Neuwirth - The - Qur'ān - As - A - Late - Antique - Text

THE QURʾĀN AS A LATE ANTIQUE TEXT
Angelika Neuwirth
We are used to regarding the Qurʾān as the “Islamic text” par excellence.
Historically viewed this is, however, not evident at all. For more than
twenty years before rising to the rank of the founding document of Islam,
the Qurʾān was an oral communication. Its message was not yet addressed
towards Muslims—who would become the faithful only by adopting the
Qurʾānic communication as their scripture, but to pre-Islamic listeners
whom we might best describe as persons educated in late antiquity learn-
ing. Western research usually approaches the Qurʾān as the Scripture that
it was to become later and interprets it in a teleological manner—as if its
ultimate signifĳicance had already been inscribed in it in statu nascendi.
Striving to understand the Qurʾān as it was communicated, as a message
targeting not-yet-Muslims, one has to relinquish the usual procedure of
reading it through the lens of Islamic texts but contextualize it within pre-
Islamic, late antique traditions instead. This article is intended to intro-
duce this approach which is presently pursued within the framework of
the project Corpus Coranicum at the Berlin Academy of Sciences.1
The Qurʾān as a text in statu nascendi, as a text of Late Antiquity, is not
a modern discovery. By the 3rd/9th century, the Basran polymath al-Jāḥiẓ
had insisted on the particular historical context of the Qurʾān as a fac-
tor in its evolution, and moreover on its interaction with listeners whose
education should have constituted the erwartungshorizont, the frame of
expectation into which the form of the Qurʾān had to be accommodated.
Al-Jāḥiẓ regards this particular surrounding of the Qurʾān’s emergence
as an essential advantage of the Qurʾān vis-à-vis the emergence of other
Copyright © 2011. BRILL. All rights reserved.
scriptures. He evaluates the sequence of the three great messengers in the

following way:
Every Prophet is given a sign to manifest his rank as a messenger: Moses was
sent to Pharaoh whose people excelled in magic. To convince them he had
to perform a miracle of magic: he changed a rod into a snake. Jesus appeared
in an age when the most prestigious art was medicine, he worked a scien-
tifĳic miracle—he resurrected the dead. Muḥammad—still later—was sent
to a people who would no longer be impressed by material exceptionalities,
but—being professionals in rhetoric, balāgha—demanded a more sublime
1
Marx (2008: 41–54).
In the Shadow of Arabic - The Centrality of Language to Arabic Culture : Studies Presented to Ramzi Baalbaki on the Occasion of His
Sixtieth Birthday, edited by Bilal Orfali, and Ramzi Balabakki, BRILL, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uoregon/detail.action?do
Created from uoregon on 2020-08-23 13:48:56.
496 angelika neuwirth
prophetical sign. Muḥammad, therefore, presented a linguistic miracle. He

brought a scripture, the Qurʾān. 2
This review of the prophetical ministries, dismissive toward the earlier
messages as it may be, does touch on an important point: the percep-
tion of the kind of scripture the Qurʾān constitutes. Al-Jāḥiẓ aptly under-
scores the Qurʾān’s claim to both semantic and aesthetic signifĳicance. He
explains that claim in historical terms rooting the Qurʾān in an epoch of
particular stylistic sensibility, a judgment that would be afffĳirmed by mod-
ern scholars such as James Montgomery3 who has demonstrated the mas-
sive ideological impact of ancient Arabic poetry as the manifestation of
cultural and even political autonomy.
Yet, not only by virtue of Muḥammad’s addressing a linguistically
demanding audience should the Qurʾān be acknowledged as closely
related to balāgha, but equally by virtue of its form. The Qurʾān is uniquely
speech-centered. Unframed by any narrative scenario the entire Qurʾān
is direct address. This address, moreover, often entails a meta-discourse,
being speech about speech, be it a comment on the Qurʾānic message itself
or on earlier traditions. This text-referentiality again is hardly surprising
in the historical epoch foregrounded by al-Jāḥiẓ. In the later biblical texts
‘Sages’, indeed scriptural interpreters in general, had taken over part of
the ancient prophet’s role. For, to quote James Kugel, “if the word of the
Lord was no longer reliably spoken by chosen messengers sent directly to
Israel, it was because that word had already been set down in writing, in
the great library of divine wisdom that Scripture had become.”4 Similar to
the Biblical Sages, the Qurʾānic speaker continuously refers to the earlier
scriptures, while adapting them to the epistemic horizons of his audience.
And yet, the overall shape of the Qurʾānic expression is presented as spon-
taneous prophetic speech, which in the Arabian Peninsula—contrary
to Israel—seems to have survived well into Late Antiquity. Muḥammad
therefore should be regarded as both a prophet, in the antique style and
as an interpreter of tradition, an exegete in the vein of the later Sages.

