The Qur'an and Late Antiquity

Abstract

The Qurʾan and Late Antiquity: A Shared Heritage, the culminating summary of the work of the most prominent German scholar of the Qurʾan, provides an original introduction to the Qurʾan against the background of the plural religious and literary cultures of Late Antiquity. In order to bridge the polarity between understandings of the Qurʾan in the Islamic world and the West, the work offers a critical introduction to the study of the Qurʾan within Western scholarship, before employing a range of philological and historical methods to present a critical image of the history of the text’s emergence, redaction, and earliest “setting in life” within the community. Setting out and upholding a chronological understanding of the stages of the “proclamation” represented by the final, canonized text, Neuwirth sets forth an original philologically and historically informed reading of the text. This entails a detailed description of the stages of “communal formation” detectable behind the canonized text, as well as an exploration of the emergence of patterns of communal liturgy and ritual-textual practices reflected in the literary forms of the suras. The process of the text’s historical emergence is set carefully against the background of the other scriptural traditions into which it inscribes itself, and the relationships between the Koran and the text corpora of the Old and New Testaments, as well as to ancient Arabic poetry, are given detailed and original treatment. No work of this kind exists now in English: both thoroughly and critically aware of the body of Western research on the Koran, and based on a thorough and historically informed literary reading of the Koranic text.