Category Archives: Review of Qur’anic Research

Review of Qur’anic Research, Vol. 3 no.8 (2017)

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In the latest installment of the Review of Qur’anic Research (Vol. 3 no.8), Cecilia Palombo (Princeton University) reviews Andrew G. Bannister’s An Oral-Formulaic Study of the Qur’ān (Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2014).  

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The relationship between “the oral” and “the written” is one of the most fertile and unresolved questions in the study of early Islam, and one that often remains latent even in different sets of research questions and debates—from the reliability of early historical accounts to the development of Islamic legal practices, to the study of “semi-literary” papyri, and others. Andrew Bannister’s An Oral-Formulaic Study of the Qur’ān has the merit of bringing that complex relationship into the focus of Qur’ānic studies by searching the Qur’ānic text itself for signs of oral diction. This fascinating book has the potential of reviving the debate regarding orality and literacy in the late antique Near East…”

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© International Qur’anic Studies Association, 2017. All rights reserved.

Review of Qur’anic Research, Vol. 3 no.7 (2017)

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In the latest installment of the Review of Qur’anic Research (Vol. 3 no.7), David Larsen (New York University) reviews The Meaning of the Word: Lexicology and Qur’anic Exegesis (Edited by S.R. Burge: Oxford University Press, 2015).

“If exegesis is not the beginning point of Islamic scholarship, it was present at the beginning, and in modern times it has not ceased to be a productive discipline. The many applications and implications that commentary and interpretation have for the historical extent of Islamic thought more than justify the recent burst of edited volumes from the Institute of Ismaili Studies variously dedicated to qur’ānic exegesis, of which The Meaning of the Word: Lexicology and Qur’anic Exegesis is the third to appear in three years. The essays in this volume are trained on hermeneutic inquiry at the level of the word—the object of exegesis at its most granular. It is a field of inquiry with natural affinities to lexicography, but…”

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© International Qur’anic Studies Association, 2017. All rights reserved.

Review of Qur’anic Research, Vol. 3 no.6 (2017)

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In the latest installment of the Review of Qur’anic Research, Daniel Brubaker reviews François Déroche’s Qurʾans of the Umayyads: A First Overview (Leiden: Brill, 2014), “a book that brings the full and mature range of Déroche’s multifaceted work in this field to bear upon the question of the state(s) and stages of development of the Qur’an as an object during the Umayyad period (41–132/661–750). The book’s subtitle appropriately reflects the size and complexity of the task; the closer one works with the manuscripts, the more one realizes that for each question answered others yet remain. Still, Déroche’s work has been substantially based upon the belief that the task is doable since these extant objects have something to tell us and serve as windows to the times of their production (and thereafter) and to the practices, values, and views of those who commissioned them, as well as those who produced them…”

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Review of Qur’anic Research, Vol. 3 no.5 (2017)

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In the latest installment of the Review of Qur’anic Research (Vol. 4, no.5), Vanessa De Gifis (Wayne State University) reviews Tafsīr and Islamic Intellectual History (London: Oxford University Press/Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2014), a collection of studies edited by Andreas Görke and Johanna Pink. In this volume, Görke and Pink pose an essential inquiry about tafsīr: “What kind of disciplinary, dogmatic, sectarian, chronological or regional boundaries are there, how are they affirmed and how are they permeated, transgressed, or shifted?” (11). The overall claim of TIIH is that a variety of criteria may be useful to make sense of the external (definitional) and internal (taxonomical) boundaries of tafsīr, contingent upon the particular aspects of qurʾānic interpretation with which researchers are concerned.

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Review of Qur’anic Research, Vol. 3 no.4 (2017)

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In the latest installment of IQSA’s Review of Qur’anic Research, Devin Stewart (Emory University) reviews David Hollenberg’s Beyond the Qurʾān: Early Ismāʿīlī taʾwīl and the Secrets of the Prophets (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2016). The book is a discussion of taʾwīl, allegorical or symbolic interpretation of the Qurʾān, based mainly on Ismāʿīlī works from the tenth and eleventh centuries. It presents three main arguments: an overarching historical argument about the Ismāʿīlī daʿwah and other similar movements, and two more focused arguments on the nature of Ismāʿīlī taʾwīl and its use of biblical material.

