Method: Literary Coherence, Intertextuality (Nicolai Sinai)

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 Qur’anic surahs naturally divide into smaller verse groups is sound. These sections emerge from readily discernible shifts in topic, speaker, and addressee, as well as various formal markers, which frequently coincide with the former. For instance, in surahs with short verses changes in rhyme tend to concur with plausible section breaks, or at least to precede or follow them by one or two verses (Neuwirth, Studien, pp. 104–5). Since the ability to map out the structure of a surah is an indispensable skill for anyone trying to work out what the Qur’an is saying, the exercise deserves to be demonstrated in some detail. By way of a concrete example, let us dissect surah 19, totalling ninety-eight verses. It opens with a chain of narratives, including the birth of John the Baptist to his father Zachariah and the birth of Jesus to Mary; later sections of the surah have a pronounced polemical quality. Many of these caesurae can be easily rationalised. Especially clear are the breaks engendered by the introductory formula that forms the first half of vv. 16, 41, 51, 54, and 56: ‘Remember, [as contained] in the Scripture, Mary/Abraham/Moses …’8 These opening injunctions recall v. 2, which introduces the Zachariah pericope: ‘A remembrance (dhikr) of the grace of yours Lord towards His servant Zachariah’. The internal structure of the Zachariah pericope itself is signalled by two vocatives: ‘O Zachariah’ (v. 7), introducing God’s response to the latter’s prayer for a son, and ‘O John’ (v. 12), which transitions to a summary of the divine graces bestowed on Zachariah’s son. The caesura at v. 58, after the surah’s sequence of prophetic reminiscences, is equally clear, given that the verse begins by reminding the addressees of all the prophetic figures previously treated: ‘These are the prophets blessed by God, from the descendants of Adam …’