۖ ۖ َقَا ََل َٰٰه� ََذا ََرِّبِيۖ ۖ َفََلََّمَ ا َأََفَ ََل َقَا ََل اَلا ُأُ ِِحُّبُ اآْلآِفِِلِيَن‬  
َ‫اِز ًًغا َقَا ََل َٰٰه� ََذا ََرِّبِيۖ ۖ َفََلََّمَ ا َأََفَ ََل َقَا ََل َلَِئِ ْْن َلَ ْْم َيَ ْْه ِِدِنِي ََرِّبِي َأَل� َ ُُكوَنََّنَ ِِمَنَ اْلَقَْوْ ِِم الَّضَ اِّلِيَن‬
ْ ِ َ‫َفََلََّمَ ا ََرَأَى ْاْلَقَ ََم ََر َب‬  
ْ
َ‫ْت َقَا ََل َيَا َقَْوْ ِِم ِإِِّنِي َبَ ِِري ٌٌء ِمَِّمَ ا ُتُْش ِِر ُُكوَن‬ َ ْ َ ٰ ٰ ً
ْ َ‫اِز ََغًة َقَا ََل َٰه� ََذا ََرِّبِي َٰه� ََذا َأْكَبَ ُُرۖ ۖ َفََلََّمَ ا َأَفََل‬ِ َ‫َس َب‬ َ ‫َّشَْم‬ْ ‫َفََلََّمَ ا ََرَأَى ال‬
ْ ْ َ ً
َ‫َض ََحِنِيًفاۖ ۖ ََو ََما َأَنَا ِِمَنَ اْل ُُمْش ِِر ِِكيَن‬ َ ْ‫ِت ََوا ْر‬َ �‫َأْل‬ َ
ِ ‫ُْت ََوْجْ ِِه ََي ِلِ َِّلَِذي َفََط ََر الَّسَ ََما ََوا‬ ُ ‫ِإِِّنِي ََوَّجَْه‬

When the night fell upon him, he saw a star; he said, “This is my God,” but when it
disappeared, he said, “I do not like those who disappear.” / When he saw the moon
shining, he said, “This is my God,” but when it disappeared, he said, “unless my God
guides me, I will be among the lost people.” / When he saw the sun shining, he said,
“this is my God; this is bigger,” but when it disappeared, he said, “my people, I exon-
erate myself from your gods.” (6:76–78)

Moving from one source of natural light to another, Abraham uses simple logic
to sift through phenomenal nominees for the designation of God. In Abraham’s
mind, God shines and is enormous; he is high and above, but still reaches down.
He is also one and only one. So it is easy to decide, among the stars, the moon
and the sun, who God would likely be. It is possible Abraham did not know the
names of the stars he was pointing at and conceivably looking for which one is
bigger and has more light. Arabic has a clear gender distinction between the moon
(he) and the sun (she), a distinction Abraham did not seem to care about in his
search for God, using the nominative third person single demonstrative pronoun
hādhā (this). Although historically masculine, hādhā is also used in classical Arabic
to designate something that is not yet known, even if the referent is feminine as in
50:32: hādhā mā tūʿadūna li-kulli awwābin ḥafīẓ (This is what you were promised,
everyone who submitted to God and every keeper [of faith]), where the feminine
150    The Qurʾān in Context

referent is al-Janna (paradise). Thus, Abraham infers that God, being ever-present,
transcends gender, and is referred to as “He” not as an indication of gender but as a
convention in language. This divine presence does not wane, cease, or vanish, not
even temporarily.
Abraham’s phenomenal nominees, including the sun as a front-runner candi-
date, disappear from the sphere of his vision for a period of time. He was deter-
mined to find God that night, and his mind is settled that whatever or whoever
the divine being he is looking for is, this being has to be as enormous as the sun.
God would ever possibly be luminous, non-gender-specific, and ever-present.
The Qurʾānic Abraham thus tries hard but eventually fails to find a matching
divinity in the list of visible colossal celestial shiny bodies he designated as poten-
tial candidates for the God position. It is not clear why Abraham believed so
deeply that there was a god without any material evidence. The Qurʾān depicts
him as a man in search of God, whom he was certain existed, perhaps innately,
but whom he still must find. When the celestial bodies of the stars, the moon, and
the sun eventually fall short in Abraham’s mental image of God, he does not give
up. Rather, he arrives at the metaphysical conclusion that God must be mightier
than what his eyes could see and greater that what his mind could grasp on that
starry night:
َ‫َض ََحِنِيًفًاۖ ۖ ََو ََما َأََنَا ِِمَنَ ْاْل ُُم ْْش ِِر ِِكيَن‬
َ ْ‫ِت ََواَأْل� َْر‬
ِ ‫ُْت ََوْجْ ِِه ََي ِلِ َِّلَِذي َفََطَ ََر الَّسَ ََما ََوا‬
ُ ‫ِإِِّنِي ََوَّجَْه‬
I have turned my face to the one who created the heavens and the earth, in pure
monotheism, and I am not among the polytheists. (6:79)
Because none of these phenomenal candidates qualifies, Abraham makes the men-
tal leap from the physical to the metaphysical. God, if God is, is not from the
phenomenal world, but is responsible for it. God, if there is a God, must have cre-
ated this world and is now being sincerely invoked, and appealed to, for guiding
Abraham in his search. This act of giving up to God is also an act of opening up for
God. Praying to a God that the heart feels or hopes is there but the mind cannot
materialize in the physical world, is the beginning of faith. Abraham’s deductive
reason from natural theology reaches beyond the limits of the physical world and
offers a thought, or perhaps a trace of human thought for as far as it could possibly
reach, a reason that leads to the failure of human reason and a hope for what is
beyond reason. In Abraham’s natural theology, God is beyond reason. He is the
frustration of reason. He cannot make himself available to us through reason.
The implication is that only the exhaustion of reason has the potential of open-
ing up God for the seeker. This is one way of finding God, and this is definitely
Abraham’s way in the Qurʾān.
Unlike natural theology, the Qurʾān reminds us that the sending down of a
message is much more direct. God simply finds a way to contact a human, a cho-
sen human who has no idea, a sleeper prophet, so to speak, who, upon reaching
a certain age, realizes through a divine revelation that he is chosen by God to
 The Qurʾān in Context    151

convey his message. God relates to this prophet that He is the Creator of the world,
provides him with some miraculous signs, and assigns him the task. The task of
the prophet is predictable: to tell people that he bears a message from God and
that they are to heed the message in order to be guided well in this world and the
hereafter. The prophet enacts the assignment and carries the task, often encounter-
ing resistance, ridicule, and death threats from his own people. The confrontation
is always rough and may result in divisive conflict, splitting the community into
two or more opposing camps: followers of the prophet, on the one hand, and his
opponents, on the other.
The Qurʾān does not tell us to what extent Muḥammad was outspoken in his
rejection of his people’s idolatrous practices before the revelation. However, what
is related in the Qurʾān and Muslim sources is that Muḥammad’s access to God, or
God’s access to Muḥammad, was exacted through a divinely ordained encounter
with the archangel Gabriel, resulting in the revelation of a book/scripture (26:193–
95) In this respect, Muḥammad is more like Moses, the prophet of Judaism, who
received the sacred tablets from God after a series of divine encounters.

M U Ḥ A M M A D A N D M O SE S

Although current scholarship examining the relationship between Muḥammad

and Moses in the Qurʾān has begun to shift from a pattern of borrowing and imi-
tation to a pattern of “intertextuality” and “parallelism,” there remains the concern
that such a shift may still represent “borrowing” under a different name, especially
when little to no attention is paid to how Qurʾānic depictions of Moses figure not
only in establishing a distinct but overlapping Muslim identity, but also in explor-
ing how such depictions serve the intentionality of the Qurʾān’s oral message
and the prophetic authority of Muḥammad.132 The parallels between Moses and
Muḥammad in the Qurʾān are uncanny. Moses not only had to get the Israelites
out of Egypt; he also had to get Egypt out of the Israelites. Likewise, Muḥammad
had to get his followers out of pagan Mecca and pagan Mecca out of the hearts
of his followers. If the Qurʾān rejects “appearances” and “form” and celebrates
essence and substance, then the similarities between Moses and Muḥammad must
always be emphasized. Remarkably, both messengers share a later-life commence-
ment of their prophetic missions, with Moses’s journey starting in his adulthood
as described in scriptural narratives, mirroring Muḥammad’s own prophetic call at
the age of forty. Like Moses, Muḥammad’s prophethood was honed and advanced
in exile. What launches both of their prophetic careers is a voice. In a parallel of
prophetic communication, Muḥammad’s experience of the Qurʾān was character-
ized by listening to the divine message conveyed through an angelic voice, reso-
nating with the notion that God’s truth was imparted to both prophets through
celestial speech. Moses’s prophethood assignment begins with the voice of God as
a vehicle of His truth:
152    The Qurʾān in Context

ِ َ‫َك ِبِ ْٱْل ََوا ِِد ْٱْل ُُمَق‬

‫َّدَِس ُطُ ًًوى‬ َ َ‫َكۖ ۖ ِإَِّن‬ َ ُ‫ ِإِِّنِ ٓٓى َأََن َ۠۠ا ََرُّب‬. ٓ �‫َى َٰٰي� ُُمو ََسٰٓى‬
ْ َ‫َك َف‬
َ ‫ٱْخَلَ ْْع َنَ ْْعَلَ ْْي‬ َ ‫َفََلََّمَٓا َأََتَ ٰٰىَهَا ُنُو ِِد‬

When he arrived at it (the fire), his name was called: “O Moses. I am your God, so
remove your sandals, you are in the sacred valley of Ṭuwá.” (20:11–12)

In the Qurʾān, the story of Moses is at once the most ubiquitous and the most cir-
cumscribed of all narratives.133 It is a story that keeps reiterating itself in numerous
sūras, where the Qurʾān emphatically shows divine omnipresence through “signs”
and, in Moses’s case, through the miracle of the staff turning into a serpent, which
Moses uses to split open the Red Sea. In particular, through the sign of ‘aṣá Mūsá
(the staff of Moses), the Qurʾān emphasizes once again the biblical understanding
that the confrontation between Moses and pharaoh is one between essence and
phenomenon, a confrontation in which siḥr (magic/sorcery) becomes the embar-
rassment of pharaoh and the turning point of liberation for the people of Israel.
Of all prophets in the Qurʾān, perhaps Moses has the most complete biography.134
Collating different verses from various sūras, it is easy to reconstruct the life of
Moses from childhood to prophecy and beyond, including his birth, his killing of
an Egyptian, his flight to Madyan (Midian), his marriage, his encounter with the
voice of God in Sinai, his confrontation with pharaoh, the revealing of the Torah,
the episode of the golden calf, and even tangential stories like the didactic narra-
tive in Sūra 18, which narrates of Moses’s accompaniment of the good servant of
God, known in Islamic exegesis as al-Khidr.
In Sūra 20, when God speaks to Moses and instructs him to take off his shoes
in reverence, he asks him about his staff. Suddenly there is a narrative shift. God,
who is always commanding, now has a curious question for Moses, and the voice
moves from directiveness and dominance to inclusiveness and dialogue, inviting
Moses to respond to God’s question:
135
‫َك َيَاٰ ٰ ُُمو ََس ٰٰى‬ َ ‫ََو ََما ِتِ ْْل‬
َ ِ‫َك ِبَِيَ ِِميِن‬
And what is this, in your right hand, O Moses? (Q. 20:17)
Some scholars argue that the Arabic language in this particular dialogical setting
is a motif familiar to both Jewish and Christian traditions, one with biblical prec-
edents characteristic of late antiquity.136 Yet the stories of Moses and all prophets in
the Qurʾān, unlike in the biblical tradition, do not appear in a chronological set-
ting, but are reiterated and peppered throughout the text in a number of separate
verses with clear ethical lessons and psychological implications (for Muḥammad)
that are related to the sūra(s) in which they appear. Comparatively at least, such
a discontinuous mode of narration complicates the dialogical intentions of a
chronological biblical narratives. In the Qurʾānic episodes involving Moses, for
instance, this complexity suggests a remarkable difference not only in communi-
cative exchange between him and God within fragmented storylines (e.g., 20) but
also in the overall communicative reference of the Qurʾān, which often addresses
Muḥammad in the second person and tells him the story of Moses as an example
 The Qurʾān in Context    153

of divine love and a solace for his fears and cares. One level of reading this verse
presents God’s question for Moses as simple and straightforward. But a deeper
exegetical level reveals the innocence of the exiled prophet in the making and his
moral distance from Egypt’s indulgence in sorcery and magic, a subtle parallel to
Muḥammad’s own life. This parallelism alone is evidence that the extent to which
the Mosaic narrative could be a product of late antiquity is not as compelling as the
insights it yields for the contemporary context of its invocation in the Qurʾān.
The therapeutic projections of the stories of Moses not only reflect the sociolin-
guistic milieu of Muḥammad’s time, but they also strengthen his psychological
position during some of the most challenging times in his prophetic career:
‫ ِإَِّالَ َت َْْذ ِِك ََرًةً ِّلِ ََمن َيَ ْْخَشَى‬.‫َك ْاْلُقُْرْ آَنَ ِلَِتَ ْْشَقَى‬َ ‫ ََمآ َأََنََز َْْلَنَا ََعَلَ ْْي‬.‫طه‬.
.....
ٓ �‫يُث ُُمو ََسٰٓى‬ ُ ‫َك ََح ِِد‬ َ ٰ َ‫ََوَهَْلْ َأََت‬
‫ٰى‬
Ṭāhā. We have not sent the Qurʾān down to you so that you would be miserable. But
it is a reminder for those who are in awe (of God).
......
Have you heard the story of Moses? (20:1–2; 9)

In the Meccan verses of Sūra 20, Muḥammad is learning to listen to, and to share,
the story of a fellow prophet, who, three thousand years prior to his own time, had
to undergo a daunting mission for the sake of God. It is by sharing these narratives
of Moses at a crucial moment in Muḥammad’s life that the latter manages not only
to discover a shared humanity with Moses but also to rekindle his confidence and
trust in God who chose and commanded Moses, a stuttering prophet with a tem-
per, to deliver the Israelites from the tyranny of a murderous pharaoh. The Qurʾān
reminds us of Moses’s humanity, how he is frightened and unsure about whether
or not he could take up the mission:
ُ ِ‫َص ْْد ِِرى ََواَلا َيَنَطَِل‬
‫ُق ِلِ ََساِنِى‬ ُ ‫ِضي‬
َ ‫ُق‬ ِ ‫ِّنّٓى َأََخَاُفُ َأَن ُيُ ََكِّذُّب‬
ِ َ‫ ََوَي‬.‫ُوِن‬ ٓ ِ‫َقَا ََل ََرِّبّ ِإ‬
He said, “My Lord, I fear they will accuse me of lying, my chest will tighten, and my
tongue will be tied.” (26:12–13)
In these verses, Moses confesses his human vulnerability, his fear, anxiety, and
stutter to God. But it is Moses’s very humanity that makes him a role model for his
people and a forerunner for Muḥammad, precisely because he has to learn to over-
come and transcend his limitations. The lesson is clear and concrete: if Moses the
fearful, the unsure, and the stutterer can deliver the people of Israel and convert
them into God-obeying Jews by teaching them the way of God, then so too can
Muḥammad teach his own community how to submit to God. Indeed, the Qurʾān
establishes this thematic affinity between Moses and Muḥammad early on in the
Meccan sūras, where the assignment of Muḥammad is tightly linked to that of
Moses through the rhetorical use of the simile particle ‫( كما‬just as/in the
same manner):
154    The Qurʾān in Context

ً‫إَّنَا َأَْرْ ََس ْْلَنَا ِإَِلَ ْْي ُُك ْْم ََر ُُسواًلا َشَا ِِهًدًا ََعَلَ ْْي ُُك ْْم ََك ََما َأَْرْ ََس ْْلَنَا ِإَِلَ ٰٰى ِفِْرْ َعَْوْ َنَ ََرُسُوًال‬

We have sent a messenger to you who is a witness on you just as we sent a messenger
to pharaoh. (73:15)

Moses gives the people of Israel not only laws to follow but also the Torah, a
scripture of teaching and learning whose enactment safeguards their identity and
national existence throughout time. The Qurʾān, too, carves a path that guaran-
tees Muslim identities and continued existence in time. It offers a special imagina-
tion of Arabian peninsular culture, interlinks it with the time of Moses’s Egypt,
and puts Muḥammad’s mission in perfect synchronicity with Moses’s. Arabia, like
ancient Egypt, is steeped in tales of enchantments and serpents. If Moses, amid
Egypt’s legendary sorcery, did not adopt their methods to make ropes “seem” like
snakes, can it not be argued that Muḥammad, in the middle of Arabia’s celebrated
poetic tradition, did not assimilate the craft of its poets or claim authorship of the
Qurʾān? Or is the realm of the miraculous already outside the sphere of thought?
We learn from the Qurʾān that the staff of Moses in its pre-miraculous condition
is a hardened tree branch he uses as a walking stick to lean on and to round up
and feed his sheep. Could it be argued that a pre-supernatural stick in the hand
of Moses is as uneventful as language is for Muḥammad before the Qurʾān? If the
divine decree is to match the miracle with the communal practices of a prophet’s
own people, then a closer examination of the associations between the Qurʾān and
the classical Arabic tradition reveal Moses’s staff to be a fitting wonder, not only for
Judaism but also for the formative environment of early Islam.
Nevertheless, there are no human champions in the Qurʾān. Despite the cen-
trality that both Moses and Muḥammad exhibit in the text, they are neither pro-
tagonists nor epic heroes.137 The one and only absolute hero is God. Even though
readers identify with the struggling prophets and people of faith (Nūḥ, Ibrāhīm,
Yaʿqūb, Yūsif, Banū Isrāʾīl, Mūsá, Hārūn, Maryam, ʿ Īsá, Asḥāb al-Kahf, Asḥāb
al-Ukhdūd, etc.), the rhythmic cadence of such narratives leads only to a confir-
mation of God’s omnipresence and absoluteness. Readers encounter occasional
but repetitive disavowals and affirmations, characteristic of Qurʾānic monothe-
ism, in the context of unfailing human impulses to resist the calls of prophets and
question the ulterior motive of monotheistic doctrine.138 But in the end, all shall
die, states the Qurʾān, and only the face of God shall remain:
‫اِإل ْْك ََر ِاِم‬ ِ ‫ُذو ْاْل ََج‬ 
ِ ‫الِل ََو‬ ُ ‫َك‬َ ّ‫ ََوَيَ ْْبَقَى ََوْجْ ُهُ ََرِّب‬.‫اٍن‬ َ ‫ُُكُّلّ ََم ْْن‬
ٍ َ‫َعَلَ ْْيَهَا َف‬ 
All that is on it shall perish. Only the face of your God shall remain, in majesty and
glory. (55:26–27)
In this world of transience, the theological unconscious in the Qurʾān is not
vague: Muḥammad’s prophethood is a dialectical continuity, or, if you will, a dis-
continuous continuity of Abrahamic monotheism. In this dialectic, the Qurʾān
both preserves the older conglomeration and creates a new accumulation of the
 The Qurʾān in Context    155

monotheistic idea, one that has rendered Muḥammad the very figure of the other,
the very unacknowledged center of the medieval and modern religious history
of the monotheistic West. For centuries, negative depictions of Muḥammad have
been one of the key stipulations of protectionism in Christian and post-Christian
Western Europe.139 The concept commonly referred to as the Judeo-Christian tradi-
tion, as Arthur Cohen suggests, involves a transformation of Jewish principles and
rituals, in which they are often reinterpreted rather than strictly conserved, or, to
use Cohen’s words, “sublated rather than preserved, a revisionism objectionable
to believers to whom the old is the only testament.”140 This perspective, which can
be seen as controversial among those who view the original Jewish teachings as
definitive, raises the following question: Is it accurate to attribute this conceptual
blend solely to Christianity? Such a synthesis seems less characteristic of histori-
cal Catholic doctrine and more akin to the liberal movements within Protestant-
ism, especially those emerging in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
It may even resemble a modern, secular Jewish thought pattern, aligning more
closely with the philosophy of figures like Hermann Cohen than with traditional
Christian theology.
Moreover, it is the historical distance and often the accumulative antipathy
towards Muḥammad and the Qurʾān that have contributed to shaping a protective
Judeo-Christian self-concept. This protective stand has, intentionally or not, accel-
erated the formation of a tradition that has increasingly omitted Islam, despite its
rightful place within the Abrahamic tradition. Indeed, the “Judeo-Christian tradi-
tion” could well consider the addition of a hyphen to include Islam. After all, Islam
resonates deeply with the heart of Judaism in its emphasis on laws and justice, and
with the soul of Christianity in its belief in the hereafter and the resurrection of the
dead. In recognizing the congruent values among these faiths, perhaps it is time to
expand our understanding of this interlinked heritage.

I N SI D E I ʿ JĀ Z : T H E QU R ʾ Ā N A N D T H E M I R AC L E

Arming messengers with miraculous signs matters tremendously in prophetic tra-

ditions. The signs act as proof that a prophet seeking to persuade his people to
embrace a religious truth has something of the supernatural to show them in order
to convince them that what they are saying is not a figment of their own imagina-
tion. When the sorcerers of Egypt’s pharaoh intimidate Moses, God inspires the
latter to throw his staff in order to reveal the sign: “Throw what is in your right
hand; it will devour what they have devised” (20:69). The Qurʾānic story of Moses
becomes a kind of solace for Muḥammad’s own story. Muḥammad is comforted in
learning that God would keep him from harm and would grant him a sign, as he
did with Moses, especially when the former knows full well how his people adore
their gods and what they would do to protect their religious beliefs and rituals. As
Muḥammad had anticipated, the people of Quraysh would not simply accept the
156    The Qurʾān in Context

news that there was a new prophet in town. And so, as al-Jāḥiẓ reminds us, in his
own historical context, Muḥammad’s need for a sign, akin to the need of Moses
and Jesus, would be especially appropriate and fitting.141
The Qurʾān constantly reminds Muḥammad that it is not easy to be a prophet.
Almost all the prophets mentioned in the Qurʾān were not believed or were per-
secuted by the majority of their people. All of them were met with hostility and
malevolence. His fate won’t be any different. The task is daunting and the mission
is arduous. Immediately upon his assignment, he is asked to perform miraculous
tasks to prove himself. He may have to lose the support of his own people and fam-
ily members. He is charged with asking his community to stop doing what they
have been doing for ages; he is asking them to abandon their sacred traditions and
start worshiping a new God. He cannot fully explain this God beyond the fact that
he was assigned this divine task. Muḥammad can neither abandon the mission nor
resort to reason to convince his people that God exists. He cannot even verify the
sincerity of his messages. But he knows in his heart that it is true. Abraham before
him tried to reason with his own people. Indeed, Abraham was quite the rational
rebel. The Qurʾān narrates that Abraham used common sense with his commu-
nity first, hoping to convert them (21:52–56), but when he exhausted the limits of
his reason, he took matters into his own hands and destroyed their sculpted gods,
almost getting himself burnt alive in the process (21:57–58). Could Muḥammad go
fully “Abrahamic” on his people and smite their sacred figures? Or would he seek
to win them over with his integrity and good character?
At this stage, all Muḥammad has to his credit moving forward is the biographi-
cal credit of truth and honesty. But first he must himself believe in God and believe
in the mission assigned to him. Then, he must muster the courage to share the
news with his community:
ْ َ‫َك ََوِإِ ْْن َلَ ْْم َتَ ْْف ََعْلْ َفَ ََما َب‬
ُ‫َّلَْغَتَ ِِر ََساَلََتَُه‬ َ ‫َيَا َأَُّيَُهَا الَّرَُسُو ُُل َبَِّلِ ْْغ ََما ُأُ ْْن ِِز ََل ِإَِلَ ْْي‬
َ ِ‫َك ِِم ْْن ََرِّب‬
O messenger, proclaim what has been sent down to you from your God, and if you
do not, then you have not delivered his message. (5:57).
He simply, and yet not so simply, has to tell his people what God assigned him to
say: “People, I am God’s messenger to all of you, who owns the heavens and the
earth. There is no other God but him; he makes life and death. Believe in God and
his messenger, the ummī prophet, who believes in God and his words, and fol-
low him so that you might be guided” (7:158). In delivering the message publicly,
Muḥammad submits fully, and without reservation, to the compelling demands
of divinity—and with it, to the consequences of his actions. Eventually, when he
is forced to flee Mecca with its high culture, commerce, and gods, Muḥammad
chooses a path of no return. In doing so, he feels more liberation than loss. Yet it
is also an exit that comes at a painful cost, recognized in the Qurʾān as a moment
in which the dejected prophet mitigates the sadness of his companion in complete
reliance on the will of God: lā taḥzan inna Allāha maʿanā (be not sad for God is
 The Qurʾān in Context    157

with us). He flees with a deep yearning for a return confirmed by a divine prom-
ise: la-tadkhulunna al-masjida al-ḥarāma in shāʾa Allāhu āminīna ruʾūsakum wa
muqaṣṣirīna lā takhāfūn (you shall enter the holy mosque safely), a promise that
shall become fatḥan mubīnan (a mighty opening). Muḥammad’s exit from Mecca
is celebrated in the Islamic tradition as hijra (migration/renunciation), a bless-
ing and a new calendrical beginning equal in value to all divine beginnings in
religious history.
In the Qurʾān, as in all scriptures, God wants to be known and worshipped. He
wants to be known publicly, to everyone, and this promulgation is, in essence, the
job of all his messengers: to announce his presence in public, to let people know
about him, to believe in him, to love him, and to serve him. Once Muḥammad has
gathered all his people and announced to them that he is carrying a message from
God, there is no coming back. He leaves his people with two choices—either to
realize that Muḥammad is telling a joke or to own up to the fact that he is telling
the truth. Muḥammad was not known to monger silly jokes, or to tell lies, or to
make fun of his community. In light of his own ethos, he must have been serious. If
so, then there are only two options: to believe him or not to believe him. It is easy
to guess that Muḥammad’s first of kin, though not all of them, were among the first
to sympathize with him and believe him because they knew his mental bearings
and his moral qualities. But those who knew of his character but did not know him
personally must have thought that the man had lost his mind.
It is one thing to show miracles to prove a point, and it is a completely differ-
ent thing to only say that one has heard the voice of God. When Moses tells pha-
raoh that God speaks to him, pharaoh takes Moses to be “bewitched” (17:101). But
Moses comes equipped with miraculous signs (20:20–22) and with enough God-
inspired confidence, as well the presence of his eloquent brother, Hārūn (Aaron),
to respond to pharaoh’s insult with insult (17:102). Unlike Moses, Muḥammad’s
prophetic task consists mainly of receiving the qawlan thaqīlan (heavy saying) of
God (73:5) and delivering it to his people, a delivery brought down by a “trusted
spirit” to settle upon his heart and in a language and a style that he and his people
could understand (26:193–94). In this heavy burden of prophethood, Muḥammad
becomes the ultimate receiver of the word of God. Although his people may still
need a fantastic sign to seal his prophethood, he is himself marked by the word
of God, which makes the Qurʾān itself the sign for the special society to which
he belongs.
In the end, Muḥammad has to make a conscious decision about how he would
respond to this “mediated” voice/sign of God. The burden is to confirm, to himself
first, that this is indeed a voice from God. How does he know for certain that it is
God? A sense of urgency is always attached to the prophetic burden. A prophet,
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari remind us, is not in a position to “decline the
burden God entrusts to him.”142 When God instructs Muḥammad to tell his next
of kin about his divine assignment (26:214), it is Muḥammad alone who has to
158    The Qurʾān in Context

make the final decision that he is God’s messenger. He alone has the intuition of
the presence of God. He alone knows that the one and only sign there is, is the
word of God itself. This is the moment when the Qurʾān becomes the sign and
the miracle of Islam.
For all these reasons, it is absolutely crucial for a voice-inspired prophet to
bring forth signs, signs that have to be both compelling and convincing in order
for people to abandon the intimate and the familiar and to heed, instead, the path
of God. The Qurʾān acknowledges the dialectical challenges of the prophetic
moment coupled with God’s protection of his prophets. Because so much depends
on the signs of God, or the signs from God, it is perfectly normal for people to
expect them and to demand them, especially if one’s own life—the lives of one’s
family and the entire community—all depend on the decisions made after wit-
nessing those signs. But Muḥammad did not have any of the miraculous signs
of Abraham, Moses, or Jesus. With respect to Muḥammad, God’s extraordinary
nature-defying, super-phenomenological acts take a different shape, giving us a
completely novel approach to the sign. This is an interesting discontinuity within
the Abrahamic tradition. In addition to this, the sign of prophecy is traditionally
different from the message being conveyed. Religious history has taught us that
there is an awful temporality to supernatural signs after all; extraordinary wonders
live and die with the people who encounter them. Like all supernatural phenom-
ena, signs are subjective and terminal, and by the time the people who witness the
miracles die, those miracles, even if they had been true, would themselves fade into
the past and soon lapse into myths and be crushed under the wheels of skeptical
and agnostic thought.
Not surprisingly, Muḥammad’s community, the Qurʾān tells us, wondered
about the signs. Just like Noah’s people, they wanted signs that he was indeed
a prophet, signs that related to their communal sense of judgement and corre-
sponded to what they already knew divine signs should look like. In short, they
needed a wonder to impress them, all of them, collectively:
‫ َأَْوْ ُيُ ْْلَقَى ِإَِلَ ْْي ِِه‬.‫ٌك َفََيَ ُُكوَنَ ََم ََعُه�ُ َنَ ِِذيًرًا‬ ُ ْ ِ ‫اِل َٰٰه� ََذا ٱل َّّرُس‬
ٌ َ‫نِز ََل ِإَِلَ ْْي ِِه ََمَل‬ ِ ‫ُوِل َيَْأ ُُك ُُل ٱلَّطّ ََعا ََم ََوَيَ ْْم ِِشى ِفِى ٱَأْل� َ ْْس ََو‬
ِ ‫اِقۙ ۙ َلَْوْ آآَل ُأ‬ ِ ‫وْا ََم‬ ْ ُ‫ََوَقَاُل‬
‫ ََك ْْن ٌٌز َأَْوْ َتَ ُُكوُنُ َلَُهُ ََجَّنٌّةٌ َيَْأْ ُُك ُُل ِِم ْْنَهَا ََوَقَا ََل الَّظاِلِ ُُموَنَ ِإِ ْْن َتََّتِّبُِعُوَنَ ِإِاَّلا ََر ُُجاًلا ََم ْْسُحُوًرًا‬.
ّ

