Islamic Studies Today Texts and Studies on the Qurʾān Editorial Board Gerhard Böwering Yale University Bilal Orfali The American University of Beirut Devin Stewart Emory University VOLUME 11 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/tsq Islamic Studies Today Essays in Honor of Andrew Rippin Edited by Majid Daneshgar Walid A. Saleh LEIDEN | BOSTON Cover illustration: A pondok pesantren (ponpes) in Indonesia, photo by Majid Daneshgar. Frontispiece: Andrew Rippin in 2010 at the UVIC library in Victoria. Photo by Ted Kuzemski. Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 1567-2808 isbn 978-90-04-33633-9 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-33712-1 (e-book) Copyright 2017 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner. Contents Preface ix Acknowledgments xiii List of Figures and Tables xiv List of Contributors xv Part 1 Islamic Exegesis and Tradition: Formative and Classical Period 1 “A Plaything for Kings” ʿĀʾisha’s Ḥadīth, Ibn al-Zubayr, and Rebuilding the Kaʿba 3 Gerald Hawting 2 Remnants of an Old Tafsīr Tradition? The Exegetical Accounts of ʿUrwa b. al-Zubayr 22 Andreas Görke 3 Muqātil on Zayd and Zaynab “The sunna of Allāh Concerning Those Who Passed Away Before” (Q 33:38) 43 Gordon Nickel 4 Asbāb al-Nuzūl as a Technical Term Its Emergence and Application in the Islamic Sources 62 Roberto Tottoli 5 Laylat al-Qadr as Sacred Time Sacred Cosmology in Sunnī Kalām and Tafsīr 74 Arnold Yasin Mol 6 Is There Covenant Theology in Islam? 98 Tariq Jaffer vi Contents Part 2 The Qurʾān and Qurʾanic Studies: Issues and Themes 7 The Qurʾān’s Enchantment of the World “Antique” Narratives Refashioned in Arab Late Antiquity 125 Angelika Neuwirth 8 Messianism and the Shadow of History Judaism and Islam in a Time of Uncertainty 145 Aaron W. Hughes 9 Some Reflections on Borrowing, Influence, and the Entwining of Jewish and Islamic Traditions; or, What an Image of a Calf Might Do 164 Michael E. Pregill 10 Inheriting Egypt: The Israelites and the Exodus in the Meccan Qurʾān 198 Nicolai Sinai 11 Re-examining Textual Boundaries Towards a Form-Critical Sūrat al-Kahf 215 Marianna Klar 12 Philology and the Meaning of Sūrat al-Burūj 239 Bruce Fudge 13 A Flawed Prophet? Noah in the Qurʾān and Qurʾanic Commentary 260 Gabriel S. Reynolds Part 3 Islam, Qurʾān, and Tafsīr: Modern Discussions 14 An Asiatic and Moslem Jesus Deracinating and Reracinating Jesus by Drew Ali 277 Herbert Berg Contents vii 15 Reading the Qurʾān Chronologically An Aid to Discourse Coherence and Thematic Development 297 Peter G. Riddell 16 The Fig, the Olive, and the Cycles of Prophethood Q 95:1–3 and the Image of History in Early 20th-Century Qurʾanic Exegesis 317 Johanna Pink 17 The “Scientific Miracle of the Qurʾān” Map and Assessment 339 Stefano Bigliardi 18 Locating the “Esoteric” in Islamic Studies 354 Feras Hamza 19 Western Non-Muslim Qurʾanic Studies in Muslim Academic Contexts On Rippin’s Works from the Middle East to the Malay-Indonesian World 367 Majid Daneshgar A Concluding Appreciation 386 Jane McAuliffe Andrew Rippin : La sainte sagesse et le saint silence 396 (Ἁγία Σοφία, Ἁγία σιγή) Claude Gilliot Appendix: Publications by Andrew Rippin 399 Index 423 Preface This volume of studies is an homage and a tribute to one of the leading schol- ars of the study of Islam. Professor Andrew Rippin has been active in the field for the past 35 years, and his influence has been both broad and deep, rang- ing from studies on early Islam to research on the Internet and its use among Muslims. His early works remain classics in the field, and his Islamic stud- ies textbooks have been used by many of us to teach Islam and the Qurʾān. Professor Rippin has also been a mentor for a generation of scholars in the field, as an advisor, recommender, reviewer, and academic innovator, as well as being unstintingly generous with his time and advice. We are grateful to all the contributors who answered the call for this vol- ume with great enthusiasm and eagerness. Each scholar wanted to contrib- ute to this Festschrift not only to acknowledge the significance of Professor Rippin’s works but also as a sign of their affection for a scholar who is univer- sally admired. The studies here focus primarily on the Qurʾān and tafsīr, both classical and modern, and represent important contributions to the field. Two articles, along with a short note in French, discuss the career, achievements, and contribu- tions of Professor Rippin. First, Majid