It is not an exaggeration, then, to classify the Qurʾān—in addition to
its being prophecy—as ‘exegesis’. Viewed in terms of its contents, the
Qurʾān, on a broad level, interprets and rephrases well-known biblical and
post-biblical traditions, while viewed in terms of its form, it largely prof-
fers an apologetic-polemical debate.5 The Qurʾānic age roughly coincides
2
Paraphrase of a section from al-Jāḥiẓ, K. Khalq al-Qurʾān, quoted after Pellat (1967: 80).
3
Montgomery (2006).
4
Kugel (1989: 17).
5
McAulifffe (1999: 163–188).
the qurʾān as a late antique text 497
with the epoch, when the great exegetical corpora of monotheist tradition
were edited and published, such as the two Talmudim in Judaism and
the patristic writings in Christianity. Daniel Boyarin has stressed that the
Talmud is no less than the writings of the Church fathers imbued with
Hellenic rhetoric. The Qurʾān is communicated to an audience whose
education, we assume, already comprises Arabian and post-biblical lore,
whose nascent scripture therefore should provide rhetorically persuasive
answers to the questions raised in biblical exegesis, answers, clad in a
language matching the standards of ancient Arabic poetry.
Al-Jāḥiẓ makes another important point. Balāgha in his perspective is
not theory, but a linguistic practice enacted publicly in oral speech. He is
aware that the Qurʾān as an oral communication involved listeners, whose
expectations, linguistic and ideological, operated as the parameter of the
persuasiveness of the Prophet’s speech. The awareness of this dramatic
character of the Qurʾān’s fĳirst communication is almost totally absent
from both Islamic and Western Qurʾānic scholarship; consequently, the
literary genre of the Qurʾān is often wrongly identifĳied. The majority of
scholars view the Qurʾān not as the transcript of an orally performed,
open-ended drama, but rather as written, pre-meditated corpus of pro-
phetical sayings—in my view, a teleological misconception. This thesis
demands a brief review of certain scholarly approaches that have been
pursued until today.
Brief Review of Earlier Scholarship
Traditional Muslim scholarship clearly distinguishes between the written

