Destabilizing Gender, Reproducing Maternity: Mary in the Qurʾān

The Qurʾān tells Mary’s story in extended passages in Sūrat Āl ʿImrān (Q 3) and Sūrat Maryam (Q 19). These stories have been interpreted to emphasize sameness between men and women and prove qurʾānic gender egalitarianism on the one hand, and to illustrate the qurʾānic valuing of female, especially maternal, experience on the other. This essay proposes a third tack, highlighting queerness. Focusing on Sūrat Āl ʿImrān, this article suggests new avenues for thinking about gender, family, and society in the Qurʾān. In situating Mary in a semi-genealogical prophetic lineage and a believing community, qurʾānic verses by turns affirm and unsettle binary gender constructions and disrupt heteronormative reproductivity. Oscillating between highlighting Mary’s femaleness and likening her to prophetic and pious males, the text offers rich notions of gender, kinship, and power. A queer reading of Mary poses certain dangers but also offers a way out of certain feminist impasses by rejecting a totalizing narrative.

Law, Structure, and Meaning in Sūrat al-Baqarah

This article uses the legal passages in Sūrat al-Baqarah to index the sūrah’s themes and structure. A consideration of all the sūrah’s legal passages shows that they contribute to a narrative of covenantal succession that structures Sūrat al-Baqarah as a whole. The main legal passages in the sūrah (vv. 178-203, 215-242) form a “Neo-Covenantal Code” to govern the civil and ritual life of the qurʾānic community. Other legal passages invoke biblical law (vv. 83–84), distinguish the qurʾānic community’s ritual practices from those of pagan and earlier biblical communities (vv. 142–177), and provide specific guidance on matters of charity, finance, and commerce (vv. 261– 283). Although Sūrat al-Baqarah’s narrative arc culminates in readying the qur’anic community, as successors to the Covenant, for military conflict, the placement of passages relating to certain matters of commercial law near the sūrah’s end may indicate a secondary process of composition.

Ring Composition in Sūrat Yūsuf (Q 12)

This paper focuses on the structure of Sūrat Yūsuf (Q 12), arguing that the sūrah demonstrates the most prominent features of ring composition more intricately than scholarship has thus far acknowledged. This paper first considers guidelines for arguing for ring composition, following critical scholarship on ring composition and Mary Douglas’ Thinking in Circles. It then demonstrates that Q 12 displays an intricate structure of mirroring, concentric composition, and parallelism, and draws attention to the literary markers and correspondences between mirrored elements throughout the narrative. The final section goes beyond the form of the sūrah to address its broader argument by placing it in the context of the third Meccan phase of the Prophet Muḥammad’s mission. The themes of betrayal, treachery, exile, reconciliation, forbearance, and reunion are central to this narrative and reflect the anxiety and despair of Muḥammad in this period. This paper demonstrates the utility of analyzing passages of the Qurʾān for ring composition, while adhering to stricter criteria for this type of analysis.

Review Essay: Positivism, Revisionism, and Agnosticism in the Study of Late Antiquity and the Qurʾān

This essay examines two recent publications relevant to research into the Qurʾān’s revelatory context in late antique Arabia: G. W. Bowersock’s The Crucible of Islam and Islam and Its Past, edited by Carol Bakhos and Michael Cook. The approaches to questions of Islamic origins, the background to the Qurʾān, and the interpretation of the qurʾānic corpus in each of these volumes are strikingly different, and tell us much about the contemporary status quo in Qurʾānic Studies on these questions, or rather the abiding incoherence of the field. Despite significant advances in the field over the last ten years, a cogent, universally accepted framework for understanding the background of the Qurʾān is still lacking, as is a general synthesis of the insights yielded by different methodological approaches. Nevertheless, the approaches of more positivist and more revisionist scholarship are not wholly irreconcilable, and a basic consensus on certain fundamentals (such as the heuristic utility of the basic chronology of revelation), as well as a tacit reconciliation with major aspects of the traditional view, point the way forward for productive research in the future.