Bukhārī’s Kitāb Tafsīr al-Qurʾān

The celebrated Ṣaḥīḥ of al-Bukhārī (d. 256/870) includes a long book of qurʾānic commentary. It is unusual in the Ṣaḥīḥ as a whole in relying heavily on reports from Companions: 72 percent of all the unique reports given full isnāds in the book, as opposed to only about 9 percent of all reports in the whole Ṣaḥīḥ. It is also unusual in the density of comment from later authorities (without isnāds) and in the number of comments from Bukhārī himself. Bukhārī accepts without demur that the Qurʾān includes loan words. In comparison with other commentaries on the Qurʾān such as those of ʿAbd al-Razzāq before him and al-Ṭabarī and Ibn Abī Ḥātim after, Bukhārī’s evidently plays down disagreement over the interpretation of words, legal applications, and textual variants. In comparison with the commentaries of al-Tirmidhī and al-Nasāʾī, Bukhārī’s includes very many comments from philologists. Bukhārī’s commentary is valuable for making out the larger history of Qurʾān commentary inasmuch as it testifes to the development of genre expectations in the mid-ninth century CE. It shows that the synthesis of ḥadīth and adab approaches was already under way, as well as other developments previously remarked in commentaries of the tenth and eleventh centuries.

“Nothing but Time Destroys Us”: The Deniers of Resurrection in the Qurʾān

In this posthumously published paper, Patricia Crone (d. 2015) examines a corpus of verses in the Qurʾān in which the mushrikūn, the supposedly pagan opponents of the qurʾānic prophet, are portrayed as objecting to the doctrine of the resurrection, one of the central tenets of the Qurʾān. In contrast to the traditional understanding of the mushrikūn as idolaters ignorant of monotheism, the evidence of the Qurʾān itself suggests that the mushrikūn were familiar with the concepts of judgment and resurrection but were either skeptical about them or denied them outright. The Qurʾān attributes statementsto them that indicate that the resurrectionwas an ancestral doctrine they had come to reject, not a new teaching. Not only do the mushrikūn appear to have been directly familiar with monotheistic concepts, but the Qurʾān attributes statements to them that seem to refect biblical phraseology. The author concludes that the most radical deniers may have represented a strain of eternalism or rationalism current in the late antique world in which the Qurʾān was revealed.

Did Ḥafṣah Edit the Qurʾān? A Response with Notes on the Codices of the Prophet’s Wives

This article revisits, assesses, and critiques the recent claim made by Ruqayya Khan that Ḥafṣah bt. ʿUmar, a wife of the Prophet Muḥammad, played a significant editorial role in the early establishment of the text of the Qurʾān but that her prominent editorial role in this enterprise has been suppressed by androcentric scholarship. In the course of our critique, we also attempt to offer insight into what role the Qurʾān codices owned by the Prophet’s wives played in early Muslim narratives of the ʿUthmānic codex, as well as how modern historical-critical and feminist readings of the early source material can, and must, mutually inform one another.

Form Criticism or a Rolling Corpus: The Methodology of John Wansbrough through the Lens of Biblical Studies

John Wansbrough’s scholarship on the Qurʾān has had a significant impact on Qurʾānic Studies over the last forty years. His ideas continue to stimulate research into historical and literary dimensions of the Qurʾān, even though assessments vary greatly regarding the plausibility of some of his major ideas, and his subtle arguments can be difficult to follow. This essay clarifies and evaluates Wansbrough’s thinking about the composition of the Qurʾān by elucidating the models from Biblical Studies that he appropriated. Detailed treatment is given to biblical form criticism and Wansbrough’s application of this method to the qurʾānic accounts of the prophet Shuʿayb. It is suggested that Wansbrough’s form-critical research yielded positive insights into the Qurʾān, but also left certain questions unanswered. It is then proposed that another model taken from Biblical Studies, the idea of a “rolling corpus” as developed in research on the book of Jeremiah, can sharpen and refine Wansbrough’s conclusions.

he Current State of Qurʾānic Studies: Commentary on a Roundtable Discussion

This paper is based on a roundtable discussion held at the 2015 IQSA Annual Meeting about the current state of the field of Qurʾānic Studies and its future, gathering together specialists in different areas from within the academic field of Qurʾānic Studies, as well as from outside it. The panelists were Kecia Ali (Boston University), Herbert Berg (University of North Carolina at Wilmington), Joseph Lumbard (American University in Sharjah), Nicolai Sinai (Oxford University), Devin Stewart (Emory University), and ShawkatToorawa (Cornell University, nowYale University); Farid Esack (University of Johannesburg) presided. The discussion is here summarized and analyzed by Karen Bauer (the Institute of Ismaili Studies, London). The aim in writing up this discussion is to present a coherent summary and analysis of its major points, so that specialists and nonspecialists alike may get a clearer picture of recent trends and changes in the field, as well as of the challenges facing scholars now and in the future

Response To Reuven Firestone’s 2015 IQSA Presidential Address

In his presidential keynote, Reuven Firestone has identified multiple features of the problem of prophecy in Islam. He informs us about the ways in which Muḥammad’s prophecy was first expected to occur according to reports from some Arabian Jews and how certain features of Muḥammad’s prophecy were even noted in Jewish sources. At the same time, he is also cautious and wonders out loud whether these episodes of Jewish notices of Muḥammad’s prophecy “could have occurred as depicted or whether something like them happened at all.” It is healthy to foster such skepticism. Skepticism allows the historian to explore other possibilities and explanations as to what happened in order to track how these predictions about Muḥammad’s prophecy played out, both at the time of their purported occurrence and when these reports were received among Muslim communities and other faith traditions over time

The Problematic of Prophecy: 2015 IQSA Presidential Address

When Muḥammad began to gain followers in Mecca, the leaders of the town sent trusted emissaries to the Jews of Yathrib/Medina to ask their opinion about whether or not Muḥammad was a true prophet. Al-Nadhr b. al-Ḥārith and ʿUqbah b. Abī Muʿayṭ traveled the 200 or so miles to Medina. When they got there, they were instructed by the Jewish leadership, “Ask Muhammad three questions. If he can answer them, he is a true prophet, but if not, then he is an imposter.”1