Walid Saleh :
to downplay the role of Muḥammad in delivering and preaching the Qur’an, such that one is presented with an almost disembodied Qur’an, a Qur’an that has no relationship to the career of Muḥammad, and is even without a relationship to a specific locale.
Saleh is still in the 9th c. (yawn...)
This approach to the Qur’an is sometimes expressed radically (Muḥammad did not exist!) or covertly (by ignoring the role of his character as an element in the explication of the Qur’anic text).
He gets scared. Normal, all is collapsing...
Milder versions of this position state that there is not much to know about
the relationship between Muḥammad and the Qur’an. The disappearing of Muḥammad from the Qur’an, and the pretence that it has no preacher, allow for a radical rereading of the Qur’an, such that one can then claim not only that it is an outgrowth of a Christian preaching environment but that the Qur’an’s main audience was a Biblically-saturated (or a Christian or Halakhic-inclined) community. Mecca disappears (for some, literally) from the map, and Muḥammad becomes, if not a legendary figure, inconsequential.1
1/Not a rereading Walid. A reading outside the narrative (Mecca/Medina/Zem Zem...) as it should always have been. But Westerners trusted you. They were wrong. Now the veil is unveiling...
2/ Yes Biblically-saturated, it is the word.
3/ Yes there's no Mecca before Islam. Nada.
4/ "Muḥammad" has never existed, yes. It is an adjective qualifying Jesus in the Dome inscription (cf. Kropp ...)
Yet this is not the only reason to revisit the topic of Muḥammad in the Qur’an: most
Qur’an specialists take (and have always taken) the historical existence of Muḥammad as a given, and so nowadays do most of the radical revisionists
Exceptionnal! He confesses that so called
radical revisionists are not! Since the existence of Muḥammad , the producer of the Quranic corpus is a given for them! Can they be designated as
radical revisionists then?
Nope.
Because a normal revisionist (that I am...) after a look at the dossier, the existence of Muḥammad is surely not a given! It has to be settled before engaging the rest.
There is actually a more serious issue at hand. Our Fragestellung about what the Qur’an has to tell us about Muḥammad is deeply problematic. It is what I call biographically conceived, seeking to reconstruct a life of Muḥammad in the manner of a nineteenth-century outline of the bourgeois comprehensive and comprehensible life. Having cast the Sīra nabawiyya aside, our turn to the Qur’an has proven disappointing, entailing a total disregard of what we could learn about Muḥammad from the Qur’an
Waiting for the "but/except"...
Got it : #2
We do have a date, indeed a fundamental date, to frame the Qur’an, which I will return to below.
But, more importantly, the Qur’an is packed with information about Muḥammad.
Exceptional! I'm a great prophet, I knew it.
The Qur’an would not be what it is if it did provide a biography in the manner academics seek. It is actually a far more important document than a linear, biographical gospel would be: it is a record of his preaching.
Because the Gospels are not a record of the preaching of Jesus? (Why not
)
I'm sure Walid Saleh is an intelligent guy. When it deals with the Quran, he is totally circumvented.
To be continued (or not...)
Topic: Qur'anic studies today