Early Islamic Studies Seminar
http://www.4enoch.org/wiki3/index.php?title=Early_Islamic_Studies_Seminar_%282013-%29,_learned_societyThe study of Islam’s origins from a rigorous historical and social science perspective is still wanting. Whereas the grand narratives of Islamic origins contained in the earliest Muslim writings have usually been taken to describe with some accuracy the hypothetical emergence of Islam in mid-7th-century Arabia, they are nowadays increasingly regarded as too late and ideologically biased – in short, as too eulogical – to provide a reliable picture of Islam's origins. Accordingly, new timeframes going from the late 7th to the mid-8th century and alternative Syro-Palestinian and Mesopotamian spatial locations are currently being explored. On the other hand, a renewed attention is also being paid to the once very plausible pre-canonical redactional and editorial stages of the Qur'an, a book whose core many contemporary scholars agree to be a kind of “palimpsest” originally formed by different, independent writings in which encrypted passages from the OT Pseudepigrapha, the NT Apocrypha and other ancient writings of Jewish, Christian and Manichaean provenance may be found, and whose original function, therefore, is far from being clear. Likewise the earliest Islamic community is presently regarded by many scholars as a somewhat undetermined monotheistic group that evolved from an original Jewish-Christian milieu into a distinct Muslim group perhaps much later than commonly assumed and in a rather unclear way, either initially dependent on the new Arab polity in the Fertile Crescent or more or less independent from it; or else as being originally a Christian movement. Finally the biography of Muhammad, the founding figure of Islam, has also been challenged in recent times due to the paucity and, once more, the late date and literary nature of the earliest biographical accounts at our disposal. In sum three major trends of thought define today the field of early Islamic studies: (a) the traditional Islamic view, which many non-Muslim scholars still uphold as well; (b) a number of revisionist views which have contributed to reshape afresh the contents, boundaries and themes of the field itself by reframing the methodological and hermeneutical categories required in the academic study of Islamic origins; and (c) several still conservative but at the same time more cautious views that stand half way between the traditional point of view and the revisionist views. The Early Islamic Studies Seminar aims at exploring afresh different the dawn and early history of Islam with the tools of Biblical criticism and the new social science methods (critical discourse analysis, narrative theory, semiotics of religion, deconstructionist historiography, etc.) set forth in the study of Second Temple Judaism, Christian and Rabbinic origins, and thereby contribute to the renewed, interdisciplinary study of formative Islam as part and parcel in the complex process of religious identity formation in late antiquity.
EARLY ISLAMIC ESCHATOLOGY
Chair: Tommaso Tesei (Van Leer Institute Jerusalem, Israel)
Although they occupy a central place in the theological discourse of the Qur’ān, doctrines of death and the afterlife in the Islamic scripture have been afforded surprisingly little attention by scholars. Equally surprising is the absence of systematic studies that address the relation between the Qur’ān’s eschatology and the eschatological systems of the various other religious communities of the Late Antique Near East. Yet, the comparative approach offers an entry-point for scholars to investigate the doctrines—eschatological or other—professed by the Qur’ānic text. Being primarily an exhortative text, the Arabic scripture generally neither seeks to establish a systematic theology nor provides its audience with elucidations on its theological statements. At the same time, the Arabic scripture repeatedly makes allusions to doctrines dealing with these and other questions, doctrines that were widespread in the Late Antique Near East. Evidently, the Qur’ān presupposes its audience to be familiar with these doctrines. Thus, a thorough comparative analysis of the eschatological creeds professed by the contemporaries of the early community believers—later identified as Muslims—is crucial to a correct understanding of the Qur’ānic theological presentation of death and the afterlife. At the same time, such analysis also offers new perspectives to better determine the doctrinal character of the proto-Muslim community, the Qur’ān being the earliest extant document to study this religious movement. The present research project involves an investigation of Qur’ānic and early Islamic beliefs about the afterlife in light of the cultural context and the intellectual history of late antique Middle East. The major aims of this research are: (1) to compile a comprehensive overview of the eschatological thoughts found in the Qur’ān and early Islamic traditions; (2) to determine to what extent such system of ideas follows the literary trends, theological perspectives and cultural beliefs of the contemporaneous religio-cultural environment; (3) to establish, based on this data, whether the Qur’ānic eschatological discourse simply refers to a local Arabian context, or if it participates in the broader theological discussions of the Late Antique Near East; and (4) to investigate to what degree the Qur’ān and the early community of believers shared the apocalyptic sentiments widespread in the 7th c. Middle East and to determine if the Qur’ānic eschatological discourse was originally meant to fulfill apocalyptic or millenarian expectations.
THE QUR'ĀN IN LIGHT OF TRADITIO-HISTORICAL CRITICISM
Chair: Guillaume Dye (Free University of Brussels [ULB], Belgium, EU)
As John Wansbrough noticed a few decades ago: "As a document susceptible of analysis by the instruments and techniques of Biblical criticism [the case for the Qur’ān as Scripture] is virtually unknown." This is related to the excessive reliance of many scholars to a kind of secular version of the Muslim narrative on the genesis of the Qur’ān, which considers it as an accurate record of Muhammad’s words, faithfully transmitted by tradition. However, such a conservative approach relies more on assumption than on proof, and recent works have shown that the Qur’ān was not ready at the time of Muhammad’s death, and that the editorial work in the following decades did not merely consist in the rearrangement of existing pericopes, but also in the reinterpretation and rewriting of prophetic logia and liturgical texts, and even in the writing of new pericopes. In other words, the Qur’ān is both a composite and composed text (with at least three levels of composition: individual pericopes, suras, codex – and the people responsible of the last two levels shouldn’t be seen only as compilers, but also as authors). It seems therefore necessary to give up the traditional chronology of Meccan and Medinan suras and consider the Qur’ān inside a larger diachrony – let’s say up to the time of ‘Abd al-Malik (it remains difficult to date precisely the eldest material witnesses to the text, and all what can be said at present is that the rasm of the Qur’ān probably took a shape close to the one we now know sometime during the second half of the 7th Century and the beginning of the 8th Century). Hence source criticism, Formgeschichte and Redaktionskritik – and also synchronic methods – can certainly shed light on the history of the Qur’ān and the first “Islamic” communities. Moreover, the concepts of traditio-historical criticism pertain the interpretation of individual qur’ānic passages: for instance, how many arbitrary interpretations could have been avoided, if scholars had kept in mind the (obvious, but unheard of in mainstream Qur’ānic studies) distinction between Sitz im Buch and Sitz im Leben? This group discussion will interact with the other subprojects of the EISS, and will especially rely on the tools and results of the computational project of a Compressed Qur’ān. Among various tasks, it will study the scribal devices and techniques used in the Qur’ān, try to sketch a profile of the scribes implied in its composition, and, if possible, set up a more realistic chronology, less dependent on the “evidence” of the Muslim tradition.
Topic: Qur'anic studies today