A brief history sketch on the genesis study of the Quranic corpus in Western Quranic studies (from the 19<sup>th</sup> century to the present day)

Abstract

This article examines the history of the origin of research of the Quranic corpus by Western academic scholarship from the nineteenth century to the present period. Particular emphasis is made on the direction of research which is based on the philological study of the Quran and the study of the earliest manuscripts. This tradition of research dating back to T. Neldeke ("History of the Quran") received considerable continuity with classical Islamic Quranic scholarship. Some attention was also paid to the so-called 'revisionist' theories of the origin of the Quranic corpus, from the earliest (A. Geiger) to the most recent ones. Although the academic community is engaged in fierce debates concerning certain issues of the origin of the written Quranic corpus, nevertheless, the basic consensus we formulated in this work corresponds in its key points to the results elaborated by Islamic Quranic scholarship over the centuries. Moreover, studies of the earliest manuscripts of the Quran, including those discovered in recent decades, as well as many other monuments, demonstrate that the Quran was almost completely codified (except for certain details) in its known form as early as the first century A.H., in contradiction to the claims of revisionist scholars. The present work can serve as a scholarly introduction to this topic, filling a serious insufficiency of relevant reference sources in Russian.