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Islam and Its Past OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 15/5/2017, SPi OXFORD STUDIES IN THE ABRAHAMIC RELIGIONS General Editors Adam J. Silverstein Guy G. Stroumsa OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 15/5/2017, SPi OXFORD STUDIES IN THE ABRAHAMIC RELIGIONS This series consists of scholarly monographs and other volumes at the cutting edge of the study of Abrahamic Religions. The increase in intellectual interest in the comparative approach to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam reflects the striking surge in the importance of religious traditions and patterns of thought and behaviour in the twenty-first century, at the global level. While this importance is easy to detect, it remains to be identified clearly and analysed from a comparative perspective. Our existing scholarly apparatus is not always adequate in attempting to understand precisely the nature of similarities and differences between the monotheistic religions, and the transformations of their ‘family resemblances’ in different cultural and historical contexts. The works in the series are devoted to the study of how ‘Abrahamic’ traditions mix, blend, disintegrate, rebuild, clash, and impact upon one another, usually in polemical contexts, but also, often, in odd, yet persistent ways of interaction, reflecting the symbiosis between them. TITLES IN THE SERIES INCLUDE: The Making of the Abrahamic Religions in Late Antiquity Guy G. Stroumsa Judaism, Sufism, and the Pietists of Medieval Egypt A Study of Abraham Maimonides and His Times Elisha Russ-Fishbane Purity, Community, and Ritual in Early Christian Literature Moshe Blidstein OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 15/5/2017, SPi Islam and Its Past Jahiliyya, Late Antiquity, and the Qurʾan Edited by CAROL BAKHOS AND MICHAEL COOK 1 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 15/5/2017, SPi 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Oxford University Press 2017 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2017 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2016960748 ISBN 978–0–19–874849–6 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 15/5/2017, SPi In memoriam Patricia Crone 1945–2015 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 15/5/2017, SPi OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 15/5/2017, SPi Table of Contents List of Contributors ix Introduction 1 Carol Bakhos and Michael Cook 1. Reflections on the State of the Art in Western Qurʾanic Studies 4 Devin Stewart 2. Processes of Literary Growth and Editorial Expansion in Two Medinan Surahs 69 Nicolai Sinai 3. ‘O Believers, Be Not as Those Who Hurt Moses’: Q 33:69 and Its Exegesis 120 Joseph Witztum 4. Pagan Arabs as God-fearers 140 Patricia Crone 5. Locating the Qurʾan and Early Islam in the ‘Epistemic Space’ of Late Antiquity 165 Angelika Neuwirth 6. Were there Prophets in the Jahiliyya? 186 Gerald Hawting 7. Early Medieval Christian and Muslim Attitudes to Pagan Law: A Comparison 213 Michael Cook 8. Remarks on Monotheism in Ancient South Arabia 247 Iwona Gajda Index 257 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 15/5/2017, SPi OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 15/5/2017, SPi List of Contributors Carol Bakhos is Professor of Late Antique Judaism and Study of Religion at the University of California, Los Angeles. Michael Cook is Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. Patricia Crone was formerly Andrew W. Mellon Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. Iwona Gajda is a researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Paris. Gerald Hawting is Emeritus Professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. Angelika Neuwirth is Professor of Arabic Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin. Nicolai Sinai is Associate Professor of Islamic Studies at the Oriental Institute, Oxford, and Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford. Devin Stewart is Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies and MESAS Chair at Emory University. Joseph Witztum is a member of the Department of Arabic Language and Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 15/5/2017, SPi OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 15/5/2017, SPi Introduction Carol Bakhos and Michael Cook This volume has its origin in a conference held at the UCLA G. E. von Grunebaum Center for Near Eastern Studies in October 2013. The theme of the conference was ‘Islam and its Past: Jahiliyya and Late Antiquity in the Qurʾan and Tradition’, and the occasion for it was the conferment of the Levi della Vida Award on Patricia Crone. It was a happy occasion for all, despite the fact that at the time the honoree was already ill with terminal cancer and died less than two years later. In preparing the volume for publication we have retained the title of the conference, but have modified the subtitle to reflect the content of the volume more precisely. This volume is not, however, a publication of all and only the talks given at that conference. Of the six talks given there, four appear here in a revised form, namely those of Joseph Witztum, Patricia Crone, Gerald Hawting, and Michael Cook. At the same time four articles that were not presented at the conference are included as chapters in this volume, namely those of Devin Stewart, Nicolai Sinai, Angelika Neuwirth, and Iwona Gajda. All the chapters in this volume are concerned directly or indirectly with the Islamic revelation, and for the most part this means the Qurʾan. In his ‘Reflections on the State of the Art in Western Qurʾanic Studies’ (Chapter 1), Devin Stewart provides a wide-ranging survey of the develop- ment and current state of qurʾanic studies in the Western academy. He shows how interest in the field has recently grown, how the ways in which it is cultivated have changed, how it has ramified, and how difficult it now is for any one scholar to keep abreast of it. This survey is placed first in the volume not only because it can serve outsiders as a coherent introduction to the field as a whole, but also because it can draw the attention of specialists at work in one valley to what is currently going on in other valleys. The next two contributions are research articles that aptly illustrate two of the trends in the scholarship surveyed by Stewart. In ‘Processes of Literary Growth and Editorial Expansion in Two Medinan Surahs’ (Chapter 2), Nicolai OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 15/5/2017, SPi 2 Carol Bakhos and Michael Cook Sinai reconstructs the redactional history of the opening passages of Q 5, dealing with dietary prohibitions and the performance of ablution before prayer, and Q 9, concerning warfare against the ‘Associators’ (mushrikūn). Sinai thus devotes his chapter to what one might call the internal archaeology of the text. If we start from the Qurʾan as we have it in our hands, how far and by what means can we convincingly reconstruct the earlier history of the text? What makes for a definite inference, a plausible inference, and an inference so vague as not to be worth making? The chapter sets out guidelines and criteria for research of this kind, and applies them to the study of the particular passages from the Qurʾan referred to above. Given that such methods were developed in scholarship on the text of the Bible as much as a century-and-a- half ago, and have since been applied well beyond the point of exhaustion in that field, one might have thought that specialists on the Qurʾan would already have done most of what can be done with them. Mercifully for the next generation of scholars, Sinai’s chapter shows that in the study of the Qurʾan the point of exhaustion for such methods still lies far in the future. In ‘“O Believers, Be Not as Those Who Hurt Moses”: Q 33:69 and its Exegesis’ (Chapter 3), Joseph Witztum, by contrast, probes what one might call the external archaeology of the text. If we start from a knowledge of the content of the Bible as refracted in Jewish and Christian tradition down to the eve of the rise of Islam, what can we do to better understand what the Qurʾan is saying, what it is not saying, and what it is doing in saying or not saying it? Given that the relevant sources in Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, and Greek were mostly published long ago, and that a quorum of scholars of earlier gener- ations were able to use these and the Islamic sources conjointly, one might again have expected the point of exhaustion to have been reached some time ago.
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