and the oral text, even providing technical terms for both, muṣḥaf, mean-
ing the codex, and qurʾān denoting the oral performance. The vast library
of masoretic scholarship on the Qurʾān comprises a sizable corpus of writ-
ings on aspects of oral performance including euphony and the position of
pauses when reciting among others. To this very day, the Qurʾān is taught
as an orally performed text whose phonetic realization is cherished as
an aesthetically sophisticated art. The oral transmission of the Qurʾān is
equally highly esteemed, even considered superior to the written, thus
the printed Cairo edition most frequently used today is based not on
manuscripts, but on oral tradition. Still, there is little concern with oral
composition,6 let alone curiosity about the epistemic implications of oral-
ity. That is, reciting through perceived as an act of mimesis of the Prophet’s
6
Kellermann (1995: 1–33).
receiving the word of God, does not aim at the recollection of the par-
ticular scenario in history, that the recited text is about, for instance the
prophet’s debate with individual opponents, as a step in the progress of
the message. Recitation is rather taken as the mimesis of a moment in the
prophetical illud tempus. This metahistorical perception of the Qurʾān is
of course related to the decisive progress in canonization, which occurred,
when with the death of the prophet the living voice of communication was
silenced and the text came to fĳill the void. Canonization, Aziz Al-Azmeh
tells us, involves a revolutionary reader’s approach to the text, turning it
from a historical document into a timeless symbol. To quote his classical
description: “The historical nature of the canonical text as a genealogical
charter of rectitude demands a status beyond history, fĳiguring as a vantage
point from which chronometric time becomes neutralized.”7 The text’s
fĳinal shape thus appears as if teleologically necessitated—a perception
incompatible with the notion of a dialectical unfolding of the message.
An awareness of Scripture as a meta-historical charter of truth, mutatis
mutandis had been prevalent in pre-modern Christian and Jewish Biblical
studies as well. Western scholarly preoccupation with the Bible had how-
ever crystallized into a highly sophisticated theology whose theoretical
potential increased thanks to the dramatic revisions it underwent during
the Reformation and the Enlightenment. The Bible thus was familiar in
virtually all its facets of meaning, when the epistemic revolution occurred
that modern scholars refer to as the “major break in Biblical studies,” the
introduction of historical critical scholarship in the 18th and 19th centu-
ries, when, to quote Robert Wilken, “Biblical scholarship acquired a life
of its own as a historical enterprise independent of the church and of the
synagogue.”8
What may be viewed as a critical turn in Biblical studies in Western
Qurʾānic scholarship was not an innovation nor a renewal, but the very
beginning. The Qurʾān had been virtually unknown to Western scholars
when it was submitted to the newly developed approach of historical-

critical research. It is true that in Muslim scholarship at approximately
the same time, critical attempts to explore new theological and anthro-
pological dimensions of the Qurʾān were underway: in the second half
of the 19th century Muslim reform thinkers put forward new approaches
that shared important ideas with Western Biblical scholarship. Those
approaches were, however, sidelined and have remained detached from
7
Azmeh (2007: 107).
8
Wilken (1998: 197–212).
Western developments. Western Qurʾānic studies thus started with a

striking non-synchronicity, with both biblical studies—which it only
superfĳicially resembled—and Muslim Qurʾānic studies, which were from
the outset excluded from its scope.
From the point of view of Western cultural critique however, the
beginnings of critical Qurʾānic scholarship deserve recognition as a sig-
nifĳicant achievement, given that well into the 19th century the Qurʾān
had been regarded polemically as the writing of a false prophet, despite
empathic views held about his person by some Enlightenment and later
Romantic thinkers. Abraham Geiger,9 who in 1833 published his famous
“Was hat Mohammed aus dem Judenthume aufgenommen?,”10 offfered a
pivotal revalorization of the Qurʾān, intimately linked to a new evaluation
of Muḥammad as a sincere seeker of truth. Geiger was one of the founders
of the Wissenschaft des Judentums, a movement that strove to historicize
the Hebrew Bible following Christian philological models, but also to con-
textualize Judaism within the three religious traditions. However complex
his motives, by applying the historical critical approach to the Qurʾān he
submitted the text to the most recent scholarly methods of his time. The
result, though, proved to be highly ambivalent. Historical critical scholar-
ship is a quest for the urtext or urtexts of Scripture—a quest that for the
Bible had resulted in the unearthing of a large number of ancient Near
Eastern traditions. These texts were apt to throw light on the historical
setting of the Bible, but rarely could seriously compete with their far more
sophisticated counterparts, shaped by the Biblical authors. In the Qurʾānic
case however, the opposite is true: what was discovered was not an “infe-
rior text,” but the most prestigious ancient text imaginable: the Hebrew
Bible itself. To Geiger the Qurʾān presented itself as a florilegium of innu-
merable biblical and rabbinic traditions that the Qurʾān’s author had
borrowed from Judaism in order to compose a work of guidance for this
community. Since deviation from such an authoritative urtext equaled a
distortion, the Qurʾān emerged as an unsuccessful attempt to rival the