They said “what is it with this ‘messenger” who eats food and walks in the markets?
Why is there no angel sent down for him to accompany him in warning? Or “why is
he not given a treasure or a garden [by his God] from which he eats?” And the unjust
ones said, “You are only following a possessed man.” (25:7–8).

To make these demands, the culture of pre-Islamic Mecca must have known about
the signs of Abraham, Moses, and Jesus. In their historical conceptual thinking,
if Muḥammad were indeed God’s prophet, where or what would his sign be? The
lives of prophets before him were loaded with divine signs, signs that the Qurʾān
itself triumphantly narrates. Moses enjoyed his share of the miraculous from the
day he was thrown into the river in a chest until the day he turned a staff into a
 The Qurʾān in Context    159

snake and split open the Red Sea. Jesus was a sign unto himself, from the immacu-
late birth to speaking in the cradle, to healing blindness and leprosy, to landing
a table full of food from the sky. In Muḥammad’s case, something else has hap-
pened. The scripture became the sign; the sign became the scripture, a divergence
from conventional understandings of prophethood, which Ibn Khaldūn cogently
characterizes as follows:
‫ وال يفتقر إلى دليل مغاير له كسائر‬،‫ فشاهده في عينه‬،‫ وهو الخارق المعجز‬،‫القرآن هو بنفسه الوحي المدعى‬
143
.‫ فهو أوضح داللة التحاد الدليل والمدلول فيه‬.‫المعجزات مع الوحي‬
The Qurʾān is itself the claimed revelation, itself the extraordinary and incapacitat-
ing sign; its witness is itself; it needs no proof outside itself as other miracles do with
revelation. It is the clearest sign of the union between the signifier and the signified.

It is impossible to know divine intentions, but this reflection by Ibn Khaldūn

reminds us how Muslims believe the Qurʾān not be a book in the same way, say,
the Bible is a book, a belief that does not diminish the sacredness of the latter. It
is just that, in Muslim faith, the Qurʾān is a book like Jesus is the messiah, the
incarnate word of God. It is the Iʿjāz (the miracle of linguistic inimitability and
incapacitation, per Ibn Khaldūn) that materializes and speaks itself, the word
that is at once the secret and its own raison d’être. But Ibn Khaldūn shies away
from answering the most pressing question: what exactly is Iʿjāz and how does it
present itself?

“B E F O R E YOU B L I N K ” : T H E R H E T O R IC O F I ʿ JĀ Z
I N SŪ R A- T- A L - NA M L ( 2 7 )

Sūra-t-al-Naml (27) ties āya/āyāt (miracle[s]/sign[s]) and ʿilm (knowledge)

together in a dynamic interaction between extraordinary phenomena and divine
knowledge. This interaction has its own semantic cycle within the verses of the
sūra, at times spiraling centrifugally outside of it, thus demonstrating the need for
intratextual and trans-sūra knowledge of the Qurʾān to understand the references.
For instance, the sūra does not mention what the nine signs of Moses are in fī tisʿi
āyātin ilá firʿawna wa qawmihi (in nine signs to pharaoh and his people, 27:12). In
monotheistic discourses, the relationship of a prophet to a miracle is like that of a
bird to its feather. One simply cannot exist without the other. The Arabic word for
miracle is muʿjiza, whose three consonants, ʿ/j/z, correspond at some level with
the Latin noun miraculum and the verb mirari, which means to “wonder at.” To be
sure, the Arabic word muʿjiza does not mean “miracle.” The verb aʿjaza means “to
make incapable, incapacitated, weak, disabled.” But its root suggests or rather
instills “wonder” precisely because muʿjiza refers to “being incapable” of meeting
the challenge by reproducing something similar to the Qurʾān. This “incapacity”
is also an act of Iʿjāz, which connotes impossibility and inimitability—namely,
that which humans can wonder at, admire with great astoundment, but that which
160    The Qurʾān in Context

they cannot mimic or reproduce. Sūra-t-al-Naml (27) enumerates the miracles of

several prophets (e.g., Moses, David, Solomon, Sāliḥ), all presented as a break with
the laws of nature. In the sūra, the word that describes the giving of the miracle is
the di-transitive Arabic verb ‫( آتينا‬we have given/provided someone with/ bestowed
upon someone), as in the following verse:
‫وَد ََو ُُسَلَ ْْي ََماَنَ ِِع ْْل ًًما‬
َ ‫ََوَلََقَ ْْد آَتَ ْْيَنَا َدَا ُُو‬
Indeed, we have bestowed knowledge upon David and Solomon. (27:15)
Like many sūras in the Qurʾān, Sūra-t-al-Naml offers no exception to the rule of
the miracle, except that the miracle of Muḥammad does not manifest itself in the
presentation of a marvelous act, but rather in the text of the Qurʾān itself, as an
extraordinary linguistic and rhetorical phenomenon. This does not prevent the
Qurʾān from speaking about the miracles of bygone prophets. These supernatural
acts are all performed, the Qurʾān confirms, under the knowledge and direction of
God, as miraculous proofs of his existence. Yet much of the credibility of miracle
narratives does depend, to use the words of David Hume, “on the truth of that
religion whose credibility they were first intended to support.”144 How, then, does
the credibility of the miracle narrative in the Qurʾān hold itself against the cred-
ibility of the Qurʾān as a miracle? What rhetorical tools does the Qurʾān employ,
to use Sūra-t-al-Naml as an example, to allow the audience to embrace both phe-
nomenality and textuality and to find a seamless parallelism between narratives of
past miracles and linguistic brilliance, between mountains commanded to repeat
prayers and a language perfected to speak that which is unsurpassable?
There are no easy answers to these questions. The root for Iʿjāz and muʿjiza is
the same in Arabic. The root is inextricably tied to the Qurʾān as both miracu-
lous and inimitable. The inimitability is tied to the very definition of āya (verse/
sign) and sūra, (a Qurʾānic chapter). The word sūra (pl. suwar) is Qurʾān-
specific. It denotes a group of āyāt (verses) that constitute textual units of vari-
ous lengths, such as Sūra-t-al-Naml, which consists of ninety-three āyāt (verses).
But the word āya also has the double meaning of a “Qurʾānic verse” and “a thing
of wonder.” In traditional Muslim exegesis, this understanding corresponds
to the concept that every āya is an āya—that is, that every verse of the Qurʾān,
from the smallest to the largest self-referential verbal/textual unit or verse of a
sūra, is itself a miracle. Although the word sūra does not appear in Sūra-t-al-
Naml, the reference to it is common in the middle and late Meccan periods,
and more prominently in the context of Āyāt al-Taḥaddī (Verses of Challenges),
where the Qurʾān dares its receiving audience and beyond to bring forth a tex-
tual unit similar to itself:
َ ‫ُوِن ِهَّللا� ِ ِإِن ُُكنُتُ ْْم‬
َ‫َصا ِِدِقِيَن‬ ْ ‫َأَ ْْم َيَُقُوُلُوَنَ ا ْْفَتَ ََراُهُ ُقُْلْ َفَْأُْتُوا ِبُِسُو ََر ٍٍة‬
ِ ‫ِّمّْثِلِ ِِه ََوا ْْدُعُوا ََم ِِن ا ْْسَتََطَ ْْعُتُم ِّمّ ن ُد‬
Or would they say, “he made it up,” say bring forth then a sūra like it, and call out to
whom you can other than God if you were telling the truth. (10:38).145
 The Qurʾān in Context    161

Readers of Sūra-t-al-Naml will notice that the word Qurʾān appears four times.
The first reference is at the outset of the sūra, which opens with the proclama-
tion that what is coming or what is to be witnessed and narrated are the words of
God—that is, the verses/signs of the Qurʾān—thus enveloping the reader/listener
within the realm of wonder:
‫يٍن‬
ٍ ِ‫ٍب ُُمِب‬ ِ ْ‫اُت ْاْلُقُْر‬
ٍ ‫آِن ََو ِِكَتَا‬ َ ‫طسۚ ۚ ِتِ ْْل‬
ُ َ‫َك آَي‬
ṬāSīn. These are the verses/signs of the Qurʾān and a clear scripture. (27:1)
In Sūra-t-al-Naml, the word Qurʾān asserts itself both as orality, or as “that
which has to be recited,” and as scripture. This synonymous apposition is a com-
mon duality throughout the Qurʾān, which I address in more detail shortly. The
second reference to Qurʾān comes in 27:6, immediately before a series of nar-
ratives on the miracles of prophets. In this particular āya, the Qurʾān addresses
Muḥammad in the second person, a shift in the method of narration and an
apostrophization that interpolates him, as a receiver of the oral Qurʾān from
God, within the domain of miracles. Note that the action of receiving the Qurʾān
is “passivized” in the verb la-tulaqqá (you are given/gifted) to confirm the divine
source of the revelation and to prevent assumptions of human authorship. The
same verse also repeats the divine attributes of ḥikma and ʿilm (wisdom and
knowledge), which are key to the thematic unity and unfolding of all miracles
in the sūra:
‫َك َلَُتَُلََّقّى ْاْلُقُْرْ آَنَ ِِم ْْن َلَُد ُْْن ََح ِِك ٍيٍم ََعِلِ ٍيٍم‬
َ ّ‫ََوِإَِّن‬
And indeed, you are receiving the Qurʾān from the all-wise and the all-knowing. (27:6)
From there, the Qurʾān’s self-reference takes a back seat and does not resurface in
the verses until the very end, specifically in 27:76, when all prophets’ miraculous
stories and feats are told. In so doing, 27:6 and 27:76 perform two simultaneous
functions: first, they create a totalizing enframement of such miracle narratives not
only by bracketing them but also by casting the Qurʾān within the import of
their mixtures. Secondly, they recast such miraculous narratives back to the pres-
ent moment of Muḥammad’s recitation of the Qurʾān, already established at the
beginning of the sūra in 27:1–6. This rhetorical act envelops the past of supernatu-
ral miracles within the present of the Qurʾān’s linguistic moment as a miracle to
its own audience. In this context, 27:76 refers to a certain audience, Banī Isrāʾil
(children of Israel) in the third person, presenting the Qurʾān as a clarifying nar-
rative, one that tells a “story” to the people of Israel, so to speak, to guide them
into an explanation of most of what they have disagreed on, thus casting Islam as
a continuity of the Mosaic covenant of monotheism:
َ ِ‫إَّنّ َٰٰه� ََذا ْاْلُقُْرْ آَنَ َيَُقُُّصّ ََعَلَ ٰٰى َبَِنِي ِإِ ْْس ََراِئ‬
ِ ِ‫يَل َأَ ْْكَثَ ََر اَّلّ ِِذي ُهُ ْْم ِف‬
َ‫يِه َيَ ْْخَتَِلُِفُوَن‬
Indeed, this Qurʾān explains to the children of Israel most of what they disagree on.
(27:76)
162    The Qurʾān in Context

The shift from Moses and the children of Israel to Muḥammad and his community
is neither sudden nor jarring in Sūra-t-al-Naml. It has been established that the
Qurʾān addresses a community familiar with both Judaism and Christianity. Like
Judaism, Quranic “monotheism” is antipolytheistic; it emphasizes the continuity
of monotheism, as the voice of God reminds Muḥammad of his primary assign-
ment as a prophet.146 The apostrophization of Muḥammad in the imperative verse
of 27:92 to proclaim the Qurʾān as the words of God and, by default, Muḥammad
himself as a prophet, makes it clear that his job is to tell his people he is com-
manded to worship God, to join all Muslims, to recite the Qurʾān, and to remem-
ber that he is only a warner. In Islam, as in Judaism, to recite is to mark the divine
word in the world, individually and publicly. The ritual of ‫( تالوة‬enunciating/
reciting) the Qurʾān is the form of shahāda (witness/testimony) that individual
and communal Muslims perform: it is their self-identification and the proclama-
tion of faith. It is thus fitting for Sūra-t-al-Naml to conclude as it begins, with āyāt,
thus rounding up and accentuating the divine significations of the Qurʾān as
signs/recitations—that is, as an act of reading that prompts the verbal performance
of the signs of God, a celebration of a miracle recognizable only to those who want
to listen and seek guidance:
ُ ْ‫َْي ٍٍءۖ ۖ ََوُأُ ِِمْر‬
َ‫ُت َأَ ْْن َأَ ُُكوَنَ ِِمَنَ ْاْل ُُم ْْسِلِ ِِميَن‬ ْ ‫ُت َأَ ْْن َأَ ْْعُبُ ََد ََرَّبّ َٰٰه� ِِذ ِِه ْاْلَبَ ْْل ََد ِِة اَّلّ ِِذي ََح َّّر ََمَهَا ََوَلَُهُ ُُكُّلّ َش‬ُ ْ‫ِإَِّنّ ََما ُأُ ِِمْر‬.
��‫ِهَّلِل‬ ْ ُ ْ ْ َ ّ ُ َ ‫ ََو ََم ْْن‬.‫ََوَأَ ْْن َأَ ْْتُلُ ََو ْاْلُقْرْ آَنَ ۖ ۖ َفَ ََم ِِن ا ْْهَتََد َٰٰى َفَِإَِّن ََما َيَ ْْهَتَ ِِدي ِلَِنَْف ِِس ِِه‬
ِ ‫ ََوُق ِِل اْل ََح ْْم ُُد‬. َ‫َض َّّل َفَُقْلْ ِإَِّن ََما َأَنَا ِِمَنَ اْل ُُمْن ِِذ ِِريَن‬ ْ ّ ُ
َ‫َك ِبَِغَاِفِ ٍٍل ََع َّّما َتَ ْْع ََمُلُوَن‬
َ ّ‫ِْرُفُوَنََهَاۚ ۚ ََو ََما ََرُّب‬ ِ ‫ ََسُي ُِِري ُُك ْْم آَيَاِتِ ِِه َفََتَْع‬.
I have been commanded to worship the God of this town who has made it sacred,
and to whom everything belongs, and I am commanded to be among Muslims and
to recite the Qurʾān. Whoever elects to be guided, this guidance will be for their
own benefit. Whoever goes astray, then say, “I am but a warner.” And say, “Praise be
to God! He will show you his signs so you would recognize them. And your God is
never unmindful of what you do. (27:91–93)

The four occurrences of the word Qurʾān in 27:1, 6, 76, and 92 are split even as
they bracket the miracle narratives of several prophets—notably Moses, David,
Solomon, Sāliḥ, and Lot. The first of these narratives describes Moses with clear
reference to the burning bush and the staff turning into a snake:
‫ َيَا ُُمو ََس ٰٰى ِإَِّنُّهُ َأََنَا ُهَّللا� ُ ْاْل ََع ِِزي ُُز‬. َ‫اِر ََو ََم ْْن َحَْوْ َلََهَا ََو ُُس ْْبَحَاَنَ ِهَّللا� ِ ََرِّبّ ْاْل ََعاَلَ ِِميَن‬
ِ ّ‫َك ََم ْْن ِفِي الَّن‬ ِ ‫َي َأَ ْْن ُب‬
َ ‫ُوِر‬ َ ‫َفََلَ َّّما ََجا ََءَهَا ُنُو ِِد‬
ّ ‫َْف ِإِِّنّي اَلا َيََخَاُفُ َلَ ََد‬
‫َّي‬ ْ ‫َكۚ ۚ َفََلَ َّّما ََرآَهَا َتَ ْْهَت َُّّز َكََأََّنَّهَا ََجاٌّنّ ََوَّلّ ٰٰى ُُم ْْدِبًِرًا ََوَلَ ْْم ُيُ ََعِّقّْبْ ۚ ۚ َيَا ُُمو ََس ٰٰى اَلا َتََخ‬
َ ‫َصا‬
َ ‫ِق ََع‬ِ ‫ ََوَأَ ْْل‬.‫يُم‬
ُ ‫ْاْل ََح ِِك‬
ْ
َ‫اْل ُُمْرْ ََسُلُوَن‬.
When he reached it, he was called “Blessed be the one at the fire and the one around
it. Glory be to God, the lord of the worlds. O Moses. It is I. I am God—the almighty,
the all-wise. Throw your staff.” When he saw it shaking like a snake, he ran off with-
out looking back. “O Moses, fear not. My messengers shall have no fear.” (27:8–10)

In the following narrative we find similar miraculous feats. But this time, the mir-
acle is not just given in a divine encounter, but bestowed in the form of a divine gift
 The Qurʾān in Context    163

of knowledge. In this case, God gives the gift of ‫( علم‬knowledge) to both David and
Solomon:
َ‫يٍر ِِم ْْن ِِعَبَا ِِد ِِه ْاْل ُُم ْْؤ ِِمِنِيَن‬ ّ َ‫وَد ََو ُُسَلَ ْْي ََماَنَ ِِع ْْل ًًماۖ ۖ ََوَقَااَلا ْاْل ََح ْْم ُُد ِهَّلِل�� ِ اَّلّ ِِذي َف‬
ٍ ِ‫َّضَلََنَا ََعَلَ ٰٰى ََكِث‬ َ ‫ََوَلََقَ ْْد آَتَ ْْيَنَا َدَا ُُو‬
Indeed, we have given knowledge to David and Solomon. And they said, “Praise be
to God who has favored us over many of his faithful servants.” (27:15)
Even though the word Qurʾān is absent in this verse, its semantic memory is
preserved in the verb ātaynā (we have given), which is often associated with the
indication that the scripture is a gift from God, as it is the case in God’s gifting
of the “book” to Moses,147 Jesus,148 and Muḥammad.149 In other words, the book—
the scripture that contains the words of God—is a gift no less miraculous than the
gift of learning how to speak to birds or to control the wind. This gift is manifest in
the package of knowledge gifted to Solomon with the strong emphasis on the act
of “giving” to specify that Solomon was taught—namely, that he was granted, from
God, the knowledge of the language of birds, ants, and the knowledge to gather an
army of birds, humans, and jinn:
ْ ‫َق الَّطّْي ِِْر ََوُأُوِتِيَنَا ِِم ْْن ُُكِّلّ َش‬
ُ‫َْي ٍٍءۖ ۖ ِإَِّنّ َٰٰه� ََذا َلَُهُ ََو ْاْلَفَْضْ ُُل ْاْل ُُمِبِيُن‬ ْ ‫وَدۖ ۖ ََوَقَا ََل َيَا َأَُّيَّهَا الَّنّاُسُ ُُع‬
َ ‫ِّلّْمَنَا ََم ْْن ِِط‬ َ ‫َث ُُسَلَ ْْي ََماُنُ َدَا ُُو‬ َ ‫ََو ََو ِِر‬
ْ َ‫ ََحَّتّ ٰٰى ِإِ ََذا َأََتَْوْ ا ََعَلَ ٰٰى ََوا ِِد الَّنّ ْْم ِِل َقَاَل‬. َ‫ِس ََوالَّطّْي ِِْر َفَُهُ ْْم ُيُو ََز ُُعوَن‬
‫ْت َنَ ْْمَلٌَةٌ َيَا‬ ِ ِ َ ِ ْ
‫ْن‬ �‫ِإْل‬ ‫ا‬ ‫َو‬ ّ‫ِّن‬‫ِج‬ ْ
‫اْل‬ َ‫َن‬ ‫ِم‬
ِ ُ ‫ُه‬ ُ
‫ُد‬ ‫و‬ ُ ‫ُن‬ ‫ُج‬
ُ َ‫اَن‬ ‫َم‬ ْ َ
َ ِ َ ‫ُِش‬
‫ْي‬ ‫َل‬ ‫ُس‬
ُ ‫ِل‬ ‫َر‬ ِ ‫ََوُح‬
َ‫َأَُّيَّهَا الَّنّ ْْم ُُل ا ْْد ُُخُلُوا ََم ََسا ِِكَنَ ُُك ْْم اَلا َيَْحْ ِِط ََمَّنّ ُُك ْْم ُُسَلَ ْْي ََماُنُ ََو ُُجُنُو ُُدُهُ ََوُهُ ْْم اَلا َيَ ْْش ُُعُرُوَن‬.
Then Solomon succeeded David and said, “O people! We have been taught the lan-
guage of birds, and given everything. This is indeed great grace.” Solomon’s army of
jinn, humans, and birds were rallied and perfectly organized for him. When they
came across the valley of ants, an ant said, “O ants! enter your dwellings lest Solomon
and his soldiers crush unaware.” (27:16–18)

The relationship between miracle and knowledge/learning continues to build up in

the incident of summoning the throne of the Queen of Sheba to Solomon’s court:
‫َك ِبِ ِِه َقَ ْْب ََل َأَ ْْن َتَُقُو ََم ِِم ْْن‬
َ ‫يٌت ِِمَنَ ْاْل ِِجِّنّ َأََنَا آِتِي‬ ٌ ‫ َقَا ََل ِِع ْْف ِِر‬. َ‫َقَا ََل َيَا َأَُّيَّهَا ْاْل ََمُأَل� ُ َأَُّيّ ُُك ْْم َيَْأِْتِيِنِي ِبِ ََعْرْ ِِشَهَا َقَ ْْب ََل َأَ ْْن َيَْأُْتُوِنِي ُُم ْْسِلِ ِِميَن‬
ُ‫ َفََلَ َّّما ََرآُه‬.َ‫َك َطَْرْ ُفَُك‬ َ ‫َك ِبِ ِِه َقَ ْْب ََل َأَ ْْن َيَْرْ َتَ َّّد ِإَِلَ ْْي‬
َ ‫ِب َأََنَا آِتِي‬
ِ ‫ َقَا ََل اَّلّ ِِذي ِِع ْْن ََدُهُ ِِع ْْل ٌٌم ِِمَنَ ْاْل ِِكَتَا‬. ٌ‫َك ََوِإِِّنّي ََعَلَ ْْي ِِه َلََقَ ِِوٌّيّ َأَ ِِميٌن‬ َ ‫ََمَقَا ِِم‬
‫ ََو ََم ْْن ََش ََك ََر َفَِإَِّنّ ََما َيَ ْْش ُُك ُُر ِلَِنَ ْْف ِِس ِِهۖ ۖ ََو ََم ْْن ََكَفَ ََر َفَِإَِّنّ ََرِّبّي‬.ُ‫ُُم ْْسَتَِقِ �ًّّرا ِِع ْْن ََدُهُ َقَا ََل َٰٰه� ََذا ِِم ْْن َفَْضْ ِِل ََرِّبّي ِلَِيَ ْْبُلُ ََوِنِي َأََأَ ْْش ُُك ُُر َأَ ْْم َأَ ْْكُفُُر‬
ِ ‫ ََغِنٌِّيّ َك‬.
‫َِري ٌٌم‬

He said, “O court! who can bring her throne to me before they come to me as Mus-
lims. An ʿifrīt from the jinn answered, “I will bring it to you before you rise from your
council, and I am strong enough and dependable for it.” The one who has knowledge
of the book said, “I will bring it to you before you blink.” So when he saw it steady
before him, he said, “This is from the grace of God to test me if I were to thank or
disbelieve. Whoever thanks, he thanks for his own benefit, and whoever disbelieves,
my God is indeed affluent and generous.” (27:38–40)

