Urheberrechtlich geschütztes Material

Two Hermeneutics – Unreconciled?

Some Observations about the Political Dimension1

of the Qurʾān

Angelika Neuwirth*

Abstract

The article advocates for a new contextualization of the Qurʾān.

A review of recent research shows that Western and inner-Is￾

lamic quranic studies are still isolated from each other by an

hermeneutical barrier. To bridge this gap, new more inclusive

models of quranic studies are required. One such model is the

re-embedding of the Qurʾān in its historical and cultural context

of development: the epistemic space of debates of late antiquity.

From this perspective, the text turns out to be a document of

a high level interaction with the theologies of its monotheistic

neighbors. This approach, which is recommended as a supple￾

ment to the approaches already pursued in Islam, promises inno￾

vation in two ways: it brings to light not only the religious but

also the epistemic revolution achieved with the Qurʾān but it

identifies the Qurʾān – at least in retrospect – to be a theological

challenge to Jewish-Christian European culture.

1 I use the term ‘political’ in the broader sense of ‘culturally and socially relevant’.

Sound academic work on the Qurʾān today bears a political dimension insofar

as it contributes to a badly needed cultural critique within Western society. In

my view the Qurʾān today has to be studied in a committed way.

* Seminar für Semitistik und Arabistik, Freie Universität Berlin.

46 Angelika Neuwirth

Urheberrechtlich geschütztes Material

1. Philology, the “host discipline” of Qurʾānic Studies

The Qurʾān until now has not been acknowledged as part of the

Western canon of theologically relevant knowledge – although it is

obviously a text that no less than the Jewish and Christian founding

documents firmly stands in the Biblical tradition. Indeed, it seems to

be the very fact of this close relationship that kindled the present con￾

troversy over the status of the Qurʾān: either as a religiously genuine

attestation of Biblical faith, a Fortschreibung, a “continuation” of the

Bible, adding to it new dimensions of meaning, or as a mere imita￾

tion, a theologically diffuse recycling of Biblical tradition. Although

new readings advocating a genuine relationship between the Bible

and the Qurʾān have lately been proposed2 scholars are still far from

recognizing the status of the Qurʾān as a new manifestation of Bibli￾

cal scripture.

This lament clearly expresses a particularly European position

vis-à-vis the Qurʾān. I won’t conceal my personal stance: I consider

the deficient acknowledgement of the Qurʾān’s status which was sus￾

tained through history as a regrettable failure to come to terms with

and benefit from an important counter-tradition to the prevailing

Christian interpretation of the intellectual heritage of Late Antiquity.

With our present Muslim-Christian co-habitation a new chance comes

to resume and reread our heritages to trace and compare what each

party has succeeded to develop out of the originally shared gamut of

traditions. One central question that arises here is that of the particu￾

lar hermeneutics involved in the Western and the Islamic perceptions

of the Qurʾān.

2 See the seminal new work of Griffith (2013). Not surprisingly, Griffith

concentrates on narrative texts, a genre which most easily bridges the gap

between Bible and Qurʾān. The focus needs however to be widened to

encompass other literary genres, argument in particular, to keep present the

Qurʾānic social setting as a live proclamation and debate, and to remain alert

to the diversity of Qurʾānic intertextuality which does not refer to the Biblical

tradition alone but equally resumes pagan Arabic poetry and Hellenistic

philosophy. The Qurʾān is not only a post-Biblical but a multifaceted and

thoroughly rhetorical text.

Two Hermeneutics – Unreconciled? 47

Urheberrechtlich geschütztes Material

In Islam the Qurʾān has at least three manifestations: in its oral,

recited appearance, as qurʾān, it is the backbone of Islamic liturgy, of

prayer and meditation. In its codified shape, mushaf, it is the basis of

learned exegesis. And last but not least, in its spiritual function, as

tanzil, it figures as the Word of God, the logos. There is no like of this

triple existence in the status of the Bible in Christianity which shares

only the first and second function, the third being occupied by the

incarnate Word, Jesus Christ. There is a marked unequality in the

two perceptions of Scripture then. But Scripture in Christianity not

only is transcended by the rank of Christ, it is also inseparable from

the historical human appearance of Jesus Christ whose life on earth

as a prophet and charismatic leader of his community is recorded in

Christian scripture. This observation is seldom reconnected with the

parallel Qurʾānic case. Yet, if we acknowledge the analogy Christ as

logos on the one hand and Qurʾān as logos on the other, we need to

provide an analogy for the messenger of the logos, the earthly Jesus

figuring in the Gospels, as well. This place is evidently held by the

proclaimer of the Qurʾān, Muhammad, who figures prominently in

it. Yet, Christian observers are reluctant to complete the compari￾

son and concede a Scriptural rank to Muhammad as well. This again

blurs the importance of the historical event of the Qurʾān which in

the Islamic perception is ever present. Not to accept the event of the

Qurʾān as a point of origin means not only to disregard early Islamic

history, it also blocks the understanding of the most important man￾

ifestation of the Qurʾān in daily life: the ritual recitation which is an

act of the believer’s mimesis of the Prophet. I will come back to this

problematic underestimation of the Qurʾān’s historical dimension.