Bible and remains stigmatized as an epigonic text until the present day.
Yet the scholarship of the Wissenschaft des Judentums certainly marks
the climax of Western Qurʾānic studies. After its violent disruption with
the expulsion of Jewish scholars from the German universities during the
Nazi terror in the 1930s Qurʾānic studies took a new and less ambitious
course, following a trend in the vein of the Leben-Jesu-Forschung, focusing
9
Geiger’s work is discussed in Hartwig et al., (ed) (2008).
10
Geiger (1833).
the person of the prophet and his psychological development.11 The

Qurʾānic text as such disappeared from the fore.
The scholar who fĳinally brought the text back to learned attention is
John Wansbrough. Rigorously rejecting the traditional historical setting
of the Qurʾān, Wansbrough in his ‘Qurʾānic Studies’ of 197712 imagined the
text to be the self-expression not of the emerging community at Mecca
and Medina, but of an already extant community, a text put to writing in
order to provide that community with as scripture enshrining its Arabian
myth of origin. Wansbrough thus declared the Qurʾān an “open text,” no
longer possible to locate in time and place, and thus virtually inacces-
sible to historical investigation. No surprise that his work brought about
a schism in the scholarly community, pitching traditionalists against skep-
tics, a grotesque situation that still prevails.
To retrieve the Qurʾānic text once more we have to go back to al-Jāḥiẓ’s
claim that the Qurʾān began as an oral communication that originated
during the age of rhetoric in Late Antiquity.
“Discourses of the Qurʾān”
Viewed as a document born of an oral communication process, the Qurʾān

efffected a double achievement: it caused the emergence of a canon and
the emergence of a community. The Qurʾān not only contributed to shape
a new community, but, at the same time, documented that process. The
Qurʾān’s audience by developing ever more sophisticated cultic rituals,
and by reaching a consensus on theological positions and exegetical
stances gradually assumes a collective identity, a process that—we con-
tend can be roughly reconstructed. Relying on Theodor Nöldeke’s still
indispensable chronology,13 one can trace a sequence of topics or even
discourses, theological, ethical and liturgical, which should have preoc-
cupied the community during the ministry of Muḥammad. Since these
observations remain hypothetical as long as they do not crystallize into

a plausible, irreversible, chain of developments, I will try, in the remarks
that follow, to broadly outline how I imagine such a development.
In view of the fact that oral communications seldom proceed linearly
but tend to describe a zigzag movement of trial and error, we may assume
11
Fück (1936: 509–525).
12
Wansbrough (1977).
13
Nöldeke (1860).
various turns and breaks to have occurred in the process of the emergence
of the text. The community whom we consider as the passive co-authors
of the text, should have been urged to re-think positions, to expound or
even revise earlier views. The text seems to reflect this movement in a
sequence of discourses that develop out of each other but that are at the
same time exposed to constant reconstruction and revision.
Let me label the fĳirst of these Qurʾānic discourses the “liturgical.” The
earliest communications on closer look reveal themselves as in dialogue
with the Psalms.14 Not only in terms of poetical form, but equally in
their imagery and the devotional attitude of their speaker, they clearly
reflect the language of the Psalms familiar from Jewish and Christian
liturgy. Yet the early Qurʾānic communications difffer from traditional
liturgical speech: They are informed by a meta-discourse, the discourse
of knowledge.
Let us consider the introduction of one of the earliest sūras:
iqraʾ bi-smi rabbika l-ladhī khalaq, Recite in the name of thy lord who
created
khalaqa l-insāna min ʿalaq created man from clotted blood
iqraʾ wa-rabbuka l-akram recite, for thy lord is the most
generous
al-ladhī ʿallama bi-l-qalam who taught by the pen
ʿallama l-insāna mā lam yaʿlam taught man what he did not know
These verses are hymnic in a psalmic vein, where creation fĳigures as God’s
most celebrated deed. Yet what comprises God’s generosity is not as in
the Psalms, primarily the maintenance of his creation but his furnishing
creatures with the gift of understanding. It is divine knowledge, conferred
by the transcendent act of writing, qalam, which God generously, akram,
shares with them. The bestowal of Scriptural knowledge is not part of the
psalmic inventory of divine grace, it fĳits however with the image of the
divine drawn in a Biblical apocryph15 and the Syriac treatises of Ephrem
of Nisibis.16 Jewish-Christian models of liturgy have thus become tools of

