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

GERHARD BÖWERING
correlated with the situations and varying circumstances of Muhammad’s life and
career. This Western chronological approach to the construction of the Qur’an
reached full elaboration in the work of Theodor Nöldeke, 11 a conclusion that was
then challenged by Richard Bell, and brought to a balanced adjudication by Rudi
Paret’s manual of commentary and concordance to the Qur’an. 12 While the
Western scholarly consensus adopted the traditional distinction between Meccan
and Medinan suras, it subdivided the Meccan phase of Muhammad’s proclamation
into three distinct periods, taking the Medinan period as the fourth. These
four periods were linked to a conception of the gradual inner development
of Muhammad’s prophetic consciousness and of the emergence of his political
career. Western scholarship forged this linkage through its biographical research
on the life of Muhammad, which was worked out simultaneously with its
research on the Qur’an. 13 Since chronological research on the Qur’an and
biographical research on Muhammad’s career were closely dependent on one
another, the possibility of a circular argument remained a constant danger
because the subjective evaluation of Muhammad’s religious development had
to be read back into various and disparate Qur’anic verses from which it had been
culled originally. In general, the fourfold chronology of the Qur’anic proclamation
was formulated on the basis of two modes of analysis: the first related Qur’anic
passages source-critically to historical events known from extra-Qur’anic literature,
and the second systematically analyzed the philological and stylistic nature of the
Arabic text of the Qur’an passage by passage.
The most radical chronological rearrangement of the suras and verses of the
Qur’an was undertaken by Richard Bell 14 who suggested that the composition of
the Qur’an followed three main phases: a “Sign” phase, a “Qur’an” phase and a
“Book” phase. The earliest phase, which is characterized by “sign passages” and
exhortations to worship God, represents the major portion of Muhammad’s
preaching at Mecca, of which only a fragmentary amount survives. The “Qur’an”
phase included the later stages of Muhammad’s Meccan career and the first two
years of his activity at Medina, a phase during which Muhammad was faced with
the task of producing a collection of liturgical recitals. The “Book” phase
belonged to his activity at Medina and began at the end of the second year after
the hijra, from which time Muhammad set out to formulate a written scripture.
In the present Qur’an, however, each of these three phases cannot be precisely
separated, because sign passages came to be incorporated into the liturgical
collection and earlier oral recitals were later revised to form part of the written
book. In explaining his complex system of distinguishing criteria, Bell convincingly
argued that the original units of revelation were short, piecemeal passages
which Muhammad himself collected into suras. He further stipulated that written
documents were used in the process of redaction, a process undertaken with the
help of scribes during Muhammad’s career in Medina. The watershed event for
the creation of the Qur’an as sacred scripture, Bell argued, was the battle of Badr
that occurred two years after the hijra. In Bell’s view, the hijra itself did not
constitute a great divide for the periodization of the suras.
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