There are various interpretations of the contest to bring forth the throne of the
Queen of Sheba to Solomon. The word ʿifrīt appears only once in the Qurʾān. It
is therefore not clear if it is an adjective or a noun, though its syntactic position
164    The Qurʾān in Context

in the verse makes it the doer of the action. Here, the ʿifrīt is clearly identified as a
male or a masculine being from among the jinn who offered to bring the throne of
the Queen of Sheba to Solomon before the latter left his council-seat. It is unclear,
linguistically, if ʿifrīt refers to a ranking member or type among the jinn or if it is a
modifier referring to a specific, formidable jinn. In classical Arabic, the word ʿifrīt
denotes a cunning, vicious, and malicious creature. Furthermore, the other “being”
in Solomon’s council who counters the offer of the ʿifrīt is not mentioned by name,
but is referred to as “the one who has ʿilm’ (knowledge of/from) of the kitāb (book).
In exegetical sources, interpretations of who that one is have ranged from Solomon’s
scribe, Āṣif ibn Barkhiyā, to a deeply knowledgeable friend of Solomon, to Gabriel,
to even Solomon himself. What is clear in the sūra, however, is that because of this
divinely inspired act, this “being” who “has knowledge of the book” is able to bring
forth the throne of the Queen of Sheba before Solomon blinked.
But whether it takes a few hours or the blink of an eye, the act of brining the
throne of the Queen of Sheba would still be a miraculous superhuman feat given
that Solomon was historically positioned in modern-day Syria and the Queen of
Sheba resided in Yemen, separated by hundreds of miles. Is it, then, a contest
of language, of bayān, of the perfection of speech? Or is it about saying it more
aesthetically, or is it a contest of speed and a competition in miraculous compe-
tencies? We will never know. What we do know is that the Qurʾān gives a speech-
act, a supersonic actualization of thought on the spot as a manifestation of such a
miracle. Interestingly enough, this miracle is tied to something else, without which
it would seem that it won’t be realized, and that is the ʿilm min al-kitāb (knowl-
edge of/from the book/scripture). There is therefore a strong affinity between ʿilm
and kitāb in Sūra-t-al-Naml, a connection that bridges the phenomenological and
metaphysical and ties them together in the realm of the miracle.
Variations on the root ʿilm appear eleven times throughout the sūra, mostly
tied to āyāt as verses, signs, demonstrations, and miracles. The word āyāt, appear-
ing ten times in the sūra with varying semantic references, has a binary intercon-
nection with kitāb. An interactive semantic interlocution of the four words āyāt,
ʿilm, Qurʾān and kitāb is formed throughout Sūra-t-al-Naml, as the definition of
each word is interdependent on the others. But the word that rounds it all off is
āyāt, the keyword at the outset of the sūra, the grammatical khabar (predicate) of
its very beginning:
‫يٍن‬
ٍ ِ‫ٍب ُُمِب‬ ِ ْ‫اُت ْاْلُقُْر‬
ٍ ‫آِن ََو ِِكَتَا‬ َ ‫طسۚ ۚ ِتِ ْْل‬
ُ َ‫َك آَي‬
ṬāSīn. These are the verses/signs/revelations of the Qurʾān and a clear book. (27:1)
The predicate āyāt is modified by the genitive case of āyāt al-kitāb (verses/signs
of the book) and the adjectival noun phrase conjunction of kitāb mubīn (and a
clear book/script). This modification will eventually culminate in a hierarchy of
complex miraculous narratives: we first have the miracles of Moses, followed by
those of Solomon, then Sāliḥ, then Lot, as monotheistic prophets receiving the gift
 The Qurʾān in Context    165

of extraordinariness. On a distinctly similar level, but nevertheless miraculous, we

find the Qurʾān. The opening of Sūra-t-al-Naml thus eloquently predicts and con-
nects its own trajectory to the miraculous. Note that āyāt could also be translated
into English as an appositive to the Qurʾān itself, although I haven’t seen it done
yet, and could make the opening of the sūra read as: “These are the verses of the
Qurʾān, a clear book,” because in Arabic grammar the comma often replaces
the ‫( و‬wa, and) connector, thus affirming not only the semantic synonymity of the
Qurʾān as a book and of the book as the Qurʾān, but more importantly its miracu-
lous nature. In this sense, the indefinite noun phrase kitāb mubīn (a clear book) in
27:1 could itself be an appositive to āyāt al-Qurʼān (the signs/verses/revelations of
the Qurʾān), a synonymous relationship that is frequent in the Qurʾān, and a good
case where Arabic grammar is a prerequisite for Qurʾānic exegesis.150
While synonymous, kitāb and Qurʾān are not identical, especially not in Sūra-
t-al-Naml where the referent kitāb assumes various semantic functions and cre-
ates effective paronomasia. For example, in 27:28–29, the kitāb Solomon writes and
commissions the hoopoe to bring to the Queen of Sheba is a brief letter, perhaps
small enough to be flown by a hoopoe, assuming that the hoopoe is of a similar size
to the current species. Qurʾān 27:75 makes references to yet another kitāb—namely,
a book that keeps the records and knowledge of everything, known and unknown,
in heaven and earth, which could be a possible reference to al-Lawḥ al-Maḥfūẓ (the
Preserved Tablet) in the realm of the divine that has record of all creation:

‫يٍن‬
ٍ ِ‫ٍب ُّمُِب‬ ِ ْ‫ََو ََما ِِم ْْن َغَاِئَِبَ ٍٍة ِفِي الَّسَ ََماء ََواَألَْر‬
ٍ ‫ِض ِإَِّالَ ِفِي ِِكَتَا‬

There is nothing unseen/hidden/imperceptible in heaven or the earth without [it]

being in a clear book. (27:75)

It is worth noting that a variation on the root of Islam in the word muslimīn
(Muslims/adherents of Islam) appears five times in the sūra, three of which occur
in the context of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Solomon’s letter to the Queen
of Sheba begins with: bi-sm Allāh al-Raḥmān al-Raḥīm (in the name of God the
most merciful, the most compassionate), thus signaling the first and only time
the customary Muslim basmala occurs inside the text of the Qurʾān.151 The seman-
tic effect of this occurrence serves yet as another rhetorical connector approxi-
mating the phenomenological miracles of Solomon with the linguistic miracle of
the Qurʾān. Whereas some might see in the act of Sheba’s “submission” to God a
curious ambiguity,152 the word muslimīn, which defines this very submission as the
core of Islam—linguistically, semantically, and physically—is itself tied function-
ally to the message of the kitāb (Solomon’s letter to the Queen of Sheba), which
consists of six precise Arabic words:
َ‫َأََّالَ َتَ ْْعُلُوا ََعَلََّيَ ََو ْْأُتُوِنِي ُُم ْْسِلِ ِِميَن‬

Do not feel superior to me, but come to me as Muslims. (27:31)

166    The Qurʾān in Context

And which he reiterates in the following verse:

َ‫ُّيُُك ْْم َيَْأِْتِيِنِي ِبِ ََعْرْ ِِشَهَا َقَ ْْب ََل َأَن َيَْأُْتُوِنِي ُُم ْْسِلِ ِِميَن‬
ُ َ‫َقَا ََل َيَا َأَُّيَُهَا ْاْل ََمُأَل� ُ َأ‬
He said, “O court! Who can bring her throne to me before they come to me as
Muslims” (27:38)
And which he also emphasizes upon the Queen of Sheba’s arrival to his palace,
witnessing the marvel of transferring her throne:
‫ْت َكََأََّنَُهُ ُهُ ََو ََوُأُوِتِيَنَا ْاْل ِِع ْْل ََم ِِمن َقَ ْْبِلَِهَا ََوُكَُّنَا ُُم ْْسِلِ ِِمين‬
ْ َ‫يَل َأََهَ ََك ََذا َعَْرْ ُُش ِِك َقَاَل‬ ْ ‫َفََلََّمَ ا ََجا ََء‬
َ ِ‫ْت ِق‬
So when she came, she was asked, “Does your throne look like this?” She said, “It is as
if this is my throne.” We have indeed been given knowledge before this [miraculous
act] and we have already been Muslims. (27:42)

And upon which she finally submits with Solomon to God:

َ‫ُت ََم ََع ُُسَلَ ْْي ََماَنَ ِهَّلِل�� ِ ََرِّبِ ْاْل ََعاَلَ ِِميَن‬
ُ ‫ُت َنَ ْْف ِِسي ََوَأَ ْْسَلَ ْْم‬ ْ َ‫َقَاَل‬
ُ ‫ْت ََرِّبِ ِإِِّنِي َظََلَ ْْم‬
She said, “My God, I have done myself wrong, and have become Muslim with Solo-
mon before God, lord of the worlds.” (27:44)
Here the referent aslamtu (I have submitted to the will of God/ I have become Mus-
lim) creates a linguistic atavism for the call for Islam—the religion of Muḥammad—
by granting it historical validity. In other words, Islam is as old as this world; it has
already happened, not just in the Meccan period in which Muḥammad is reciting
the new textual miracle—that is, the Qurʾān or al-kitāb—but in the far off days
of Solomon. Calling the Qurʾān kitāb is not just a sign that the latter is different
from other texts existing in Arabia during the time of Muḥammad. To be sure,
the Qurʾān is the first complete text ever to be written down in the history of the
Arabic language, notwithstanding the writings of the Muʿallaqāt and the hanging
of them on the walls of the Kaaba in pre-Islamic Mecca. In the Arabic-speaking
world, the writing of the Qurʾān thus constitutes a decisive moment of transition
from a preliterate society to a society of the book. Recall that the Qurʾān refers to
Christians and Jews as Ahl al Kitāb (People of the Book), a term that often casts
itself against al-ummiyyīn (nonscriptural/gentile communities), which includes
Arab polytheists. The Qurʾān as kitāb distinguishes itself from the Arabian culture
of polytheism but also from the scriptures of the People of the Book by assert-
ing itself as Kitāb ʿArabiyyin or bi-lisānin ʿArabiyyin mubīn (an Arabic scripture/a
scripture in a clear Arabic tongue). This distinction is important because it sig-
nifies the function of the Qurʾān text in the framework of its own social envi-
ronment as an important marker of the transition from a preliterate to a literate
society. To this effect, G. E. von Grunebaum contends that “by giving the Arabs a
book, God elevated them to the rank of the other scripturaries; by giving them the
final revelation of the Koran He lifted them above the others. Since the Hellenistic
period the possession of a revealed book had been the mark of most new religious
groups. In Muḥammad’s world the primitive polytheist lacked this distinction.”153
 The Qurʾān in Context    167

Furthermore, primitive polytheists, to extend von Grunebaum’s point, lacked the

rebuttal to the persistent and enduring rhetorical challenge that had become more
prominent from the middle Meccan period onward. Verse 27:81 testifies to this
challenge by stating that the words of God will only appeal to those who want to
believe and embrace Islam, like Solomon, Sheba, and her people:
َ ‫ََو ََما َأَنَتَ ِبَِهَا ِِدي ْاْل ُُع ْْم ِِي َعَن‬
ْ ‫َضالَلَِتِ ِِه ْْم ِإِن ُتُ ْْس ِِم ُُع ِإَِّالَ ََمن ُي ُْْؤ ِِمُنُ ِبِآَيَاِتَِنَا َفَُهُم‬
َ‫ُّمُْسِلِ ُُموَن‬
Nor can you guide the blind out of their misdirection. Only those who believe in our
signs will hear you, for they are Muslims. (27:81)
Thus, the confirmation to Muḥammad that the signs of God are available to those
who are willing to listen makes the act of listening to the Qurʾān a central gateway
to faith. But why is this background important for the list of miracles in Sūra-t-al-
Naml? Because whenever the word āyāt is mentioned, the syntax and the rhetoric
of the sūra tie themselves into one single knot that captures the process of under-
standing the Qurʾān as a miracle. It also serves as a reminder of why and how
these narratives are integrated in a contextual and rhetorical system of a language
that asserts itself regardless of historical revisionism. In the Islamic tradition, the
relationship between the text and its immediate culture is predicated on what such
culture understands divinity to be. Divinity is attached to miraculous acts in a
manner that surpasses the epistemological limits of such cultures. Addressing
the rhetorical miracle of the Qurʾān, al-Zarkashī, perhaps guided by a hint from
al-Jāḥiẓ, makes the following statement:
‫ ويخفى وجهها في مواضع لقصورنا عن مرتبة العرب يومئذ في سالمة‬،‫ونحن تتبين لنا البراعة في أكثره‬
‫ وقامت الحجة على العالم بالعرب إذ كانوا أرباب الفصاحة ومظنة‬.‫الذوق وجودة القريحة وميز الكالم‬
‫ فإن هللا تعالى إنما جعل‬،‫ كما قامت الحجة في معجزة عيسى باألطباء وفي موسى بالسحرة‬،‫المعارضة‬
‫ فكان السحر في مدة موسى‬،‫معجزات األنبياء بالوجه الشهير أبرع ما تكون في زمن النبي الذى أراد إظهاره‬
154
.‫ والفصاحة في مدة محمد‬،‫ وكذا الطب في زمان عيسى‬،‫قد انتهى إلى غايته‬
We witness this linguistic brilliance in most of it [the Qurʾān], and we miss some
owing to our lack of the degree of Arabicity which the bygone Arabs attained in the
soundness of taste, the eminence of poetic talent, and the excellence of speech.
The Qurʾān’s defiance of the world thus materialized through these ancient Arabs,
precisely because they were the ultimate masters of eloquence and the most qualified
among all humans to produce an Arabic parody of the Qurʾān if they could, just as
divine defiance targeted physicians in the time of Jesus and magicians in the time of
Moses. God exacts miracles in a manner that outdoes the best of what people have in
the eras of their respective prophets. Magic reached its zenith in the time of Moses, as
did medicine in a time of Jesus, and linguistic eloquence in the time of Muḥammad.
Whether one agrees with al-Zarkashī’s premises or with his definition of the mir-
acle as a socially tailored act or not, Sūra-t-al-Naml in particular, and the Qurʾān
in general, brings together, linguistically, figuratively, and rhetorically these wide-
spread narratives in order to tie them neatly into semantic connectors with an
overarching thematic unit, creating what Kermani describes as “an aesthetic proof
168    The Qurʾān in Context

of a religion’s truth.”155 Whether or not the goal is to defy the Arabs of Muḥammad’s
time with an oral account that they can marvel at but not reproduce, what stands
before us now is a kitāb seeking to persuade its audience that what granted the staff
to Moses, what bestowed the special ʿilm on Solomon, what destroyed the people
of Thamūd, and what obliterated the people of Lot, is the same spirit that sent
down the Qurʾān and trusted an inimitable scripture to the heart of an ummī man.
This close reading of Sūra-t-al-Naml shows that one can find in the Qurʾān
rhetorical continuities that are seamlessly consistent and articulate. Somewhere in
between, at the interface of all these miracle narratives, the word Qurʾān comes
to embody this very consistency. And even if it only occurs four times in the sūra,
its carefully placed occurrences, together with the atavistic reference to “Islam” as
a future in the past and a past in the future, allows for a mode of discourse to take
place within a concatenation of prophetic narratives that can no longer be sepa-
rated from the present time of tanzīl. This mode of discourse would become even
more discernable if, instead of focusing on whether the Qurʾān got the biblical
story of Solomon “right” or not, we delved into the intricate aesthetics and rhe-
torical structures that scaffold the Qurʾān’s narrative, thereby revealing the text’s
profound depth and nuance.
Appropriately enough, European academics have always responded to linguis-
tic and figural complexities of this kind in their respective national literatures, and,
understandably in cases of disagreement, they conveyed their points in ethical
and civil terms. It would be absurd to believe that one could ever fully exhaust the
rhetorical or aesthetic aspects of the Qurʾān. But it would be even more absurd to
think that one can avoid doing so by adopting a method insensitive to the most
obvious features of the text. Even if one has to read only Sūra-t-al-Naml in the
Qurʾān, it is easy to see that much of its investment is in building an architectural
mapping of monotheism, which, if taken as a whole, would offer a way of inter-
preting the world. But this very mapping is produced in admirable figurations
and linguistic features, which should in turn trigger curious questions: What is
the meaning of this unique act of storytelling and of all such extraordinary events
that are inexplicable by the laws of physics? What is the story of monotheism?
What message does it convey? How did its journey begin, and why? Such ques-
tions would lead to the conclusion that Sūra-t-al-Naml is itself a fragment of a
larger narrative, or that monotheism, or even the archetypal structuration of
prophetic advocacy for the one God across human time, is itself a piece of a larger
puzzle, a space between memory and history, and a charted course that somehow
wants to interpolate us within its sphere. What connections do we have to such
fragmented narratives that make us defend one version of monotheism against
the other, or perceive them as parts of an existential puzzle, one that we feel autho-
rized to piece together complete, or simply dismiss? It is not easy to find satisfy-
ing answers to these questions. At the very least, for the seasoned Arabist, the
 The Qurʾān in Context    169

undeniable elegance and the commanding presence of the Qurʾān’s language are
far more compelling than the myriad questions its verses may invoke.
To conclude, these four modes—the cosmic point of view, the dissociation
from poetry, the (dis)continuity of the monotheistic idea, and the quality of its
linguistic miracle—are only parts of the larger system that constitutes the Qurʾān’s
unique and authoritative eloquence. Together, they reveal the existential position-
ing of prophets as human subjects, the experience of daily life, the social habits
of the first Muslim community, the countering of the nomadic “point of view” of
pre-Islamic poetry with a cosmic one, and the Qurʾān’s distinct structure for the
production of meaning. And even though it has now become one of the most
global and most deterritorialized of all books of faith, the Qurʾān’s local context
will always remain the anchor of its oral character and the mark of its rhetori-
cal singularity. A critical method seeking to place it within the grand narrative
of world history will necessarily have to respect its complex Arabicity and envi-
sion new methods to do it justice. The argument for the Qurʾān’s distinctiveness
in what has now become the patented ideological space of late antiquity will
depend largely on the future methodological enrichment of the field of Qurʾānic
studies. This pursuit transcends academic curiosity; it is a critical venture with far-
reaching political ramifications, as it essentially contributes to shaping the narra-
tive and direction of a global religion within the very forums of our contemporary
and future academic discourses.
 Conclusion
The Future of Qurʾānic Studies

At the outset of this study, I suggested that pre-Islamic Arabic literature, rather
than the category of late antiquity, is the most effective way of approaching and
understanding the Qurʾān. I then tried to demonstrate that pre-Islamic Arabic
thought and culture are “symbolic,” both aesthetically and socially, of the foremost
exception that is the Qurʾān itself, a scripture that both reflects and eclipses its own
contemporary historical setting. Over the course of this book’s chapters, I have
taken this argument one step further. I have tried to demonstrate that whereas pre-
Islamic poetry represents poetic discourse turned into a socio-aesthetic space, the
Qurʾān represents aesthetic discourse turned against itself. On a pragmatic level,
this distinction does not seem substantial. Both discourses, after all, end up as
social-political aesthetics. However, what the transformative power of the Qurʾān
has introduced to the field of aesthetics, that the transformative sovereignty
of poetry into socio-aesthetics could not, is a much more profound integration of
social and aesthetic categories than has ever been witnessed before in the entire
history of the Arabo-Islamic world.
This is no small feat. For this reason, it has been important for me, and as I
assume for all global readers alike, to redirect the course of Qurʾānic studies in the
Euro-American academy. I did so by interrogating Euro-American scholarship’s
reliance on the historical-critical method, a method that fulfills the path of biblical
criticism by treating the Qurʾān as a footnote to such history. To this day, most
Euro-American scholarship on the Qurʾān operates from within an epistemologi-
cal framework that presupposes such a primary biblical “intertext” (a new euphe-
mism for “influence” or “borrowing”).1 By taking the immediate prehistory of the
Qurʾān out of this equation, this predominant approach clings only to a method
of interpreting the text from the theoretical end tail of extrapeninsular sources,
171
172    Conclusion

leaving behind the story of the Qurʾān’s Arabicity, its internal dialogues and con-
versations with its immediate pre-Islamic culture, and the local literary and socio-
economic contexts associated with its age. Geert Jan van Gelder, whose estimable
work on pre-Islamic Arabic “respects the Muslim tradition” and expresses hopes
that “enlightened Muslims” would be able to address the extraordinary literariness
of the Qurʾān, does not fail to underscore the necessity of a series engagement
with pre-Islamic Arabic poetry.2
In this spirit, the guiding principle of this study has been to let the Qurʾān
speak for itself, and to let it make its own statement, in its own distinct way,
through its own language, images, narratives, and themes. Readers of and listen-
ers to the Qurʾān in its original Arabic would realize how inviting the freedom
and open-endedness of its figural ingenuity is. The Qurʾān proclaims its differ-
ence from poetry, and it retains within its own text the evidence of its difference.
To argue that the Qurʾān reflects the context of its age is neither new nor, for
the most part, contestable, but it is nonetheless an argument that continues to
be understudied.
This book has engaged directly with this literariness and and has offered a rhe-
torical, literary, and linguistic reading of the two discourses of pre-Islamic poetry
and the Qurʾān. It has focused on the aesthetic potential of the Arabic language, as
well as on the autonomous possibilities of its significations in both discourses. As
far as the comparison between pre-Islamic poetry and the Qurʾān is concerned,
the truth that interests a literary critic is not of the order of broad categorizations
or sweeping generalities. As I have sought to demonstrate, a literary reading is
skeptical of the bulldozering and levelling that a historical categorization makes,
and of all similarities that it must construct to justify its own status. Yet such a
reading remains concerned with a specific reality, and because this reality goes
as far as to question the validity of broad historical categorizations, it chooses to
stand outside the comfy blanket of late antiquity, which paints everything “as a
night,” to recall Hegel, “in which all cows are black.”3 The method this study calls
for does not yield to the historical imperative of one size that fits all.
While I steer away from hankering after origins and histories of texts, I focus on
the language, aesthetics, ethics, individuals, and communities associated with the
primary texts of seventh-century Arabia. My main objective is to open new hori-
zons in the field of Qurʾānic studies. There is a definition of Islam in relationship
to late antiquity that views the Qurʾān as organic, and not necessarily advocating
for the abandonment of its native soil in favor of “out-sourcing.” Thomas Sizgorich
offers this position by stating that “the birth and early growth of the Muslim com-
munity within a late antique cultural milieu did nothing to undermine the evolu-
tion of a distinctively Islamic cultural tradition. Rather, the tradition begun within
that milieu would prove so powerful as to recast ancient signs and symbols as
uniquely its own.”4
 Conclusion    173

Sizgorich’s statement reminds us that historical traditions cannot be reduced to

texts. However, when a text becomes the main concern of a certain brand of histo-
rians, it follows that its very history will only be made available through a serious
and direct engagement with its form and content. In fact, it was only two hundred
years ago, in the long aftermath of Europe’s scientific revolution, that the notion of
discovering a truth behind the past through a “scientific method” became the pre-
occupation of history. In Europe, the birthplace of the historical-critical method,
the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries witnessed the
academic rise of revisionism, with an agenda that Frederick Beiser aptly describes
as “simple but ambitious: to legitimate history as a science. Its aim was to show
what makes history a science. All the thinkers in the historicist tradition . . . wanted
to justify the scientific status of history. They used ‘science’ in a broad sense of that
term corresponding to the German word ‘Wissenschaft,’ that is, some methodical
means of acquiring knowledge.”5 I address this issue elsewhere, but suffice it here
to say that the move toward the “scientification” of history as a discipline is akin to
the polarization we witness nowadays in the university, where the humanities are
perceived as providing lesser market value than STEM research.6
In its Abrahamic version, a history of monotheism means for scholars of the
Qurʾān and late antiquity that there is an intended execution of the original idea,
a continuity thesis of Old Testament monotheism. When it comes to the Qurʾān, this
continuity thesis has come to mean, or rather necessitate, the historical formation of
an order of divination that is structurally identical, or at least substantially similar,
to the original order of such divine history. There is truth to this claim. So, when
Neuwirth states that “in its eschatological parts, the Qurʾān comes distinctively
close to biblical prophet speech, although the great visions of the biblical prophets
have come to be replaced by the short sura-introducing tableaux of the oath series,”7
she advances the argument that divine history (scripted divine history, that is) is an
order of calculated repetitions, not of voluntary or original spontaneity, and that the
only changes are more or less technical, designed to “orient themselves stylistically
to the ancient Arabic models of the seer speech.”8 Neuwirth further contends that
apocalyptic visions “such as that of the ‘valley of the rotting bones’ in Ezekiel 37 have
their Qurʾānic counterpart in the oath of Q. 100:1–5 on the suddenness of the awak-
ening, or Q. 82:1–5 on the loosing [sic] of the cosmos.”9 She maintains for the Qurʾān
what Daniel Weidner says of the Bible—namely, that “it is speech performance in the
most eminent sense of the word, performance with apocalyptic power.”10 In this par-
ticular instance, she effectively demonstrates the parallels between the Bible and the
Qurʾān and confirms, perhaps with a hint from Stefan Sperl and James Kugel, that
“just as in the Bible, in the Qurʾān context the speech owes its impressing power to
poetic strategies—an immanent potential for conflict—which in both cases requires
a demarcation between prophecy and poetry, which in the case of the Qurʾān already
occurred during the genesis of the text itself.”11
174    Conclusion

