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

FRED M. DONNER
and interpretation – orthographic, linguistic, and historical – that must be
resolved before we could prepare such an “Urtext” edition with any confidence.
To attempt such an undertaking before we have attained greater clarity on at least
the more pressing of these problems, it seems to me, would be to risk making
many false starts and possibly calamitous failure of the enterprise, as laboriously
edited parts of the text were shown to be incorrect by new discoveries. Above all,
we need as a community of scholars to reach some consensus on the most basic
question of all, namely whether there ever actually was an Ur-Qur’an; for, as we
have seen, some scholars challenge even this assumption.
Another reason to be wary of the notion of preparing a critical edition of the
Qur’an, in the present state of the field, is because such an enterprise is likely to
become a kind of “private” or closed operation, on which a very small team of
scholars work intensively, perhaps even in virtual secrecy, and probably with
materials that they keep to themselves. This is, however, a formula for the
production of a narrowly conceived product, shaped above all by the working
assumptions of those who are “in” on the project; as time goes by there tends to
be in such projects an increasing rigidity and insistence on “orthodoxy” among
those working on it, even as more and more new idea arise outside the pale
of those who are part of it. The parallel with the Dead Sea Scrolls editorial project
is all too obvious, and that experience is not something to be replicated: as we
all know, it was really when the Scrolls were “liberated,” that is, made finally
available for examination by all scholars everywhere after roughly a half-century
of being tightly controlled by a small coterie of scholars, that a burst of new
scholarly energy in Scrolls studies was unleashed.
I am not trying to suggest, however, that we do nothing – quite the contrary,
there is much we can do to advance the study of the Qur’an, but preparation of a
critical edition of the Qur’an is the wrong place to start at present. As a scholarly
field, we are not yet ready to undertake it, because we do not yet have sufficient
clarity on the fundamental issues that must be resolved first. What we need to do
now, then, is to construct some tools, or working aids, that can help this and the
next generation of scholars resolve those fundamental issues, and thus make
possible the eventual preparation of a critical edition. To do this would be to
make an enduring and indispensable contribution to Qur’anic scholarship, and it
seems obvious that this should be the agenda for our generation of scholars.
Our field of Near Eastern studies seems generally to be slow to provide us with
proper tools and working aids – for example, we still after all these years do
not have a good dictionary of Classical Arabic, much less a historical or etymological
dictionary of Arabic (something that would, of course, also be of great
assistance in Qur’anic studies). As far as the Qur’an and Qur’anic studies are
concerned, the creation of two web-based databases might help us to answer basic
still-unresolved questions about the Qur’an.
The first of these would be a Qur’an Manuscripts Database (QMD). There are
many basic questions about the Qur’an’s origins and earliest development that
hinge on matters of simple orthography – which is, of course, anything but simple,
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