some questions that bother at the moment
- does any one has any recent publication from Patricia Crone, I read a paper she wrote in 2010, about the Pre Islamic religion of Mecca, and honestly i was surprised, it seems she is no more a revisionist but rather a new traditionalist, any thoughts about that.
- is there any serious study that show there was any interpolation, addition after Uthman codex ?
- i was watching a video of Fred Donner, and it seems he is not totally convinced that the change of Qibla happened in the Medina , and he has alluded, it may be a later addition, any compelling theory.
Responding to your questions one by one, if I can help,
Crone's article is not focused on Mecca, and seems to view the Qur'anic mushrikun as some sort of deviant monotheistic angel worshipers, not as genuine pagans. I actually think Crone has missed the boat on the biggest revolution in Qur'anic scholarship since Wansbrough, which is that it has rather decisively been shown that the Qur'an originated from Christian texts and tropes that were 'Judaized,' in polemical fashion. That is why her thesis in Hagarism was completely wrong. She is great at the later Islamic history, but her Qur'anic scholarship has consistently come up short in my book. That's why she hates guys like Donner and Luxenberg, and has so bitterly criticized them. The problem is that she applies 'historical' analysis to a text and situation that requires more of a religious studies approach. She keeps going down cul-de-sacs because she doesn't adequately account for the degree to which the Qur'an is a *palimpsest* of the ideologies and contributions of different groups, created over time. In short, Wansbrough may be completely wrong about the time period (I think the Qur'an was in near-complete state by around 660 or so, subject to minor orthographical wrangling, surah order, different readings, etc), but in my book he's completely right about how the text was formed.
As to the Uthmanic codex, there are threads on it, but I think the problem is that it's already heavily interpolated in the form we first see it. If the question is are there any early Qur'anic manuscripts that show obvious interpolations in the standard Qur'anic text, the answer is yes, the Sanaa I palimpsest shows this, but the interpolations that it shows are not really that exciting -- they are mostly clarifications, added short bits of text to make the verse divisions and rhymes work, etc. Beyond that, we don't really have any earlier Qur'anic manuscripts, and so there's no way from a manuscript perspective (as opposed to an analytical perspective) to assess interpolations (with very few exceptions -- 4:176 is a blatant interpolation, for example, and there's some evidence that the very early BNF 328 manuscript confirms that.
On the Qibla, there is a prominent theory, which I personally think is almost certainly correct, that it was not changed in "Medina" but rather was changed in stages by different groups of believers as part of the project to place Islamic origins back in Mecca; this would have taken place around the mid 7th century or so, but it took decades to be fully enforced in different areas and mosques. There is a great article by Robert Kerr on this, but it's entirely in German ... I think I posted it earlier in this thread.
Topic: Qur'anic studies today