Post-Enlightenment Academic Study of the Qur’ān

The modern study of the Qur’ān, meaning thereby “the critical dispassionate (i.e. non-polemical) search for knowledge, unconstrained by ecclesiastical institutional priorities” (Rippin, Qur’an. Style and contents, xi n. 2), insofar as it is a living tradition of learning and the basis of all contemporary research, cannot be assessed in its entirety in a single entry. Rather, the present entry can merely aim at specifying the major trends of research and the overall development of modern scholarship. The selective bibliography below is limited to writings of a general character, collections of papers and literature dealing specifically with the modern study of the Qur’ān and its methodology.

The study of the Qur’ān has never ceased being a primary concern in the realm of Islamic studies during the past two centuries. Given the outstanding importance of the Qur’ān in Islam, it is likely to remain so in the future. The interest of scholars in the Qur’ān, however, has shifted its center of attention from time to time, depending on the prevailing Zeitgeist as well as on the ensuing challenges and results of ongoing research.

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Nineteenth century

The academic study of the Qur’ān in the West around the middle of the nineteenth century was largely stimulated and influenced by two German works, G. Weil's Historisch-kritische Einleitung (18441) and Th. Nöldeke's Geschichte des Qorāns (18601). Both writings, but above all Nöldeke's, set new standards for future research and went beyond the achievements of previous literature. As an illustration of the contemporary state of the art in Europe, suffice to say that, in 1846, Solvet's Introduction à la lecture du Coran merely offered to the French public a new translation of G. Sale's Preliminary discourse (this discourse was part of Sale's influential book The Koran commonly called Alcoran of Mohammed… to which is prefixed a preliminary discourse, which had already been published in London in 1734; see pre-1800 preoccupations of qur’ānic studies). The treatise of Sale offers a general overview of the contents of the Qur’ān, the basic tenets of the Muslim faith (q.v.; see also creeds) and a rough sketch of pre-Islamic Arabia and the developments of early Islam (see pre-islamic arabia and the qur’ān; age of ignorance). In itself, it draws mainly on material contained in E. Pococke's Specimen historiae arabum (1650) but more importantly, and in marked difference to the accounts of Weil and Nöldeke, Sale does not yet treat the text of the Qur’ān in its own right nor does he deal in detail with the formal, linguistic and stylistic elements of the text.

G. Weil in his Historisch-kritische Einleitung, which is only a short treatise that devotes some forty pages to the Qur’ān as such, took up the Muslim division between Meccan and Medinan sūras (see chronology and the qur’ān; mecca; medina) in order to establish a chronological framework of revelation (see revelation and inspiration; occasions of revelation). In doing so, he became the first to attempt ¶ a reassessment of the traditional dating of the sūras and to divide the Meccan material into three further periods, something which was then fully elaborated and improved upon by Nöldeke. Although Weil and Nöldeke considered matters of content while establishing a chronological order of revelation for the Meccan sūras — e.g. similarity of content and terminology in individual sūras was seen as evidence for their mutual correlation and their approximate time of origin — both scholars also stressed the importance of formal and linguistic elements of the qur’ānic text for defining the criteria according to which the three Meccan periods could be distinguished (see e.g. form and structure of the qur’ān; oaths; rhetoric and the qur’ān; exhortations). This four-period dating system, consisting of three Meccan periods and the Medinan period, proved influential for decades to come. It considerably influenced the future conceptual analysis of the Meccan segments of the Qur’ān and even led to the re-arrangement of the Meccan sūras in a number of twentieth-century translations of the Qur’ān in western languages (cf. Blachère, Introduction, 247 f.) and was also initially adopted for the French translation by R. Blachère. The idea of re-arranging the text of the Qur’ān, including the division of single sūras into unities of differing chronological status, ultimately led to the complex undertaking of R. Bell in his translation of the Qur’ān “with a critical re-arrangement of the Surahs” (1937-9; see also below; see translations of the qur’ān).

Of the studies mentioned so far, Nöldeke's Geschichte des Qorāns (gq), since its appearance in a second enlarged edition in the first decades of the twentieth century — considerably augmented by three other scholars — has proven to be the decisive standard text to which all ¶ modern scholars interested in the Qur’ān must refer. It is still a helpful tool today, especially as many of its shortcomings have been detected, discussed and revised. The elaboration of the four-period dating system is presented in the first volume of gq.The second volume, written by Nöldeke's pupil F. Schwally, contains a detailed analysis of the collection of the Qur’ān (q.v.; see also codices of the qur’ān; muṣḥaf). The third volume, by G. Bergsträsser and O. Pretzl, treats the history of the qur’ānic text and is mainly concerned with variant readings and the later-established “readings” (qirā’āt) known from Islamic tradition (see readings of the qur’ān).