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Review of Qur’anic Research, Vol. 3 no.3 (2017)

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In the latest installment of the Review of Qur’anic Research, Johanna Pink (Albert-Ludwigs-Universität, Freiburg) reviews The Qur’an and Its Readers Worldwide edited by Suha Taji-Farouki (Oxford University Press, 2015). This volume presents readers with an unprecedented broad perspective on the global field of Muslim qurʾānic exegesis. It brings together ten chapters that bear witness to exegetical approaches from all over the world: Bosnia, Turkey, South Asia, Indonesia, Iran, Egypt, the U.S., East Africa, Germany, and China. Consequently, it contains examples from Muslim majority societies as well as diasporic communities from the early twentieth century to the present.

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© International Qur’anic Studies Association, 2017. All rights reserved.

Review of Qur’anic Research Vol. 3 no. 2 (2017)

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In the latest installment of the Review of Qur’anic Research, Orhan Elmaz reviews Christian Peltz’s two-volume Der Koran des Abū l-ʿAlāʾ (Weisbaden: Harrassowitz, 2013). Peltz’s work is dedicated to a text unique in classical Arabic literature in many respects: Abū al-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī’s (d. 449/1057) Kitāb al-Fuṣūl wa’l-ghāyāt fī tamjīd allāh wa’l-mawāʿiẓ. Maʿarrī’s work has drawn scholarly interest because it has been believed to constitute an attempt at imitating or parodying (muʿāraḍah) the Qurʾān.

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Review of Qur’anic Research, Vol. 3 no. 1 (2017)

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In the latest installment of the Review of Qur’anic Research, Fred M. Donner reviews Michael Penn’s When Christians First Met Muslims: A Sourcebook of the Earliest Syriac Writings on Islam (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015). Since the publication of Patricia Crone and Michael Cook’s Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World (1980), several collections of non-Muslim sources used to reconstruct the history of Early Islam have appeared in conversation, bringing together languished manuscripts that were previously unpublished and often untranslated into one place. A major milestone was the appearance of Robert Hoyland’s Seeing Islam as Others Saw It: A Survey and Evaluation of Christian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian Writings on Early Islam (1997), a collection whose value has hardly diminished in the two decades since its publication. Also critical in this regard is Andrew Palmer’s The Seventh Century in the West-Syrian Chronicles (1993). Michael Penn’s When Christians First Met Muslims is a welcome addition to this list of useful compendium of non-Muslim sources that describe the origins of Islam.

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© International Qur’anic Studies Association, 2017. All rights reserved.

Arabs and Empires Before Islam

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IQSA members – the final Review of Qur’anic Research for 2016 is up! In the latest installment of RQR, Dr. Ilkka Lindstedt reviews Arabs and Empires Before Islam (Greg Fisher, ed. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2015). With contributions by over 20 leading experts of pre-Islamic Arabia, it is a formidable achievement in the field of pre-Islamic Arabian studies. It presents the history of Arabia from antiquity to the 630s CE, taking into account the subject’s diversity and presenting a variety of source materials.

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Much importance is given to the surviving material evidence in the present volume. It provides, for example, interpretations of significant new inscriptions and reinterpretations of previously published ones, many of which have previously been dispersed in hard-to-access publications, and explains their worth for the study of history. It has been (and unfortunately still is) a common habit of Arabists to look first and foremost at the Arabic historiography of the Islamic era and other literary evidence when discussing pre-Islamic Arabia. This is probably a question of habit and training: Arabists and Islamicists usually know well, for example, the Arabic works of the ninth–tenth centuries by Ibn al-Kalbī (d. 206/821-22), Ibn Hishām (d. 218/833), and al-Ṭabarī (d. 310/923), but they are not aware of the magnitude of the surviving pre-Islamic Arabian epigraphic record (numbering almost 100,000 known items at the moment).

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© International Qur’anic Studies Association, 2016. All rights reserved.

The Jews of Medina and the Challenge of Early Islamic Historiography

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Cover of Mazuz, Religious and Spiritual Lives of the Jews of Medina (Brill, 2014). Image from brill.com.

In the latest installment of the Review of Qur’anic Research 2, no. 2, Michael Pregill reviews Haggai Mazuz’s The Religious and Spiritual Lives of the Jews of Medina (Leiden: Brill, 2014). This work not only seeks to establish the historicity of much of the data the traditional sources offer us on the culture, customs, and traditions of the Jewish communities of the Ḥijāz in Muhammad’s time, but proposes to offer a conclusive demonstration of the squarely halakhic nature of these Jews. According to Mazuz, much of what the classical Islamic sources relate about Muhammad’s Jewish contemporaries can be correlated with data about Jewish ideas and practices found in the Babylonian Talmud and other mainstream rabbinic sources, which he interprets as proof that these Arabian communities were essentially rabbinic in orientation.

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© International Qur’anic Studies Association, 2016. All rights reserved.