According to the prevailing consensus, the Quran originated in the ¯ first third of the seventh century CE in the towns of Mecca and Medina. Its author (in Muslim eyes, its transmitter) was Muh. ammad who ‘published’ his revelations in segments which he later rearranged and edited, in large measure himself. Yet he did not…

Article This article aims to contextualize a short Qurʾānic passage – Q 30:2‒5 – with reference to Jewish and Christian materials that have not hitherto been deployed for this purpose. The article builds on the findings of recent scholarship, which reads this passage eschatologically rather than historically, and argues that there are, in fact, two…

Article Qur’anic Oaths as Incipits of Prophetic Speech Chart:

Article More specifically, Sinai observes that the isolated letters and the statement “This is the Scripture” that open Sūrat al-Baqara are typical not of Medinan material but of suras that pre-date the hijra (See Nöldeke, History, 173, and Nicolai Sinai, The Qur’an: A Historical-Critical Introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 100). While the marked similarities…

Article The idea of surahs forming pairs, triplets, or quadruplets is itself not entirely new. For example, the Pakistani Qurʾan scholar Amīn Aḥsan Iṣlāḥī (1903–1997) expounded the notion of surah pairs and groups which he regarded as a central task of exegetical activity (see Mir, Coherence in the Qurʾan, esp 75–98). Others have proposed surah…

The segmentary character of Qur’anic discourse was first highlighted in 1896 by David Heinrich Müller.3 Unfortunately, Müller spoke of the Qur’an’s ‘strophic composition’, and his theory was then lambasted on the grounds that Qur’anic paragraphs almost never maintain a fixed number of constituent verses for a significant stretch of text.4 Nonetheless, Müller’s basic insight that…

The Qur’an (from Arabic qurʾān, ‘reading’ or ‘recitation’) is a relatively compact scripture: with c. 77,400 Arabic words, its length equals approximately 56 per cent of the Greek New Testament (138,020 words in total). It is composed in a language close to the idiom of early Arabic poetry, although both the lexicon and certain grammatical…

If any great changes by way of addition, suppression or alteration had been made, controversy would almost certainly have arisen; but of that there is little trace. ‘ Uthmān offended the more religious among Muslims, and ultimately became very unpopular. Yet among the charges laid against him, that o f having mutilated or altered the…

Traditional Chronology: Other Chronology (Muir, Nöldeke, Grimme):

Article To be more exact the Aramaic loanwords in the Quran are of the same type seen in ancient South Arabian languages and Ethiopic so if there is a connection with Syriac texts as Decharneux posits, the transfer must have happened indirectly and through intermediaries