2. Privileging intertexts over the text:

the de-contextualized Qurʾān

The Western perception of the Qurʾān thus seems to be curtailed: it

does not take notice of the recited Qurʾān nor usually of its status

48 Angelika Neuwirth

Urheberrechtlich geschütztes Material

as the logos but remains limited to its codified manifestation as the

mushaf. This distorted perception can only be explained historically,

a brief outline of the development of Western Qurʾānic studies seems

to be in place here.

It is noteworthy that while Jewish readings of the Bible by now

have received a place – though marginal – in theology, the Qurʾān

has remained a domain of philology, widely excluded from theologi￾

cal discourses. Western critical scholarship on the Qurʾān – liberated

from religious prejudices – started in the 19th century. Although the

Qurʾān had been appreciated esthetically by the Romanticists and

made accessible to European readers in various congenial transla￾

tions, in the 19th century, there was no comprehensive knowledge

about the epistemic achievement induced by the Qurʾān in its Arabian

milieu, let alone about its theological relationship to the other reli￾

gious traditions; pertinent disciplines such as the history of religions

or the study of Oriental cultures were still undeveloped. What was

to be the “host discipline” for the new object of study was philology.

Indeed, the birth of Western Qurʾānic studies occurred synchronously

with the emergence of philology as an academic discipline.

More precisely, it originated from an epistemic revolution in Bib￾

lical studies: the introduction of historical critical scholarship in the

18th and 19th centuries, an approach which turned the Bible from

a religious foundational text into a historical text detached from its

liturgical and doctrinal embeddings in the service of the Church or

the Synagogue. Historical critical scholarship was widely welcomed

as a momentous renewal in academic theology which – synchro￾

nously with the emergence of the discipline of archaeology – relo￾

cated the Bible into the historical spaces of the Ancient Orient and

Mediterranean Late Antiquity respectively. It was this academic con￾

text in which Qurʾānic scholarship emerged. What was a renewal in

Biblical studies, however, in the case of the Qurʾān was not a renewal

but the very start of its academic investigation. Thus an important

methodological step was overleapt: Whereas in the case of the Bible

the dissection of the text into small units for analysis was a step that

Two Hermeneutics – Unreconciled? 49

Urheberrechtlich geschütztes Material

complemented rather than superseded the earlier holistic reading

of the text, with the Qurʾān, which had not yet been made famil￾

iar to the Western reader in its entirety before, this was the initial

procedure. There is a momentous gap between the perception of the

Bible and the Qurʾān then: What Northrup Frye has made visible to

us, the omnipresence of the Bible in Western tradition, its function

as a virtual subtext of innumerable literary and art works of West￾

ern pre-modernity, mutatis mutandis applies no less to the Qurʾān for

Islamic culture. To realize this epistemically overarching dimension

demands however to look at the Qurʾān as a unity. Northrup Frye

who titled the Bible “The Great Code”3, highlights the holistic aspect

of its reception: “…what matters is that ‘the Bible’ has traditionally

been read as a unity, and has influenced Western imagination as a

unity” (Frye 1982: XIII). It is this holistic perception which in West￾

ern scholarship has been missing until now.

The Qurʾān occupies a comparable position in Islamic culture.

Yet, what mattered in early Western Qurʾānic scholarship was not its

status nor its theological dimension, but the Qurʾān as a textual arti￾

fact. It was to be included into the realm of scriptural texts that had

been severed from their traditional contexts to be submitted to a new

reading according to the new historical critical approach. Viewed as

an intellectual venture Abraham Geiger’s4 path-breaking work from

1833 “Was hat Mohammed aus dem Judenthume aufgenommen?”

(Geiger 2005 [1833]), which initiated the historical critical scholar￾

ship in the Qurʾān looks impressive. It offered a pivotal revalorization

of the Qurʾān positioning it not – as had been usual – in the cultural

backwater of the Arabian peninsula, but in a pluricultural milieu of

3 See Frye 1982. He explains: “… here is a book that has had a continuous

fertilizing influence on English literature from Anglo-Saxon writers to poets

younger than I and yet no one would say that the Bible is a work of Literature.

