In the latest installment of the Review of Qur’anic Research (Vol. 6, no 8), Waleed Rikab (Rice University) reviews Daniel Beck’s Evolution of the Early Qurʾān: From Anonymous Apocalypse to Charismatic Prophet (New York: Peter Lang, 2018).

In his review, Rikab writes “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….”      

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