The Oxford Handbook of Qur 'anic Studies.

• Author: Fudge, Bruce

The Oxford Handbook of Qur 'anic Studies. Edited by MUSTAFA SHAH and MUHAMMAD ABDEL HALEEM. New York: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2020. Pp. xxiv + 912. $145, [pounds sterling]125.

When John Wansbrough's Quranic Studies appeared in 1977 it was readily understood that the title referred to a collection of studies of the Quran and its exegesis. The same term in the title The Oxford Handbook of Qur'anic Studies (henceforth, the Handbook) has a different sense. "Quranic Studies" is now a discipline in itself, or at least a major subfield of Islamic studies. It is especially prominent in the Anglophone world, but there are similar developments elsewhere. There are two primarily English-language journals of Quranic studies, at least one academic association, and any number of regular conferences and panels on "Quranic Studies." All this is relatively new.

'Ulum al-Qur'dn, "the quranic sciences," have, of course, been around for a long time. Are the "studies" the direct descendants of the 'ulum? I do not know how to answer that question, but it is instructive to compare the Handbook with the classic work in the (relatively small) 'ulum al-Qur'an genre, the Itqan of al-Suyuti (d. 911/1505).

The Itqan is largely philological. It treats the text of the Quran and its use of language. It pays much attention to the establishment and transmission of the text (how, when, where, and sometimes why it was revealed and then collected); it tells us how to understand its meanings, especially in terms of explaining and classifying the functions of different verses. It does not interpret the Quran for us; it explains what one might need to know in order to do so. It also describes features of quranic style and rhetoric, usually by classifying and subdividing.

The Handbook treats, in principle, the same topics, but it is obviously responding to concerns very different, and much broader, than those of al-SuyutT's intended readers. Arabic philology is still omnipresent, of course, but it is not quite as predominant. The most obvious difference between the Itqan and the Handbook is that the latter is overall less concerned with the quranic text itself than with how people have understood it.

The book contains eight parts, which may be reduced to the following main areas of interest: First. the state of the field: the study of the Quran in (almost exclusively) European and American universities. Second, the possible origins and antecedents of the Quran, be they in Judaism, Christianity, pre-Islamic Arabia, or late antiquity in general. Third, the creation and dissemination of the physical text in manuscript...