The Qur'an in its historical context (pdf - Islam and Christian-Muslim ...

GABRIEL SAID REYNOLDS
his writing style, at once profoundly learned and terribly obtuse, presents a
serious obstacle to the communication of his thought. Nevertheless, it is worth the
effort, for Wansbrough’s description of the literary nature of the Qur’an presents
a meaningful challenge to the standard hermeneutic used in reading it.
In Wansbrough’s reading, the very literary nature of the Qur’an, above all its
formulaic nature, reveals its origins: “Exhibiting a comparatively limited lexical
range, those formulae serve to confirm the impression of a composition made up
of originally unrelated pericopes.” 57 According to Wansbrough, these pericopes
were consolidated into a scripture in response to a sectarian environment, an
environment where Christians and Jews, not pagans, challenged the young Arab
religion. In other words, it was in ‘Abbasid Iraq that Muslims set about establishing
their own scripture, along with their own salvation history. 58 Neither the former,
nor the latter, reflects the actual experiences (wie es eigentlich gewesen war) of a
prophet in seventh century Hijaz, but rather something closer to nostalgia. 59
Wansbrough’s view means, among other things, that the traditional idea of the
chronology of the Qur’an, or, more generally, the idea of Meccan and Medinan
suras, is misguided. 60 The importance of this contention cannot be underestimated,
for this idea has been a formative influence in both Islamic and western scholarship.
Nöldeke spent much of his efforts in the first volume of the Geschichte trying to
establish a precise chronological order of suras. The 1924 Cairo Qur’an edition,
following the traditional Islamic practice, includes the marker “Meccan” or
“Medinan” at the head of each sura. More recently, Angelika Neuwirth followed
this division in her Studien zur Komposition der mekkanischen Suren. 61
Wansbrough’s skepticism of the historicity of the ‘Uthmanic recension of
the Qur’an is also worth taking seriously. By Wansbrough’s reading, the reports
of Qur’anic variants in Islamic literature are not recollections of ancient texts
that differed from the ‘Uthmanic text. 62 Rather, they are the outcome of exegesis.
He argues that most of the variants mentioned in this literature are so minor –
quite unlike variants to Biblical texts – that they appear to be the product of
grammatical or syntactical speculation or emendation. 63 Wansbrough is not alone
in this argument. 64
Finally, Wansbrough challenged the traditional notion of classical Arabic.
Semiticists long believed classical Arabic, in large part due to its robust system
of inflections and broad sound system, to be an ancient language, probably the
closest language to Ur-Semitic. Indeed, it was this belief, in part, that led to
the rise of Arabic Studies in Europe, for it was thought that Arabic preserved
ancient Semitic characteristics that could explain certain riddles in Biblical
Hebrew and Aramaic. Accordingly, most scholars in the nineteenth century,
informed by the model of Latin and Romance languages, held that modern Arabic
colloquials were neither ancient nor independent (as French, Spanish and so on
are not independent of Latin), but something like mischievous children of pure
classical Arabic.
The Qur’an, on the other hand, was generally thought to preserve this classical
language. Nöldeke agreed with this idea (although he found the Qur’an contain
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