rhetoric to promote an argument, in this instance the discourse of divinely
communicated knowledge, which, in turn, is the premise for mankind’s
ultimate rendering account of the end of time.
14
Neuwirth (2008. 157–190).
15
Najman (1999: 379–410).
16
See Becker (2008).
Eschatology
I will touch on the second discourse—“the end of time,” “eschatology”—

only in passing. The friction aroused by this new focus which rigorously
called the, until then, cherished social values into question, can hardly
be overestimated. Whereas hymnic texts in praise of the Lord can easily
be accommodated even in a heterogeneous pagan and monotheist cultic
community, the idea of the Last Judgment that unsettles the confĳidence
in virtually all the existing social and ideological structures cannot. It is
therefore reasonable to assume that the so-called “break with the pagan
Meccans,” studied exhaustively by Uri Rubin,17 the revocation of the origi-
nal cult communion that is signaled by the believers’ choosing new times
of prayer, is connected with the emergence of the second discourse, the
controversial and even polarizing idea of the Last Judgment.
From Mecca to Jerusalem—Electedness
It is only logical that the community, having attained independence in

cultic matters and now following the monotheists’ hours of prayer, should
have looked upon the structure of those services as models. In Middle
Meccan times the Qurʾānic sūra displays the structure of a monotheist
service with the recital of a Biblical narrative at its core framed by a poly-
phonal or even antiphonal beginning and end. A verbal service after Jew-
ish Christian models had obviously come to counterbalance the until then
predominant ritual. At the same time, the Fātiḥa, obviously a communal
prayer, is introduced to give voice to the community itself.18 The Fātiḥa is
clearly evoked as a prayer already in use in one of the central texts of the
Qurʾān, Sūrat al-Ḥijr (15: 87), a Middle Meccan sūra, that entails the pri-
mordial election of the Qurʾānic community:19 This enormous increase in
prestige is conveyed through a narrative (15: 26–43), capsulized by the fol-
lowing: Satan/Iblīs,20 commanded by God to bow down before the newly

created Adam, refuses. He is condemned, but granted a respite to fulfĳill an
essential task: to test mankind by means of seduction. There is one group,
however, that he will have no access to: “God’s faithful servants,” ʿibāduka
l-mukhlaṣūn, who in the same text are identifĳied as the Qurʾānic community,
17
Rubin (1987: 40–67).
18
See Neuwirth, A. / Neuwirth, K. (1991: 331–337).
19
Neuwirth (2000: 143–172).
20
Idem (2001: 113–152).
the historical listeners to the Qurʾānic recitation. This community in pre-

existence is received among God’s elect, not unequal to the Israelites,
whose leader Moses is the prototype of their leader, Muḥammad. No sur-
prise that the community marks its new adherence to the Biblical tradi-
tion by adopting the direction of prayer cherished by the older religions,
toward Jerusalem,21 to express their preference for the Biblical tradition
over the local Meccan.
For the audience of the Qurʾān to become a Scriptural community,
however, more than a divine assignment was required. Core texts of the
older traditions have to be re-read and adapted to the newly developing
world view as well as to the Arabic linguistic standards. The re-reading of
Ps 136 in sūrat al-Raḥmān22 most strikingly reflects this ambitious enter-
prise, being an artistic tour de force that draws on virtually all the registers
of the Arabic language: phonology, morphology, and even syntax.
Let us briefly look at the two texts. A number of common structural
characteristics, primarily the unique phenomenon of antiphonal speech,
the employment of a refrain, suggest that Q 55 is not just a text replete
with references to the equally antiphonal Ps 136, but a critical “re-reading,”
a counter-text that is intended as such. Already the two refrains expose
the essential diffference between both texts. The psalm has the hymnic kī
le-ʿōlām ḥasdō, “for his kindness endures forever,” a conviction deduced
from historical experience, whereas the Qurʾānic refrain is an address to
men and demons universally, fa-bi-ayyi ālāʾi rabbikumā tukadhdhibān,
“so which of your Lord’s bounties/signs do you both deny?” i.e., a call for
the entire creation to attest that there are divine self-manifestations in
signs that should be heeded. Remembering historical experience, pivotal
in Jewish tradition, is confronted with the Qurʾānic call for understanding
the divine signs.
Sūrat al-Raḥmān begins:
Al-Raḥmān The merciful
ʿallama l-qurʾān He taught the Qurʾān