This is how Neuwirth makes a powerful case for Islam as a “shared tradition”
of late antiquity. For her intended audience, Neuwirth’s argument is considered a
revolutionary academic venture, coming a time when Europe has grown so scho-
lastically accustomed to alienating and distancing itself from Islam and Muslims.
Armed with her penetrative expertise in biblical criticism, Neuwirth proves that
Islam has been misunderstood and treated as the other of Europe, whereas it is
indeed part of Europe’s own inherited theological history. This is perhaps the best
and most sophisticated retooling of late antiquity as a bridge between a highly
appreciated period that led to the very idea and foundation of Western Europe and
the less historical appreciated ramifications of the period. Neuwirth’s approach
responds effectively to a current crisis in modern and contemporary political
thought in Germany and a timely call for de-exoticizing and de-othering Islam,
asking the question, “gehört der Islam zu Deutschland/Europa?” (does Islam
belong to Germany/Europe?).
But to retool late antiquity this way blankets, rather than levels, the variegated
histories of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in Europe, Africa, and Asia.12 In fact,
while “sameness” implies “repetition,” at least theoretically and, to some extent,
monotheistically, in accord with the Abrahamic tradition, one must not, in prac-
tice, ignore the differences. Reading the Qurʾān with biblical eyes, or searching for
the Bible in the Qurʾān, one is conditioned to spot only “similarities” and hence
derivativeness—variations on an original theme. Academically, at least, the his-
torical sources of this issue lie clearly in a centralized Old-Testamentism that has
shaped Euro-American scholarship on the Qurʾān since the nineteenth century.
Repetition is an attractive idea, and it insightfully facilitates Neuwirth’s inclusion
of the Qurʾān in the ancient cycles of biblical history. But one must also learn to
see, and accept, the differences and diversities of the Qurʾānic text. The Qurʾān
includes alternative themes, ideas, commentaries, references, inversions, sub-
versions, and interpretations that must not be lost in the macrocosm of the late
antique debate. In addition to its similar attachment to a monotheistic ideal, the
Qurʾān remains a document of alterity with intricate microlinguistic significations
and with “inside” references and subtleties that will be lost if read only as part of
the complex continuum of a terra incognita. It certainly does include staggering
fragments of language and dehistorized arrangements of sūras that may appear
“illogical” to Western eyes.13 But to “rationalize” it and reduce it to a category that
makes it look like an end product of late antique biblical history repeats the same
vicious circle of othering by a different name.
One would thus hope that future scholarship on the Qurʾān would regard it
with Brechtian eyes, as a Verfremdungseffekt, a distancing or estrangement effect,
precisely because it emerged in and engaged with a distinct linguistic tradition.
This estrangement effect serves two important functions. First, it ultimately allows
for more nuanced appreciations not only of the diverse literariness and language
of the text—or what we might call the aesthetics of the text—but also of the text
 Conclusion    175

itself as different, which we might call the ethics of reading the text. Second, it will
make us more aware of the extent to which a consistent and methodical ideol-
ogy has dictated its conceptual limitations on ethical and aesthetic judgments of
the celebrated tradition of another culture, imposing them on academic curricula,
and continuing to project erroneous simulations of Islam’s history—which is obvi-
ously one of the “privileges” through which Euro-American academe has access to
history itself.
When we recall that the language of the Qurʾān rivaled poetry as a new dis-
course of aesthetic power and that conventional tafsīr accounts relied fundamen-
tally on the language of pre-Islamic poetry to explicate the Qurʾān and that without
it no exegesis or translation of would have been possible, it becomes difficult to
ignore the fact that the absence of pre-Islamic Arabic from current academic
debates betrays a deeper contradiction in terms, leaving a gaping lacuna in the
Western academy of Qurʾānic studies. It is not without a valid reason that Amīn
al-Khūlī, a towering Arabist, philologist, and rhetorician of the last century, would
describe the Qurʾān as kitāb al-ʿArabīyya al-aqdar wa-atharuhā al-fannī al-aqdas
(the greatest book of the Arabic language and its most revered literary heritage).14
This testimony is not surprising given that the Qurʾān is by far the most sig-
nificant literary text of the Arabic language, even more compelling than other
texts centuries before or after. In part, this may explain the rush in late antique
scholarship to “include” it in its periodization, with the insistence that the Qurʾān
is ultimately “homiletic” in character and “belonging to” (euphemism for “deriva-
tive of ”) an ancient genre that flourished in the late antique world writ large.15
Yet, a literary-linguistic approach to the Qurʾān from within the context of its
own Arabicity reveals that this so-called “scientific” method of interpreting the
Qurʾān from the lens of the historical-critical method is neither emancipatory
nor inclusive, but is at best a Eurocentric orchestration of the Old Testament’s
avowal of origins.
Viewing late antiquity as a new avenue for escaping the entrenched hierarchy
in academic discourse offers hope. It suggests that embracing Islam within this
framework could offer the most timely and considerate approach yet for address-
ing Eurocentrism in Qurʾānic studies and the broader academic world, thanks
to its potential to explore similarities and connections between Judaism, Chris-
tianity, and Islam. However, this approach is fundamentally flawed, as it merely
provides a partial resolution. It not only overlooks the specific historical context
and diversity of the Qurʾān; it also portrays a Judeo-Christian world that appears
static and unmoved in its own textuality, disregarding the significant historical
evolutions of these texts and of the Qurʾān itself. This perspective recurrently
adopts a negative analogy of the Qurʾān, relying on a methodology grounded
in derivative thought rather than the much needed positive analogy that would
acknowledge the Qurʾān both as a product of its era and as a transformative force
within the monotheistic tradition.
176    Conclusion

A positive analogy would in fact put the Qurʾān into its own immediate mise
en scène, allowing it be the document of history that it is, noticing that it is a
commentary on biblical history that lends itself easily to a comparison between
seemingly incompatible versions of divine narratives. As a result of this compari-
son, the Qurʾān points out affinities, allusions, equivalences, and resemblances
among preceding prophetic narratives whether recurring in the Qurʾānic text or
acknowledged without inclusion;16 more importantly, however, it also draws dis-
tinctions between narratives that are, in fact, comparable, but whose comparabil-
ity subscribes to certain terms—for example, sociohistorical conditions and power
relations in seventh-century Hijaz, rather than just the thin linearity of an origin
and its replica.
Yet the law of Eurocentrism has always been a law of an original versus a copy,
not the acknowledgement of difference as authority, but the dissolution of this
authority into an “inclusive” act of hierarchical referentiality. It is not at all dif-
ficult to amass a series of passages from the Qurʾān that are analogous to biblical
and para-biblical traditions.17 The reason for this is obvious: the Qurʾān does not
disavow its relationship to Judaism and Christianity. On the contrary, the Qurʾān
embraces this relationship and demonstrates deep interest in and familiarity with
narratives and ethical traditions of communities from which both Judaism and
Christianity originated. Yet the Qurʾān unequivocally discards claims of “influ-
ence” under any name. As is evident from the academic training of numerous
Euro-American scholarships on the Qurʾān over the span of the last fifty years,18
methodological approaches to the Qurʾān and late antiquity originate primarily in
the historical-critical method of Bible interpretation. However, it remains inexpli-
cably reductionist to approach the Qurʾān as the sum of its biblical narratives and
themes, especially when these narratives serve as only one component of its over-
all constitutive totality. Even on occasions when the Qurʾān addresses prophetic
miracles, it does so in a manner that is at once relatable to and different from the
Old Testament, focusing more on episodic interlacing of such stories (to serve a
higher moral lesson and affirm a monotheistic continuum) than on presenting
each story as a sequential historical plot with a beginning, middle, and end, except
perhaps for the story of Joseph (12). This progressive dehistoricized consciousness
embraces a condition of admonishment where historical time is set right up to the
moment in which the Qurʾān answers to it. Precisely by doing so, the lesson drawn
from prophetic stories across human time is itself the transforming critique of
human history.19 In other words, the Qurʾān proclaims that it neither invents nor
originates monotheism, but functions, rather, as an endorsement of its existence
throughout time since creation.
In every context, the Qurʾān confirms divine justice as an inalienable attribute of
divinity. God, who occupies half the space of the Qurʾān, is not in the business
of abandoning humanity, the Qurʾān tells us, but is keen on sending prophets
and signs to every community and nation.20 Prophetic narratives recited in the
 Conclusion    177

Qurʾān are themselves symbolic of this overarching divine justice. It therefore

matters significantly that we position the Qurʾān within seventh-century Arabia,
among communities with a massive appetite for language and for gods. Otherwise,
it would be practically impossible to envisage the Qurʾān emerging outside this
backdrop of literary aesthetics and theistic ethics. It is precisely inside this local
context that the Qurʾān ascertains its theistic and linguistic triumph in the face of
historical determinacy.21 What does not simply rehash older patterns and narra-
tives is itself historically signifying, at least in accordance with Karl Marx’s remark
that each era completes only the tasks assigned to it.22
While the argument for a superhuman prophetic narrative in the Qurʾān—or
for the Qurʾān itself as an extraordinary linguistic phenomenon—may fall flat in
a secular postreligious world, a world in which many of us can be found on our
phones rather than reading poems, studying languages with “strange” alphabets, or
reading arcane poetry, one must not rush to the conclusion that the extraordinary is
not part of our world, or that the fantastic does not take place in our lived reality.
It is just that its impact on our shared humanity may well be too close for comfort.
In this context, what must be historically recorded—and what must not get lost in
translation—is that the Qurʾān remains the most reliable source of its own lan-
guage. Nothing more, nothing less. In Islam, as well as in Judaism and Christianity,
the core doctrine will always remain the mysterious Logos, kalima-tu-Allāh (the
Word of God). Whether this Word of God is incarnate or remains immaterial, its
(im)materiality is inherently immaculate, beautiful, and unmimetic.
Those who choose to bypass this Arabicity and view the Qurʾān as a byproduct
of an extrapeninsular historical condition of late antique times are not only miss-
ing the rich open-endedness, wealth, and complexity of its distinct language; they
are masking an anxiety of having their own ideological methods laid bare by the
very text they seek to read and historicize. It turns out that “including” the Qurʾān
under the rubric of late antiquity is, after all, nothing but a refusal to read the
Qurʾān, a refusal that has reached its highpoint in the historical-critical approach
of the Euro-American academy. By freeing the Qurʾān from the ʿaṣabiyya of the
“derivative,” one would also embolden the Abrahamic and eventually free it from
the toxic opposition between origin and replica, which is itself a genetic symptom
of a naïvely mimetic Eurocentric mind.
For the field of Qurʾānic studies to have a fresh beginning, it will have to eman-
cipate itself from relying on an outmoded method to interpret the Old Testament
and the reapplication of such a method to the Qurʾān, especially when this method
has already garnered the discontent of eminent Bible scholars. Not only this, but
its subscription to academe must rid itself of what Neuwirth herself character-
izes as “an epistemic pessimism,” a rash dismissal of the “vast corpora of Islamic
learning as useless for Qurʾānic studies” and “little interest in the pagan, the Jāhilī
Arab background of the Qurʾānic event . . . for the sake of a principal re-location
of the Qurʾān out of Arabia into an undetermined Christian space.”23 There is
178    Conclusion

nothing necessarily perverse in juxtaposing the Qurʾān with the historical con-
texts of Abrahamic monotheism; the Qurʾān itself welcomes this juxtaposition.
But one must do so from within the ethics of the comparative, without hijacking
the Qurʾān’s Arabicity or colonizing its socio-linguistic context. David Damrosch
makes an excellent point when he states that “appropriately so, the Qurʾān is a
gift not only to humanity in general but to comparatists in particular,” a gift that
may not immediately be “inviting to the literary critic,”24 but that soon opens up to
“literary analysis and insights.”25 Damrosch’s words remind us of this dire need for
a new generation of scholars who can study the Qurʾān, comparatively, in nones-
sentialist terms and challenge, where appropriate, orientalist, neo-orientalist, and
even Islamist forms of “conventional wisdom.”
The future of Qurʾānic studies in the Euro-American academy will flourish
only when its method is no longer a prisoner to ideological nonlinguistic value
judgements. Academically and ethically, today we need a method that respects
the Qurʾān’s Arabic language, the reception of the form and meaning of such lan-
guage by its intended audience at its own historical time, and the aesthetic and
linguistic modalities extant both in the language of the Qurʾān and the pre-Islamic
idiom that forms and informs it. In fact, the corpus of pre-Islamic literature is rich
enough to require an independent discipline to further investigate its status and
relationship to the Qurʾān. Euro-American scholarship on the Qurʾān will also
have to come to terms with the fact that compelling instances of humanism could
also lie outside the epistemic spheres of Europe.
The Qurʾān, a seminal document of seventh-century humanism with a global
reach, still beckons further exploration and a wider audience. Overlooking this
strand of humanism in both pre-Islamic poetry and the Qurʾān itself not only
reinforces the divisive force of ʿaṣabiyya; it also amplifies its distortion. We should
imagine, then, the transformative potential were the Qurʾān to be positioned in a
way that decenters biblical history from its long-standing pedestal as the sole point
of reference, challenging the historical-critical method’s monopoly on interpret-
ing scripture. Could this not herald a paradigm shift, prompting a reevaluation
of our collective humanism and inspiring a level of critical thought more daring
and profound than ever before? What could the implications of embracing such a
positive analogy be?
 Note s

I N T R O DU C T IO N : P R I M UM N O N N O C E R E

1. Neuwirth, The Quʾan and Late Antiquity, 37.

2. Ibid. (emphasis mine).
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., 2–3.
5. Ibid., 37.
6. Ibid., 16.
7. Ibid., 2.
8. Ibid., 4.
9. Ibid., 3.
10. Ibid., x.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid., 2, 3, 4–6, 8–12.
14. See Castell, The Rise of the Network Society.
15. See, e.g., Haleem, “Grammatical Shift for Rhetorical Purposes”; Haleem, “Rhetorical
Devices and Stylistic Features of Qurʾānic Grammar”; Afsar, “A Literary Critical Approach
to Qurʾānic Parables”; Blankinship, The Inimitable Qurʾān; Norman O. Brown, “The Apoc-
alypse of Islam”; El Masri, The Semantics of Qurʾanic Language; Flowers, “Reconsidering
Qurʾanic Genre”; Hoffmann, The Poetic Qurʾān; Kermani, God is Beautiful; Mir, “Between
Grammar and Rhetoric”; Neuwirth, “Images and Metaphors in the Introductory Sections
of the Makkan Suras”; Neuwirth “Rhetoric and the Qurʾān.”
16. Bronwen, “The Earliest Greek Understandings of Islam,” 227.
17. Ibid., 228.
18. MacAuliffe, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Qurʾān; Rippin and Mojaddedi,
eds., The Wiley Blackwell Companion to the Qurʾān.

179
180    Notes

19. This is a largely Euro-American trend in Qurʾānic studies. See, for instance,
Paret, Mohammed und der Koran; Bobzin, Koran; Cook, The Koran; and Déroche, Le Coran.
Over the last fifty years, there have been a few commendable attempts to engage with the
Qurʾān’s literary and lingo-aesthetic significations; however, most of these studies are spo-
radic, emanating not from a disciplinary or field orientation, but rather from individual
scholars and philologists with a strong training in classical Arabic, whose findings continue
to be haunted by the hundred-year-old tenuous and unfounded intiḥāl (forgery) thesis of
both D. S. Margoliouth and Ṭāhā Ḥusayn.
20. Schneidau, Sacred Discontent: The Bible and Western Tradition, 249.
21. Attribution of Qurʾānic diction to pre-Islamic poetry is traced back to Nāfiʿ ibn
al-Azraq ibn Qays al-Ḥanafī al-Bakrī (d. 685). He was the leader of the Kharijite faction
of the Azāriqa during the Umayyad dynasty. Ibn al-Azraq is reported to have asked Ibn
ʿAbbās questions about specific terminologies of the Qurʾān and evidence of their existence
in pre-Islamic Arabic poetry. This report is in a Q and A format and can be found in numer-
ous postclassical and medieval tafsīr sources but was not gathered in one account until
al-Suyūṭī collected about two hundred questions in his Tafsīr. See al- al-Suyūṭī, al-Itqān fī
ʿUlūm al-Qurʾān, 105.
22. Ibn Sallām, Lughāt al-Qabāʾil al-Wārida fī al-Qurʾān.
23. al-Fatḥ ʿUthmān Ibn Jinnī, Sir Ṣināʿa -t- al-Iʿrāb.
24. See, e.g., Sperl’s essay, “The Qurʾān and Arabic Poetry.”
25. See Christopher Livanos and Mohammad Salama, “A Bridge Too Far?,” 145–69.
26. Schimmel, Deciphering the Signs of God, 150.
27. 3:144
28. 42:13.
29. Earlier scholarship tracing the exchange of words and expressions between pre-
Islamic Arabic and the Qurʾān could be found in works by Julius Wellhausen, Carl Brock-
elmann, Toshihiko Izutsu, and Susanne Krone. For a recent application of this approach,
Nicolai Sinai offers a survey of what pre-Islamic poetry has to say about the occurrence
of the referent Allāh. Sinai’s survey leads him to the conclusion that there is a “significant
degree of continuity between quranic theology and earlier Arabian notions of Allāh.” See
Sinai, Rain-Giver, Bone-Breaker, Score-Settler, 4.

1 . R E M A P P I N G QU R ʾ Ā N IC ST U D I E S : H I ST O R I E S A N D M E T HO D S

1. Smith’s work was published in India in 1943 and is still a major work in circulation
today. See Smith, Modern Islam in India.
2. Quoted in Graham, “The Scholar’s Scholar: Wilfred Cantwell Smith and a Collegial
Life of the Mind,” 7.
3. Quoted in Cracknell, ed., Wilfred Cantwell Smith, 123. For more on Wilfred Cantwell
Smith’s legacy, see Hick, “On Wilfred Cantwell Smith: His Place in the Study of Religion.”
4. See Winder, “Four Decades of Middle Eastern Study.”
5. Philip Willard Ireland, ed. The Near East: Problems and Prospects.
6. H.A.R. Gibb, review of Social Forces in the Middle East, by Sidney Nettleton Fisher,
218.
7. Ibid.
 Notes    181

8. For a nuanced genealogy of studying Islam as a “problem” in Western Europe, espe-

cially in relation to Christian theology and secular thought, see Hourani, “Islam and the
Philosophy of History.”
9. Despite the largely uncritical theses Nöldeke proposes regarding the establishment
of the ʿuthmānian text, his work is still the uncontested primary source in determining
the validity of the sūra chronology and the division of the history of the Qurʾān into four
periods, three Meccan and one Medinan, used by contemporary scholars like Neuwirth
and others. The reason behind this excessive reliance on Nöldeke is simply because, to date,
no other major studies on putting the Qurʾān and the Prophet’s oral preaching into writ-
ing have been attempted. The publication of a new English edition of Nöldeke’s work in
2013, translated by W. H. Behn (and complete with tables, bibliography, and indexes), has
finally made this magnum opus available to the international English-speaking research
community of Qurʾānic studies, and is expected to trigger more scholarship on the topic.
See Nöldeke et al., The History of the Qurʾān.
10. Historikerstreit, or the Historians’ Debate, was a public controversy triggered in
mid-1980s Germany following the publication by the Frankfurt School philosopher Jürgen
Habermas of an article in Die Zeit (July 11, 1986) in which he criticized tendencies in the his-
toriography of the Third Reich. For more on the historical debates leading to Historikerstreit
and the ethical crisis of the 1980s on how to write and confront Germany’s own history of
racism and antisemitism in the aftermath of the Holocaust, see Fischer, Bündnis der Eliten;
Hamilton, Who Voted for Hitler; Moses, German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past. See also
Salama and Langbehn, eds., German Colonialism.
11. On reading the first part of Hagarism, Wansbrough dismissed the study as “inau-
thentic,” with material based solely on “the authors’ methodological assumptions, of which
the principal must be that a vocabulary of motives can be freely extrapolated from a dis-
crete collection of literary stereotypes composed by alien and mostly hostile observers, and
thereupon employed to describe, even interpret, not merely the overt behaviour but also
intellectual and spiritual development of the helpless and mostly innocent actors. Where
even the sociologist fears to tread, the historian ought not with impunity be permitted to
go” (Wansbrough, review of Hagarism, by Patricia Crone).
12. Barth, The Epistle to the Romans.
13. For a fuller analysis of Bultmann’s influence on Wansbrough, see Stewart, “Wans-
brough, Bultmann, and the Theory.”
14. See also Borg, Jesus in Contemporary Scholarship.
15. Wansbrough, Quranic Studies, 11, 19.
16. See Bultmann et al., Kerygma and Myth.
17. Wansbrough, Quranic Studies, xxii.
18. Ibid., xxii.
19. Ibid., xxii–xxiii.
20. Ibid., xxiii.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid., 99, 113.
23. See Bultmann, Kerygma and Myth, 10.
24. Wansbrough, Quranic Studies, 20, 51, 54, 72.
25. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, 1:160.
182    Notes

26. Ibid. See also J. A. C. Brown, Hadith. See in particular Brown’s chapter, “The Authen-
ticity Question: Western Debates over the Historical Reliability of Prophetic Traditions,” 197–
239. In this chapter, Brown provides a fair-minded critique of the literature of Ḥadīth criticism
in the West, identifying four main stages: Orientalism, the philo-Islamic apologetics, Western
revisionism, and post-revisionism. For a more recent study of the life of Muḥammad, see
Sean W. Anthony, Muhammad and the Empires of Faith. In this well-researched and nuanced
postrevisionist examination of the life of Muḥammad, Anthony combines non-Muslim with
Muslim sources. He interweaves narratives from the Greek text Doctrina Jacobi, which is often
quoted as the earliest documentary witness to the life of Muḥammad, with classical Muslim
sources such as ibn Shihāb al-Zuhrī (d. 124/742) and ibn Isḥāq (d. 150/767), and accounts from
late antique Christianity, most notably the story of the Byzantine emperor Heraclius’s vision
and Muḥammad’s letter to him. More importantly for our purpose, Anthony shows that a his-
torically reliable investigation of Muḥammad’s life can be demonstrated through a patient and
careful study of early Muslim sources in the sirah-maghazi literature, evidence in the Qurʾān,
as well as early Greek and Syriac non-Islamic sources. Combined, all these sources prove that
Muḥammad lived in Mecca circa 570 AD and later claimed to belong to a long line of Abra-
hamic prophets who received revelation; he then moved to Yathrib (Medina) and formed a
community of believers who were inspired by his teachings and who continued to preserve
the message of Islam until it transformed the world.
27. The Middle East would be partitioned again with the rise of area studies in the light
of the Cold War.
28. Neuwirth, The Qurʾan and Late Antiquity, 22.
29. Levinas calls for an acknowledgement of an exterior transcendence in the other
that must be accepted, a transcendence that escapes one’s comprehensive knowledge. In
this acknowledgment lies the core of religio-ethical responsibility towards the other. See
Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 49.
30. Watt, Muslim-Christian Encounters, 133.
31. Geiger, “Was hat Mohammed aus dem Judenthume aufgenommen?” In this
essay, Geiger (1810–74) argues that the Qurʾān was derivative and that Muḥammad could
not have authored it without plagiarizing numerous terms from the Hebrew Bible and rab-
binic literature. See also Geiger, Judaism and Islām, 44.
32. See Salama and Langbehn, eds., German Colonialism.
33. For a nuanced analysis of Germany’s complex relationship to Islam, see Almond,
The History of Islam in German Thought.
34. See Schimmel, “Islamic Studies in Germany,” 401–10.
35. See, for instance, Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge; Habermas, Knowledge and
Human Interests; de Certeau, The Writing of History; Young, White Mythologies; Gilroy, The
Black Atlantic; Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason.
36. “I do not exhaustively discuss the German development after the inaugural period
dominated by Sacy. Any work that seeks to provide an understanding of academic Oriental-
ism and pays little attention to scholars like Steinthal, Müller, Becker, Goldziher, Brockel-
mann, Nöldeke—to mention only a handful—needs to be reproached, and I freely reproach
myself ” (Said, Orientalism, 18).
37. See, for instance, Toorawa, “Seeking Refuge from Evil,” 54–60; Boullata, ed., Literary
Structures of Religious Meaning in the Qurʾān; Monroe, “Oral Composition in Pre-Islamic
 Notes    183

Poetry,” 1–53; Montgomery, “Dichotomy in Jahili Poetry,” 1–20; Izutsu, Ethico-Religious

Concepts in the Qurʾān; J. Stetkevych, Muhammad and the Golden Bough; S. P. Stetkev-
ych, The Mute Immortals Speak; Bauer, “The Relevance of Early Arabic Poetry for Qurʾānic
Studies,” 699–732; el Masri, The Semantics of Qurʾanic Language: al-Āḫira.
38. Stewart, “A Modest Proposal for Islamic Studies,” 158.
39. Ibid., 188.
40. Ibid., 187.
41. See Popper, Open Society, esp. chapter 23.
42. Quoted in Cracknell, ed., Wilfred Cantwell Smith, 123.

2 . W HAT I S L AT E A N T IQU I T Y A N D W HAT D O E S

T H E QU R ʾ Ā N HAV E T O D O W I T H I T ?

1. Sadeghi and Goudarzi, “Ṣanʿā ʾ 1 and the Origins of the Qurʾān,” 1. See also Sade-
ghi and Bergmann, “The Codex of a Companion of the Prophet and the Qurʾān of the
Prophet,” 343–436.
2. Examples of this trend include Wansbrough, Quranic Studies; Wansbrough, The
Sectarian Milieu; Hawting, “The Literary Context of the Traditional Account of Pre-
Islamic Arab Idolatry,” 21–41; Hawting, The Idea of Idolatry and the Emergence of Islam;
Rippin, “The Exegetical Genre asbāb al-nuzūl: A Bibliographical and Terminological
Survey,” 1–15.
3. See, e.g., Crone, “Islam, Judeo-Christianity and Byzantine Iconoclasm,” 59–95; Lül-
ing, A Challenge to Islam for Reformation; Luxenberg, Die syro-aramäische Lesart des Koran;
Luxenberg, The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran; Reynolds, The Qurʾan and its Biblical
Subtext; Zellentin, The Qurʾan’s Legal Culture.
4. I borrow the term “late antiquarians” from Devin Stewart, who is the first to coin it in
his survey, “Reflections on the State of the Art in Western Qurʾanic Studies,” 30–31.
5. See, e.g., Fowden, From Empire to Commonwealth; Cameron and King, eds., The Byz-
antine and Early Islamic Near East II; Cameron, ed., The Byzantine and Early Islamic Near
East III; Griffith, The Qurʾan in Arabic.
6. There are many scholars whose work represents this trend, including, among others,
Garth Fowden, Hugh Kennedy, Aaron Hughes, Robert Hoyland, Guy Stroumsa, Nicolai
Sinai, and Holger Zellentin. See, for instance, Stroumsa, The Making of the Abrahamic Reli-
gions in Late Antiquity; Hoyland, “Early Islam as a Late Antique Religion,” 1053–77.
7. Neuwirth, “Locating the Qurʾan in the Epistemic Space of Late Antiquity,” 159–79.
Neuwirth’s article is also published under a slightly different title. See “Locating the Qurʾan
and Early Islam in the Epistemic Space of Late Antiquity.”
8. See Studien zur Komposition der mekkanischen Suren. See also Neuwirth, “Rezension
zu Wansbrough, Qurʾanic Studies, Die Welt des Islams”; Neuwirth, Sinai, and Marx, eds.,
The Qurʾān in Context; Neuwirth and Sells, eds., Quranic Studies Today; Neuwirth, Der
Koran als Text der Spätantike; Neuwirth, Scripture, Poetry and the Making of a Community.
9. See N. O. Brown, The Challenge of Islam, 55–59.
10. Neuwirth, The Qurʾan and Late Antiquity, 25.
11. See Sperl and Dedes, eds., Faces of the Infinite.
12. Dussel, Beyond Philosophy, 54.
184    Notes

13. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 79.