Even Blake who went much farther than anyone else in his days in identifying

religion and human creativity, did not call it that: he said ‘The Old and New

Testament are the Great Code of Art’, a phrase I have used for my title after

pondering its implications for many years” (ibid: xvi).

4 See for Geiger and the Wissenschaft des Judentums: Hartwig et al. 2008.

50 Angelika Neuwirth

Urheberrechtlich geschütztes Material

Late Antique debates – a perspective that we are presently striving

to re-establish. Due to a few grave preconceptions, the result of his

study, however, was highly ambivalent. Qurʾānic studies started with

a surgical operation of the text which was looked upon as a collection

of isolated paraenetical and doctrinal statements rather than a com￾

prehensive prophetical message. Historical critical scholarship is not

least a quest for the urtexts of Scripture – a quest that for the Bible

had resulted in the unearthing of a large number of Ancient Oriental

and Late Antique traditions. These texts were apt to throw light on

the historical setting of the Bible, but could rarely ever compete seri￾

ously with their far more sophisticated counterparts, shaped by the

Biblical authors. In the Qurʾānic case, however, the opposite seemed

to be true: what was discovered as the lower layer of the text was not

an “inferior earlier tradition”, but the most prestigious ancient text

imaginable: the Hebrew Bible itself. And since deviation from such

an authoritative urtext was tantamount to a distortion, the Qurʾān

emerged as a rather unsuccessful attempt to rival the Bible and was

to remain stigmatized as an epigonal text until this very day.

After the violent disruption of historical critical scholarship with

the expulsion of Jewish scholars from German universities in the

1930s through Nazi terror – no more than 100 years after Geiger’s

work – Qurʾānic studies took a new and far less ambitious course, fol￾

lowing a trend in the vein of the then en vogue Leben-Jesu-Forschung,

focusing the person of the prophet as a figure within Arabian cul￾

ture (Fück 1936: 509–525). By repositioning the Qurʾānic event into

a local Arabian pre-Islamic milieu the new scholarship forfeited a

major achievement of its predecessor: the contextualization of the

Qurʾān with the late antique knowledge of its milieu. Nor did the pro￾

ponents of the Muhammad scholarship succeed to come up to their

New Testament Studies model, the Leben Jesu-Forschung. They have

been blamed for not critically questioning their traditional Islamic

sources enough whose status as documents of a later epoch they did

not sufficiently look through. The Qurʾānic text which was read pri￾

marily to provide information about the psychological development

Two Hermeneutics – Unreconciled? 51

Urheberrechtlich geschütztes Material

of the Prophet, disappeared from the fore as an object of philology for

several decades.

To valorize the epistemic dimension of this shift in interest, it

is worth remembering a model lately proposed by Sheldon Pollock

(2009: 931–961) who regards philology as a tripartite venture: a

query for “textual meaning”, an investigation into the text’s tradi￾

tional understanding, its “contextual meaning”, and finally a re-think￾

ing of one’s own scholarly preconceptions and responsibilities, the

“philologist’s meaning”. Pollock does not present this differentiation

between textual and contextual meaning as a new discovery, but

rather as a reprise of a pre-modern distinction established not only in

European but almost synchronously in Indian philology as well. The

Renaissance thinker Giambattista Vico5 who introduced the duality of

approaches into European literary criticism abbreviated them under

the labels of the verum, the “truth” to be gleaned from the text as such

and the certum, what the recipients were upholding as the “certain”

meaning. In the earliest phase of Qurʾānic study we are still primarily

with the verum, the focus on the text as such including its historical

layers. It is true that the earliest scholars did accept the traditionally

established context of the Qurʾān as a given: the Prophet Muham￾

mad’s ministry in Mecca and Medina during the period of 610–632.

Yet, this milieu was not dealt with as a challenge that the Qurʾān was

responding to. Rather, their gaze was turned backward: The Qurʾān

was regarded as part of a vernacular Biblical tradition, the vast realm

of Aggadah6, orally transmitted post-Biblical lore comprising most

diverse exegetical readings of the Bible. Although the early schol￾

ars were aware of a dynamic tradition, a kind of vernacularisation,

this did not involve the text of the Qurʾān itself, whose reflections of

the older religious lore was not accepted as serious re-interpretations

but often dismissed as mistaken or distorted readings of it. What was

5 See Vico 1725.

6 The Aggadah, the undefined corpus of orally transmitted post-Biblical lore

has been classified by Heller 1934, XXIV: 418ff.

52 Angelika Neuwirth

Urheberrechtlich geschütztes Material

contextualized then was not the Qurʾān itself but its lower subtextual

layers which were reconnected to the earlier scriptures.