In some sense, the third volume of gqcan be considered as the indispensable preliminary to the final task of an edition of the Qur’ān according to the most exacting standards of the philological method, that is, an edition based on ancient manuscripts, the entire available Islamic literature on the subject (see traditional disciplines of qur’ānic study) and, most importantly, accompanied by a critical apparatus that would list all known variant readings and orthographical peculiarities (cf. Bergsträsser, Plan eines Apparatus Criticus). Nothing, however, has come of this and an edition of the Qur’ān that follows the above-mentioned critical methodology remains a desideratum. The final contribution of research in this direction, pre-dating the publication of the third volume of gqby one year, is Jeffery's Materials for the history of the text of the Qur’ān (1937). Since then, individual contributions for the history of the text have been made in a number of articles but no major work has been published which would offer a synthesis of the material. Also, ancient manuscripts of the Qur’ān, going back to the first and second Islamic centuries, and which have become known in the meantime, have not yet been published properly ¶ and still await detailed analysis (cf. Puin, Observations). It is noteworthy, however, that in his multi-volume Arabic-German edition of the Qur’ān (Gütersloh 1990 f.) A.Th. Khoury decided to include many variant readings in the commentary, although he made no effort to be comprehensive (the contributions of Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy, the first European to study al-Dānī, and those of Edmund Beck for the study of the variant readings of the Qur’ān should likewise not be overlooked).

Nöldeke's gqand the work of Schwally, Bergsträsser and Pretzl shaped in any case much of the modern study of the Qur’ān in its later developments, directing it mainly towards the study of the formal, stylistic and linguistic aspects of the text, as well as towards the study of the terminology of the Qur’ān and to its semantic and conceptual analysis. Yet many topics of future research were, as seems natural, not yet raised in the gq. It is also important to note that Nöldeke's pioneering work, notwithstanding its undeniable scientific merits, is littered with less-than-sympathetic remarks about what he (as well as other Orientalists of his formation and generation) thought of the scripture to which he devoted his studies, in particular its aesthetic qualities (see Wild, Die schauerliche… Öde). In this respect, his generation stood too much under the spell of ancient literature which pervaded the minds of nineteenth-century European philologists and which made them incapable of truly appreciating texts stemming from different cultural contexts. The nearest Nöldeke came to esteeming the Arabic literary heritage was in his fondness for pre-Islamic poetry, in which he discovered a likeness between the Bedouin (q.v.) worldview and that of the ancient Germanic tribes (see also poetry and poets; arabs). In many of their judgments on the Qur’ān, however, Nöldeke and his successors come ¶ perilously close to T. Carlyle's famous statement, “it is a toilsome reading as I ever undertook. A wearisome confused jumble, crude, incondite; endless iterations, long-windedness, entanglement (…). Nothing but a sense of duty could carry any European through the Koran” (On heroes, 86 f.). The modern study of the Qur’ān during the last part of the twentieth century has contributed much to changing this attitude, yet the works of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholars were chiefly responsible for the fact that only in the recent past did it become widely acknowledged in the West that the Qur’ān could be esteemed as a piece of highly artful literature, possessing considerable and distinctive aesthetical qualities, as well as beauty of expression.

Another shortcoming of the gq, and perhaps the one that most limits its merits from our viewpoint, is the relatively marginal role accorded to Islamic learning and heritage. This is not to be seen as an entirely negative factor, or only as a drawback, because, for one thing, to begin to treat the Qur’ān as a text in its own right and to attempt to judge and evaluate it on its own premises, independently of what the Islamic scholarly tradition had to offer, was a great step forward in the understanding of the Qur’ān. Furthermore, the Arabic literature available to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholars was very limited and simply insufficient, if compared to today's wealth of accessible material. Yet this method of setting aside or overriding, if necessary, the data of the Islamic tradition in favor of the intrinsic evidence of the qur’ānic text manifests a major methodological flaw. The reason for that is the eclectic, and therefore often arbitrary, use made of the Islamic tradition. On the one hand, the gqauthors often did not follow the Islamic tradition concerning the origin, chronology, order ¶ and semantic value of the textual constituents of the Qur’ān but, on the other hand, in trying to establish an independent framework and in attempting a fresh interpretation of the qur’ānic event, they did take the Islamic tradition into account. Within the context of this latter approach, the tradition was especially consulted on two accounts: for the qur’ānic depictions of the historical circumstances of the revelation (viz. the life of the Prophet and the vicissitudes of his community; see sīra and the qur’ān) and for the details found in classical Islamic works elucidating the emergence of the Qur’ān as a document in a historically definable context. Nöldeke himself had become aware of this problem through his acquaintance with the studies by H. Lammens, whose writings emphasize the non-historicity of the Islamic tradition and, consequently, the futility of making use of it at all. Nöldeke thus felt compelled to defend the value of the Islamic tradition in historical matters and stressed that the Medinan period, at least, was “in the clear light of history” (“mit der Übersiedlung nach Jathrib betreten wir hell historischen Boden,” Die Tradition, 165). The methodological flaw involved here is, however, undeniable. Disclosing this weakness and its wide-reaching implications was to become a distinctive feature of the modern study of the Qur’ān during the twentieth century.