14. In the context of Islamic legal studies, Wael B. Hallaq confronts this serious issue in
a number of articles. See, for instance, Hallaq, “On Orientalism, Self-Consciousness and
History,” 387–439; “The Quest for Origins or Doctrine?,” 1–31; and “Review: The Use
and Abuse of Evidence,” 79–90.
15. See Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State. See in particular Anderson’s chapter,
“The House of Islam,” 361–96. Islam was no doubt a subject of heated historical debates among
many intellectuals in Europe across the centuries. See also Prideaux’s True Nature of Imposture
Revealed in the Life of the Impostor Mohammad (1697), a remarkable account of a derisive his-
toriographic polemic rampant in seventeenth-century Europe. A work like Henry Stubbe’s An
Account of the Rise and Progress of Mahometanism with the Life of Mahomet and a Vindication
of Him and His Religion from the Calumnies of Christians (1676) expresses reverence for Islam
and favorably considers it a religion similar to Christianity. In his book, Stubbe describes
Muḥammad as a “genius.” The difference of course is in circulation. Whereas Prideaux’s work
circulated widely in Europe and North America, Stubbe’s work remained unpublished. For
more positioning of Islam as the “other” of Europe, see Hourani, “Islam and the Philosophers
of History,” 206–68; see also Salama, Islam, Orientalism, and Intellectual History, 78–145.
16. Bevir, “Why historical distance is not a problem,” p. 25.
17. See Sallustius Crispus (Sallust), De Coniuratione Catilinae (44–40 BC); Gaius Cor-
nelius Tacitus, Agricola (98 AD), and Titus Livius (Livy), Ab Urbe Condita (753 BC).
18. Durant, The Story of Civilization, vol. 3, 665.
19. P. Brown, The World of Late Antiquity, 7.
20. Mommsen, The History of Rome, vol. 3, 611.
21. H. I. Bell, Egypt from Alexander the Great to the Arab Conquest, 133–34.
22. Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages.
23. See Pirenne, “Mahomet et Charlemagne,” 77–86.
24. Pirenne, Mohammed and Charlemagne.
25. E. Ashtor, “Quelques observations d’un Orientaliste sur la these de Pirenne,” 188.
26. Ehrenkreutz, “Another Orientalist’s Remarks concerning the Pirenne Thesis,” 104.
27. P. Brown, The World of Late Antiquity, 189.
28. Ibid., 190.
29. Ibid., 190–93.
30. Ibid., 203.
31. See, for instance, Clover and Humphreys, “Towards a Definition of Late Antiquity,”
3–26; Cameron, “The ‘Long’ Late Antiquity,” 165–91.
32. Murray, “Peter Brown and the Shadow of Constantine,” 195.
33. P. Brown, The World of Late Antiquity, 158.
34. Ibid., 131.
35. Ibid., 68.
36. Ibid., 169–70.
37. See Cameron, “The ‘Long’ Late Antiquity,” 190.
38. Crone and Cook, Hagarism, 3.
39. Donner, review of Hagarism, 199.
40. Ibid.
41. There has been further elaboration of this phenomenon in in the works of Aziz al-
Azmeh and Averil Cameron. See Al‐Azmeh, The Emergence of Islam in Late Antiquity; see
Cameron, “Patristic Studies and the Emergence of Islam,” 249–78.
 Notes    185

42. Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History, 97.

43. Ibid., 98.
44. Neuwirth, The Qurʾan and Late Antiquity, 108.
45. Kennedy, “Islam,” 219.
46. Griffith, Arabic Christianity in the Monasteries of 9th-Century Palestine.
47. Kennedy, “Islam,” 235.
48. See Jones, The Later Roman Empire, 284–602.
49. See H. I. Marrou, A History of Education in Antiquity.
50. See Elton, Warfare in Roman Europe, AD 350–425; Elton, The Roman Empire in Late
Antiquity; Cameron, ed., The Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East.
51. See Valantasis, ed., Religions of Late Antiquity in Practice.
52. Hughes, “Religion without Religion: Integrating Islamic Origins into Religious
Studies,” 869.
53. Ibid., 869n4.
54. See, e.g., Hughes, Abrahamic Religions; Stroumsa, “Athens, Jerusalem and Mecca,”
153–68; Stroumsa, The Making of the Abrahamic Religions in Late Antiquity.
55. Neuwirth, The Qurʾan and Late Antiquity, 456–57.
56. Neuwirth, “Locating the Qurʾan and Early Islam in the Epistemic Space of Late
Antiquity,” 167.
57. I am grateful to Dr. Christian Junge for explaining the multiple connotations of
“zugang.”
58. Neuwirth, The Qurʾan and Late Antiquity, 455.
59. Ibid., 22.
60. Ibid., 420 (emphasis mine).
61. Ibid., 22.
62. Ibid.
63. See John Barton, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Biblical Interpretation.
64. Weil, Mohammed der Prophet, sein Leben und seine Lehre (1843). Quoted in Nöldeke
et al., The History of the Qurʾān, 373.
65. Neuwirth, The Qurʾan and Late Antiquity, 23.
66. See Berman, Inconsistency in the Torah. See in particular Berman’s scintillating
chapter 11: “A Critical Intellectual history of the Historical-Critical Paradigm in Biblical
Studies,” 201–26.
67. Neuwirth, The Qurʾan and Late Antiquity, 306.
68. Ibid., 241–86.
69. Ibid., 286–90, 334–37.
70. Thomas Bauer, “The Relevance Of Early Arabic Poetry For Qurʾānic Studies Includ-
ing Observations On Kull and on Qurʾān 22:27, 26:225 And 52:31,” 700.
71. Ibid., 459.
72. Ibid., 410.
73. Von Grunebaum, “Ausbreitungs-und Anpassungsfähigkeit,” 14. Quoted in Neu-
wirth, The Qurʾan and Late Antiquity, 41.
74. Neuwirth, The Qurʾan and Late Antiquity, 41–42.
75. See alsoَ 12:2; 12:2; 13:37; 16:13.
76. Montgomery, “Dichotomy is Jahili Poetry,” 1–20.
77. Zwettler, The Oral Tradition of Classical Poetry.
78. Neuwirth, The Qurʾan and Late Antiquity, 21.
186    Notes

79. Israel and Silverthorne, eds., Spinoza, 101–2.

80. Crone and Cook, Hagarism.
81. Luxenberg, Die syro-aramäische Lesart des Korans.
82. See, e.g., Donner’s notion of the “community of Believers” in Muhammad and the
Believers, 78.
83. Zellentin, ed., The Qurʾan’s Reformation of Judaism and Christianity, 1.
84. Ibid., 2.
85. Ibid.
86. Zellentin, “The Rise of Monotheism in Arabia,” 158.
87. Ibid.
88. Ibid., 159.
89. LaCapra, “Rethinking Intellectual History and Reading Texts,” 274.
90. According to Lee Ross’s theory of “attribution bias,” scientists, including psycholo-
gists and scholars, often find themselves caught in ideologically biased assumptions, derived
largely from predominant cultural societal factors: “The intuitive scientist’s ability to master
his social environment depends in large measure upon the accuracy and adequacy of his
hypotheses, evidence, and methods of analysis and inference. Conversely, sources of over-
sight, error, or bias in his assumptions and procedures may have serious consequences, both
for the lay psychologist himself and for the society that he builds and perpetuates” (Ross,
“The Intuitive Psychologist and His Shortcomings,” 174).
91. LaCapra, “Rethinking Intellectual History and Reading Texts,” 247.
92. Ibid. (emphasis mine).
93. Fowden, Before and After Muhammad.
94. Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
95. See Jalāl al-Dīn Abd al-Raḥmān al-Suyūṭī, Lubāb al-Nuqūl fī Asbāb al-Nuzūl,
168–70. See also Abū al-Ḥasan ʿAlī al-Wāḥidī, Asbāb al-Nuzūl, 297–99.
96. Fowden, Before and After Muhammad, 5.
97. Ibid., 6.
98. See Stroumsa, The Making of the Abrahamic Religions in Late Antiquity.
99. Cameron, “Patristics and Late Antiquity: Partners or Rivals,” 299.
100. See, e.g., Hoyland, “Early Islam as a Late Antique Religion,” 1055.
101. Ibid., 1070.
102. Stewart, “Reflections on the State of the Art in Western Qurʾanic Studies,” 6.
103. Cameron, “Patristics and Late Antiquity: Partners or Rivals,” 302.
104. See, e.g., Thomas Römer, The Invention of God.
105. See Salama, and Langbehn, eds., German Colonialism, ix–xxxi.
106. Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, 72.
107. Bennet, To Reclaim a Legacy, 4, 22, 41.

3 . I N T E L L IG E N C E V E R SU S P OW E R : R H E T O R IC A L DY NA M IC S
I N P R E - I SL A M IC P O E T RY A N D T H E Q U R ʾ Ā N

1. See Monroe, “Oral Composition in Pre-Islamic Poetry,” 1–53; Zwettler, The Oral Tra-
dition of Classical Arabic Poetry. Monroe’s and Zwettler’s studies and their use of formu-
laic-oral theory as valid for Arabic poetry have been sharply criticized by Gregor Schoeler,
 Notes    187

Ewald Wagner, Thomas Bauer, Suzanne Stetkevych, and others. See, more specifically,
S. P. Stetkevych, “Structuralist Analyses of Pre-Islamic Poetry,” 85–10. See also Agha, “Of
Verse, Poetry, Great Poetry and History,” 1–35; Stetkevych, The Mute Immortals Speak;
Montgomery, The Vagaries of the Qaṣīdah. See also Montgomery “The Empty Hijaz,” 37–97;
Farrin, Abundance from the Desert; Beeston, “Himyarite Monotheism,” 149–54; Conrad,
“The Arabs,” pp. 678–700.
2. Nöldeke, “Arabia, Arabians” 272–75. See also Encyclopaedia Biblica, pp. 272–75.
3. In Mohammed and the Rise of Islam, Margoliouth writes that “the language of the
Koran was thought by experts to bear a striking likeness to that of the early poetry: and
though for us it is difficult to pass an opinion on this point, seeing that the early poetry is
largely fabrication modelled on the Koran, we may accept the opinion of the Arabs” (60).
4. Ḥusayn, Fī al-Shiʿr al-Jāhilī, 7.
5. Ibid., 88.
6. See, e.g., Dmitriev, “An Early Christian Arabic Account of the Creation of the World.”
7. For more on Ṭāhā Ḥusayn’s venture on pre-Islamic poetry, see Salama, The Qurʾān
and Modern Arabic Literary Criticism, 17–36.
8. Arberry, The Seven Odes, 238.
9. Gibb, Review of The Seven Odes 272.
10. Stetkevych, Muhammad and the Golden Bough.
11. Stetkevych, The Mute Immortals Speak, 27.
12. Ibid., 27–28.
13. While the examination of the phonology and lexicology of the Qurʾān in light of
the North Arabian inscriptions is still embryonic, Ahmad al-Jallad has taken positive steps
in examining the etymological history of Arabic, especially when it comes to finding an
evidentiary nexus between the Qurʾān’s language and pre-Islamic Arabic poetry. In a recent
study, al-Jallad makes reference to numerous Arabic Qurʾānic roots (e.g., qsm, hdy, m(y)t,
taʿa, ḏll, siḥr, nʾr), as well as to ritualistic stems that are traceable to pre-Islamic Arabic in
its historical evolution via Safaitic inscriptions, many of which appear in pre-Islamic poetry.
See al-Jallad, The Religion and Rituals of the Nomads of Pre-Islamic Arabia, 53, 65–66, 69, 72,
97. See also al-Jallad’s discussion of votive inscriptions and the literary background of the
Qurʾān, in particular the structural affinities between the South Arabian Hymn of Qāniya
and the early Meccan sūras, such as 75 and 84 (Al-Jallad, “The Linguistic Landscape of pre-
Islamic Arabia,” 122–25).
14. See Key, Language between God and the Poets.
15. Thomas Bauer, “The Relevance of Early Arabic Poetry for Qurʾānic Studies Includ-
ing Observations on Kull and on Q 22:27, 26:225, and 52:31,” 699–700.
16. See, in particular, Bauer’s argument about the grammar of kull, followed by ism
mufrad nakira versus kull, followed by ism jamʿ muʿrraf, and how such a subtle and minute
difference allows (with insight from pre-Islamic poetry) for a more accurate and nuanced
understanding of this construct in the Qurʾān. See Bauer, “The Relevance of Early Arabic
Poetry,” 706–15.
17. Wagner, Grundzüge der klassischen arabischen Dichtung, 12–29.
18. Von Grunebaum, “The Nature of Arabic Unity Before Islam.”
19. Meinecke, Weltbürgertum und Nationalstaat, 1–22.
20. Von Grunebaum, “The Nature of Arabic Unity Before Islam,” 6.
188    Notes

21. Ibid., 7. See also Watt, Muhammad at Medina, 142–43.

22. Von Grunebaum, “Pre-Islamic Poetry,” 40.
23. Ibid., 8.
24. James Montgomery criticizes von Grunebaum’s “stereotypical” depiction of nomad-
Arab, but still agrees to the value of “Bedouinised” poetry in identifying the rise of the
Arabs. See Montgomery “The Empty Hijaz,” 37–97.
25. Ibid., 8.
26. Dmitriev, “An Early Christian Arabic Account of the Creation of the World,” 349–88.
27. Ibid., 388.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid.
31. See, e.g., J. A. C. Brown, “The Social Context of Pre-Islamic Poetry,” 29–50.
32. Bauer, “The Relevance of Early Arabic Poetry for Qurʾānic Studies,” 705–6.
33. Ibid., 705.
34. Serrano, Qurʾān and the Lyric Imperative, 125.
35. Abū al-Ḥasan ʿAlī (b. ʿῙsā) al-Rummānī, “al-Nukat fī Iʿjāz al-Qurʾān,” 75.
36. Bauer, “The Relevance of Early Arabic Poetry for Qurʾānic Studies,” 706.
37. See, e.g., Albert Arazi’s chapter, “La nuit et le jour,” 49–103. See also Pellat, “Layl and
Nahār,” 707–10.
38. Muḥammad ibn Makram ibn Manẓūr, Lisān al-ʿArab, 4115.
39. To be sure, there is an instance Homer’s Iliad (1.10–23) where Chryses begs Agamem-
non for the return of his daughter Chryseis. In 1.24–32, Agamemnon harshly rejects Chry-
ses’s plea and sends him packing. Then 1.33–34 reads as follows (in Lattimore’s translation):
“So he spoke, and the old man in terror obeyed him /And went silently away beside the
murmuring sea beach.” Upon which, Chryses prays to Apollo, who sends his plague into
the Achaians’ camp. This is a credible example of pathetic fallacy, although Lattimore’s
“murmuring” is probably too weak. See Kirk, The Iliad: A Commentary, 56–57: “Is there an
intended contrast between the priest’s silence . . . and the roar [!] of the sea? Ostensibly not,
since . . . the sea is roaring because that is what it typically does . . . . Yet the overtones . . .
are often of tension and sadness . . . and this perhaps colours Khruses’ temporary silence,
making it ominous.”
40. al-Qays, Dīwān Imruʾ al-Qays, 18–19.
41. al-Dhubyānī, Dīwān al-Nābigha al-Dhubyānī, 29–30.
42. Ibid., 56.
43. 26:61.
44. See also 4:78; 4:100.
45. 10:90.
46. al-Rummānī, “al-Nukat fī Iʿjāz al-Qurʾān,” 81–82.
47. For a nuanced, close reading of the Qurʾān’s relationship to poetry with special ref-
erence to Sūra-t- al-Shu ʿarāʼ (26), see the following articles by Irfan Shahid: “A Contribu-
tion to Koranic Exegesis”; “Another Contribution to Koranic Exegesis”; “The Sūra of the
Poets, Qurʾān XXVI,” 175–220; “The Sūra of the Poets Revisited,” 398–423.
48. ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī, “al-Risāla al-Shāfiya,” 122, 124–25.
49. Ibn al-Ṭayyib al-Bāqillānī, Iʿjāz al-Qurʾān, 76–85, 162–170.
50. See al-Khaṭṭābī, “Bayān Iʿjāz al-Qurʾān,” 22–23.
 Notes    189

51. Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful, 99.
52. See also the Qurʾān’s depiction of ḥūr ʿīn, heavenly wide-eyed women of incompa-
rable beauty (44:54; 52:20; 55:72; 56:22) and wildān mukhalladūn, heavenly eternal youths
(76:19).
53. See, for instance, the preamble verse of Sūra-t-Yūsuf (12), which states the following:
َ‫َك َٰٰه� ََذا ْٱْلُقُْرْ ََءاَن‬ َ ‫ِص ِبِ ََمٓا َأَْوْ ََح ْْيَنَٓا ِإَِلَ ْْي‬ِ ‫َص‬ َ َ‫َك َأَْحْ َسََنَ ْٱْلَق‬ َ ‫َنَْحْ ُنُ َنَُقُُّصُ ََعَلَ ْْي‬
We relate to you the best/the most beautiful of stories through Our revelation of this
Qurʾān. (12:3)
54. Ṭarafa, Dīwān Ṭarafa ibn al-ʿAbd, 19.
55. See Heidegger, Being and Time.
56. Ṭarafa, Diwān Ṭarafa ibn al-ʿAbd, 25.
57. The Qurʾān teems with instances of this dialogic anti-resurrection tension, as in the
following examples:
ُ ‫ُث ٱُهَّلل� ُ ََمن َيَ ُُم‬
‫وُت‬ ُ ‫ٱِهَّللِ ََج ْْه ََد َأَ ْْي َٰٰم� ِنِ ِِه ْْمۙ ۙ اَلا َيَ ْْب ََع‬ ْ ‫( ََوَأَ ْْق ََس ُُم‬16:38)
� ِ‫وْا ِب‬
ٰ ٰ
‫وْا َأَ ِِء ََذا ُكَُّنَا ِِعَٰظ� ًًما ََو ُُرَٰف�ًتًا َأَ ِِءَّنَا َلَ ََم ْْبُعُوُثُوَنَ َخ َْْلًقًا ََج ِِديًدًا‬ ْ ُ‫( ََوَقَاُل‬17:49)
ْ ُ‫( ََز ََع ََم ٱَّلّ ِِذيَنَ ََكَفَُر ُٓٓو ْْا َأَن َّلّن ُيُ ْْب ََعُث‬64:7)
‫وْا‬
�‫ِث َفَِإَِّنّا ََخَلَ ْْق َٰٰن� ُُكم ِّمّ ن ُتُ ََرا ٍۢۢب‬ ِ ‫( ياَأَُّيَّهَا ٱلَّنّاُسُ ِإِن ُُكنُتُ ْْم ِفِى ََر ْْي ٍۢۢب� ِّمَّنَ ْٱْلَبَ ْْع‬22 :5)
ٌ‫ِت َلََيَُقُوَلََّنّ ٱَّلّ ِِذيَنَ ََكَفَُر ُٓٓو ْْا ِإِ ْْن َٰٰه� ََذآ ِإِاَّلا ِِسْحْ ٌٌر ُّّمِبِيٌن‬ ِ ْ‫( ََوَلَِئِن ُقُ ْْلَتَ ِإَِّنّ ُُكم َّّم ْْبُعُوُثُوَنَ ِِم ۢۢن َبَ ْْع ِِد ْٱْل ََمْو‬11:7)
ُ َ ّ ٰ
َ‫ َقَاُلُ ٓٓوْا َأ ِِءَذا ِِمْتَنَا ََوُكَّنا ُت ََراًبًا ََو ِِع ًًما َأ ِِءَّنا َل ََم ْْبُعُوُثوَن‬. َ‫وْا ِِم ْْث ََل ََما َقَا ََل ٱَأْل� َ َّّوُلُوَن‬
َ �‫َٰظ‬ ُ ّ ُ ْ َ َ ْ ْ ُ‫( َبَْلْ َقَاُل‬23:81–82)
ۢ ْ َ ّ َ ٰ ُ ّ ُ َ َ ُ
‫( ََوِإِن َتَ ْْع ََجْبْ َفَ ََع ََجٌبٌ َقَْوْ ُلُهُ ْْم َأ ِِءَذا ُكَّنا ُتَٰر� ًبًا َأ ِِءَّنا َلِفِى َخَْلٍۢق� ََج ِِديد‬13:5)
َ‫ َهَ ْْيَهَاَتَ َهَ ْْيَهَاَتَ ِلِ ََما ُتُو ََع ُُدوَن‬. َ‫( َأََيَ ِِع ُُد ُُك ْْم َأََّنّ ُُك ْْم ِإِ ََذا ِِمُّتّ ْْم ََو ُُكنُتُ ْْم ُتُ ََراًبًا ََو ِِع َٰٰظ� ًًما َأََّنّ ُُكم ُّّم ْْخ ََرُجُوَن‬23:35–36)
‫( إن هي إال حياتنا الدنيا نموت ونحيا وما نحن بمبعوثين‬23:37)

58. ʿAlī, al-Mufaṣṣal fī Tarīkh al-ʿArab Qabl al-Islām, 123.

59. Murtaḍá al-Zabīdī, Tāj al-ʿArūs min Jawāhir al-Qāmūs, 98.
60. 34:19. For an in-depth discussion of poetry as eternalization in pre-Islamic culture,
see Geert Jan van Gelder, “Persons as Texts/Texts as Persons,” 237–53.
61. al-Ālūsī, Bulūgh al-Arab fī Ma ʿarifa-t-Aḥwāl al-ʿArab. 199.
62. The word hām is often a near-synonym of aṣdāʾ, a kind of screech owl represent-
ing the ghost of a someone killed whose death has not yet been avenged, and appearing
on his grave. But it can also mean “skulls.” See also Homerin, “Echoes of a Thirsty Owl,”
165–84.
63. ʿAlī, al-Mufaṣṣal fī Tarīkh al-ʿArab Qabl al-Islām, 123.

4 . P O E T IC PAG A N I SM A N D T H E M O N O T H E I S T IC A E S T H E T IC

1. Pre-Islamic Arabia enjoyed ritualistic forms of worship and religious customs. Many
scholars of early Islam, including al-Shahrastānī, Yāqūt al-Ḥamawī, and al-Azraqī, remind
us that circumambulating the Kaaba was a common practice among pre-Islamic Arabs as
part of their belief in Bayt Allāh (the House of God) and cyclical pilgrimages. See al-Fatḥ
Muḥammad al-Shahrastānī, al-Milal wa al-Niḥal, 33; al-Ḥamawī, Muʿjam al-Buldān, 279,
281, 619; and al-Azraqī, Akhbār Makka, 8–9. Ibn al-Kalbī also makes reference to other pil-
grimage houses pre-Islamic Arabs traveled to, such as Bayt Thaqīf (the House of Thaqīf).
See Ibn al-Kalbī, Kitāb al-Aṣnām, 44–48. Al-Hamadānī confirms that Arabs performed
190    Notes

various pilgrimages to sacred houses, such as Bayt Al-lāt wa-Kaʿba-t-Najrān wa-Kaʿba-t-

Shaddād al-Ayādī wa-Kaʿba-t-Ghaṭfā. See al-Hamadānī, al-Iklīl, 84. For more references on
other kaabas and houses of gods, e.g., Kaʿba-t-Dhī-alshará wa-Kaʿba-t- Dhī-Ghāba, wa-
Bayt Al-lāt wa-Bayt al-Uʿzzá wa-Bayt Manāt, see the following: ʿAlī, al-Mufaṣṣal fī Tarīkh
al-ʿArab qabl al-Islām, 152–53, 180, 214–24; al-Zabīdī, Tāj al-ʿArūs min Jawāhir al-Qāmūs,
271; al-Masʿūdī, Murūj al-Dhahab, 47. The rise of Mecca as a commercial hub allowed many
inhabitants of the Arabian Peninsula and beyond to flock to the Meccan Kaaba for blessings
and worship. The Qurʾān confirms pre-Islamic Arabs’ acknowledgement of a supreme god
whom they called Allah, while they still worshiped other deities like ‫الالت و العزى و مناة‬
)53:19(. See Ibn al-Kalbī, Kitāb al-Aṣnām, 13–27.
The following are examples of verses that describe pre-Islamic Arabia’s knowledge of the
existence of Allah, who was worshipped in association with other deities:

ُ �‫َض َلََيَُقُوُلَُّنّ ٱُهَّلل‬َ ْ‫ِت ََوٱَأْل� َْر‬ ِ �‫َق ٱل َّّس َٰٰم� َٰٰو‬ َ َ‫( ََوَلَِئِن ََسَأ َ ْْلَتَُهُم َّّم ْْن ََخَل‬43:9)
ُ �‫ُهَّلل‬ ‫ٱ‬ ّ‫َّن‬ ُ ‫ُل‬ ‫و‬ُ ‫ُق‬َ ْ ُ َ‫( ََوَلَِئِن ََسَأ َ ْْلَتَُهُم َّّم ْْن ََخَل‬43:87)
‫َي‬َ ‫َل‬ ‫ْم‬ ‫ُه‬َ ‫َق‬
ِ ‫ِهلل‬ ‫ون‬ ُ ‫ُل‬ ‫و‬ُ ‫ُق‬ ‫َي‬ ‫َس‬ . ‫يِم‬
ََ ِ ِ َ ِ َ ‫ِظ‬ ‫َع‬ ْ
‫ٱْل‬ ‫ِش‬ ْ‫ْر‬ ‫َع‬ ْ
‫ٱْل‬ ّ‫ُّب‬ ‫َر‬ ‫َو‬
َ َ ِ ‫ِْع‬ ‫ْب‬‫َّس‬ّ ‫ٱل‬ ِ �‫( ُقُْلْ ََمن َّرُّّبّ ٱل َّّس َٰٰم� َٰٰو‬23:86–87)
‫ِت‬
‫( ََواَّلّ ِِذيَنَ اَّتّ ََخ ُُذوا ِِمن ُُدوِنِ ِِه َأَْوْ ِلَِيَا ََء ََما َنَ ْْعُبُ ُُدُهُ ْْم ِإِاَّلا ِلُِيَُقَِّرُّبُوَنَا ِإَِلَى ِهَّللا� ِ ُُز ْْلَفَ ٰٰى‬39:3)
2. Abū Zayd, Mafhūm al-Naṣṣ, 61.
3. Ibn al-Athīr, al-Nihāya fī Gharīb al-Ḥadīth wa al-Athar, 147–48.
4. Abū Zayd, Mafhūm al-Naṣṣ, 160.
5. 20:114.
6. 75:16–19.
7. Hegel, Ästhetik, 117.
8. See Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, 58.
9. Van Gelder, Sound and Sense in Classical Arabic Poetry.
10. Macaulay, “Minute on Education,” 107–17.
11. For a comprehensive account of Macaulay’s educational policies, see Naik and
Nurullah, A Students’ History of Education in India (1800–1973), 66–146. See also Said, Ori-
entalism, 152, 196.
12. Nicholson, A Literary History of the Arabs, 134.
13. Nicholson’s bias against the Qurʾān is evident in his truncated reference to the God
of the Qurʾān as “as a stern, unapproachable despot, requiring utter submission to His arbi-
trary will, but infinitely unconcerned with human feelings and aspirations. Such a Being
could not satisfy the religious instinct” (Nicolson, A Literary History, 231).
14. Ibid., 308.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid., 77.
17. Ibid.
18. Abū Tammām, Dīwān Abī Tammām, 154. “ʿAmr” in this line refers to the legendary
veteran warrior ʿAmr ibn Ma ʿdiyakrib (d. 642), who converted to Islam during the early
hijra years, and is also known as Fāris al-ʿArab (the Warrior of Arabs). “Aḥnaf ” is Aḥnaf ibn
Qays (d. 686), a companion of the Prophet known for his gentle nature and thoughtfulness.
“Iyās” is Iyās ibn Muʿāwiya (d. 739), a judge who lived in Basra in the seventh and eighth
centuries. He was known for his immense intelligence.
19. Abū Bakr Muḥammad Ibn Yaḥyá al-Ṣūlī, Akhbār Abī Tammām, 231.
20. Ibid.
 Notes    191

