Muhammad Is Not the Father of Any of Your Men: The Making of the Last Prophet.

• Author: Robinson, Chase F.
• Position: Book review

Muhammad Is Not the Father of Any of Your Men: The Making of the Last Prophet. By DAVID S. POWERS. Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion. Philadelphia: UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS, 2009. Pp. xvi + 357. $55.

Muhammad Ls Not the Father of Any of Your Men is as provocative as it is ambitious. Its origins lie in philological and legal questions--what does kalala mean in Qur'an 4:12 and 4:176 and what does the verse mean for Islamic law? Although the author has been addressing these questions for some time, answering them has now enveloped him in philology, paleography, Semitics, biblical criticism, law, early Islamic history, Qur'anic exegesis, and much more besides. For this reason alone the book should be read carefully by anyone seriously interested in early Islam, which, once commanded by polymathic Orientalists, has branched into increasingly discrete sub-fields, each requiring slow-to-acquire expertise. Many may disagree with the author's bold claims, but in its audacious synthesis of scriptural, legal, and historical and textual evidence, it is a tour de force.

That the early commentaries are unpersuasive in their attempts to gloss a great deal of Qur'anic vocabulary is not a new insight, of course; almost twenty-five years ago in a noteworthy monograph, Powers himself drew attention to the exegetes limitations. What is one to make of a "clear text that so frequently is not'? The tradition itself conceded the possibility of scribal errors, but the dogma of the Qur'an's miraculous inimitability, supported by historical narratives that recounted an early compilation and practices of oral transmission held to preclude copyists' errors, discouraged a culture of textual emendation. With James Bellamy's work and, much more recently, that of Christoph Luxenberg, modern Qur'anic studies can be said to have fully broken free of a scholarly conservatism rooted in traditional reverence towards the text. As the late antique "prehistory" of Qur'anic material grows less murky, along with the first century of Islam, our understanding of how, when, and why authority was invested in selected recensions and reading improves.

Mutanunad Is Not the Father of Any of Your Men is an important installment in the wide-ranging work of revision. It might uncharitably he said to bury its lead, however: on paleographic grounds, chapter eight demonstrates that in one early manuscript (BNF 328a, which, written in the "Hijazi" script, appears to belong to...