The subsequent “Muhammad scholarship” as against that was

purely context-oriented. The new sira-based readings of the Qurʾān

positively contributed to increase and promulgate knowledge about

the until then marginalized event of the Qurʾān. Its representation,

however, – limited by the perspective of the traditional reports that

tended to downplay the theological challenges exerted by the syncre￾

tistic, Jewish and Christian opponents on the Prophet and his com￾

munity – obscured the relevance of the Qurʾānic intervention into the

late antique debates and thus blurred the innovations of the Qurʾānic

world view. It did not either comply with the standards of the time

which had seen important archaeological and epigraphic discover￾

ies. The attempt to rely on one single method borrowed from Bibli￾

cal studies, the Leben-Jesu-Forschung, while neglecting the progress

that was taking place in the various subdisciplines of the field proved

insufficient7.

To fill that gap, to update Qurʾānic studies by introducing another

methodologically momentous new approach, John Wansbrough in

1977 presented a comprehensive study on the Qurʾān as text, Qur’anic

Studies: Sources and Methods of Scriptural Interpretation8. Underlying

his work is Rudolf Bultmann’s form criticism, the classification of

units of scripture by literary pattern to determine the historical con￾

text of each unit’s literary tradition, a method that led him to what

is known as the de-mythologisation, Entmythologisierung, of Scripture

(Bultmann 1921). The New Testament scholar Bultmann held that

the narratives of the life of Jesus were offering theology in narra￾

tive form where lessons were taught in the then familiar language of

myth. It was myth – a myth typologically closely related to that laid

out by Bultmann for the Gospels – that Wansbrough claimed to dis￾

cover in the narrative of Muhammad’s life and ministry. Superimpos￾

7 A harsh critique of this sira-oriented scholarship, the allegation of blind

credulence, has been put forward by al-Azmeh 2014.

8 See the discussion of his approach by al-Azmeh 2014.

Two Hermeneutics – Unreconciled? 53

Urheberrechtlich geschütztes Material

ing the model on the Qurʾān, Wansbrough carried historical criticism

to extremes, explaining the text as a later, anonymous compilation. A

priori rejecting the traditional historical setting of the Qurʾān,9 Wans￾

brough imagined the text not as the self-expression of the emerging

community at Mecca and Medina, but as the manifesto of an already

extant Jewish-Christian community, a Jewish-Christian apocryph so

to say, written to provide that community with an Arabian myth of

origin. The Qurʾānic text thus appeared as virtually inaccessible to

historical investigation.

With Wansbrough a complete detachment of the text from its

transmitters and its recipients took place for the first time. Not only

are verum and certum rigorously disconnected, there has also occurred

a supersession of the verum, of the recipients’ reading. Its place has

been appropriated by the researcher who presents a counter model

of his own imagination to the traditionally transmitted milieu of the

Qurʾān. A solipsistic hypothesis has replaced a widely accepted image

of history. While earlier historical critical scholarship never isolated

the text from Muhammad, but – imagining him as a kind of author

who premeditated the project of the foundation of Islam – grossly

overstated his personal function in the genesis of the Qurʾān, Wans￾

brough and his school, who became known as the revisionist scholars,

move in the opposite direction. They regard the Prophet as a non-his￾

torical figure invented by the compilers of the Qurʾān to endow the

later emerging Islamic community with a mythical Arabian land of

origin. This thesis which denies the Prophet Muhammad and his com￾

munity any role in the emergence of the new religion with a single

stroke cancels the entire rationale of the genesis of the Arabic Islamic

culture. It is unsurprising that Wansbrough’s work not only caused

a schism in the western scholarly community, but at the same time

precipitated the estrangement of the Muslim scholarly community – a

grotesque situation that still prevails until this day.

9 A new critique of the Wansbrough school, deconstructing its “hyper-scepti

￾

cism” has been put forward by al-Azmeh 2014.

54 Angelika Neuwirth

Urheberrechtlich geschütztes Material

It is not least this malaise, the until now still widely missing con￾

sciousness of the implications of daring textual experiments carried

out on the Qurʾān, experiments not only incompatible with estab￾

lished historical facts but also liable to be falsified by epigraphic and

manuscript data, that calls for new reflection. What should Qurʾānic

studies be about and what role should philology, the guardian disci￾

pline of the Qurʾān in Western academia, play to re-array the stage?

It is “the philologist’s meaning”, his intellectual vision and capability

to discern the highly complex preconditions of sound Qurʾānic schol￾

arship that has to be involved in the work on the Qurʾān.

3. Privileging language over history:

an ocean of meanings?