21. Ibid., 232.

22. Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, 147.
23. Reference here is not to a particular sūra but to numerous Qurʾānic instances where
prophets, in this case Ṣāliḥ and Jesus, were disbelieved, persecuted and alienated by their
own people. For examples of Ṣāliḥ, see 7:73–79, 11:61–68, 26:141–59, and 27:45–53. For exam-
ples of Jesus, see 2:87, 3:52, 5:87, 43:64, and 61:14.
24. Abū al-Ṭayyib Aḥmad al-Mutanabbī, Dīwān al-Mutanabbī, 20–22. See also ʿAbd
Allāh Ibn al-Ḥusayn al-ʿUkbarī, al-Tibyān fī Sharḥ al-Dīwān, 319–24.
25. 12:111.
26. For detailed analyses of the representations of Maryam in the Qurʾān, see the fol-
lowing: Anthony, “The Virgin Annunciate in the Meccan Qurʾān,” 363–85; Toorawa, “Sūrat
Maryam (Q. 19),” 25–78; Mourad, “Mary in the Qurʾān,” 163–74.
27. 19:16–26; 3:47.
28. Joyce, “Drama and Life.”
29. See Ibn Khaldūn, al-Muqaddima, 408–9. See also ʿĀbid al-Jābirī, Naḥnu wa-
al-Turāth, 323–25; Watt, Muhammad at Mecca, 16–20.
30. Ibn Qutayba, al-Shiʿr wa al-Shuʿarāʾ, 13.
31. Abū al-Qāsim Maḥmūd al-Zamakhsharī, Asās al-balāgha, 502.
32. Ibn Manẓūr, Lisān al-ʿArab, 3590.
33. ʿAntara ibn Shaddād, “Muʿallaqa-t- ʿAntara,” 147.
34. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 32.
35. Ibid.
36. Kaʿb ibn Zuhayr, quoted in Ibn ʿAbd Rabbih, al-ʿIqd al-Farīd, 186. See also Shawqī
Ḍayf, Tārīkh al-Adab al-ʿArabī, 226.
37. Imruʾ al-Qays, Dīwān Imriʾ al-Qays, 114.
38. P. Brown, The Body and Society, 216.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibn Abī Sulmá, Dīwān Zuhayr ibn Abī Sulmá, 97.
41. Imruʾ al-Qays, Dīwān Imriʾ al-Qays, 25.
42. Ibn Qays al-Aʿshá, Dīwān al- Aʿshá al-Kabīr: Maymūn ibn Qays, 57.
43. Abū Dhuʾayb al-Hudhalī, Dīwān Abī Dhuʾayb al-Hudhalī, 192–93.
44. Ibn Abī Sulmá, Dīwān Zuhayr ibn Abī Sulmá, 110.
45. Imruʾ al-Qays, Dīwān Imriʾ al-Qays, 8.
46. Al-Jāhiẓ states that pre-Islamic poetry appeared one hundred to two hundred years
before Islam.
47. See Saleh, “The Preacher of the Meccan Qurʾān,” 74–111.
48. Saleh, “Death and Dying in the Qurʾān,” 445–55.
49. See van Ess, Theology and Society in the Second and Third Centuries of the Hijra,
25–26.
50. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 32.
51. 26:195.
52. Saleh, “Death and Dying in the Qurʾān,” 98.
53. For an elaborate discussion of Arabic notions such as al-baʿth, al-ḥashr, al-balīyya,
al-ḥisāb, al-thawāb, al- ʿiqāb, al-janna, al-nār, etc., in pre-Islamic poetry, see ʿAlī, al-Mufaṣṣal
fī Tarīkh al-ʿArab Qabl al-Islām, vol. 6, 123–35.
192    Notes

54. The Qurʾān presents most pagans as unbelievers in life after death. However, like the
Greeks and the Romans, pagan Arabs worshipped many gods for material gain or simply
for avoiding misfortune in life. Numerous Arab references in pre-Islamic Arabic poetry
document a firm belief not only in the day of judgement but also in a return to some sort
of life after bodily death. Al-Sukkarī cites enough examples from such poets as al-Aʿshá,
Imruʾ al-Qays, al-Akhnas ibn Shihāb al-Tamīmī, and Ummayya ibn Abī al-Ṣalt, among
others, to make a valid argument for the spread of belief in the day of judgment among
pre-Islamic Arabs. See Abū Jaʿfar Muḥammad ibn Ḥabīb, Kitāb al-Muḥabbar, 320–24. See
also Jawād ʿAli’s elaborate discussion of the use of Arabic notions such as al-baʿth, al-ḥashr,
al-balīyya, al-ḥisāb, al-thawāb, al- ʿiqāb, al-janna, al-nār, etc., in pre-Islamic poetry (ʿAlī,
al-Mufaṣṣal fī Tarīkh al-ʿArab Qabl al-Islām, vol. 6, 123–35).
55. Saleh, “Death and Dying in the Qurʾān,” 105.
56. Ibid., 109.
57. Ibid., 106.
58. Pre-Islamic poetry includes numerous examples of this rhetorical question mode.
A famous example comes from Imruʾ al-Qays’s lines:
‫أغواِل؟‬
ِ ‫ِب‬ ٌ ‫ومسنونٌةٌ ُُزر‬
ِ ‫ٌق كأنيا‬ ‫ضاِجعي‬
ِ ‫أَيَقُتُُلُني وال ََمش ََرِفُِّيُ ُُم‬
Can he really kill me when the fine sword is by my side / with its blade shining like
the teeth of ghouls?
See Abū al-Ḥasan ibn Rashīq al-Qayrawānī, al-ʿUmda fī Maḥāsin al-Shiʿr wa Adabih
wa-Naqdih, 288. See also the same rhetorical structure used in al-Ṣaltān al- ʿAbdī’s response
to Jarīr:
ّ
‫ووَّد أبوك الكلُبُ لو كان ذا نخل؟‬ ‫أعيرتنا أن كانت النخل مالنا‬

Do you mock us when the palm trees are ours / and when your father, that dog,
wishes to have palm trees?
See Ibn ʿAṭiyya, Dīwān Jarīr bi-sharḥ Muḥammad ibn Ḥabīb, 578.
59. 17:49.
60. 19:66.
61. 67:25
62. ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī, Dalāʾil al-Iʿjāz, 114.
63. Ibid., 8–12.
64. 2:23.
65. 11:13.
66. 17:88.
67. Saleh, “Death and Dying in the Qurʾān,” 99.
68. Al-Jurjānī, Dalāʾil al-Iʿjāz, 8–9.
69. See Kermani, God is Beautiful. In this study, Kermani examines the structure of
the Qurʾān’s own treatment of aesthetics. One thing is certain in Kermani’s study from the
start: it emphasizes “community” and “voice,” where the aesthetic only makes sense in
the context of the larger question of the relationship of “affect” between the proclaimer
and the listeners. Kermani shows that understanding the Qurʾān belongs to a more
advanced but approachable state of aesthetic thought than methodological applications.
Devin Stewart aptly defines Kermani’s venture as a work that “presents itself as an alterna-
tive path to the Orientalists’ negative assessment of the Qurʾān as an aesthetic text, which
 Notes    193

imply that Muslims’ claims about its beauty were simply the result of bias, devotion, blind
adherence to tradition, and imperfect understanding” (Stewart, Review of God is Beautiful,
95–96). For a recent study treating voice and the affect of Qurʾānic recitals, see Nelson, The
Art of Reciting the Qurʾan.

5 . A D A B A N D T H E E T H IC A L AU T HO R I T Y O F T H E Q U R ʾ Ā N

1. Heidegger, “Aus einem Gespräch von der Sprache (Zwischen einem Japaner und
einem Fragenden),” 151.
2. During this conversation, Heidegger calls for bypassing Plato’s good old quarrel with
poetry and moving beyond the binary oppositions that have beset Western metaphysics
for centuries. Yet Heidegger’s call is itself an aporia, in the sense Max Statkiewicz astutely
describes it—that is, as philosophy’s irreconcilable debt to Plato, a debt that makes Western
philosophy always inevitably “Platonic.” It would therefore be better if it were confronted, or
“dialogued with,” than bypassed. See Statkiewicz, Rhapsody of Philosophy, 162–63.
3. P. Brown, “Late Antiquity and Islam: Parallels and Contrasts,” 25.
4. Ibid., 24.
5. Ibid., 29 (emphasis mine).
6. Ibid., 29. Cf. Festugière, Antioche, 218; Anawati, “Homo Islamicus,” 240.
7. Jaeger, Paideia.
8. See Adler, “Was Homer Acquainted with the Bible?” 70–174.
9. See al-Baghdadi, “Registers of Arabic Literary History,” 437–461.
10. See, for example, Michael Cook’s short study on the Qurʾān. For what is be sup-
posed to be an informed “historical” account, Cook’s study offers the most cryptic and out
of context ahistorical reading to date, repeatedly subjecting the Qurʾānic text to a bizarre
comparison with the tenets of European modernity. See Cook, The Koran, a Very Short
Introduction, 23–26, 37, 160–61. See also Walid Saleh’s salient deconstruction of Cook’s
approach, among others, in “In Search of a Comprehensive Qurʾān,” 143–65.
11. von Grunebaum, Classical Islam, p. 33.
12. Toynbee, “Greece,” 167.
13. Toynbee, A Study of History, 450 ff.
14. Becker, Das Erbe der Antike im Orient und Okzident. 12.
15. Cf. Nöldeke and Schwally, eds., Geschichte des Qorans, 4.
16. See Fowden, Before and After Muhammad; al-Azhmeh, “Rome, New Rome and
Baghdad: Pathways of Late Antiquity,” 55–80.
17. See Bowersock, Hellenism in Late Antiquity.
18. Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth, 10.
19. Ibn Qutayba, al-Shiʿr wa al-Shuʿarāʾ, 9.
20. Ibn Sallām al-Jumaḥī, Ṭabaqāt al-Shuʿarāʾ, 26.
21. Ibn Qutayba, al-Shiʿr wa al-Shuʿarāʾ, 11.
22. See, e.g., al-Jurjānī, Dalā ʾilal-Iʿjāz, 20–23.
23. Bravmann, The Spiritual Background of Early Islam, 1.
24. Ibid., 2.
25. Ignác Goldziher, Muhammedanische Studien, vol. 1, 1–39. Over the last few decades,
some important studies have broken new ground in excavating the ethical landscape of
pre-Islamic and Qurʾānic Arabia, thus effectively delegitimating the late antiquity thesis
194    Notes

by reemphasizing indigenous Arabic influence on the Qurʾān. See, e.g., Izutsu, Ethico-
Religious Concepts in the Qurʾan. For a more recent account, see Natij, “Murūʾa: Soucis
et interrogations éthiques dans la culture arabe classique,” 206–63. See also Jamil, Eth-
ics and Poetry in Sixth-Century Arabia. See in particular Jamil’s chapter (3–29) on ḥilm,
jahl, muruwwa, and dīn, in which she discusses Goldziher, Bichr Farès, Izutsu, Bravmann,
among others.
26. Ḍayf, Tārīkh al-Adab al-ʿArabī: al-ʿAṣr al-Jāhilī, 7.
27. Quoted in ibn Aḥmad al-Qurṭubī, al-Jāmiʿ li-Aḥkām al-Qurʾān, Vol.22, 304.
To be sure, this verse, which al-Qurṭubī attributes to Hudhalī, is not found in Dīwān
al-Hudhaliyyīn. It is also quoted anonymously in ibn Hishām/ibn Isḥāq, al-Sīra al-Nabawiyya,
539, where ibn Hishām explains al-ḥāl as “mud (ṭīn) mixed with sand.” My attribution of
this verse to al-Hudhalī is therefore speculative.
28. See, for instance, 2:177.
29. Lev. 9:34.
30. Romans 12:20.
31. Al-Qādī Nāṣir al-Dīn al-Bayḍāwī, Tafsīr al-Bayḍāwī, 477–78.
32. ʿAmr ibn Kulthūm, “Muʿallaqa-t-ʿAmr ibn Kulthūm,” 275–77, 238–40.
33. Zuhayr ibn Abī Sulmá, Dīwān Zuhayr ibn Abī Sulmá, 110–11.
34. al-Muthaqqib al-ʿAbdī, Dīwān Shiʿr al-Muthaqqib al-ʿAbdī, 227–30.
35. Ṭarafa, Dīwān Ṭarafa ibn al-ʿAbd, 69.
36. There are no surviving historical records of al-Hamdānī’s exact dates of birth and
death. The consensus is that he lived and died shortly before Islam. See Muḥammad ibn
Ḥazm al-Andalusī, Jamhara-t-Ansāb al-ʿArab, 395.
37. Ibn Ḥarīm al-Hamdānī, Dīwān al-Luṣūṣ fī al-ʿAṣrayn al-Jāhilī wa al-Islāmī, 137.
38. Ṭarafa, Dīwān Ṭarafa ibn al-ʿAbd, 24–27.
39. 107:2–3.
40. Imruʾ al-Qays, Dīwān Imriʾ al-Qays, 12.
41. See al-Bāqillānī, Iʿjāz al-Qurʾān, 76–85, 162–70.
42. Reference to infāq (spending for the sake of God) in 57:7, 10, 11, 18, and 24 directly
ties charity to faith and devotion. It is important to point out that infāq should not be con-
fused with zakā. The Qurʾān makes a clear distinction between the two. While both are acts
of giving for the sake of God, infāq has wider implications of giving that includes money
among other ethical acts of self-abnegation. See, for instance, 57:10, where the spending
includes possessions and one’s own life. See also 8:63; 2:215, 217, 254, and 270; 34:39; 4:39;
13:22; 28:54. Zakā, on the other hand, is a religious farīḍa (obligation) and one of the com-
mandments of Islam. Specific verses calling for zakā include the following: 2:42, 83, 110, 177,
277; 5:12; 6:141; 9:11; 23:4; 73:20.
43. 57:27.
44. See, for instance, 4:164; 35:24; 13:7; 16:36. To be clear, there is no contradiction
between the promise made in these verses and the meaning of 5:19. While some terms
overlap, there is a subtle difference between rasūl, nabiyy, and nadhīr. In this particular
verse, the noun fatra has been traditionally translated into English as a “break” or “interval”
between messengers. The verse in full reads as follows:
‫ٓاَء ُُكم‬ ۢ ‫ٓاَءَنَا ِِم ۢۢن َبَ ِِش‬
َ ‫يٍۢر� ََواَلا َنَ ِِذي ٍۢۢر�ۖ ۖ َفََقَ ْْد ََج‬ ْ ُ‫ٓاَء ُُك ْْم ََرُسُوُلَُنَا ُيَُبَِّيُِنُ َلَ ُُك ْْم ََعَلَ ٰٰى َفَ ْْتَر ٍَۢۢة� ِِّمَنَ ٱلُّرُُس ُِِل َأَن َتَُقُوُل‬
َ ‫وْا ََما ََج‬ َ ‫ِب َقَ ْْد ََج‬ ِ �‫َٰٓي�� َٓأ َ ْْه ََل ْٱْل ِِك َٰٰت‬
ْ ‫يٌر ََوَنَ ِِذي ٌٌرۗ ۗ ََوٱُهَّلل� ُ ََعَلَ ٰٰى ُُك ِِّل َش‬
‫َْى ٍۢۢء� َقَ ِِدي ٌٌر‬ ٌ ‫َبَ ِِش‬
 Notes    195

A hurried reading of this verse might assume that there is a contradiction in terms,
namely that the Qurʾān contradicts itself by admitting to a clear six hundred-year discon-
tinuity between Jesus and Muḥammad. The particular reference in this verse, however, is
an address to the people of the book about a messenger with a “revealed book.” In addition,
in classical Arabic, the root f.t.r means “to relax,” “lessen,” or “lose intensity, as in (43:75). It
could also mean “to become tepid, indifferent, or lukewarm,” as in 21:20. See al-Rāzī, Tafsīr
al-Fakhr al-Rāzī, 198–99.
45. See, for instance, the following verses:
‫( ِإَِّنّآ َأَنَز َْْلَنَا ٱلَّتّْوْ ََر ٰٰىَةَ ِفِيَهَا ُهًُدًى ََوُنُور‬5:44)
‫يِه ُهًُدًى ََوُنُو ٌٌر‬
ِ ِ‫يَل ِف‬ ِ ِ �‫َصِّدًّقًا ِّلّ ََما َبَْيَْنَ َيَ ََد ْْي ِِه ِِمَنَ ٱلَّتّْوْ ََر ٰٰى ِِة ََو ََءاَتَ ْْي َٰٰن�ُهُ ٱِإْل‬
َ ‫نِج‬ َ ‫يَسى ٱْب ِِْن ََمْرْ َيَ ََم ُُم‬َ ‫( ََوَقََّفّ ْْيَنَا ََعَلَٰٓى� ٓ ََءا َٰٰث� ِِر ِِهم ِبِ ِِع‬5:46)
ُ ‫( َٰٓي�� َٓأَُّيَّهَا ٱلَّنّاُسُ َقَ ْْد ََجآ ََء ُُكم ُبُْرْ َٰٰه�ٌنٌ ِّمّ ن َّّر‬4:174)
‫ِّبُّك ْْم ََوَأَنَز َْْلَنَآ ِإَِلَ ْْي ُُك ْْم ُنُوًرًا ُّّمِبِيًنًا‬
46. See 27:9 and 27:12.
47. See 27:12, 27:13, 27:19, and 27:28.
48. Abū ʿUthmān ʿAmr ibn Baḥr al-Jāḥiẓ, al-Bayān wa- al-Tabyīn, 272–73.
49. See the reference to Qatāda’s interpretation of 57:27 as rafḍ al-nisāʾ wa ittikhādh
al-ṣwāmiʿ (rejection of women and resort to monasteries) in Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī, al-Durr
al-Manthūr fī al-Tafsīr bil-Maʾthūr, 293.
50. See al-Suyūṭī, Lubāb al-Nuqūl fī Asbāb al-Nuzūl, 108.
51. P. Brown, “Late Antiquity and Islam: Parallels and Contrasts,” 31–32.
52. Examples of popular celibates include St. Paul (ca. 0–67 AD), who applauded cel-
ibacy, though he still acknowledged the permissibility of marriage for fellow Christians
who could not uphold this higher ideal. Celibacy may indeed have been an extreme ethical
response to the sexual promiscuities of the times, a step better than marriage. The Council
of Elvira, the first know council of the Christian church in Spain declared (ca. 306 AD) that
all priests and bishops, regardless of their current marital status, should abstain from hav-
ing sex. By the fourth century, the Western church adopted the celibacy principle and the
monastic tradition that accompanied it, an adoption that culminated in the celebration of
celibacy in the writings of church fathers like Ambrose and Augustine. In 692, the decrees
of the Eastern churches in the Council of Trullo dictated that bishops must be celibate.
53. P. Brown, “Late Antiquity and Islam: Parallels and Contrasts,” 32.
54. Ibid., 32. Cf. 36. See also Gellner, Saints of the Atlas, 149.
55. Ibid., 34. See also Tellenbach, Church, State and Christian Society at the Time of the Inves-
titure Contest; Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages, 34–44, 100–133.

6 . T H E Q U R ʾ Ā N I N C O N T E X T: M O N O T H E I SM A N D T H E B I RT H
O F T H E U N M I M E T IC

1. Asad Q. Ahmed, The Religious Elite of the Early Islamic Hijaz, 1–3.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid., 5.
4. See Col. Playfair, “On the Himyaritic Inscriptions Lately Brought to England from
Southern Arabia,” 174–77. See also Irfan Shahid, “Byzantium in South Arabia,” 27–29. For a
more recent account of the Himyaritic Inscription, see Irene Gajda, Le royaume de Himyar
à l’époque monothéiste.
196    Notes

5. In postclassical Shiʿa exegetic tradition, a direct cause of the downfall of the Himya-
ritic dynasty is said to be the religious intolerance of Qawm Tubbaʿ (the people of King
Tubbaʿ) (44:37; 50:14) who had embraced Judaism and who persecuted Christian converts.
On the pretext of the murder of the Jews by the people of Najran, Dhū Nuwās, the sovereign
of Yemen, took up arms against them, occupied their city, and gave its inhabitants a choice
between a return to Judaism and death by fire in a trench. When they opted to hold onto
their Christian faith, a large ‫( أخدود‬pit) was dug, filled with burning fuel, and all who refused
to renounce their faith, amounting to twenty thousand, were cast in the flames. See ʿAlī ibn
Ibrahīm al-Qummī, Tafsīr al-Qummī, vol. 2, 413.
6. 18:13; 85:7
7. 61:6.
8. Von Grunebaum, Muḥammadan Festivals, 5.
9. Ibid., 5.
10. Ibid.
11. 106:1–2.
12. See Ibn Fāris ibn Zakariyyā, al-Ṣāḥibī fī Fiqh al-Lugha al- ʿArabiyya wa Masāʾilihā
wa Sunan al-ʿArabiyya fī Kalāmihā, 41–47.
13. Jeffery, The Foreign Vocabulary of the Qurʾān, iv.
14. 18:31.
15. Ibn Zakariyyā, al-Ṣāhibī, 42.
16. 17:35.
17. Ibid., 45.
18. See Gibb, “Pre-Islamic Monotheism in Arabia,” 271.
19. Ibid. In this context, Gibb acknowledges important work by scholars who successfully
adopted this positive linguistic understanding of the Qurʾān. These scholars include Chaim
Rabin, who makes the case that the Qurʾān evidences the existence of a nonrabbinic Jewish
sect in seventh-century Arabia, and Edward Ullendorff, whose study investigates semitic
languages, including Hebrew and classical Arabic and relies on the scholarship of Muslim
grammarians as evidence suggesting Christianity in South Arabia and Ethiopia was founded
on Judaic elements that existed in South Arabia in early post-Christian centuries. See Rabin,
Qumran Studies, 112–30; see also Ullendorff, “What is a Semitic Language?” 216–36.
20. See al-Qurṭubī, al-Jāmiʿ li-Aḥkām al-Qurʾān, pp. 110–112. In this account, al-Qurṭubī
responds to differing opinions on the “Arabicity” of the Qurʾān among Muslims scholars,
including that of al-Ṭabarī, ibn ʿAṭiyya, and Abū ʿUbayda.
21. See J. Stetkevych, Muḥammad and the Golden Bough.
22. Gibb, “Pre-Islamic Monotheism in Arabia,” 271.
23. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, Vol. 1, 71–73.
24. 85:22.
25. 13:39.
26. Madigan, The Qurʾān’s Self-Image, 77.
27. 2:30–34.
28. 39:3.
29. See, e.g., Shoemaker, The Death of a Prophet. See also Donner, Narratives of Islamic
Origins.
30. See Chejne, The Arabic Language. See also Khayr Bik, al-Lugha al- ʿArabiyya.
 Notes    197

31. See also Shoemaker, Creating the Qurʾān, 17–18.

32. Naṣr Ḥāmid Abū Zayd, Mafhūm al-Naṣṣ, 63.
33. 26:192–97.
34. 33:40.
35. 17:106; 25:32.
36. See Sadeghi and Goudarzi, “San’a’1 and the Origins of the Qurʾān,” 1–129. See also
Sadeghi and Bergmann, “The Codex of a Companion of the Prophet and the Qurʾān of the
Prophet,” 343–436. For a thorough precis on this topic, see Sinai, “When Did the Consonan-
tal Skeleton of the Quran Reach Closure? Part I,” 273–92; and “When Did the Consonantal
Skeleton of the Quran Reach Closure? Part II,” 509–21. See also Al-Azami, The History of
the Quranic Text.
37. See 2:189; 36:38–40.
38. See, e.g., the reference to the Event of the Ifk of 626/7 AD in 24:11–26.
39. 68:4.
40. 7:157.
41. 93:6–8.
42. Wills, What the Qurʾān Meant and Why It Matters, 65.
43. Ibid., 65.
44. Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, 117.
45. Stewart, “Speech Genres and Interpretation of the Qurʾan,” 5–6.
46. Samji, The Qurʾan: A Form-Critical History.
47. Bell, Introduction to the Koran, 76–77.
48. 3:7.
49. See 77:27; 50:9; 7:57; 25:48; 35:9; Q. 56:68–70; 27:60,63; 11:52; 15:22; 6:99; 31:10, 34;
39:21; 40:13; 42:28; 43:11; 45:5; 16:10, 65; 71:10–11; 14:32; 78:14–15; 30:24, 46, 48; 29:63; 2:22, 164;
8:11; 13:12, 17; 24:43.
50. 42:28.
51. Imruʾ al-Qays, Dīwān Imruʾ al-Qays, 72.
52. Ibid., 73.
53. Shakespeare, King Lear, act 3, scene 4, 24–27.
54. See, e.g., 2:130; 7:168; 3:39, 46, 114; 21:105.
55. See, e.g., 2:25, 62, 82, 277; 3.57.
56. Ibn Abī Sulmá, Dīwān Zuhayr ibn Abī Sulmá, 41.
57. 76:19.
58. 76:19.
59. See also Rami Tannous’s discussion of ḥūr (women of paradise) in the Qurʾān and
the its local significations in the work of the pre-Islamic poet ʿAbīd ibn al-Abraṣ (Tannous,
“Negotiating the Nativity in Late Antiquity,” 353–56).
60. I am grateful to Geert Jan van Gilder for providing me with this example.
61. S. Stetkevych, The Mute Immortals Speak, 42.
62. See Bamyeh, The Social Origins of Islam, 273–93. In this important study, Bamyeh
situates the monotheistic call of the Qurʾān, especially in its break with paganism and a
revamping of Ḥanīfism, within the context of booming trade practices, tribal shifts, and
relocations, as well as other sociocultural transformations in seventh-century Mecca
and the Arabian Peninsula.
198    Notes