khalaqa l-insān He created man
ʿallamahu l-bayān. He taught him clear speech—or: understanding
What is inherent in the world since the act of creation is the divine mes-
sage and the distinctness of human articulation or understanding (bayān).
God created the world as a manifestation of his presence, as a text of
21
Idem (1993: 227–270) and idem (1996: 93–116, 483–95).
22
Idem (2008: 157–190).
no lesser standing than his verbal revelation, and endowed man with the
understanding of both his verbal and his creational self-expression. The
text of Q 55 with its insistence on symmetry and dual structures sets out
to rhetorically orchestrate this double theological claim to a sign system
in creation and in Scripture.
Both texts remain closely parallel in their initial parts extolling the acts
of divine creation. It is only at the point where the Psalm turns to expound
God’s past interventions for His people’s sake; that the sūra diverges. In
the Qurʾānic world view it is not history, but creation and its entelechy in
the beyond that is proof of God’s presence. Sūrat al-Raḥman which had
begun with the contention that creation and language are part of the same
primordial divine project, ends with a dual and extremely ornate linguis-
tic representation of the consummate character of creation in paradise. In
the Qurʾān, an eschatological future celebrated in language has taken the
place of a historical past.
We now will move beyond a number of Meccan discourses and turn to
Medina, singling out one important discourse.
Medina: Inheriting Biblical traditions from their Jewish

and Christian claimants
Whereas at Mecca Biblical traditions had been current as part of com-

mon knowledge, at Medina the real heirs of Biblical tradition, learned
Jews and Christians, appeared to reclaim their monopoly on the exegesis
of biblical tradition. Debates over particular issues have left their traces
in the Qurʾān. To choose a short exemplar, I will briefly discuss Q 112,
Sūrat al-Ikhlāṣ, “the pure belief.” It reads:
Qul huwa llāhu aḥad Say: He is God, one
Allāhu l-ṣamad God the absolute
lam yalid wa-lam yūlad He did not beget, nor is He begotten
wa-lam yakun lahu kufuwan aḥad and there is none like Him.
It is difffĳicult to miss the fact that v. 1 “Say: He is God, One,” qul, huwa llāhu
aḥad, echoes the Jewish credo “Hear Israel, the Lord, our God, is One,”
Shemaʿ Yisrā’ēl, adōnāy elōhēnū adōnāy eḥād. It is striking that the Jewish
text remains audible in the Qurʾānic version, which—against grammatical
norms—adopts the Hebrew-sounding noun aḥad instead of the more per-
tinent adjective wāḥid, for the rhyme. This ‘ungrammaticality’ cannot go
unnoticed. I am referring to the notion analyzed by Rifffaterre, regarding
the awkwardness of a textual moment that semiotically points to another
text, which provides a key to its decoding. This other text in our case is
the Jewish credo.23
This striking translingual quotation is part of the Qurʾānic negotiation
strategy that appropriates the Jewish credo. Although the Qur’anic tran-
script is altered, being universalized having not exclusively Israel, but any
believer in general addressed, it continues, through the sustained sound
presence of the Jewish credo, to partake in the older text’s authority—an
important political stratagem: The new version sounds like a challenge
addressed to Jewish listeners in particular, who during the fĳirst Medinan
years needed to be won over to the new movement. In this short sura,
however, still another credo is involved: the Nicene creed:
Nicaeno-Constantinopolitanum Deuteronomium 6,4 Qurʾān, Sura 112