It is important to throw a glance at the approach followed in Islamic

scholarship. The fact that pre-modern Islamic tradition has – for evi￾

dent reasons – shown little interest in the reconstruction of the gen￾

esis of the text has set the course for a hermeneutic of its own. It is

true that it has always been admitted that the text entails a host of

disputes fought out between the nascent community and their imme￾

diate neighbors, be they pagans, Jews or Christians, over particular

religious traditions. Yet, due to the early emerging opinion that the

Qurʾān has abrogated the previous scriptures, the older traditions

that we find debated in the Qurʾān have been turned into no longer

valid, obsolete, paradigms of meaning. Other aspects of the Qurʾān

appeared far more relevant. The canonization of the Qurʾān set off

a literary as well as a religious revolution. For early Muslims, Peter

Heath holds, “it caused the virtual demise of any pre-Islamic Ara￾

bian pagan religious texts and relegated the Torah and the Gospels

to positions of marginal importance. Jewish and Christian religious

traditions as well as pre-Islamic poetry and prose became instead

resources, secondary materials to draw upon for understanding the

lexical, grammatical, or historical context of the one text that mat-

Two Hermeneutics – Unreconciled? 55

Urheberrechtlich geschütztes Material

tered” (Heath 1989: 173–210). One of the most significant conse￾

quences of this preference of the Qurʾān over the earlier traditions

concerns the valorization of the form, of its verbal “appropriateness”,

its pertinence. In other words, the signifier, the form, gains equal

weight with the signified, the semantic contents. To return once

again to Peter Heath: “Each word becomes a trigger for interpretive

processes, stemming from what Tvetan Todorov has termed the ‘Prin￾

ciple of Pertinence’. In accordance with this principle, every word or

phrase in the Qur’an acquires enormous power for eliciting herme￾

neutic responses.” (Heath: ibid) Since the text is viewed as having

a single meaning but many significances, each word can attract as

many readings as interpreters can identify. The Qurʾān has become

an ocean of significances, a bahr min al-maʿani, a view that tends to

establish a distinct boundary between the Qurʾān as a self-sufficient

text and the epistemic milieu of its origin, a view that is often based

on a Qurʾānic verse – 18:109: “Say: if the ocean were ink to write out

the words of my Lord – sooner would the ocean be exhausted than

would the words of my Lord, even if we added another ocean like

it – for its aid”. Not this verse in itself, but its reading as a reference

to the infiniteness of textual meanings, tends to establish a distinct

boundary between the Qurʾān as a self-sufficient text and the epis￾

temic milieu of its origin.

The Qurʾān’s “enormous power for eliciting hermeneutic

responses” and in particular the exegetes’ rating of the signifier above

the signified, are not least due to the Qurʾānic orality. According to

William Graham the intrinsic orality and abiding oral presence of the

Qurʾān can hardly be overstated. “Perceived as God’s ipsissima vox,

the vocally transmitted text is memorized, internalized, and repeated

as divine speech, and expected to live on the lips and in the hearts

of the faithful.10 Although Graham refers to his own, modern, expe￾

rience, his descriptions seem to apply to the earliest reception of the

Qurʾān as well. His observation of the Qurʾānic “intrinsic orality” has

10 William Graham is quoted by Kelber (2013: 304).

56 Angelika Neuwirth

Urheberrechtlich geschütztes Material

been corroborated in literary scholarship. The impact of orality on the

exegetic privileging of the signifier, the focusing of small and smallest

speech units instead of more extended semantically relevant state￾

ments, however, has not yet been investigated. Should it have been

the omnipresence of the orally recited Qurʾān (which can be assumed

to date back to the very origins of the Qurʾān’s proclamation), that

invited a multiplicity of listeners to ponder on individual words or

phrases appearing obscure to them thus generating a multiplicity of

explanations of those small speech units? A comparable interest in

larger text units – entire narratives or more lengthy arguments – did

not arise in exegesis. There is almost no interest in the explanation

of entire suras as units. Such an interest would rather presuppose the

study of a text conceived as a written document11.

There is then, in traditionalist Islamic exegesis a prevailing inter￾

est in the “certum”, the received “significances” that are warranted

by trusted transmitters. Their “truth” vis-à-vis the text itself is – at

least in non-linguistic commentary – widely sidelined. The abstinence

from dogmatic decisions displayed here may be considered part of

the “culture of ambiguity” that Thomas Bauer (2011) has claimed for

pre-modern Islamic culture as such.

11 Thus, in spite of their very different assumptions concerning the contextual

embedding of the Qurʾān, revisionist Western scholars share traditional

Muslim preference of the mushaf over the “live dispute” of the proclamation,

mirrored in the text. The revisionist stance is due to a kind of epistemic

pessimism, on the distrust vis-à-vis the extant written testimonies. Muslim

exegetes as against that, equally overleaping the oral scenario of “live

interaction”, proceed from a stage of development where the Qurʾān has

already congealed into a fixed written text. They thus project the Qurʾān into

the post-prophetical milieu where the theological voices of the communities

involved in the Qurʾānic debate have already been muted, where the new

paradigm of “Islam” has already come to prevail as the community’s identity.

