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Introduction

Nicolai Sinai and Angelika Neuwirth

The academic discipline of Qurʾanic studies today is most strikingly characterized, not by any impressive scholarly achievements of the field itself, which has been appropriately diagnosed by Fred Donner as being “in a state of disarray,”1 but by the large-scale interest of the media that the Qurʾan’s origin and interpretation have solicited dur- ing the last decade or so.2 Indeed, the lacunae of the field—impossible to overlook when confronted with the impressive list of what has been achieved in biblical or classical studies—have developed into a veritable litany: There is no critical edition of the text, no free access to all of the relevant manuscript evidence, no clear conception of the cultural and linguistic profile of the milieu within which it has emerged, no consensus on basic issues of methodology, a significant amount of mutual distrust among scholars, and—what is perhaps the single most important obstacle to scholarly progress—no adequate training of future students of the Qurʾan in the non-Arabic languages and literatures and cultural traditions that have undoubtedly shaped its historical context. Yet the general public’s interest in Qurʾanic studies, oddly opposed as it may seem to the sorry state of the discipline itself, may not be an altogether negative thing; it holds out a vague promise of exciting discoveries that may attract younger scholars and inspire more senior

1 Donner, “Recent scholarship,” 29. 2 The take-off point for this rather unprecedented rise in the attention given to the Qurʾan in Western media can be dated to January 1999, when Toby Lester published his article “What is the Koran?” (The Atlantic Monthly 283: 43–56). Media attention to the Qurʾan was subsequently stoked by the near-coincidence between the publica- tion of ’s Die syro-aramäische Lesart des Koran in 2000 and the new public interest in all things Islamic that followed the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001; a perfect illustration of the extent to which public awareness of Lux- enberg’s book has been shaped by the specter of Islamic terrorism is provided, for example, by ’s piece “Virgins? What Virgins?” published in The Guardian, January 12, 2002. Most recently, the Qurʾan has made it onto the front page of the Wall Street Journal with Andrew Higgin’s article “The Lost Archive” (January 12, 2008). 2 introduction researchers. Indeed, what the field of Qurʾanic studies has lacked for too long is precisely the injection of such a healthy dose of excitement. Publications from before the 1970’s, when existing narratives about the Qurʾan’s origin were for the first time subjected to radical doubt, all too often convey a sense that there is, firstly, not much left to be known about the Qurʾan, and, secondly, that the object of all this supposedly stable mass of knowledge, the Qurʾan itself, is not all that interesting—in fact, that it is an epigonal text not worthy of the same kind of methodological sophistication that biblical and classical lit- erature have generally been accorded.3 In 1961, two years before the publication of the first installments of his highly respected German translation of the Qurʾan, Rudi Paret could state “that the picture of that has so far been worked out by European Orientalists is well-founded and can be modified and rounded out merely in mat- ters of detail. A new and systematic interpretation of the Qurʾan hardly leads to new and exciting discoveries.”4 In Qurʾanic studies, it seemed, the gate of ijtihād had been closed, and the discipline could from now on devote itself to administrating the accumulated knowledge of ear- lier pioneers. Or, to put it more bluntly, Qurʾanic studies had become a subject that was bound to bore itself to death. Excitement was to come to Qurʾanic studies in the guise of skepti- cism. There appears to be a general sense among many scholars that the publication in 1977 of ’s Qurʾanic Studies and of Hagarism by Michael Cook and marks a decisive break in the history of the discipline, which hitherto had largely accepted the general historical framework within which Islamic tradi- tion locates the promulgation of the Qurʾan. Frequently the earlier work of Günter Lüling (Über den Ur-Qurʾān: Ansätze zur Rekonstruktion vorislamischer christlicher Strophenlieder im Qurʾān, 1974) and Christoph Luxenberg’s recent Die syro-aramäische Lesart des Koran (2000) are grouped together with the above-mentioned scholars under the loose term “revisionism,” although those familiar with these books are usually quick to point out the very different methods and assump- tions on which they are based.5 The full import of the heterogeneity of “revisionism,” however, will perhaps not be fully internalized until the history of modern Qurʾanic studies ceases to be told according

3 For the rather pejorative views of Orientalists on the Qurʾan’s literary value, see Wild, “Schauerliche Öde.” 4 Paret, “Der Koran als Geschichtsquelle,” 140 (translation by N. Sinai). 5 For a survey, cf. Reynolds, “Introduction,” 8–19.