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

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RECENT RESEARCH ON THE
CONSTRUCTION OF THE QUR’AN
Gerhard Böwering
The Qur’an, proclaimed in Arabic by Muhammad in the northwestern region of
the Arabian peninsula during the first quarter of the seventh century, reveals a
significant relationship to the tradition of the Jewish and Christian scriptures
and echoes themes found in their midrashic and apocryphal writings. No single
collection of biblical writings, normative, apocryphal or midrashic, however, has
been identified as the major source in which the Qur’an may have been rooted. 1
To the best of our present knowledge, the Bible had not been translated into
Arabic by the time of Muhammad, either in its entirety or in the form of single
books. 2 It is generally believed that Muhammad gathered his biblical knowledge
principally, if not exclusively, from oral sources. 3 This oral lore was communicated
to Muhammad in his mother tongue, but its original forms were in Syriac,
Aramaic, Ethiopian and Hebrew materials, as evidenced by the vocabulary of
foreign origin to be found in the Arabic Qur’an. 4 This foreign vocabulary formed
an integral part of Muhammad’s proclamation and was understood by his
audience in Mecca and Medina whom he addressed in eloquent Arabic. 5
The earlier paragraph represents a summation of my present position on the
single most vexing question in the field of Qur’anic studies, the question of
how the Qur’an was composed and finally codified. No issue has grabbed more
contemporary attention, both scholarly and non-scholarly, and no issue is
more likely to generate religious controversy between Muslims and non-
Muslims. In recent decades several publications have proposed radical
revisionist theories of Qur’anic origins. Some of these have captured more
attention than others, both positive and negative, but the response has been text
specific rather than comparative and comprehensive. What I will do in the
pages that follow attempts to address that lack by bringing forward a number of
these studies for sustained analysis. That analysis will not be comprehensible,
however, unless it is placed within the context of the last century and a half
of Western scholarship on the Qur’an. The insights and consensus achieved
during that period form the backdrop against which these newer studies must be
understood and assessed.
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