Review of El-Badawi and Paula Sanders (eds.), Communities of the Qur’an
When I first saw the title of the book under review here, Communities of the Qur’an, I was excited. In the field of qurʾānic studies, there has been a decades-long (if not longer) focus on the qurʾānic text itself, on its origins and history, its linguistic and literary qualities, but rather much silence about the people who engage with it. This volume, edited by Emran El-Badawi and Paula Sanders, aims to change that by bringing together scholars who, in complex ways, write about and often also represent communities of the Qurʾān that the editors selected based on a thoughtful process. The result is a collection of essays, ten plus the introduction by the editors, rounded out with a foreword by Reza Aslan, and an afterword by Reuven Firestone.
Review of Nicolai Sinai, Rain-Giver, Bone-Breaker, Score-Settler
Nicolai Sinai’s small book, or essay, is a very welcome contribution to the study of the deity Allāh and the religious map of Arabia on the eve of Islam based on the jāhiliyyah (pre-Islamic) poetry. The work is available as an open-access e-book. Sinai’s study is rich in methodological considerations and lucid in style. The argumentation is easy to follow. In short, the essay is a joy to read. What I find especially significant is his integrated use of different source sets: in addition to Arabic poetry, he employs the Qurʾān and ancient Arabian epigraphic evidence as comparative materials (while eschewing Arabic prose literature). The picture that he puts forward is credible and well documented.
Review of Stephen Shoemaker, The Apocalypse of Empire
Stephen Shoemaker’s The Apocalypse of Empire builds upon the methodology, and some of the most provocative conclusions, of the author’s earlier monograph The Death of a Prophet.[1] In that book, Shoemaker subjects the extant evidence concerning Muḥammad’s death to close scrutiny, concluding that the Prophet died after the invasion of Palestine commenced in 634 CE and not before, as most accounts hold. Even more shockingly, Shoemaker asserts that Muḥammad preached a fervently eschatological message and led his followers in a campaign to conquer Jerusalem as the focal point of an imminent apocalyptic culmination of history.[2] One of the most compelling features of The Death of a Prophet is Shoemaker’s deployment of a methodology and framework drawn from the study of early Christianity in order to show how the overtly eschatological message of the original movement that followed Muḥammad was radically rewritten in the course of just a few decades, forever altering the meaning and thrust of Islam in its formative period.
Review of Daniel Beck, Evolution of the Early Qur’an
Recent scholarship, especially following the contributions of Angelica Neuwirth and Nicolai Sinai, has increasingly stressed that the Qurʾān is better understood through an examination of the Late Antique period and the multiple religious traditions that were active in the Hijaz and the shām region, which included Christian, Jewish, and Manichean traditions. In Evolution of the Early Qurʾān, Daniel Beck offers a new contextualization of several early Meccan sūrahs in the Qurʾān against this Late Antique background, and situates his contribution in correcting tendencies among scholars to see these early sūrahs either as obscure, or as secondary to the later corpus, or as representing fossilized relics of earlier traditions.
Review of Sean Anthony, Muhammad and the Empires of Faith
What do we know about Muḥammad? How do we know what we know and how certain can we be of that knowledge? These are questions that have been asked by scholars many times and answered in many different ways. In Muhammad and the Empires of Faith: The Making of the Prophet of Islam, Sean W. Anthony presents a fresh attempt to provide answers to these questions. The book has two goals. It strives to “revitalize historical research into the life and times of Muḥammad” and it attempts to “shed new light on the historical circumstances and the intellectual currents that gave rise to the sīrah-maghāzī tradition as a discrete genre of Arabic letters from the last decade of the seventh century C.E. up until the end of the eighth” (1). The book is therefore truly a study of two topics, the historical Muḥammad and the sīrah-maghāzī genre, and an urgent plea to make sense of the former in light of the latter.
