Le messie et son prophete: aux origines de l'istam.

• Author: Lawson, Todd
• Position: Book review

Le Messie et son prophete: Aux origines de l'Islam. By EDOUARD-MARIE GALLEZ. Studia Arabica, vols. 1 and 2. 2 vols., 3rd ed. Versaille: EDITIONS DE PARIS, 2007. Pp. 526 (vol. 1), 588 (vol. 2). [euro]35 and [euro]39 (paper).

This book offers a radical interpretation of Islam and of early, formative Islamic history. As such, it is experimental. The pertinence of Dead Sea "spirituality" for Islam and for the form and contents of the Qur'an has been a question ever since the scrolls were discovered. Henry Corbin (uncited here), inspired by Hans Joachim Schoeps, understood Q 3:67, "Abraham was neither a Jew nor a Christian but rather a hanif muslim," to mean that Abraham was neither a Jew nor a Christian because he was both. But this work is not concerned with mere phenomenological resonances--it

wishes to present positive history. Written over a period of ten years, this study is an exhaustive treatment of the question filed in 2004 as a doctoral dissertation at the University of Strasbourg (Theologie catholique) and republished already in several editions since first appearing in 2005, when it inaugurated the new series focused on Arab Christianity and its relations with Islam, -Studia Arabica," edited by Marie-Therese Urvoy.

The one-thousand-plus pages are divided into three books (tomes) in two volumes. The first contains "The Essene File: A Forest That Hides a Tree" (pp. 41-305) and "The Origin and Development of the Judeo-Nazarene Religion" (pp. 309-518); the second "History and Legendology: Muhammad and the Beginnings of Islam" (pp. 13-503), a bibliography of works referred to or cited in the copious footnotes of all three books (pp. 513-46), and a series of three indexes (pp. 547-75): (1) authors and works of antiquity; (2) names of persons not found in the first index; (3) Qur'anic verses or groups of verses cited. Each volume closes with a detailed table of contents (1: 519-24. 2: 577-82), and each volume is introduced by a general description of the method and contents to follow. For volume one, this is in two parts, a brief avant-propos (pp. 9-13) followed by an introduction in which the Qur'an's -Mary problem" is resolved by petitioning the working hypothesis that there is a connection between the Qur'an and the ideas found in the Judeo-Christian, or more precisely, Judeo-Nazarene religious culture traced from Qumran to al-Hira just before the rise of Islam.

Starting with what is usually called Essene-ism, which includes texts from...