Islam and Its Past: Jahiliyya, Late Antiquity, and the Qur'an.

AuthorGrasso, Valentina A.

Islam and Its Past: Jahiliyya, Late Antiquity, and the Qur'an. Edited by CAROL BAKHOS and MICHAEL COOK. Oxford Studies in the Abrahamic Religions. Oxford: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2017. Pp. ix + 267. $85, [pounds sterling]65.

The idea for Islam and Its Past was formed at the conference of the same name held at UCLA's G. E. von Grunebaum Center for Near Eastern Studies in 2013. All eight chapters "are concerned directly or indirectly with the Islamic revelation, and for the most part this means the Qur'an" (p. 1).

Chapter one by Devin Stewart provides a brief survey of previous research in Quranic studies, starting from the translation of the Quran into Latin by Robert of Ketton. Stewart divides the history of Western Quranic studies into five periods: the twelfth to sixteenth centuries, the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, the nineteenth century to the Second World War, mid-twentieth century, and the late twentieth century to the present. He furthermore divides the field into three primary fields of inquiry: "investigation of the text," "history of its revelation," and "history of its recording."

Stewart begins by examining the approach of the "old Biblicists," the first Western scholars interested in the Quran. These scholars aimed to evaluate the development of early Islam through a comparative analysis of the Bible and the Quran, which offered the first deep analysis of hadith and exegetical literatures. Over the last three decades, the debate has often still focused on whether the Quran should be seen as entirely dependent on the Judeo-Christian scriptures or as an original and autochthonous product of Arabia. Those more inclined to the latter viewpoint often compare the Quran with material from the Christian tradition written in Syriac. Stewart labels this camp "New Biblicists." He further traces eight "influential trends" in current Quranic scholarship. Among these are "the extra-peninsulists or allohistorians," who prefer using "outside sources" to write the history of early Islam, and "the late antiquarians," who explore the rise of Islam within the broader framework of late antiquity by integrating it into the philosophical, artistic, and legislative framework of the period. Stewart also mentions "the sheepskinners, or the new textualists," who study the history of the Quran through an analysis of its sources, linguistic features, and the structure of the suras, and "feminist critics," who approach the reading of the Quran from a gender studies perspective.

In his final pages, Stewart encourages further attempts to translate both the Quran and nineteenth-century scholarship written in German, and expresses a desire for ideological openmindedness, better knowledge of the Arabic language in the West, and a greater awareness of medieval Islamic scholarship. He moreover exhorts his academic audience to engage in more multilateral discussion, particularly given that the field is rapidly expanding and more scholars are now approaching the Quran from a wide range of disciplines. Ultimately, despite the evident limits of putting different approaches into separate boxes, Stewart's chapter serves as a stimulating introduction to the work as a whole.

Chapter two, by Nicolai Sinai, deals with the editorial expansion of two suras traditionally dated before the hijra. He begins with some general...

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