In the first installment of Volume 8 of IQSA’s Review of Qur’anic Research (2022), Saqib Hussain (University of Oxford) reviews Martin Whittingham’s A History of Muslim Views of the Bible: The First Four Centuries (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2021).
In the review, Hussain writes “In this compact book, Martin Whittingham presents the historical beginnings of Muslim attitudes to the Bible. Billed as the first of two volumes, this installment takes us from the Qurʾān and its position on the scriptures of the “People of the Book” to the turn of the fifth century AH / eleventh century CE, i.e., up to and including the writings of Ibn Ḥazm (d. 456/1064) and some of his contemporaries, whom Whittingham sees as marking a watershed in the way Muslims have viewed and approached the Bible. The planned second volume will continue the story to the present day. While previous studies have focused on key Muslim thinkers or specific aspects of Muslim scholarly use and/or critique of the Bible, the present work ranges far broader in its scope, seeking to present a chronology of evolving attitudes toward the Bible across a wide variety of literary genres. These attitudes are gauged both through explicit statements about the Bible from Muslim scholars, and through what may be implicitly gleaned about such attitudes from the way the Bible is utilized or discussed. The scope of the book is thus both impressive and unique, and Whittingham has produced a work that will surely be required reading for anyone interested in this field…”
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