63. Abū ʿAbd Allāh al-Ḥusayn al-Zawzanī, Sharḥ al-Muʿallaqāt al-Sabʿ, 58.
64. See Nāṣir al-Dīn al-Albānī, Silsila-t- al-Aḥādīth al-Saḥīḥa wa Shayʾ min Fiqhihā wa
Fawāʾidihā, 449.
65. 3:110.
66. 4:92; 58:3; 90:13.
67. 3:195; 4: 7, 32, 124; 24: 4–9, 23; 33:35.
68. Bowering, “The Qurʾān,” 190.
69. 69:7.
70. 75:50–51.
71. See Dayeh, “Prophecy and Writing in the Qurʾān, or Why Muḥammad was not a
Scribe,” 31–62.
72. 26:226.
73. Plato, Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII, 72.
74. 10:32.
75. 26:193–94.
76. 2:31.
77. Al-Khaṭṭābī, “al-Qawl fī Bayān Iʿjāz al-Qurʾān,” 24.
78. Ibid., 27.
79. Al-Jurjānī, Dalā ʾil al-Iʿjāz, 49–65.
80. Kermani, God is Beautiful, 129.
81. Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” 135.
82. Lawrence, Selected Literary Criticism, 398.
83. See Kant, The Critique of Judgement. See in particular §41, “Of the Empirical Interest
in the Beautiful” and §42, “On the Intellectual Interest in the Beautiful,” 174–83.
84. Kermani, God is Beautiful, 130.
85. Roman Jakobson, quoted in Kermani, God is Beautiful, 130.
86. Jakobson, Language in Literature, 378.
87. Ibid.
88. 48:29.
89. 51:50–51; 79: 45.
90. 88:21.
91. 34:28.
92. Al-Jurjānī, “al-Risāla al-Shāfiya,” in Thalāth Rasāʾil, 122.
93. Al-Zarkashī narrates an incident of an Arabian who heard the following verse for
the first time (22:1):
‫يٌم‬
ٌ ‫َِظ‬ ْ ‫َّبَُك ْْمۚ ۚ ِإَِّنَ َز َْْل ََزَلََةَ الَّسَا ََع ِِة َش‬
ِ ‫َْي ٌٌء َع‬ ُ ‫َيَا َأَُّيَُهَا الَّنَاُسُ اَّتَُقُوا ََر‬
to which he responded by saying “you broke the meter. It should read as follows instead”:
‫زلـزلـة الـسـاعة شـيء عـظـيم‬ ‫يـا أيـها النـاس اتـقوا ربـكم‬
Thinking that he was correcting someone’s poetry by offering to remove the particle
“‫ ”إن‬so the verse would be in a correct conventional meter (al-sarīʿ). To which the response
was: ‫ وليس الشعر‬، ‫( هذا القرآن‬This is the Qurʾān, not poetry). See Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd Allāh
al-Zarkashī, al-Burhān fī ʿUlūm al-Qurʾān, 116.
94. In 30:2–4, the Qurʾān makes a brief reference to the Byzantine-Sasanian War of
602–28 AD, reporting the defeat of the Romans (Byzantines) by the Persians, but also pre-
dicting a victory soon to come:
 Notes    199

ِ ْ‫ ِفِي َأَ ْْدَنَى اَأْل� َْر‬.‫ُّرُوُم‬

َ‫ِض ََوُهُ ْْم ِِم ْْن َبَ ْْع ِِد ََغَلَِبِ ِِه ْْم ََسَيَ ْْغِلُِبُوَن‬ ُ ‫ُُغِلَِبَت ال‬
The Romans were defeated. In the lowest of land; yet they will, after their defeat, tri-
umph. (30:204).
95. Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence, 36.
96. Plato, Republic, xx.
97. Kermani, God is Beautiful, 129.
98. 2:1; 12:1; 14:4; 20:113; 26:192–95; 26:198; 44:58.
99. 16:35; 24:54; 29:18; 36:17.
100. 29:64.
101. Dakake, “Mecca and Medina,” 23.
102. Ibid., 24.
103. See Tottoli, Biblical Prophets in the Qurʾān and Muslim Literature, pp. 3–70.
104. 42:13
105. See Donner, Narratives of Islamic Origins, 76–85.
106. 11:42–43.
107. 11:45–46.
108. 66:10.
109. 19:42–46.
110. 37:102.
111. 15:60; 37:135
112. 12:9.
113. 12:84.
114. 21:87; 27:142.
115. 9:40; 36:9.
116. Corbin, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ʿArabi, 223.
117. 26:193–94.
118. 19:10–11.
119. Saleh, “Meccan Gods, Jesus’ Divinity,” 92.
120. 21:69.
121. 20:39.
122. 2:50; 10:90; 26:63; 20:77.
123. 19:19.
124. 5:110.
125. 93:6–8.
126. See, e.g., 2:214; 3:123–24, 159; 4:59, 84; 7:157–58; 8:30, 65; 9:40, 61, 73; 9:108–9; 15:94;
17:73–81, 90–93; 21:107; 24:11–12; 25:32; 26:214–16; 33:18–19, 21–23, 25–27; 42:52; 58:1; 62:2;
68:2–5; 80:1–10; 94:4; 74:1–2; 111:1–2.
127. 7:157–58.
128. See Günther, “Muḥammad, the Illiterate Prophet,” 1–26.
129. See 7:157, 158; 2:78; 3:20,75; 62:2.
130. See Abū al-Wafāʾ Ibn ʿAqīl’s argument on “al-Nasab ilá al-Ism al-Murakkab” (attri-
bution to compound nouns), 501.
131. Shahrūr, al-Kitāb wa al-Qurʾān, 141.
132. For works that began to reflect on Mosaic references in the Qurʾān as informing
a Muslim identity, see Bashear, Arabs and Others in Early Islam; Rubin, Between Bible and
Qur’ an.
200    Notes

133. For earlier scholarship that views the Qurʾān as dependent on Jewish sources in pro-
phetic narratives, see Obermann, “Koran and Agada,” 23–48. See also Lassner, Demonizing
the Queen of Sheba. For a practical critique of the neglect of the Arabo-Islamic contexts, see
J. Stetkevych, Muḥammad and the Golden Bough; Stetkevych, “Sara and the Hyena,” 13–41.
134. For a fuller and more penetrating account of Moses in the Qurʾān, see Wheeler,
Moses in the Qurʾān and Islamic Exegesis.
135. For a thorough stylistic analysis of the use of vocatives in the Qurʾān, see ʿAbd
al-Qādir Muḥammad Muntaṣir Dahmān, Asālīb al-Nidāʾ fī al-Qurʾān al-Karīm. For a
focused study of the use of vocatives in the Medinan versus Meccan sūras in relationship
to prophetic proclamations, see Stewart, “Vocatives in the Qurʾan and the Framing of Pro-
phetic Proclamations,” 199–248.
136. See, e.g., Brock, “From Ephrem to Romanos,” 141. See also Dmitriev, “An Early
Christian Arabic Account of the Creation of the World,” 354.
137. Eric Auerbach makes a subtle distinction between representations of prophets
in the Old Testament (e.g., Abraham, Jacob, and Moses) and depictions of heroes in the
Homeric epics. To Auerbach, such biblical figures “produce a more concrete, direct, and
historical impression than the figures in the Homeric world—not because they are better
described in terms of sense (the contrary is the case) but because the confused, contradic-
tory multiplicity of events, the psychological and factual cross-purposes, which true his-
tory reveals, have not disappeared in the representation but still remain clearly perceptible”
(Auerbach, Mimesis, 17). It is not clear what Auerbach means by “true history,” but the
Qurʾān’s representations of the same figures in fact differ dramatically in that they avoid
the convention of a beginning, middle, and end common in Genesis narratives. Instead, the
Qurʾān presents a diffused prophetic narrative, where the story of Moses, for instances,
recurs over and again from different narrative angles, thus infusing such narrative portray-
als with a new world of dramatization. In this mode of representation, the Qurʾān parts not
only with the motifs of the world of mythologies and supernatural monsters, but also with
the historical linearity of the Old Testament.
138. See 11:7–8; 13: 5; 16: 38–39; 17:10, 49–5, 97–99; 18: 48; 19: 66–68; 20:16, 22:5; 23:
112–115; 25:11; 29: 23; 30: 8, 16; 32:10, 28; 34: 7, 29; 36:48; 37:15–16;14:50; 45:24–25, 31–32; 46:17;
51:12; 56: 46–48.
139. Georges Bataille, for instance, reduces the early years of Muḥammad’s prophethood
to a “military enterprise,” in an undisguised apology to Western Europe in order to justify
the latter’s antipathy toward Islam. See Bataille, The Accursed Share, 86.
140. Cohen, The Myth of the Judeo-Christian Tradition.
141. See Abū ʿUthmān ʿAmr ibn Baḥr al-Jāḥiẓ, “Ḥujaj al-Nubuwwa,” 278–80. See also
Stroumsa, “The Signs of Prophecy.”
142. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 124.
143. Ibn Khaldūn, Muqaddima-t- Ibn Khaldūn, 88.
144. Gaskin, introduction to David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natura Religion, xii.
145. See also 2:23; 9:64, 86, 124, 127; 11:23; 24:1; and 47:20.
146. 27:92.
147. 2:53; 87; 136.
148. 2:136; 253.
149. 15:87; 20:99.
 Notes    201

150. Chronologically, Sūra-t-al-Naml is not the first sūra in which the word kitāb
appears as a strong reference to the Qurʾān. As an appositive to the Qurʾān, kitāb first
appears in the Meccan sūra of Sad:
ِ ‫َّكََر ُأُْوْ ُلُوا اَأْل� َ ْْلَبَا‬
‫ِب‬ َ ‫ٌك ِّلَِيََّدََّبَُرُوا آَيَاِتِ ِِه ََوِلَِيََتَ ََذ‬ َ ‫ِِكَتَاٌبٌ َأَنَز َْْلَنَاُهُ ِإَِلَ ْْي‬
ٌ ‫َك ُُمَبَا ََر‬
A book We have descended unto you, blessed, so that they may contemplate its
verses, and so that those with kernels of insight may be remember. (38:29)
151. For a brief account the occurrence of basmallah in the Qurʾān, see Nöldeke et al.,
The History of the Qurʾān, 277–78.
152. See, e.g., Penchansky, Solomon and the Ant, 111–12.
153. Von Grunebaum, Islam, Essay on the Nature and Growth of a Cultural Tradition, 89.
154. Badr al-Dīn Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd Allāh al-Zarkashī, Al-Burhān fī ʿUlūm
al-Qurʾān, 386–87.
155. Kermani, God is Beautiful, 251.

C O N C LU SIO N : T H E F U T U R E O F QU R ʾ Ā N IC ST U D I E S

1. Albert Hourani’s introduction to Islam in European Thought is one of the most impor-
tant critical interventions in the direction of deconstructing European thought on Islam.
Although more essayistic and tailored in its examination of important scholars of Islam
such as H. A. R. Gibb and Marshall Hodgson, Hourani touches on some inklings of this
thought, especially in his work on the problems of historical sources in both Louis Mas-
signon and Jacques Berque. Hourani has little to say about what may have existed in eigh-
teenth- and nineteenth-century academic European thought on Islam or offer a critique of
the deeper historical revisionism and its entombment of Islam’s origins and sources. Nor
does it expose the wider horizontal and vertical connections between the rise of historical
revisionism and the persistence of racial ideologies in the postcolonial Europe. Overall,
Hourani’s study is more about specific authors and texts than it is about connecting the dots
and finding epistemic connections in scholarship on Islam among European academics.
2. Van Gelder, Sound and Sense in Classical Arabic Poetry, 9–10.
3. Hegel, Phenomenology, 9.
4. Sizgorich, “Narrative and Community in Islamic late antiquity,” 42.
5. Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition, 6.
6. See Salama, The Qurʾān and Modern Arabic Literary Criticism, 33–36.
7. Neuwirth, The Qurʾan and Late Antiquity, 370.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. In fact, this topic has occupied Neuwirth’s intellectual thought for decades. Angelika
Neuwirth’s and Nora Schmidt’s edited volume, Denkraum Spätantike: Reflexionen von Anti-
ken im Umfeld des Koran, serves the same purpose, where the term “Denkraum” expresses
the spatial presence and not just mere temporality. Neuwirth’s book, Koranforschung—eine
politische Philologie? Bibel, Koran und Islamentstehung im Spiegel spätantiker Textpolitik und
moderner Philologie, revisits the same theme. This time, Neuwirth not only showcases the
202    Notes

complexities of the textual history of sacred texts, but also expertly exposes the biases and
politics inherent in the field of philological theology.
13. See Bonald, Mélanges littéraires, politiques et philosophiques. For the specific case
of Germany, see Humboldt, “On the Historian’s Task,” 69. In nineteenth-century Ger-
many, historians needed to adopt skepticism in order to survive and be taken seriously as a
discipline and be treated as equal to the sciences. It is no coincidence that early German
historians of the Qurʾān (such as Gustav Weil’s 1844 Historisch-kritische Einleitung in den
Koran) wanted to arrange its text chronologically, even long before Nöldeke embarked on
his field-defining work, Geschichte des Qorâns. It is worthy to note that the chronological
distinction between Meccan and Medinan sūras is already achieved in the Muslim tradi-
tion, notably in Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī’s al-Itqān fī ʿUlūm al-Qurʾān (1505). For a criticism of
the Noldeke-Schwally-Bergsträsser chronological sequencings, see Stefanidis, “The Qurʾān
Made Linear,” 1–22. See also Böwering, “Chronology and the Qurʾān” and Robinson, Dis-
covering the Qurʾān, 95–96.
14. Amīn al-Khūlī, Manāhij Tajdīd fī al-Naḥw wa-al-Balāgha wa-al-Tafsīr wa-al-Adab,
304.
15. See Reynolds, ed., The Qurʾān in Its Historical Context; Reynolds, ed., New Perspec-
tives on the Qurʾān; Neuwirth, Sinai, and Marx, eds., The Qurʾān in Context; Zellentin,
The Qurʾān’s Legal Culture; Neuwirth, The Qurʾan and Late Antiquity.
16. 40:78.
17. As an example of this trend, see Reynolds, The Qurʾān and the Bible. The argument
that the Qurʾān “borrows” from the Bible is as old as Marracci’s Prodromus: “Ita ut’Alcoranus
sit mixtura trium legum, seu religionum, Hebraicae, Christianae, et Israeliticae, additis
paucis quisquillis, quae e cerebro suo Mahumetus extraxit.” See also Livanos and Salama,
“A Bridge Too Far?” 145–69.
18. Wansbrough, Quranic Studies; Crone and Cooks, Hagarism; Cooks, The Koran; Neu-
wirth, “Qurʾānic Studies and Historical-Critical Philology,” 31–60; Shoemaker, Creating the
Qurʾān.
19. 12:111.
20. 35:24.
21. 12:3. In this particular verse, the Qurʾān specifically raises the status of relating the
narrative of the prophets, both in form and in content, to a grammatical superlative degree,
as “the best/most mastered/most refined of narratives,” narratives which, as the Qurʾān
states, Muḥammad “could not have possibly been aware of before the Qurʾān’s revelation.”
22. Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 12.
23. Neuwirth, “Locating the Qurʾān in the Epistemic Space of Late Antiquity,” 193.
24. Damrosch, “Literary Criticism and the Qurʾān,” 4–10.
25. Ibid., 6.
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Abraham, 144–48; Muḥammad and, 149–51, 158 al-Bāqillānī, 4, 67–68, 111, 131, 136
Abū al-Ḥasan al-Rummānī, 59 al-Bayḍāwī, 105
Abū Dhuʾayb al-Hudhalī, 90, 103–4 alfāẓ, 139
Abū Tammām, 81–83, 86 al-Ḥanīfīyya (Ḥanīfism), 124
adab, 98–115, 120. See also ethics al-Ḥaqq, 137
ʿAdī Ibn Zayd al-ʿIbādī, 57 al-ḥayawān, 143
Adorno, Theodor, 87, 92, 95 alhaytuhā, 111
aesthetics, 53; as category of the beautiful, 91; al-ḥifẓ ʿan ẓahr qalb, 121
comparative, 80; Euro-American, 78–81, al-Ḥīra, 62
84; Eurocentric marginalization of Arabic, al-Jāḥiẓ, 4, 45, 102, 113, 156, 167, 191n46
79–81, 84, 96; expansive category of Arabic, al-Jallad, Ahmad, 187n13
141; hedonistic, 75, 77; literary, 59, 68, 76; al-Janna, 150
of orality, 67, 78, 96; poetic paganism and al-Khaṭṭābī, 4, 67, 123, 139–40
monotheistic, 76–96; of pre-Islamic poetry, al-kitāb, 120
59, 63–64, 77, 80, 171; quantum leap in Allāh, 122, 189n1
post-Qurʾānic Arabic, 80–81, 172; of the al-Lawḥ al-Maḥfūẓ, 165
Qurʾān, 59, 67–68, 76, 84, 86, 171; resistance allegory, 49, 66
to normative scriptural, 78; social, 76, 84; al-Masjid al-Aqṣá, 44
social-political, 171; sociolinguistic Qurʾānic, al-mawt, 73
86. See also Arabic language; beauty; orality al-Mutanabbī, 80, 84
ahl al-kitāb, 148, 166 al-Muʿtaṣim, 81
Aḥmad Ibn al-Muʿtaṣim, Prince, 81, 83 al-Muthaqqib al-ʿAbdī, 106–8, 110
Ahmed, Asad, 116 al-Nābigha al-Dhubyānī, 60–65, 68, 70, 76–77
aḥsan al-ḥadīth, 71 al-Nuʿmān, 61–62, 64
aḥsan al-qaṣaṣ, 71 al-qarīḥa al-shiʿriyya, 82
aʿjamī (non-Arabic) vocabulary, 6 al-rūḥ, 73
al-ādib, 103 al-Rūḥ al-Amīn, 138
al-Aʿrāf, 69–70 al-Rummānī, 4, 65–66, 123

225
226    index

al-ṣāliḥūn/al-ṣāliḥāt, 130 ʿaṣabiyya, 15, 20–21, 23, 37, 48–49, 100, 102,
al-Ṣaltān al-ʿAbdī’, 192n58 177–78
al-Shahrastānī, 189n1 asbāb al-nuzūl, 4, 19
al-Suyūṭī, 180n21 asceticism, 47
al-Ṭāʾif, 57 aṣdāʾ, 189n62
al-ummiyyīn, 166 Ashtor, Eliyahu, 32
al-Zamakhsharī: Asās al-balāgha, 87 Āṣif ibn Barkhiyā, 164
al-Zarkashī, 167 Auerbach, Eric, 200n137
Amīn al-Khūlī, 175 āya/āyāt, 159–62, 164–65, 167
ʿAmr ibn al-ʿĀṣ, 40 āyāt al-Qurʾān, 165
ʿAmr ibn al-Ḥārith, 61–62, 64 āyāt al-taḥaddī, 3
ʿAmr ibn Kulthūm, 99, 105–6 Ayyām al-ʿArab, 59
ʿAmr ibn Ma ʿdiyakrib, 190n18
amthila, 120 baḥr al-kāmil (al-kāmil metre), 82
anamnesis, 99 balāgha, 4, 9, 58, 84, 139; emergence of a
Anawati, Georges, 100 language of, 64
ʿAntara ibn Shaddād, 86–87, 100 balāghun mubīn, 143
Anthony, Sean W.: Muhammad and the Empires Bamyeh, Mohammed, 197n62
of Faith, 182n26 Banī Isrāʾil, 43, 161
ʿArab al-Furs wa-ʿArab al-Yūnān, 57 Banū Dhubyān, 130
ʿArab al-Shamāl, 57 Barth, Karl, 18
Arabia, 35, 47, 56, 89, 99–100, 154; ethical Barthes, Roland, 75
landscape of pre-Islamic and Qurʾānic, basmala, 165
193n25; hospitality in pre-Islamic, 103–4; Bataille, Georges, 200n139
indigenous social prehistory of, 56; paganism Battle of Badr, 73
in sixth-century, 118; pre-Islamic, 53–75, Bauer, Thomas, 43, 56, 58–60, 187n16
99–111, 121, 189n1; rhetorical “materiality” of bayān, 139, 164
pre-Qurʾānic and Qurʾānic, 77; scorching Bayt Allāh, 189n1
heat of, 122–23; seventh-century Meccan and Bayt Thaqīf, 189n1
Medinan communities of, 42, 76, 109, 117, beauty, 78, 86; rhythmic quality and aesthetic
126, 134, 138, 177; southern, 28, 117–19; tribal beauty of the Qurʾān, 83; truth and, 140.
and communal values of pre-Islamic, 104. See also aesthetics
See also Mecca; Medina; pre-Islamic Arabs Becker, Carl Heinrich, 101
Arabic language, 2, 4, 21–24, 36, 79, 121; birth of Beiser, Frederick, 173
the unmimetic in Qurʾānic, 125–26; claims Bell, Harold Idris, 30–31; Egypt From Alexander
of detecting traces of Hellenistic culture in the Great to the Arab Conquest, 31–32
the, 38; classical, 13, 17, 23–24, 56–57, 60, 70, Bell, Richard, 124
78–79, 93; difficulty of the, 56, 79; eternity in Bennett, William, 51
pre-Islamic, 130; literatures of the, 81; orality Bergsträßer, Gotthelf, 17
of the, 77, 121; post-Qurʾānic, 84; pre-Islamic, Berque, Jacques, 201n1
69, 76, 78, 89, 100, 118–19, 172, 175; Qurʾān as Bevir, Mark, 30
height of excellence of the, 38–39, 42, 71, 92, Bible, 27; acts of charity and kindness familiar to
122, 175; Qurʾān’s adherence to grammar and the, 112; comparative approach to the Qurʾān
rhetoric of the, 95; rhetorical brilliance of and the, 97, 173–74; criticism of the, 11, 18,
the, 59; rhetoric suspends logic in classical, 24, 45, 51, 116, 174; the desert as the backdrop
94; vocabulary of monotheism in the for divine encounters in the, 89; Gospels
pre-Islamic, 119. See also aesthetics; languages; of the, 117, 126; Hebrew, 56, 125; narrative of
pre-Islamic Arabic literature; rhetoric Hagar and Ishmael in the, 144; scholarship
Arabic literary criticism, 59, 72 on the, 2, 42–43; speech performance with
Arberry, A. J., 55 apocalyptic power of the, 173; teaching on
archangel Gabriel, 151 feeding one’s enemies in the, 104–5; teaching
Aristotle, 48, 101 on hospitality in the, 104; Western
 index    227

historians of the, 58. See also Judaism; colonialism, 5; intellectual, 15, 51; rise of, 21–22.
Christianity; Torah See also imperialism
Biblicism, 2, 37 colonization: epistemological, 51; intellectual, 50;
bidʿa, 113 of Muslim nations, 16
Bravmann, M. M., 103 Constantinople, 33
Brown, Peter, 115; The Body and Society, 88; continuity thesis, 31, 37–48
The World of Late Antiquity, 30–34, 36–41, Cook, Michael, 17–18, 25, 193n10; Hagarism, 27,
47–48, 89, 98–102, 105, 110 35–39, 41, 45, 47–48
Brown, J.A.C.: Hadith, 182n26 Corbin, Henry, 146
Bultmann, Rudolf, 18–19 Corpus Aristotelicum, 12
Byzantium, 33 Crone, Patricia, 17–18, 25, 44, 46; Hagarism, 27,
35–39, 41, 45, 47–48, 181n11
Cameron, Averil, 34, 50, 184n41
Castells, Manuel, 5 Dakake, Maria, 144
celibacy, 98, 102, 112–15; Christian practice of Damrosch, David, 177
monasticism and its associative practice David, 163
of, 113, 195n52; popularity of the Christian Ḍayf, Shawqī, 102–3
practice of, 195n52; Roman persecution and, death, 73–74; defiance of, 90; pre-Islamic view
114–15. See also Christianity; sexuality of chance and the randomness of, 91–93;
Christianity, 2, 4, 9, 11, 28, 31, 35, 40, 47–48, 50, rhetoric of, 77
54–55, 71, 112–18, 148, 152, 162, 176–77; ascetic decolonization, 1, 14, 24
holy man of, 115; celibacy in, 112–13; early Deleuze, Gilles, 157
medieval, 102, 114–15; figurations of creation desert, 89, 103, 115, 127
of early, 57; historical Catholic, 155; Islam as Desert Fathers, 88–89
the archenemy of, 32; liberal Protestant, 155; Deutschlandradio Kultur, 29
persecution in early, 114–15, 196n5; “radical Didascalia, 101
communal appeal” of, 34; in Southern diwan, 96, 102
Arabia, 117–19; Syriac, 10, 49. See also Bible; ḍiyāfa, 99–100
celibacy diyār, 68
classical Arabic poetry, 58, 61–75; absence Dmitriev, Kirill, 57–58
of transcendental anxiety in, 68; Donner, Fred, 36–37
architectural employment of the Qurʾān Durant, Will: Caesar and Christ, 30–32
in, 82–83; conceptions of night in, 60–67; Dussel, Enrique, 29
environmental depictions of nomadic life
in, 86; exaggerated sense of personal and Eco, Umberto, 123
tribal glory in, 105–6; as ḥarām or ḥalāl, 111; Egypt, 33, 154
individualistic ethos of pre-Islamic, 120, 126, Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, 1
129, 141; linguistic mediation of, 73, 78–79; Ehrenkreutz, Andrew, 32
materialistic community that favors affluence Eliot, T. S., 131
and possessions in, 108; mimesis of pre- emotions: and experience of torrential rain
Islamic, 130, 136; ode genre of, 75–77, 81–82, in the desert, 127–28; nature that mimics
86–92, 105–6, 110–11; oral/aural dimension human, 60–61, 67, 89; pleasure and fear
of, 78, 82, 121; secular revelation of mortality as the signature Qurʾānic, 69; reference
in, 75; self-affirming mortal human nature to prophetic figures from the Qurʾān to
in, 65; tribal ethos of pre-Islamic, 126, 129, express, 84
141; use of formulaic-oral theory as valid for, empathy, 68, 104, 128–29; and compassion, 134;
186n1; as weaponized in tribal politics and and subjectivity, 129. See also ethics
dynastic rivalries, 142. See also Golden Odes; eschatology, 66, 69, 104, 110, 122, 173
pre-Islamic Arabic literature; invective; eternity, 130–31, 144
panegyric; qaṣīda ethics, 53, 58, 97–115; of accumulation of wealth,
Cohen, Arthur, 155 106, 109–10, 112; Christian, 104–5, 112–13;
Cohen, Hermann, 155 early medieval Christian sexual, 110; of
228    index

ethics (continued) hādhā, 150

food, 103–5; literary aesthetics and theistic, Ḥadīth, 73, 111, 144
177; pre-Islamic codes of, 106–11, 120, 134; Hagarism, 2, 22, 25
pre-Islamic sexual, 110–12; Qurʾānic, 109–12, haiku, 89
120–21; unwritten laws of moral conduct and, hām, 189n62
99; and virtues of the guest-host relationship, ḥamāsa, 9, 88, 124
100. See also adab; empathy; social justice ḥaqq al-ḍayf, 9
Ethiopia, 28 ḥaqq al-jār, 9
Eurocentrism, 3, 12, 21, 34–35, 44, 49–51, 79–81, Haram ibn Sinān, 130
84, 100, 102, 176; blanket periodization of, Ḥarb al-Basūs (Basūs War), 105
125; law of, 176; in Qurʾānic studies and the Hassān ibn Thābit, 143
broader academic world, 175 Hatti, Philip, 16
Hawting, Gerald, 6
fakhr, 9, 88, 124 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich: Phenomenology
farīḍa, 194n42 of Spirit, 10, 38, 45, 78, 172
faṣāḥa, 139 Heidegger, Martin, 97, 193n2
fatra, 194n44 Hellenism, 100–101, 110
Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 82 Hemingway, Ernest, 82
Foucault, Michel, 30, 49 hijāʾ, 88, 124
Fowden, Garth, 48; Before and after Muhammad, Hijaz, 44
49–50, 101 hijra, 157
Freud, Sigmund, 46 ḥikma, 161
Himyaritic dynasty, 196n5
Geiger, Abraham: Was hat Mohammed aus dem Himyaritic Inscriptions, 117
Judenthume aufgenommen?, 22, 182n31 historical-critical method, 3, 6–12, 23, 28, 36,
Gellner, Ernst, 115 42–45, 51, 58, 84, 171–78
gender, 110 historical determinism, 54
geopolitics, 5, 13 historical positivism, 8
Germany, 22, 182n33, 202n13 historicist tradition, 45, 173
ghādara, 86 Historikerstreit, 17, 181n10
Ghassanids, 61–64 historiography, 11, 47; Christian, 18; derisive
ghazal, 124 polemical, 184n15; Islamic, 19; of the Third
Gibb, H.A.R., 16–17, 55, 119, 201n1 Reich, 181n10; Western, 30
Gibbon, Edward, 36; History of the Decline and history: early Islamic, 116; Eurocentric, 35;
Fall of the Roman Empire, 48–49 indigenous, 5; of pre-Islamic Arabia, 130;
Global South, 12–13 reassessment of, 52
God: absoluteness of, 142; antagonists in the Hodgson, Marshall, 19, 119, 201n1
Qurʾān of , 147; as Creator, 151; as hero of the Holocaust, 17, 181n10
Qurʾān, 154, 176; Muḥammad as messenger Homer: Iliad, 188n39; Odyssey, 62–63, 78, 99, 147
of, 141; omnipotence of, 147; performing Hourani, Albert, 201n1
social justice and believing in, 123; power of hudá, 112
the speech act of divine language of, 140; as Hughes, Aaron: “Religion without Religion,” 40
transcendent for Abraham, 150. See also Islam humanism, 34, 101, 125, 178
Golden Odes, 82. See also classical Arabic poetry Hume, David, 160
Goldziher, Ignác, 103 ḥūr ʿīn, 189n52, 197n59
Goudarzi, Mohsen, 26–27 Ḥusayn, Ṭāhā, 54–55; Fī al-Shiʿr al-Jahilī, 131
Great Mosque of Ṣanʿāʾ, 26 hyperbole, 62
Griffith, Sidney, 39
Guattari, Félix, 157 Ibn al-Azraq, 180n21
Ibn al-Kalbī, 189n1
Habermas, Jürgen, 181n10 Ibn al-Mughīra, 67, 141
ḥabība, 68 Ibn Isḥāq, 182n26
 index    229