Two Hermeneutics – Unreconciled? 57

Urheberrechtlich geschütztes Material

4. Why do we need Late Antiquity as the historical

backdrop for the Qurʼan?

It is often ignored that those who first listened to the Qurʾān were

not Muslims yet, their Muslim identity only emerged in the course of

their “Qurʾānic education”, their listening to and debating the pro￾

phetic proclamation. During the period of this process they are best

described as individuals familiar with late antique traditions. “Late

Antiquity” – it must be admitted – is a contested concept. Though

allowing for an understanding in the sense of a historical epoch

(whose delimitation, however, is controversial among historians), it

is, in our context, not politically determined.12 Rather, the term is

used to denote an “epistemic space” where particular textual prac￾

tices were developed to induce a new understanding of the diverse

heritages (or the diverse “antiquities”, so to say). Among the multi￾

ple heritages constantly discussed and reinterpreted in the Qurʾānic

milieu were both the Biblical traditions that had for several centuries

been revisited by Jewish and Christian exegetes alike, and pre-Islamic

Arabian lore documented in ancient Arabic poetry. New readings of

older traditions in the Arabic language did not exclusively originate

with the Qurʾān but had several precedents, not least in pre-Islamic

poetry, such as in the poems of al-Aʾshā, ʿAdi ibn Zayd or Umayya ibn

Abi l-Salt. Jāhiliyya, the pre-Islamic culture, should therefore not be

viewed – as it often is – as the essential other (the opposite) of Islam

12 A new perspective on the conventional distinction of epochs is overdue. A

challenging new model has been developed by Garth Fowden, Before and

after Muhammad: The First Millennium Refocused (forthcoming). Extending the

scope of Late Antiquity into Islam underlies a new research project presently

being pursued in the programme “From Logos to Kalam”, which forms part of

the larger research project “Episteme in Motion” (Special Research Unit at the

Freie Universität Berlin). Our particular concept of Late Antiquity primarily

as an epistemic space is also indebted to the University of Göttingen’s Courant

Research Centre “Education and Religion. From Early Imperial Roman Times

to the Classical Period of Islam (EDRIS)” and particularly to its speaker, Prof.

Peter Gemeinhardt, who in February 2013 convened an interdisciplinary

workshop to discuss the concept of Late Antiquity from the perspectives of

Classical Philology, Church History, Philosophy and Islamic studies.

58 Angelika Neuwirth

Urheberrechtlich geschütztes Material

but, rather, as a vast space of debate involving diverse cultures, a

space out of which the Qurʾān as well as other types of early Arabic

literature emerged.13 Typically, late antique re-readings interpreted

earlier texts and traditions according to novel ethical terms in com￾

pliance with the new tenet of “care of the self” (epimeleia heautou), a

concept that originated in late antique philosophy. This tenet – fore￾

grounded by Guy Stroumsa (2009)14 as having been a major driver

of innovation in Late Antiquity – encouraged the perception of the

soul and the body as inseparable constituents of the individual. This

new perception allowed for more inclusive psychic and, thus also,

emotional expressions in poetry, thereby for the first time placing the

realm of the “other”, the female, the aged and even the dead, on an

equal footing with the masculine sphere that earlier on had been the

natural vantage point of the poet. Even the animal “other” occasion￾

ally was given a voice in the newly widened mental space described

by the poets.15 Such an extension of scope has been highlighted in

a number of important studies on ancient Arabic poetry,16 without,

however, having been related to the wider context of late antique

thinking, let alone to the evidence of such thinking in the Qurʾān,

where the care of parents and dependent individuals is encouraged

and the status of women is paid new attention.17

Due to a host of new textual and material findings, we have more

recently gained new insights into the general knowledge and cultural

practices of the first/seventh century.18 We can no longer proceed

from the image of the Hijaz as a culturally barren region that was

13 This insight is the focus of the research project entitled “From Ruins to

Resurrection” presently being carried out by Ghassan El Masri (Freie Univer￾

sität Berlin).

14 See also Stroumsa 2014.

15 See Ullmann 1981; Jacob 1914, 1915.

16 See in particular Jacobi 1997: 3–99; Borg 1997; Dmitriev 2008; Seidensticker

1992.

17 For more on this, see the discussion of the Qurʾānic Decalogue in “A Discov

￾

ery of Evil in the Qurʾan? Revisiting Qurʾanic Versions of the Decalogue in the

Context of Pagan Arab Late Antiquity”, in Neuwirth 2014.

