2 The Qur'an: a historical-critical introduction active in the field, I hold views on these issues that are not unanimously shared. 1 hope that my relatively detailed engagement with conflicting perspectives and arguments will convey some sense of what others have written, and ultimately empower the reader to navigate the field by herself, and, if need be, to gainsay me. My main aim is less to convey factual certainties than to initiate the reader into the multifaceted methodological toolkit that ought to be applied to the Qur’an no less than to other scriptures. Qur’anic scholarship is still beset by an unfortunate bifurcation between literary approaches and the intertextual analysis of specific Qur’anic passages in the light of earlier Christian and Jewish literature. This involves obvious dangers: a literary perspective unmoored from considerations of historical context can quickly become subjective, while an intertextual approach that ignores the Qur’an’s literary features can easily degenerate into atomistic source-hunting. Both viewpoints should therefore be seen as complementary rather than as mutually exclusive. Equally indispensa- ble are an appropriate awareness of the internal heterogeneity of the Qur’anic corpus and some rudimentary reliance on quantitative methods. The present book is thus committed to presenting the historical-critical study of the Qur’an as a genuinely multi-pronged and multi-dimensional endeavour, rather than as the exercise in narrow reductionism that some may intuitively associate with the label ‘historical-critical’, What is the ‘histo: al-critical’ method? At this point, the reader may legitimately demand to know what, exactly, I understand by approaching the Qur’an from a historical-critical perspective, and why this may at all be a worthwhile endeavour.’ I shall take the two compo- nents of the hyphenated adjective ‘historical-critical’ in reverse order. To interpret a literary document critically means to suspend inherited pre- suppositions about its origin, transmission, and meaning, and to s their adequacy in the light of a close reading of that text itself as well as other relevant sources. A pertinent example would be the demand voiced by Thomas Hobbes (d. 1679) that discussion of the question by whom the different books of the Bible were originally composed must be guided exclusively by the ‘light ... which is held out unto us from the books themselves’, given that extra-Biblical writings are uninformative about the matter; according to Hobbes, an impartial assess- ment of the literary evidence refutes the traditional assumption that Moses was the author of the While critical interpretation in this basic sense is perfectly compatible with believing that the text in question constitutes rev- elation, it may nonetheless engender considerable doubts about the particular ways in which that text has traditionally been understood. Benedict Spinoza (d. 1677), one of the ancestors of modern Biblical scholarship, goes yet further. In his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus he criticises earlier interpreters of the Bible for
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| Title | Historical-Critical Quran Introduction |
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2 The Qur'an: a historical-critical introduction active in the field, I hold views on these issues that are not unanimously shared. 1 hope that my relatively detailed engagement with conflicting perspectives and arguments will convey some sense of what others have written, and ultimately empower the reader to navigate the field by herself, and, if need be, to gainsay me. My main aim is less to convey factual certainties than to initiate the reader into the multifaceted methodological toolkit that ought to be applied to the Qur’an no less than to other scriptures. Qur’anic scholarship is still beset by an unfortunate bifurcation between literary approaches and the intertextual analysis of specific Qur’anic passages in the light of earlier Christian and Jewish literature. This involves obvious dangers: a literary perspective unmoored from considerations of historical context can quickly become subjective, while an intertextual approach that ignores the Qur’an’s literary features can easily degenerate into atomistic source-hunting. Both viewpoints should therefore be seen as complementary rather than as mutually exclusive. Equally indispensa- ble are an appropriate awareness of the internal heterogeneity of the Qur’anic corpus and some rudimentary reliance on quantitative methods. The present book is thus committed to presenting the historical-critical study of the Qur’an as a genuinely multi-pronged and multi-dimensional endeavour, rather than as the exercise in narrow reductionism that some may intuitively associate with the label ‘historical-critical’, What is the ‘histo: al-critical’ method? At this point, the reader may legitimately demand to know what, exactly, I understand by approaching the Qur’an from a historical-critical perspective, and why this may at all be a worthwhile endeavour.’ I shall take the two compo- nents of the hyphenated adjective ‘historical-critical’ in reverse order. To interpret a literary document critically means to suspend inherited pre- suppositions about its origin, transmission, and meaning, and to s their adequacy in the light of a close reading of that text itself as well as other relevant sources. A pertinent example would be the demand voiced by Thomas Hobbes (d. 1679) that discussion of the question by whom the different books of the Bible were originally composed must be guided exclusively by the ‘light ... which is held out unto us from the books themselves’, given that extra-Biblical writings are uninformative about the matter; according to Hobbes, an impartial assess- ment of the literary evidence refutes the traditional assumption that Moses was the author of the While critical interpretation in this basic sense is perfectly compatible with believing that the text in question constitutes rev- elation, it may nonetheless engender considerable doubts about the particular ways in which that text has traditionally been understood. Benedict Spinoza (d. 1677), one of the ancestors of modern Biblical scholarship, goes yet further. In his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus he criticises earlier interpreters of the Bible for