Some scholars attempt to relocate, so-to-speak, the Qur᾿ān from its traditional Hijazi environment to north, based on the assumption that the tradition has projected the origins of Islam into the Hijaz while constructing a salvation history. This view has not found favor in the academic community and most scholars (including Tomasso Tsei) prefer to identify the Hijaz as the cradle of the Qur᾿ān’s community.
Noldeke, Watt, and even very old scholars would agree that the origins of the Quran are within the Hejaz:
There’s an argument that because the Qur’anic is familiar with Christian tradition, it can’t be from the Hijaz because it there’s little to no Christianity in the Hijaz. This argument obviously won’t convince Muslims, rather they could use it to argue that the Qur’an is from a divine source because of this. Forgetting all this, Nicolai Sinai responds:
In particular, as Guillaume Dye and Tommaso Tesei have pointed out, the Qur’an’s extensive adaptation of Christian traditions and narratives sits somewhat uneasily with the lack of evidence for organised Christian communities in the immediate milieu in which the Qur’an’s genesis is supposed to have unfolded (Dye 2019, 772–776; Tesei 2021, 188–189). However, seeing that in the early seventh century the Ḥijāz had effectively become encircled by Christian centres in Najrān, in Ethiopia, in the northern borderlands of the Arabian Peninsula, and on the Gulf coast (e.g., Munt 2015, 252–253), I am not sufficiently unsettled by the dissonance just noted in order to be tempted to jettison the conventional paradigm of the Qur’an’s gestation—for instance, by decoupling extensive sections of the Qur’anic corpus from the career of Muhammad and his Ḥijāzī context (thus Dye 2019, 784, and Tesei 2021, 189). The fact that some fundamental religious terms in Qur’anic Arabic have their most immediate ancestors in Classical Ethiopic—including→al-injīl (meaning the Gospel or the Christian Bible),→al-ḥawāriyyūn (denoting the apostles of Christ; see under → rasūl), fāṭir (“creator”; → khalaqa), and probably also → al-shayṭān (“the devil”) and → jahannam (“hell”)—certainly coheres very well with the supposition that the manifold Christian traditions found in the Qur’an passed through western Arabia.
- To previous arguments in favour of a Ḥijāzī origin of the Qur’an, one may now add van Putten’s detailed contention that the Qur’an’s canonical rasm tends to display morphological and phonological features that are associated with Ḥijāzī Arabic, such as the loss of the glottal stop or hamzah (van Putten 2022, 99–149). It must be conceded that our understanding of the idiosyncrasies of Ḥijāzī Arabic is often dependent on information supplied by Muslim scholars, who may at least on occasion have derived their understanding of Ḥijāzī Arabic from the Qur’anic text, even if one would also expect statements about dialectal features to have been to some degree controlled by common linguistic knowledge. But the possibility of circular inference does not apply to the elision of glottal stops, since in the post-Qur’anic Islamic tradition the Qur’an was usually recited with hamzahs (van Putten 2022, 150–181).
- Wansbrough (he’s not taken seriously by any scholar today) tried to argue that the Qur’an was composed in Iraq. Obviously, numerous responses emerged. There is not an obvious reason for why Mecca/Medina would have been developed and back projected as the region of starting points had Islam and the Quran began somewhere else. That, yet it would be challenging to make sense of on this situation how all disagreeing or contradicting customs would have been smothered suddenly. For William Graham, for instance, there is no convincing reason to argue that the Qur’an emerged in Iraq merely because its linguistic style is referential and repetitive; this could also have happened in seventh-century Mecca and Medina. There is no question that Iraq was a center of intersection and contestation between rabbinic Jews and Christians in the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries. Nevertheless, it is difficult to understand why Muslim authors would forge a massive literature placing the collection and codification of the Qur’an in the Hijaz. This returns us to the accusation that revisionism is conspiratorial by nature: “Indeed, one needs practically a conspiratorial theory of history to argue that the massive 3rd/9th-century written sources are not substantially compendia of earlier written as well as oral tradition that grew out of an identifiable (if internally diverse) religious community with recognized sources of religious authority, including a fixed scripture” (Graham, “Book Review,” 140).
