Quranic studies
Quranic studies employs the historical-critical method (HCM) as its primary methodological apparatus, which is the approach that emphasizes a process that "delays any assessment of scripture’s truth and relevance until after the act of interpretation has been carried out".
[12] Traditionalists accept the traditional account of the formation of the Quran (canonized under Uthman, by a committee headed by Muhammad's companions, with codices being produced and sent out to regional centers to replace any alternatives).
[16] In the decades after the canonization, a "rasm literature" emerged whereby authors sought to catalogue all variants that existed in copies or manuscripts of the Quran that descended from the Uthmanic standard.
[18][19] Recent studies indicate that there is a common oral ancestor to all the canonical (and likely also non-canonical) readings that dates to the seventh century, after the reign of Uthman.
[24] The strongest justification that was seen for this was the view, by these authors (including John Wansbrough), that the Hejaz (if not Arabia) lacked the level of familiarity with Christian tradition that is displayed by the Quran.
Shoemaker places the life of Muhammad in the Hejaz, but positions the compilation of his oral teachings, including the redaction and editing of the Quran, in the Levant during the reign of the caliph Abd al-Malik.
[29] Another proponent, Guillaume Dye, believes that the Quran represents a redaction of texts that would have emerged in different parts of Arabia, including but not limited to the Hejaz.
[30] The majority of historians accept a Hejazi origins of the Quran,[31] following a long standing consensus going back to Theodor Noldeke and his contemporaries through to W. Montgomery Watt before the rise of the revisionist school.
Furthermore, the so-called ‘Constitution of Medina’, which is widely accepted as a genuinely early (i.e. start of the first-/seventh-century) document preserved in two third-/ninth-century Arabic works, does place a ‘Prophet’ (nabī) and a ‘Messenger of God’ (rasūl Allāh) called Muḥammad in a place called Yathrib (Lecker 2004).Recent study of pre-Islamic Arabian inscriptions shows that the Arabic dialect of the Quran was a late-antique Hejazi.
[44] Most recently, Michael Pregill has argued for three redactional layers of the Quran largely distinguished by their degree of familiarity with biblical and parabiblical tradition.
In addition, similarities between Quranic stories and motifs have regularly been observed with earlier rabbinic literature, especially in the Mishnah and Talmud, going back first to the studies of Abraham Geiger in the first half of the 19th century.
[81][82] The first major argument put forwards that Jewish Christianity played an important role in the formation of Quranic tradition was Aloys Sprenger in his 1861 book Das Leben und die Lehre des Moḥammad.
[88] In the last few years, the thesis for the specific role played by Jewish Christians has been resisted by Gabriel Said Reynolds,[89][90] Stephen Shoemaker,[91] and Guillaume Dye.
While formal works on Quranic studies had not emerged until multiple centuries after the death of Muhammad, key topics were addressed within other disciplines earlier own.
Early exegetical works (tafsīr) included discussions on asbāb al-nuzūl (occasions of authorship), qirāʾāt (readings), and linguistic nuances.
Figures like Muḥammad ibn Khalaf al-Marzubān (al-Ḥāwī fī ʿUlūm al-Qurʾān) and others compiled extensive discussions on topics such as abrogation, ambiguous verses, and linguistic peculiarities.
[94] Al-Suyūṭī’s al-Itqān fī ʿUlūm al-Qurʾān expanded on al-Zarkashī’s framework, identifying 80 sciences and incorporating discussions on previously neglected areas.
[95] The modern discipline of studying the Quran may be considered to have begun in 1833, with the publication of the book Was hat Mohammed aus dem Judenthume aufgenommen?
This approach continued in the works of Hartwig Hirschfeld, Israel Schapiro, and others, before finally culminating in Heinrich Speyer's Die biblischen Erzählungen im Qoran, published in 1931.
This mode of scholarship however came to an end with World War II, when a mass of Jewish academics were dispersed from Nazi Germany, and the primary contributors transitioned to working in adjacent areas of research.
The current paradigm of research was initiated by Christoph Luxenberg; though his thesis was universally rejected among academics, it generated considerable new interest in studying the Quran in light of its historical context.
The primary historians of this new wave of scholarship have included Gabriel Said Reynolds, Holger Michael Zellentin, Emran El-Badawi, and Joseph Witztum.
As for Sprenger, his work was published in 1861–65 in three volumes under the title Das Leben und die Lehre des Mohammad, nach bisher größtenteils unbenutzten Quellen.
Both Noldeke and Sprenger owed much to the Al-Itqan fi Ulum al-Qur'an of Al-Suyuti which had summarized hundreds of works of the medieval Islamic tradition.
The major scholars from this time period, including Arthur Jeffrey, W. Montgomery Watt, William Graham, Rudi Paret, and others, thought it best to treat the Quran as Muslims do (as sacred) and so avoided discussion of its relationship with earlier Jewish and Christian literature.
In addition, growing attention was paid to the tafsir (in which important progress was made) in part to avoid thorny critical issues surrounding the Quran and Muhammad.
This continued well into the twentieth century, the latter period of which was best characterized by the works of Andrew Rippin, Jane McAullife, and Brannon Wheeler (as in his book Moses in the Quran and Islamic Exegesis).
[98] Books that critically appraised traditional sources concerning the origins of the Quran only began to appear in the 1970s, starting with the revisionist writings of Günter Lüling (1974), John Wansbrough (1977), and Patricia Crone and Michael Cook (1977).
In 2015, the publication of the Study Quran by HarperCollins included an English translation of the text, accompanied by a massive collection of traditional interpretations for each verse from a total of several dozen Islamic exegetes.
For example, a critical edition of the Quran, which has been available for the Bible for decades, is still unavailable, despite an effort towards producing one in the first half of the twentieth century that was cut short by the second world war.