(al-Ikhlāṣ)
We believe in Πιστεύομεν εἰς ἕνα Hear, Israel, :‫ יִ ְשׂ ָר ֵאל‬,‫ ְשׁ ַמע‬Say: He is     
one God, Θεὸν the Lord is ,‫ֹלהינוּ‬ֵ ‫ יְ הוָ ה ֱא‬God, one,  
 
our God, the ‫יְ הוָ ה ֶא ָחד‬  
Lord is One.
   
the Father Πατέρα God the    
Almighty, Maker παντοκράτορα, absolute,
of heaven and ποιητὴν οὐρανοῦ
earth, and of all καὶ γῆς, ὁρατῶν τε
things visible and πάντων και ἀοράτων.
invisible
      
And in one Lord Και εἰς ἕνα κύριον He did   
Jesus Christ, the Ἰησοῦν Χριστόν, τὸν not beget,  
only-begotten υἱὸν τοῦ θεοῦ τὸν nor is He 
Son of God, μονογενῆ, τὸν ἐκ τοῦ begotten
begotten of the πατρὸς γεννηθέντα
Father before all πρὸ πάντων τῶν
worlds (æons), αἰώνων, φῶς ἐκ
Light of Light, φωτός, θεὸν ἀληθινὸν

very God of very ἐκ θεοῦ ἀληθινοῦ,
God, begotten, γεννηθέντα οὐ
not made, ποιηθέντα,
   
  
being of one ὁμοούσιον τῷ πατρί· And there    

substance with is none     
the Father; like Him   
23
Rifffaterre (1978: 92).
V. 3 “He did not beget nor is he begotten”, lam yalid wa-lam yūlad, is a
reverse echo of the Nicene Creed; it rejects the emphatic afffĳirmation of
Christ’s sonship “begotten, not made”—genethenta, ou poiethenta by using
a no less emphatic double negation. This negative theology is summed up
in v. 4 “And there is none like Him”, wa-lam yakun lahu kufuwan aḥad.
That verse not only inverts the Nicene formula of Christ’s being of one
substance with God—homoousios to patri—but forbids one to think of
any being, equal in substance to God, let alone a son. Although these
verses negate the essential statement of the Nicene Creed, they ‘translate’
the Greek/or Syriac intertext, adopting its rhetorical strategy of intensifĳica-
tion. Theology is modifĳied—rhetoric is maintained.
A Gaze Beyond the Qurʾān: From Polyphony to Dichotomy
What has been presented is not recorded in Islamic tradition. The sīra
takes little interest in the debates with the older communities, and is even
less willing to acknowledge them as foundations of text generation. Few
traditional readers, if any, would read Sūrat al-Ikhlāṣ or Sūrat al-Raḥmān
in light of their pre-Islamic intertexts. Why not?
The period of the Qurʾān’s emergence which al-Jāḥiẓ had labeled ʿaṣr
al-balāgha and which we have translated as Late Antiquity, in the Islamic
context is usually referred to as al-jāhiliyya, “the age of ignorance.” Much
ink had already been spilled on the meaning of jāhiliyya when Franz
Rosenthal24 in 1970 profffered the hypothesis that the term jāhiliyya might
be explained as a Qurʾānic pun. The word jāhiliyya occurs four times in
the Medinan sūras, always denoting a negatively judged collective or a
negative moral stance. It is usually translated as the “age of paganism,”
though in the Qurʾānic context this is an impossible meaning, since the
new age of Islam at that time had not yet been conceived of, let alone
begun. Yet the word, to quote Rosenthal, “appears to have been used by
Muḥammad with peculiar forcefulness. This would suggest that some

