The Qurʾān as a Classic

This volume is a study in the history of the reception of the Qurʾān in the early Islamic centuries. It aims at taking scholarship beyond attempts at situating early qurʾānic exegesis within the confines of magisterial classical Tafsīr, and offers a systematic investigation of the early interpretations of select qurʾānic passages against the backdrop of the interreligious milieu of the growing Islamic Empire.

By incorporating writings on the Qurʾān across different genres, not only by Muslim authors, but also by Arabophone Christian writers, this study maps the exegetical trajectories of key qurʾānic passages in the early Islamic period, thereby providing historical context for classical Tafsīr works. Far from an imagined splendid isolation marred by occasional interreligious polemics, the picture we get is an exegetical feedback loop, with Christians relying on, as well as reacting to, Muslim data, and vice versa.

This study further argues that incorporating Arabic Christian readings of the Qurʾān inevitably enriches our understanding of the reception of the sacred text, and indeed helps us better capture the dynamism characteristic of the interreligious context of Qurʾān interpretation in the early Islamic centuries.