The latter half of the nineteenth century is marked by an increasing number of treatises produced in the wake of Weil and Nöldeke. Many of those are distinguished by the fact that they adopt the principles of research developed by the German Orientalists but reach different conclusions. This is the case — to name but a few — with the respective writings of W. Muir, A. Rodwell, H. Grimme and H. Hirschfeld. Although these scholars came to different and conflicting conclu-¶ sions, all (with the debatable exception of Rodwell) certainly enhanced the critical study of the Qur’ān along the lines of philological research. Muir and Rodwell, in their treatises of 1878, each developed a chronological sequence and re-arrangement of the sūras. Muir's re-arrangement distinguishes six different periods, proposing five Meccan periods, which he defined by recourse to the successive stages of Muḥammad's career as a prophet (see prophets and prophethood). Grimme, on the contrary, attempted to order the sūras on the basis of doctrinal characteristics, with only two Meccan periods and one Medinan (cf. Watt-Bell, Introduction, 112). Finally, Hirschfeld, in his New researches into the composition and exegesis of the Qoran (1902) introduced still another sequence of the qur’ānic passages. This scheme is likewise based on the content of the sūras and their respective messages, which were assigned by Hirschfeld to one of six “modes” (confirmatory, declamatory, narrative, descriptive, legislative, parable).

In contrast to the preceding studies, in which the sūras (q.v.) were largely taken for granted as textual unities and thus as entities of the same origin and chronological status, Rodwell and Hirschfeld also tried to identify single passages within the sūras that belong together thematically and hence also chronologically. This idea was then carried forward and implemented, in varying degrees, by R. Bell and R. Blachère. In Bell's re-arrangement of the sūras, incorporated into his translation of the Qur’ān, he not only tried to break the sūras up into short coherent passages but even into single verses (q.v.) or verse groupings. This was done according to his famous hypothesis that all sūras had undergone various processes of revision and that during the collection of the Qur’ān the leaves or papers that contained the text were partially disordered. He also ¶ suggested that something written on the back of these papers was then, by mistake as it were, inserted in the context of a sūra to which it did not belong (see Watt-Bell, Introduction, 101-7; also Merrill, Bell's critical analysis; Bell's evidence for his dissections of the single sūras is available in greater detail in his posthumously published Commentary). Less radically, Blachère in the first edition of his translation of the Qur’ān (1947-51) adopted, with minor modifications, the chronological scheme of the Meccan sūras as laid down in gqand thus produced his own “reclassement des sourates.” This scheme, however, was abolished in the second edition (1956) and Blachère retained the traditional (Islamic) order.

It needs to be emphasized that none of the studies carried out during the second half of the nineteenth century ever reached the influence of Nöldeke's gqin modern scholarship; nor were their results accepted as easily and widely. This is doubtless because Nöldeke's initial periodization and the ensuing evaluation of the qur’ānic text on the basis of his chronology steers the middle course between being too indiscriminate on the one hand and being too sophisticated on the other. Compared to that, Muir's six periods or Hirschfeld's six “modes” seem somewhat over-detailed and thus of difficult application in further research. Another reason for the dominance of Nöldeke's scheme in modern scholarship has been the fact that the second edition of gqappeared only after the publication of the late nineteenth-century treatises and thus already includes the critical discussion or even refutation of rival accounts. What is more, given the hypothetical nature of every such reconstruction of the origin of the Qur’ān, which is based on circumstantial evidence drawn primarily from formal, linguistic and stylistic features, the more detailed the ¶ proposed partition of the qur’ānic text, the more difficult it is to argue for both its accuracy and its ability to do justice to other sorts of reasonable hypotheses. Having proposed a dissection of the qur’ānic text into tiny passages of accidental sequence and thus rendering a meaningful reconstruction of its internal chronology virtually impossible, R. Bell then faced this problem in its most extreme form.

From the present point of view, therefore, the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century attempts at rearranging the qur’ānic text do not seem very convincing. The character of most such rearrangements is too hypothetical to be assessed properly. Also, there is essentially no evidence that is extra-qur’ānic but contemporaneous with the period of qur’ānic origins that could validate or refute the proposed hypotheses. We are thus left with the impression that much of what was said in favor of a certain rearrangement of the qur’ānic text often does not appear improbable — but neither is there any compelling evidence for its validity. One final drawback of first establishing a chronological order of the qur’ānic textual material and then attempting its interpretation on the very basis of this scheme has been summarized by A. Rippin (Qur’an. Style and contents, xxii) as follows:

Using the chronological framework produces a systematic picture of the development of semantic information which may then be used to re-date elements which do not fit into the basic scheme. Certainly such a method has its circularity (…), but it is often held out that such a study might prove persuasive if it combined a number of such thematic and semantic elements to produce a single cohesive and coherent pattern; a study of this type, however, has not yet been undertaken.