Review of Seyyed Nasr et. al, The Study Qur’an
Following in the footsteps of the Harper Collins Study Bible and the Jewish Study Bible, The Study Quran is a welcome addition to the field of qurʾānic studies. In response to a proposal from the publisher, the distinguished Islamicist Seyyed Hossein Nasr agreed to serve as the Editor-in-Chief and general supervisor of the project on the condition that the team of scholars who carried out this monumental task would include only Muslim scholars who accept the Qurʾān “as the word of God and an authentic revelation” (xl). To this end, Nasr chose three talented young scholars to serve as General Editors: Caner Dagli, Maria Dakake, and Joseph Lumbard. Another scholar, Mohammed Rustom, served as Assistant Editor. The volume has three parts: the translation, a verse-by-verse commentary printed below the translation, followed by fifteen essays on topics relating to the Qurʾān. Special attention was paid to the dust jacket and page design: In the translation, verse numbers are marked in red, inserted within a red medallion, and placed at the beginning of the corresponding verse—a significant break from the Islamic tradition, which places verse numbers at the end of a verse. A substantial General Introduction to the volume was written by the Editor-in-Chief. The three General Editors were each responsible for a section of the translation, a section of the commentary (to which the Assistant Editor also contributed), and at least one of the essays in the third section (Joseph Lumbard wrote two). The other eleven essays in the third section were written by Ingrid Mattson, Muhammad Mustafa al-Azami, Muhammad Abdel Haleem, Walid Saleh, Toby Mayer, Muzaffar Iqbal, Aḥmad Muḥammad al-Ṭayyib, Muṣṭafā Muḥaqqiq Dāmād, William C. Chittick, Jean-Louis Michon, and Hamza Yusuf. The volume also has three appendices: Appendix A presents information (source references, variants) on ḥadīths cited, paraphrased, or referred to in the commentary, with a link, in red, to the sūrah number and verse number in which a particular ḥadīth is mentioned; and a bibliography of published ḥadīth sources. Appendix B is a timeline of major events relating to the career of the Prophet and the revelation of the Qurʾān. Appendix C includes short biographies of the Qurʾān commentators whose works are cited in the text. The volume also includes a comprehensive index as well as eleven color maps that depict Arabia, the Hijaz, pilgrimage stations in Mecca, the topography of Medina, and important battles: Uḥud, the Trench, Badr, Mecca, Ḥunayn, and Ṭā’if.
Review of Kristian Petersen, Interpreting Islam in China
Some readers of the Review of Qurʾanic Research might wonder whether a book on Islam in China is worth their attention. It most definitely is, especially if their interest transcends the Qurʾānic text itself and extends to Muslims’ engagement with their sacred scripture. As the author of Interpreting Islam in China, Kristian Petersen, rightfully criticizes, “much of Western scholarship has associated Islam very closely, and at times even exclusively, with Arab Muslims in the Middle East—often establishing essentialized orientations of the center and the periphery” (3). Regions at the margin of the Islamicate world such as Southeast Asia, China, or sub-Saharan Africa are often relegated to the domain of anthropologists: culturally interesting, but irrelevant to discourses on theology, normativity and scriptural interpretation. This is a dangerous move because it replicates biases inherent to our field of study, instead of calling them into question. It is also a tendency that robs the field of Qurʾānic studies of much empirical and analytical potential. This is something that Petersen explicitly, and quite successfully, seeks to remedy. It is therefore highly advisable especially for scholars who have no expertise on Islam in China to take his book seriously as a contribution to our understanding of how the Qurʾān was read and interpreted by Muslims throughout history, across space and language divides. Even if one’s own field of study focuses on entirely different languages or regions, as is the case with this reviewer, Petersen’s thoughtful analysis allows us to appreciate broader trends and situate our own research within the history of Muslim approaches to the Qurʾān. This is because Petersen has taken great care, throughout the book, to go beyond a philological analysis of his sources and draw systematic conclusions that make his findings accessible, theoretically useful, and suitable for comparison with the development of Muslim scholarship, education, and scriptural exegesis in other regions of the world.
Review of Youssouf Sangaré, Le scellement de la prophétie en Islam
Le scellement de la prophétie en Islam is a learned and well-argued study of the qurʾānic hapax legomenon khātam al-nabiyyīn (seal of the prophets; Q Aḥzāb 33:40) and more generally of the notion of the cessation of prophecy in Islam. An introductory section is dedicated to key vocabulary (nabaʾ, nabī, rasūl, risālah, and the root kh-t-m) and to a study of Sūrat al-Aḥzāb where the expression khātam al-nabiyyīn appears. Chapter 1 addresses the question of whether this expression is rightly understood in light of reports in Islamic literature that Mani (d. 277) named himself “seal of the prophets.” The following chapters offer a chronological study of how Muslim scholars understood the notion of the sealing of prophecy (khatm al-nubuwwah) in the classical period (seventh to fourteenth centuries; chapter 2), in the writings of al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111), Ibn ʿArabī (d. 628/1240), and Ibn Taymiyyah (d. 728/1328; chapter 3), and in the modern period (chapter 4). Along the way Youssouf Sangaré illustrates the complications surrounding the notion of the sealing of prophecy and amplifies those voices in Islamic tradition which resist the idea that God went silent with the death of Muḥammad.