- While Wansbrough’s study arrived at a late fixation of the Qur’anic text, John Burton proposed the opposite view: The Qur’an was codified during Muhammad’s lifetime, and not in the times of Abu Bakr or ‘Uthman, as presented in the Islamic tradition. In his The Collection of the Qur’an, Burton analyzes the Muslim sources extensively, including Suyuti’s al-ItqƗn, Ibn Abi Dawud’s KitƗb al-ma܈Ɨۊif, and Zarkashi’s alBurhƗn, and comes to the conclusion that the present Qur’an can be traced back to the codex of Muhammad, rather than that of ‘Uthman. He concludes his book by saying, “What we have today in our hands is the muۊ܈af of Muhammad” (John Burton, The Collection of the Qur’an (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 239-240). How and why does Burton come to this conclusion? Burton begins by pointing out that, as we have seen, Muslim authors such as Suyuti and Ibn Abi Dawud recorded Companions’ complaints about missing verses. But it is inconceivable that Muslims themselves would claim that their Holy Scripture is incomplete. For Burton, the collection of the Qur’an after the death of Muhammad is a hypothetical construct to support a juridical argument, namely, that the Qur’an is the primary source of law, followed by the sunnah. The problem this would have been intended to address surfaces when it is discovered that certain Qur’anic legal injunctions do not align with what was already universally accepted, as with the punishment for adultery. In the Qur’an (Q 24:2), the prescribed punishment is 100 lashes; meanwhile, jurists had already accepted stoning, a penalty also attributed to the prophetic tradition.
- In other words, stoning is not only confirmed by pre-Qur’anic scriptures, but was also practiced during Muhammad’s lifetime. Therefore, the jurists developed a theory of abrogation (naskh), ruling that the punishment of stoning must be applied even though it is not found in the Qur’an. That is to say, they claimed that Qur’anic text regarding the stoning of adulterers was suppressed, but the ruling remains applicable (naskh al-tilƗwah dnjna-lۊukm). The juristic formulae that were developed are as follows: naskh alۊukm wa-l-tilƗwah (the suppression of both wording and ruling), naskh alۊukm dnjna-l-tilƗwah (the suppression of the ruling but not of the wording), and naskh al-tilƗwah dnjna-l-ۊukm (the suppression of the wording but not of the ruling). In a nutshell, Burton claims, the theory of the sources of law (u܈njl al-fiqh) shaped the supposedly factual reports about the collection of the Qur’an.
- Dost points out that there is local Arabian beliefs and traditions in the structuring of the content of the Quran: https://www.academia.edu/36831359/_An_Arabian_Qurān_Dissertation_Defense_Draft_2016_
All toponyms mentioned in the Qur’an are Hijazi, and the Constitution of Medina is also Hijazi origins:
I do consider it to comprise material at least originally circulating in the early seventh century ce Ḥijāz, albeit this material may have been collected and codified in other regions and at other times. (For other arguments in this direction, see Donner 1998: 35–63; Rubin 2009; Sinai 2017: 59–65.) It has often been noted that the Qur’an ‘has little concern with the proper names of its own place and time’ (Reynolds 2010: 198; see also Robin 2015a: 27–8), which, I think, makes it all the more significant that it does mention a handful of Ḥijāzī toponyms, including Badr (Q. 3:123), Ḥunayn (Q. 9:25), Yathrib (Q. 33:13), and Mecca (Q. 48:24)—this last notably in close conjunction with al-masjid al-ḥarām, ‘the sacred place of worship’, which appears in the following verse— as well as the tribe of Quraysh (Q. 106:1). Furthermore, the so-called ‘Constitution of Medina’, which is widely accepted as a genuinely early (i.e. start of the first-/seventhcentury) document preserved in two third-/ninth-century Arabic works, does place a ‘Prophet’ (nabī) and a ‘Messenger of God’ (rasūl Allāh) called Muḥammad in a place called Yathrib (Lecker 2004). It is for these reasons that in what follows I will generally assume the original geographical context of much of the material in the Qur’an to be the early seventh-century ce Ḥijāz, although by no means necessarily the Mecca and Medina as described in Arabic sources of the second/eighth century and later.
Prof. van Putten also shows that the Qur’an was written in a Hijazi dialect of Arabic: https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/mill-2023-0007/html
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