The Qur an as a Classic

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

By incorporating writings on the Qur an across different genres, not only by Muslim authors, but also by Arabophone Christian writers, this study maps the exegetical trajectories of key qur anic passages in the early Islamic period, thereby providing historical context for classical Tafsir 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 Qur an 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 Qur an interpretation in the early Islamic centuries.