The Quran as Text.

• Author: MADIGAN, DANIEL A.
• Position: Review

The Qur an as Text. Edited by STEFAN WILD. Islamic Philosophy, Theology and Science: Texts and Studies, vol. 27. Leiden: E. J. BRILL, 1996. Pp. xi + 298.

This collection, its editor notes, aspires to be "a worthy sequel" to the earlier volumes of essays edited by Andrew Rippin, Approaches to the History of the Interpretation of the Qur an (Oxford, 1988), and by G. R. Hawting and Abdul-Kader A. Shareef, Approaches to the Qur an (Routledge, 1993). It sees itself as part of a shift in emphasis in Qur anic studies over the last two decades that has seen less concern with the pre-history of the text--its antecedents, the stages of its redaction, etc.--than with the text as we actually have it today, the text which shapes the lives and beliefs of the Muslim community. Originally from a symposium held at the University of Bonn in 1993, the essays themselves (one in French and seven in each of English and German) are quite varied in character. In some respects the collection serves to demonstrate either that Qur anic studies have not yet fully made the shift the editor describes, or perhaps that the contrast between the "old" way and the "new" may have been too sharply drawn. Even while claiming that they are adopting the "new" more literary approach to the Qur an, several of the articles still find themselves unavoidably drawn into speculation about the emergence of the text in the Meccan and Medinan context.

This is perhaps best illustrated by the most substantial of the book's fifteen articles--that by Angelika Neuwirth on the emergence of the Qur anic literary unit, the sara. In a scenario not unrelated to that proposed by Richard Bell but relying more on a reconstruction of the history of ritual in early Islam, she sees the structure and vocabulary of the Qur an's suras developing through four phases. The thirty-two early Meccan suras Neuwirth perceives as having emerged within the context of an early Islamic worship that was grafted onto the rituals of the Ka ba (pp. 84-88). The Meccan suras of the middle period, with their explicit invocations of the kitab, their more complex and defined structure and their rehearsal of the events of salvation history, seem to have emerged from a ritual context that was a reprise of Christian and Jewish liturgies of the word, during the period in which the focus of ritual activity was Jerusalem (pp. 89-91). These liturgical suras give way in their turn to what Neuwirth calls the Rede-Suren, those that are...