more specifĳic and meaningful connotation was concealed behind the
term.” Rosenthal looks for a solution outside the Qurʾān. “Such special
signifĳicance might have accrued to the term through its connection with
the famous Jewish concept of galut, exile, diaspora. . . . Exile stands for the
very qualities of savagery, immorality and ignorance of the true God that
Muḥammad fĳinds objectionable in the jāhiliyya.” The relationship indeed
24
Rosenthal (1970: 32–34).
is striking. Both terms—jāhiliyya and galut—viewed from this retrospec-

tive, have induced an excessively dichotomic understanding of the world,
a wholesale reduction of entire epochs of real history to a travesty of ideal-
ized heilsgeschichte.
It is true that the newly coined term al-jāhiliyya has not yet been
exploited in the Qurʾān for its ideological potential; rather, the Qurʾānic
jāhiliyya points primarily to manners and customs of the ancient Arabs
who had been morally ostracized. Yet, the verdict enshrined in the
concept of jāhiliyya has strongly contributed to successfully eradicate
a comprehensive memory of this great epoch in Arab history. Nobody
has foregrounded this concern more urgently than the Lebanese histo-
rian Samir Kassir25 who claims that in current Near Eastern perceptions
of history, a self-exclusion from pre-Islamic culture is at work: The myth
of origin that identifĳies the beginning of the signifĳicant history with the
ministry of the Prophet, reduces the previous history to an era of almost
exclusively nomadic culture. Kassir claims: “One can hardly overestimate
the turn in worldview that would occur once the Golden Age that pre-
ceded the Golden Age is recognized.” Kassir’s demand for an intellectual
self-liberation from teleological constraints, however, addresses only half
of the revision required. The Near Eastern self-exclusion from European
history is matched by the equally determined Western exclusion of the
Qurʾān from its history, epitomized in the highly political notion that the
Qurʾān is a text fundamentally alien to European culture, while other writ-
ings from the same geographical area and standing in the same line of
tradition—most prominently Biblical and post-Biblical literature—are
assimilated as founding documents of European identity.
Returning to al-Jāḥiẓ’s observation and locating the Qurʾān in the ʿaṣr
al-balāgha, in Late Antiquity, we may hope for a fĳinal resolution to the
disturbing a-synchronicity inherent in Western Qurʾānic studies and at
the same time join the plea voiced by Near Eastern intellectuals to rethink
the borderlines of Near Eastern and European cultures.
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THE QURʾĀN AS A LATE ANTIQUE TEXT

scriptures. He evaluates the sequence of the three great messengers in the

prophetical sign. Muḥammad, therefore, presented a linguistic miracle. He

as an interpreter of tradition, an exegete in the vein of the later Sages.

Brief Review of Earlier Scholarship

Traditional Muslim scholarship clearly distinguishes between the written

when it was submitted to the newly developed approach of historical-

Western developments. Western Qurʾānic studies thus started with a

distortion, the Qurʾān emerged as an unsuccessful attempt to rival the

the person of the prophet and his psychological development.11 The

“Discourses of the Qurʾān”

Viewed as a document born of an oral communication process, the Qurʾān

observations remain hypothetical as long as they do not crystallize into

of Nisibis.16 Jewish-Christian models of liturgy have thus become tools of

I will touch on the second discourse—“the end of time,” “eschatology”—

From Mecca to Jerusalem—Electedness

It is only logical that the community, having attained independence in

lowing: Satan/Iblīs,20 commanded by God to bow down before the newly

the historical listeners to the Qurʾānic recitation. This community in pre-

ʿallama l-qurʾān He taught the Qurʾān

Medina: Inheriting Biblical traditions from their Jewish

Whereas at Mecca Biblical traditions had been current as part of com-

Nicaeno-Constantinopolitanum Deuteronomium 6,4 Qurʾān, Sura 112

Light of Light, φωτός, θεὸν ἀληθινὸν

A Gaze Beyond the Qurʾān: From Polyphony to Dichotomy

Muḥammad with peculiar forcefulness. This would suggest that some

is striking. Both terms—jāhiliyya and galut—viewed from this retrospec-

the borderlines of Near Eastern and European cultures.

Angelika Neuwirth et al. Beirut/Würzburg: Ergon-Verlag, 113–152.

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