18 See Franke et al. 2011.

Two Hermeneutics – Unreconciled? 59

Urheberrechtlich geschütztes Material

propelled into an age of cultural florescence only with the advent of

Islam; on the contrary, we must assume that an extensive transfer

of knowledge had already taken place and that a broad scope of not

only local but also Biblical and post-Biblical traditions was familiar to

Muhammad’s audience. These, however, were in no way immediately

adopted by them but negotiated at length – the Qurʾān reflects a most

rigorous sifting, revision and ultimately supersession of basic Jewish

and Christian traditions. To fully understand the achievement of the

Qur’ān – not only in religious terms but in the broader perspective of

intellectual world history and the history of knowledge – we must not

ignore the significant process of cultural translation that took place

there.

The instrument of this cultural translation was rhetoric. It is in

this respect that the Qurʾān shares decisive characteristics with core

texts of its late antique milieu. To start with the Talmud, which is

roughly contemporaneous though hardly related to the Qurʾān genet￾

ically, there are distinctive traits that both corpora have in common –

as seen, for instance, not only in their dialogical structure but in the

striking use of pastiche of different literary genres in the same nar￾

row context

19 to evoke always changing reactions in the listeners.

One might think here of the exuberant-sounding introductory oath

clusters, characteristic of the early suras, that are followed by sober,

objective statements about the human condition.20 This juxtaposition

of contrasting forms and ideas in the early Qurʾānic texts – as much as

in the Talmud – obviously has a discomfiting effect. What is further

noteworthy is the peculiar combination of textual extracts from dif￾

ferent heritage traditions: not unlike the Midrashic contextualisations

of Biblical texts from different Biblical corpora, the Qurʾānic suras

combine almost verbatim quotations from Arabic poetry with sum￾

maries from prominent Biblical prophetical texts (see Sūrat al-Balad,

Q. 90, as an example). Heritage (“antiquity”) in the Qurʾānic case is

19 These traits were recently studied by Daniel Boyarin (2009).

20 See “Images and Metaphors in the Introductory Sections of the Meccan

Suras”, in Neuwirth 2014.

60 Angelika Neuwirth

Urheberrechtlich geschütztes Material

less homogeneous than in the Rabbinic case; it is at least twofold,

comprising both the pagan Arab and the Biblical or post-Biblical her￾

itage. No surprise, then, that there is an unmistakably forensic dimen￾

sion to the Qurʾān. The individual suras widely consist of debates

interspersed with questions and answers, caveats, retractions and

concessions – all pointing to a lively negotiation of current traditions.

The Qurʾān, judged upon its literary appearance, presents itself as the

transcript of an ongoing debate of the theological problems that were

present in Late Antiquity.21

Already, the Qurʾān’s rhetoric and conceptual lexicon should suf￾

fice to prove that it did not simply – as Peter Brown (2002) claims

for early Islamic culture per se – develop “under the umbrella” of late

antique Christian culture, merely slipping on the guise of Christian

models. Far from being only a contemporaneous phenomenon, the

Qurʾān in many respects featured as an active and creative player

in the culture of Late Antiquity, first and foremost in the theological

realm. Within its Arabian homeland, the Qurʾān triggered the new

activity of theoretical reflection as it initiated the newly cherished

cultural practice of writing.22 However, its innovative power goes

beyond that. One has to remember that the Qurʾān was not just in

conversation with earlier traditions, but submitted these traditions

to a new authority: that of writing. The new centrality of the word

of God, propelled by the Qurʾān, was warranted by the image of a

“divine writing”. Writing (and thus language) according to the Qurʾān

was there before creation; indeed, creation according to the Qurʾān

obeys linguistic rules – a theological breakthrough that transcends

local Arabian dimensions of relevance. It is tantamount to a challenge

of the Christian logos theology which in the Qurʾān is countered by a

new hypostasis of the word, the hypostasis of “language”.

21 Such debates and negotiations are strongly reminiscent of the stratagems of

persuasion that Peter Brown has highlighted for the Christian culture of Late

Antiquity; see Brown 1992.

22 See Neuwirth: “The ‘Discovery of Writing’ in the Qur’an: Tracing an Epis

￾

temic Revolution in Late Antiquity”, in Nuha al-Shaar, ed., Qur’an and Adab

(Oxford, forthcoming).

Two Hermeneutics – Unreconciled? 61

Urheberrechtlich geschütztes Material

Bibliography

al-Azmeh, Aziz: The Arabs and Islam in Late Antiquity. A Critique of

approaches to Arabic Sources, Berlin: Gerlach-Press, 2014.