Review of Nevin Reda, The al-Baqara Crescendo
In The al-Baqara Crescendo, Nevin Reda does an exceptional job of describing the Qur’ān in the vocabulary of art, aesthetics, acoustics, chanting, song, music, the rhythms and rhymes of orally-recited poetry, poetic-like rhetorical devices, and German terminology. Her emotive vocabulary and accessible writing style lures the reader into a feeling that her approach is holistic and that Sūrat al-Baqarah is coherent. Reda includes fourteen tables, each painstakingly-crafted in order to illustrate particular textual parallels. The transliteration table, however, includes only eighteen of the twenty-eight Arabic letters, and the glossary does not include all of her technical terms.
Review of Shahab Ahmed, Before Orthodoxy
This volume originally aimed at being the first of three volumes concerning the history of Islamic approaches towards the story of the satanic verses (qiṣṣat al-gharānīq); unfortunately, volumes 2 and 3 of this project could not be completed, due to the passing away of the author. According to the satanic verses story, while the prophet Muḥammad recited Q al-Najm 53 in Mecca, Satan interpolated his own words into the divine revelation, making the prophet pronounce words in favor of Allāt, Manāt and al-‘Uzzā, the three female deities that were worshipped by the non-believers (mushrikūn) of Quraysh. This compromise over monotheism made the mushrikūn of Mecca accept Islam. However, later this interpolation was corrected, which led the mushrikūn to again reject Islam. The book is comprised of four sections: an introduction and three chapters. The first chapter discusses methodology. The second chapter, which makes up roughly two-thirds of the book, presents fifty early narrative versions of the story and analyzes the chains of transmissions (isnāds) and content (matn) of each. The third chapter considers why the early Muslim community regarded the satanic verses incident to be true.
Review of Greg Fisher (ed.), Arabs and Empires before Islam
Arabs and Empires before Islam 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. The volume will supplement or supplant the earlier go-to works by Robert Hoyland[1] and Jan Retsö.[2] It can also be (favorably) compared to the recent book of Aziz al-Azmeh,[3] which has received mixed reviews.[4] The volume contains contributions from over 20 leading experts[5] of pre-Islamic Arabia, which in itself is remarkable. It is a book that one will read with great excitement from cover to cover, but it is also serves as an excellent reference volume should one need to check, say, when a certain king of Ḥimyar ruled or the like. The text is accompanied by fifteen maps pinpointing the localities mentioned in the sources and scores of other figures. There are also sixteen color plates that present, for example, important inscriptions – such as the Old Arabic Jabal Usays graffito and Ḥarrān building inscription – that have so far been widely available only as low definition black and white photographs.
Review of Michael Penn, When Christians First Met Muslims
It is well known today that Islam was not “born in the full light of history” as the eminent scholar of religion Ernest Renan (1823–1892) once boldly claimed. Rather, it crystallized in the course of a lengthy historical evolution, still poorly understood, that probably had its roots in western Arabia in the early years of the seventh century C.E. but only reached its first culmination a century or more later. Renan’s sanguine confidence in our ability to reconstruct Islam’s origins stemmed from his conviction—shared by most in his day—that both the text of the Qurʾān, and the detailed traditional accounts in Arabic found in the works of Muslim historians, biographers, theologians, and jurists, offered us almost unmediated evidence for “what had actually happened” during the lifetime of Muḥammad and during the process of expansion that followed his death. Critical study of the Arabic narrative sources by several generations of scholars since then, however, has shown this blind confidence in the traditional Islamic origins story to be ill-founded. Grave doubts have also been raised in recent years about the Qurʾān text as a source of historical information, even for the events of the prophet’s life.
