The Qur'[a.bar]n in Context: Historical and Literary Investigations into the Qur'[a.bar]nic Milieu.

• Author: Rippin, Andrew
• Position: Book review

The Qur'[a.bar]n in Context: Historical and Literary Investigations into the Qur'[a.bar]nic Milieu. Edited by ANGELIKA NEUWIRTH, NICOLAI SINAI, and MICHAEL MARX. Texts and Studies on the Qur'an, vol. 6. Leiden: BRILL. 2010. Pp. vii + 864. $323.

To declare that the academic discipline of Qur'anic studies is in a state of disarray--an assessment stemming most recently from Fred Donner and invoked in this new attempt to define the approach in the field--is a rhetorical statement of questionable veracity. There are competing scholarly priorities and paradigms, certainly, but of what lively discipline would that not be true? The goal of making the argument for the need to overcome this supposed disarray in the discipline is, of course, to suggest a future trajectory for Qur'anic studies in which all scholars will participate to the benefit of the field. Getting agreement on the starting point is something of a challenge, as this substantial collection of essays certainly recognizes. It is one of the clear merits of the work, however, that it does argue for a particular approach to the Qur'an, one commonly identified with the prodigious Output of one of the editors. Angelika Neuwirth. I describe this as a merit of the book because, given the fact that it includes a total of twenty-seven essays stemming mainly from a 2004 conference, it is a rare accomplishment to be able to craft a volume of proceedings that makes such a specific and unified argument.

The overall argument has two principal elements, mirrored by the division of this collection of essays into two parts and reflected in the emphases of the volume's subtitle, viz., historical and literary investigations.

The first of those elements constructs an argument for what amounts to a general acceptance of the framework of Muslim accounts of the origins of Islam in teems of history and geography while wishing to place it. religiously and perhaps linguistically, in what is now being commonly called the "late antique" context. This adds up to a significant emphasis on understanding the currents of religious thought in the Near East at the time of the rise of Islam, and thus especially a focus on Syriac Christianity as well as on the place of Arabia in the world.

This is an argument that dismisses the view that Islam had its origins outside of the Hij[a.bar]z (as associated with the work of John Wansbrough and, more recently, Gerald Hawting), but also rejects the ideologically driven concept of Arabia as j[a.bar]hiliyya, cut off from the rest of the world. It is also an approach that recognizes the accomplishments in comparative philology and folklore of earlier generations of scholars. There is, however, a larger context to the argument as well--and a specifically German one--that looms ever larger and even more outlandish than the British views which originated in the quite different world of the 1970s. This also accounts for some of what the editors point to as the "disarray" of the discipline and gives that assertion greater resonance. The editors cite the unusual (for Qur'anic studies) publicity certain ideas in the discipline have received in the press, especially in Germany, behind which to a large extent is the work of the Institut zur Erforschung der fruhen Islamgeschichte and des Koran, known as Inarah. That presence remains largely unspoken but it does lie behind the thrust of the essays in this book--although given Inarah's latest (fifth in the series) highly critical salvo, Die Entstehung...