Ibn Khaldūn, 159 iṭmiʾnān al-qalb, 146

Ibn Khidhām, 88 Iyās ibn Muʿāwiya, 190n18
Ibn Manẓūr, 60
Ibn Qutayba, 72, 86, 102 Jaeger, Werner, 99
Ibn Sallām al-Jumaḥī, 102 Jāhilī poetry, 3, 55, 60, 131–32
ʿifrīt, 163–64 Jāhilī tradition, 28, 36, 103, 177
iḥsān, 130 Jakobson, Roman, 140–41
iʿjāz tradition, 4, 10, 59, 70, 79, 125, 139, 155–69 Jameson, Frederic, 49, 98
ʿilm, 159, 161, 164, 168 Jawād ʿAlī, 73
ʿilm min al-kitāb, 164 Jeffery, Arthur, 119
imperialism: hubris of, 81; postcolonial self- Jesus, 20, 145, 148, 158–59, 163, 167, 191n23,
critique of Western, 22. See also colonialism 194n44
improvisation, 81–82 John of Damascus: De haeresibus, 6–7
Imruʾ al-Qays, 60–62, 64–70, 88–89, 92, 100, Jones, A.H.M.: Later Roman Empire, 39
110–11, 126–29, 192n58 Joyce, James, 85
infāq, 194n42 Judaism, 2, 4, 9, 11, 19, 28, 31, 35, 40, 47, 50,
inkār al-baʿth, 74 54–55, 71, 112, 115–18, 148, 151–52, 162,
intelligence: aesthetic, 64, 82; poetic, 65, 82–83; 176–77; emphasis on laws and justice of,
rhetorical, 64, 68, 72, 92, 96 155; Halakhic and Haggadic traditions of,
intersectionality, 51 27; rabbinic Iraqi, 20; in Southern Arabia,
intertextuality, 42; parallel intertextualities 117–19. See also Bible
between pre-Islamic poetry and the Judeo-Christian tradition, 155
Qurʾān, 78 al-Jurjānī, ʿAbd al-Qāhir, 4, 56, 67, 72, 94–97, 123,
intiḥāl (forgery) thesis, 54–55, 180n19, 187n3 139, 141
invective, 142. See also classical Arabic poetry
iʿrāb, 139 Kaaba, 44, 144, 166, 189n1
Iranian Islamic Revolution, 1 Kaʿb ibn Zuhayr, 88, 143
Islam: academic research on the origins of, 17, kalim, 139
29, 31, 34–35, 38, 45, 47; alternative theories kalima-tu-Allāh, 177
of the genesis of, 6, 22, 35; Arabicity of, 51; Kant, Immanuel, 140
Christian borrowings of, 45; as Christian karam, 9
heresy in medieval Europe, 118; Euro- Keats, John, 140
American scholarship on, 1, 4, 15–18, Kennedy, Hugh: “Islam,” 39–40
22, 32, 36, 43–47; European perception Kermani, Navid, 139–41, 143, 167, 192n69
of, 5, 21, 36; global scholarship on, 4; khawf, 68
institutional hierarchy in classical, 115; kitāb, 164–66, 168
invasion of Egypt of, 41; as Jewish sect, kitāb mubīn, 164–65
45; medieval Arab-Islamic scholarship Kloos, Willem, 131
on, 40; Muḥammad’s early call of, 91, knowledge: rebellion against conceptual, 74;
148; Muslim historical narratives of the as recognition, 69
genesis of, 28, 35, 40; “othering” of, 5–6, Kūfī script, 122
34, 49, 174; peninsular prehistory and Kugel, James, 173
early history of, 28, 31, 34–35; religious kuhhān, 142
heritage of, 97; Shia, 3; sociolinguistic
particularity of, 51; sociopolitical valences LaCapra, Dominick, 46–48
of the first community of, 121–22; Sunni, lafẓ, 86
3; umma regulated by an overpowering Lakhmids, 61–62
oral authority in early, 9. See also God; languages: Aramaic, 121; Armenian, 35; Coptic,
miracles; Muḥammad; Muslims; Qurʾān; 35; Greek, 35–36, 121; Hebrew, 196n19;
Sufi tradition Pahlavi, 36; Samaritan, 36; Sanskrit, 79,
Italy, 34 81; Syriac, 36, 121. See also Arabic
iʿtidhār, 124 language
230    index

late antiquity, 2, 4–5, 10, 26–52, 153, 171–72; as Mommsen, Theodor, 31–32
Anglo-centric phenomenon, 34; epistemic monasticism, 113
space of, 11; Islam and, 40, 101–2, 172, 175; money, 108–10
political unconscious of the return to, 5; monotheism, 10–11, 38, 101, 116–69; Abrahamic, 11,
relationship between the Qurʾān and, 39–52, 24, 28, 40, 50, 97, 101, 124, 154, 173–74; literary
84, 169, 174; scholarly concept of, 13, 30, 38; mythopoeic, 19; origins of Western, 40; pre-
transition into the Middle Ages of, 45 Islamic, 116–18; Qurʾānic, 154, 162, 168, 175
Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical Montgomery, James, 44
World, 39 mortality, 65; as definition of humanity, 91–93
Lawrence, D. H., 140 Moses, 145–48, 151, 163–64, 167; Muḥammad and,
layl, 60–65, 68. See also night, Qurʾānic 151–55, 157–59; staff of, 168
Lenczowski, George, 17 mos maiorum, 99
Levinas, Emmanuel, 21, 51, 142, 182n29 muʿallaqāt, 80, 100
Lewis, Bernard, 17 mudrikī, 63–64
literacy, 166 mufākharāt, 55
Lot, 164, 168 Muḥammad, 6, 10, 18, 20, 28, 32–35, 48–49, 70,
love: poetry of, 62; loss of, 68; unrequited, 90 73, 85, 102, 112, 125; and Abraham, 149–51;
Luxenberg, Christoph, 45 call of, 116; community of, 117; detractors
of, 91; discovery of a golden bough by, 55;
Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 79, 81, 190n11 early stages of prophethood of, 130, 135; flight
Madigan, Daniel, 120 from Mecca of, 145, 151, 157; interactions
madīḥ, 124 with Christian communities of, 39; Jesus
maʾduba, 102 as precursor to, 118; as khātam al-nabiyyīn
Maḥmūd Shukrī al-Ālūsī, 73–74 of all prophets, 122; Meccan culture of,
Mālik ibn Ḥarīm al-Hamdānī, 100, 108, 194n36 47, 119; as messenger of God, 141, 158; and
maʾná, 56, 86, 139 Moses, 151–55; as nonliterate, 121; as poet,
Manicheanism, 10 67, 91, 135–36; and the prophets, 144–49, 156;
manūn/manāyā, 90 reception of the Qurʾān by, 122, 138, 149, 157,
Margoliouth, David Samuel, 54–55 163; as soothsayer, 135; teaching of, 44, 133;
Marracci, Ludovico, 10, 49 as ummī prophet, 122, 148, 156, 168; Western
Marvell, Andrew: “To His Coy Mistress,” 110–11 scholarship on the hagiography of, 19.
Marx, Karl, 177 See also Islam; Qurʾān
Mary, 85, 191n26 mujassad, 132
māshiṭa, 132 muʿjiz/muʿjiza, 137–39, 159–60
Massignon, Louis, 201n1 mukhaḍram, 90
materialism, 143 Murray, Alexander, 33
Maymūn Ibn Qays al-Aʿshá, 90 murūʾa, 103
Mecca, 28, 32, 35, 57, 148, 182n26; embrace of Muṣḥaf ʿUthmān (Samarkand Kufic Qurʾān), 121
materialistic values in pre-Islamic, 109; muslimīn, 165–66
ideology of pre-Islamic, 76, 158; rise as a Muslims, 3, 165–66; social habits of the first
commercial hub of, 189n1; topography of community of, 169; as strangers, 25.
seventh-century, 144; tribal traditionalism See also Islam
in, 118; writings of pre-Islamic, 166. myth, 19; desert as a, 89; Greek, 104; and
See also Arabia religion, 147
Medina, 182n26; topography of seventh-century,
144. See also Arabia Nāfiʿ ibn al-Azraq, 8
Meinecke, Friedrich, 57 nasīb, 62
Middle Ages, 45 naskh script, 122
Middle East, 16–17; allegedly Hellenized, 45 Naṣr Ḥāmīd Abū Zayd, 48, 121
mimesis, 130, 136, 137 nathr, 124
miracles, 47, 146, 148, 151, 154–60, 165, 167–68; natural theology, 145–46, 149–50.
prophetic, 176. See also Islam See also theology
 index    231

naẓm, 56, 123, 139, 142 124–44, 169, 172, 187n13, 192n54; prose, 22,
Neil, Bronwen, 6–7 42, 57, 124, 142. See also Arabic language;
Neoplatonism, 10, 28. See also philosophy classical Arabic poetry; pre-Islamic Arabs
Neuwirth, Angelika, 1–4, 201n12; The Qurʾan as pre-Islamic Arabs, 9, 17, 57, 73–74, 89; annals
a Text of Late Antiquity, 2–4, 7, 11, 24–29, 34, that record the deeds and history of, 144;
38, 41–44–45, 50, 173–74, 177 culture and religion of, 47; literary and
New Cambridge Ancient History, 39 poetic sensibility of, 9, 96, 102, 131; Northern,
Nicholson, Reynold, 79, 84, 96; A Literary 57; peninsular Arabic sources for the literary
History of the Arabs, 80–81, 190n13 traditions and social habits of, 26; social and
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 51–52 linguistic habits of, 96; Southern, 57; spread
night, Qurʾānic, 65–67. See also layl of belief in the day of judgment among,
nihilism, 75 192n54. See also Arabia; pre-Islamic Arabic
Noah, 145, 147, 158 literature
Nöldeke, Theodor, 54, 101, 181n9; “Geschichte pre-Islamic Bedouins, 57, 188n24
des Qorān” (doctoral dissertation), 17 Pretzl, Otto, 17
nūr, 112 Prideaux, Humphrey: True Nature of Imposture
Revealed in the Life of the Impostor
orality: of Arabic aesthetics, 78, 82–83, 96; of Mohammad, 184n15
classical Arabic poetry, 78, 82; of the Qurʾān, prolepsis, 71
77–78, 119–20, 126. See also aesthetics prophecies, 47; and divine justice, 176–77; of
orientalism, 29, 37–40, 44, 50, 178, 182n36, Muḥammad, 130; of Noah, 145; proof of, 56.
192n69; classical, 7, 37, 46, 49, 79 See also Qurʾān

paganism, 28, 31 qaṣīda, 55, 61–62, 72, 74, 82, 88, 136; pre-Islamic,
paideia, 98–99, 101, 104, 115 100, 124–25, 130–31. See also classical Arabic
panegyric, 82, 142. See also classical Arabic poetry
poetry qawlan thaqīlan, 157
pathetic fallacy, 60–61, 64, 66–68 qayn, 132
patristics, 50 qīnatun, 132
Persia, 33 qiṭaʿ shiʿrīyya, 134
Petra, 35 Qurʾān: antimaterialistic view of the world of
philosophy: Aristotelian influence in Islamic, 48; the, 109; Arabicity of the, 1–6, 11, 23, 38–46,
classical Muslim, 12; pre-Islamic Arabian 76–77, 84–85, 96, 101, 121, 126, 140, 143, 167,
poetic, 92. See also Neoplatonism 169, 172, 175–78; Arabic prehistory of the,
Pickthall, Marmaduke, 10 53, 142, 144, 187n13; Āyāt al-Taḥaddī (Verses
piety, 47 of Challenge) of the, 95; balāgha of the, 4,
Pirenne, Henri, 31–32 9; biographical references to Muḥammad
plagiarism, 49 in the, 4, 132–44, 148, 151; Christians in the,
Plato, 101, 138, 193n2; critical examination of 117–18; as complement to a historical chain
poetry of, 137, 143; Phaedrus, 137; Republic, of monotheistic prophethood, 120; death in
137, 143 the, 64; as dialectical text, 24; as discourse
polytheism, 110, 119; Hellenistic, 101; Meccan, of difference, 125–26; elegance and the
124, 141; monotheistic community emerging commanding presence of the language of
in the midst of, 121, 148, 166; primitive, the, 167, 169; ethical value and authority of
166–67; and tribalism, 124 the, 33, 97–115; Euro-American scholarship
postcolonialism, 5, 13, 46 on the, 1–26, 38, 41, 45–46, 50–51, 79, 84, 96,
postmodernism, 1, 51, 147 101, 120–21, 171, 174–78, 180n19; European
poverty, 134 translations of the, 10; generic autonomy of
power: and historical inquiry, 12; of literature, 10; the, 123–24; inevitability in the, 63–64; as
Qurʾānic discourse of, 68; rhetoric of, 64, 68 integral part of the religious history of the
pre-Islamic Arabic literature, 13, 42, 45, 53, 171; West, 38; Islamic linguistic and rhetorical
poetry, 7–13, 36, 42–47, 53–75, 80–115, 120, scholarship on the, 11, 76; as key source
232    index

Qurʾān (continued) rithāʾ, 88, 124

reference for Arabian culture, 46; late Ross, Lee, 186n90
antique context of the, 12, 30, 39–52, 84, 169,
174; literary significations of the, 2–3, 5, 7, 23, Sadeghi, Behnam, 26–27
41–44, 58, 65, 172, 174; Meccan and Medinan Said, Edward: Orientalism, 22
themes of the, 9; memorization by post- sajʿ, 122
Islamic Arab poets of the, 83; mistreatment sajʿ al-kuhhān, 124
of women condemned in the, 133–34; Saleh, Walid, 45, 93, 96, 147
mothers have supreme moral status in the, Sāliḥ, 164, 191n23
111; Muslim interpretive methods on the, Salman Rushdie affair, 1
23; Muslim readers of the, 6–7, 11; Muslim Samji, Karim, 123
scholarship on the, 2–3; as nāqiḍ lil-ʿāda, Ṣanʿāʾ palimpsest (Ṣanʿāʾ1), 27
59; notions of death and resurrection in the, sarābin biqī ʿatin, 89
93–94, 146; orality of the, 77–78, 121, 143–44, ṣarfa, 68
151; pleasure and fear as the signatures of Schacht, Joseph, 17
the, 69; poeticity of the, 1, 62, 91, 142; point Schimmel, Annemarie, 10
of view from the sky to the earth in the, Schneidau, Herbert, 7
128; prophethood in the, 125–26, 141–42, Schwally, Friedrich, 17
144, 151–52, 154–56; racism condemned in scientific revolution, 173
the, 133; reading in hagiographic terms of Seleucids, 62
the, 3; reliance on writing during the life of Serrano, Richard, 59
Muḥammad to preserve the, 121; rhetoricity Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, 48–49
of the, 76–77, 80, 84–85, 123; rhythmic quality sexuality: in early medieval Christianity, 110;
and aesthetic beauty of the, 83, 125, 141; male, 110–11; in pre-Islamic Arabia, 110–11.
shared and diverse collectivity as the ethos See also celibacy
of the, 130; social and literary contexts of the, Shaddād ibn al-Aswad, 73
13, 24, 46–47, 76, 96, 171–72; sociolinguistic shafaqa, 68
structure of the, 98, 102; as unmimetic, shahāda, 162
125–26, 139, 142. See also Islam; Muḥammad; Shahrur, Muḥammad, 149
prophecies; revelation; sūra/suwar shāʿir, 135–37
Quraysh, 4, 155 shajāʿa, 9
Shakespeare, William, 131; King Lear, 129
Rabin, Chaim, 196n19 Shayṭān, 134
race, 105, 110, 133; in pre-Islamic Arabia, 132 Sheba, Queen of, 163–67
racism, 133 Shihāb al-Zuhrī, 182n26
rahba, 68, 70 shiʿr, 124, 135
rahbāniyya, 113–14 shiʿr ḥasan, 72
rāhib, 113 shuḥḥ, 9
raḥīl, 55 siḥr, 152
rain, 126–29; Qurʾānic, 128–29 Sinai, Nicolai, 180n29
rajāʾ, 68 Sīra, 4, 19, 28, 144
Renan, Ernest, 40 sirah-maghazi literature, 182n26
resurrection, 93–94, 146 Sizgorich, Thomas, 172–73
revelation, 47; Arabic, 71; Qurʾānic, 144; secular, slaves, 133–34
75. See also Qurʾān Smith, Wilfred Cantwell, 15–16, 25
rhetoric: of Arabicity, 77; ethical, 104; of social justice, 9, 47, 76, 98, 143; believing in God
intelligence, 96; in intertextual dialogue and performing, 123; and social equality, 110,
with the Qurʾān’s tradition of ancient Arabic 120, 130, 133. See also ethics
poetry, 77; Qurʾān as discourse of rhetorical Solomon, 163–68
power, 80, 85, 143. See also Arabic language soothsaying, 135, 142
Rippin, Andrew: The Blackwell Companion to the Sperl, Stefan, 173
Qurʾan, 7, 29 Spinoza, Baruch, 45
 index    233

Statkiewicz, Max, 193n2 Umayya ibn Abī al-Ṣalt, 100

Stetkevych, Jaroslav: Muhammad and the Golden ummī, 148
Bough: Reconstructing Arabian Myth, 55 ʿunṣuriyya, 9
Stetkevych, Suzanne: The Mute Immortals Speak: usarāʾ al-kuffār, 105
Pre-Islamic Poetry and the Poetics of Ritual, ʿUthmān ibn ʿAffān, 121
55–56, 131 ʿUthmān ibn Maẓ’ūn, 113
Stewart, Devin, 23, 50, 123, 192n69
structuralism, 141 van Gelder, Geert Jan, 73, 172; Sound and Sense,
Stubbe, Henry: An Account of the Rise and 78
Progress of Mahometanism with the Life of von Grunebaum, Gustav, 17, 44, 101, 118, 166–67;
Mahomet and a Vindication of Him and His “The Nature of Arab Unity before Islam,” 57
Religion from the Calumnies of Christians,
184n15 waʿd wa waʿīd, 69
subjectivity, 131 wafāʾ, 9
Sufi tradition, 136; ẓāhir (surface or external waḥy, 122
meaning) and bāṭin (internal or hidden Wansbrough, John, 17–20, 22, 26–27, 46, 181n11
meaning) in the, 136. See also Islam Ward-Perkins, Bryan, 30
ṣuḥuf, 116 waṣf, 124
sukūn, 73 Watt, William Montgomery, 21
Sūq ʿUkāẓ poetry contests, 55 Weidner, Daniel, 173
suqūṭ/saqṭ, 92 Weil, Gustav: Mohammed der Prophet, sein
sūra/suwar, 6, 95, 122, 144, 148, 152, 160–61, 174; Leben und seine Lehre, 43
Meccan, 43, 109, 123, 134, 142, 153, 200n135; whiteness, 132
Medinan, 123, 200n135; Qurʾān’s earliest, 43, Wickham, Chris: Framing the Early Middle Ages:
134–35, 141–42. See also Qurʾān Europe and the Mediterranean, 400–800, 31
Syria, 28, 33 wildānun mukhalladūn, 131, 189n52
Wills, Garry, 122
taʿāṭuf, 68 women: mithluki (the likes of you) and the
tafsīr literature, 10, 19, 59, 125, 175, 180n21 denigration of, 111; Qurʾānic inheritance and
taḥaddī, 68 divorce rights of, 134; Qurʾānic moral status
tanzīl, 122, 146, 168 of, 111, 134; slave, 132–33; as a subordinate
taqrīḍ al-shiʿr, 87, 124 class in historical communities of Islam, 134
Ṭarafa ibn al-ʿAbd, 72–77, 90–93, 100, 103, Wordsworth, William, 131
107–10, 132–33 writing, 121; seventh-century development of the
tashbīh, 62 two main styles of Arabic, 122; on the walls
tashbīh balāgha, 65–66 of the Ka’ba in pre-Islamic Mecca, 166
theology: classical Arabic, 131; negative, 6;
systemic Protestant, 18. See also natural xenia, 99, 103
theology
Theophanes the Confessor: Chronographia, 6–7 Yāqūt al-Ḥamawī, 189n1
tijāra-t-al-raqīq, 9 Yathrib, 57
Tolstoy, Leo, 140 Yemen, 28
Torah, 27, 117, 126, 154. See also Bible yuqarriḍ al-shiʿr, 87
Toynbee, Arnold, 101 Yūsuf Yaʿqūb Ibn Isḥāq al-Kindī, 81–82, 86
trade: cross-regional, 118–19; of seventh-century
Mecca, 132 zakā, 109, 130, 194n42
truth: of artistic mediums, 75; and beauty, 140; Zellentin, Holger: The Qurʾān’s Reformation of
postmodern view of, 147; psychological pre- Judaism and Christianity, 45–47
Islamic, 57 Zoroastrianism, 10
Zuhayr Abī Sulmá, 89, 91, 100, 106, 130–31
Ullendorff, Edward, 196n19 ẓulm, 9
Umayyad dynasty, 59 Zwettler, Michael, 44
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Salama
God’s
In God’s Other Book, Mohammad Salama presents a powerful critique of the ways
we study and analyze early Islam and its sacred text, filling a glaring hole in our
understanding of this formative environment. Interrogating the ideological frame-
work of late antiquity, Salama exposes hidden assumptions that prevent scholars

Other
from truly placing Islam in its sociohistorical and cultural milieu. He offers an
alternative theoretical and practical model focused on pre-Islamic Arabic cultural
production. Foregrounding the indigenous Arab community of seventh-century

The Qurʾān between History and Ideology

God’s Other Book
Hijaz, Salama demonstrates how the Qurʼān played an organic role in commenting
on, interacting with, and taking sides concerning matters of ethnicity, ethics, dress
codes, and social habits. Only with renewed attention to the Qurʼān itself can West-
ern readers engage ethically with Islamic studies and with the cultures and tradi-
Book
tions of those who live according to another book.

“This book is bold, timely, and uncompromising, demanding to be read carefully for
its erudite argument. Through ample evidence, a reimagined interpretive frame,
and analytical acumen, Salama offers insights into the irony of Western scholar-
ship on the Qurʼān: its effort to draw the Muslim scripture into a late antique land-
scape overlooks reading practices sensitive to the text’s agency and indigeneity.”
—Asad Q. Ahmed, Magistretti Distinguished Professor of Middle Eastern Languages
and Cultures at University of California, Berkeley

“In showing why the Qurʼān must be seen as an authentically Arabian and truly
revolutionary literary accomplishment, Salama provides a welcome corrective to
Euro-American Qurʼānic studies. A milestone in the field.”—Stefan Sperl, Professor
Emeritus of Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies at SOAS, University of London

Mohammad Salama is Professor of Arabic and Qurʼanic Studies and Asso-

ciate Dean for Faculty Affairs in the College of Humanities and Social Sci-
ences at George Mason University.

University of California Press|www.ucpress.edu

The Qur ʾān between
A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, ISBN: 978-0-520-39184-0 History and Ideology
University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program.
Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. 9 780520 391840

Cover design: Michelle Black. Cover illustration: Folio from a Qurʼānic manuscript, second half of 8th century. Gift of Monir Far-
manfarmaian in memory of Dr. Abolbashar Farmanfarmaian, 2021. The Met Collection. Author photo: CHSS Photography Team.
Mohammad Salama