Bauer, Thomas: Die Kultur der Ambiguität. Eine andere Geschichte des

Islams, Berlin: Verlag der Weltreligionen, 2011.

Borg, Gert: ‘Mit Poesie vertreibe ich den Kummer meines Herzens’:

Eine Studie zur altarabischen Trauerklage der Frau (Ufarriǧ hamm

ṣadrī bi-l-qarīḍ), Leiden: Nederlands Historisch-Archaeologisch

Instituut te Istanbul, 1997.

Boyarin, Daniel: Socrates and the Fat Rabbis, Chicago: The University

of Chicago Press, 2009.

Brown, Peter: Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Chris￾

tian Empire, Madison: WI, 1992.

— The World of Late Antiquity: AD 150–750, London: W. W. Norton &

Company, 2002.

Bultmann / Rudolf: Die Geschichte der synoptischen Tradition, Göttin￾

gen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1921.

Dmitriev, Kirill: Das poetische Werk des Abū Ṣaḫr al-Huḏalī: Eine litera￾

turanthropologische Studie, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2008.

Fowden, Garth: Before and after Muhammad: The First Millennium Refo￾

cused, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013.

Franke, Ute et al. (eds.): Roads of Arabia: The Archaeological Treasures

of Saudi Arabia. Berlin: Wasmuth, 2011.

Frye, Northrup: The Great Code. The Bible and Literature, San Diego:

Mariner Books, 1982.

Fück, Johann: “Die Originalität des arabischen Propheten”. In:

Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft, Nr. 90 /

1936, pp. 509–25.

Geiger, Abraham: Was hat Mohammed aus dem Judenthume aufgenom￾

men?, Berlin: Reprint, 2005 (1st ed. 1833).

Griffith, Sidney: The Bible in Arabic, Princeton: Princeton University

Press, 2013.

62 Angelika Neuwirth

Urheberrechtlich geschütztes Material

Hartwig, Dirk et al. (eds.): ‘Im vollen Licht der Geschichte’: Die Wis￾

senschaft des Judentums und die Anfänge der Koranforschung,

Würzburg: Ergon, 2008.

Heath, Peter: “Creative Hermeneutics. A comparative analysis of

three approaches”. In: Arabica, no. 36 / 1989, pp. 173–210.

Heller, Bernhard: “Ginzberg’s Legends of the Jews”. In: JQR N.S., no.

xxiv / 1934, xxv / 1934.

Jacob, Georg: Schanfarà-Studien, Bd. 1: Der Wortschatz der Lâmîja

nebst Übersetzung und beigefügtem Text, Munich: Verl. der Bayer.

Akad. der Wiss., 1914.

— Schanfarà-Studien, Bd. 2: Parallelen und Kommentar zur Lâmîja,

Schanfará-Bibliographie, Munich: Verl. der Bayer. Akad. der Wiss.,

1915.

Jacobi, Renate: “Bemerkungen zur frühislamischen Trauerpoesie”. In:

Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes, no. 87 / 1997,

pp. 3–99.

Kelber, Werner H.: Imprints, Coiceprints & Footprints of Memor, Atlanta:

Society of Biblical Literature, 2013.

Neuwirth, Angelika: Scripture, Poetry and the Making of a Community.

Reading the Qurʾan as a Literary Text, Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 2014.

— “The ‘Discovery of Writing’ in the Qurʾan: Tracing an Epistemic

Revolution in Late Antiquity”. In: Qurʾan and Adab. Ed. by Nuha

al-Shaar. Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming.

Pollock, Sheldon: “Future Philology? The Fate of a Soft Science in a

Hard World”. In: Critical Inquiry, no. 33 / 2009, pp. 931–961.

Seidensticker, Tilman: Altarabisch ‘Herz’ und sein Wortfeld, Wiesbaden:

Harrassowitz, 1992.

Stroumsa, Guy G.: Das Ende des Opferkults: Die religiösen Mutationen

der Spätantike, Berlin: Verlag der Weltreligionen, 2011 (french

1st ed. 2005).

— The End of Sacrifice: Religious Transformations in Late Antiquity,

Chicago: IL, 2009 (french 1st ed. 2005).

Two Hermeneutics – Unreconciled? 63

Urheberrechtlich geschütztes Material

Ullmann, Manfred: Das Gespräch mit dem Wolf, Munich: Bayerische

Akademie der Wissenschaft, 1981.

Vico, Giambattista: Scienza nuova, Naples: n. p., 1725.

Wansbrough, John E.: Quranic Studies: Sources and Methods of Scrip￾

tural Interpretation, Oxford: Prometheus Books, 1977.

64 Angelika Neuwirth