Daneshgar highlights his influence in the Muslim world; he was one of Majid’s Ph.D. supervisors, and they collaborated subsequently on a number of projects. A concluding appreciation has been written by Rippin’s colleague and long-time friend Professor Jane McAuliffe. These two articles attest to Rippin’s influence in both academia and more widely. There is a final homage in French by Claude Gilliot, entitled “Andrew Rippin: La Sainte Sagesse et Le Saint Silence.” This Festschrift is divided into three parts. Part 1 covers the early and clas- sical period of Islamic exegesis and tradition. Gerald Hawting discusses the history of the motif of the building and rebuilding of the Kaʿba. He considers the history and implications of a ḥadīth of ʿĀʾisha, in which Muḥammad had said that he was not satisfied with the form of the Kaʿba, discussing how and why a tradition that implies that the Kaʿba is somehow flawed or imperfect and not in accordance with what the Prophet wished for, came to be so gener- ally accepted. Andreas Görke, in a ground-breaking study, sheds light on the exegetical legacy of ʿUrwa b. al-Zubayr, who, up to now, has been only studied as a historian and one of the seven fuqahāʾ of Medina. Gordon Nickel, also a doctoral student of Rippin, studies the exegesis of a verse in sūrat al-Aḥzāb that deals with Zayd and his wife, Zaynab bint Jaḥsh. Nickel’s main source is the com- mentary of Muqātil b. Sulaymān (d. 767), which was apparently written before x Preface the formation of the doctrine of the ʿiṣma (infallibility) of prophets. Professor Roberto Tottoli pays particular homage to the career of Professor Rippin by revisiting the history of asbāb al-nuzūl literature and its connection to exegeti- cal works, a topic that Professor Rippin examined in detail in his early work. Arnold Yasin Mol discusses the meaning and significance of Laylat al-Qadr, which was seen as a sacred night of enormous significance, as it was then that the Qurʾān and the fate of humanity were seen as intertwined together in both Sunni commentary and theology. Mol argues that, for the Islamic exegetical tradition, the revelation of the Qurʾān is not simply a matter of historicity (the occasions of revelation) and textual meaning (what and who is addressed), but primarily reflects a sacred cosmology in which the Qurʾān is transferred from Creator to creation, from the unseen to the seen world, and in Islamic theology this transfer became the main point that determined the ontologi- cal status of both the Qurʾān and time itself. This chapter relies heavily on the commentary of Abū Manṣūr al-Māturīdī (d. 944) on sūrat al-Qadr (Q 97). The last chapter in this section, written by Tariq Jaffer, investigates covenant theology in Islam through an analysis of Q 7:172. According to Jaffer, in the Islamic tradition the covenant has generally been understood as a primor- dial event that took place before the creation of the cosmos, one in which God extracted all future generations of souls from Adam’s loins and charged them with a religious obligation to live in service of Him. This chapter traces the theme of “covenant” in Islamic intellectual history from the ninth to the twelfth centuries. Its main focus is on the theological controversies that sur- round Q 7:172 in Islamic theology and Qurʾān commentaries. Part 2 is devoted to articles on both the Qurʾān and Qurʾanic Studies. The work of Angelika Neuwirth revisits the place and function of Biblical mate- rial in the Qurʾān. According to Neuwirth, the Qurʾān does not simply reflect a massive conversion process from paganism to a monotheist faith but equally offers a re-writing of the rich literary and social heritage of Arabian antiquity that is available to us through ancient Arabic poetry, epigraphic evidence, and archaeological findings. The radical change that the Qurʾān induced finds its echo in the recipients’ allegation that the proclaimer is working magic, that he has enchanted reality. How do the two rival canons, the biblical and the Arabian, interact? Or, more precisely, how does the audience or, later, the com- munity reach a consensus about their respective validity? The fact that, in its final stage, the Qurʾān displays a successful combination of these two cultural heritages invites the question about the strategies applied to achieve this particular merger which – in her view – signals a revolutionary expansion of monotheist religious thought in Late Antiquity.