The Study of Islamic Origins: New Perspectives and Contexts (Issn)

"The study of Islam's origins from a rigorous historical and social science perspective is still wanting. At the same time, a renewed attention is being paid to the very plausible pre-canonical redactional and editorial stages of the Qur'an, a book whose core many contemporary scholars agree to be formed by various 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. 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. The following volume gathers select studies that were originally shared at the Early Islamic Studies Seminar. These studies aim at exploring afresh the dawn and early history of Islam with the tools of biblical criticism as well as the approaches set forth in the study of Second Temple Judaism, Christian, and Rabbinic origins, thereby contributing to the renewed, interdisciplinary study of formative Islam as part and parcel of the complex processes of religious identity formation during Late Antiquity." --Provided by publisher Contents 5 Introduction 7 I Early Islam and the Qur’ān: Methodological Considerations 17 The Current Status and Problems of Islamic Origins 17 A New Arabic Apocryphon from Late Antiquity: The Qurʾān 35 II Early Islam and the Qur’ān: Historical, Literary, and Cross-Comparative Analyses 51 Body Parts Nomenclature in the Qur’anic Corpus 51 The Queen of Sheba in the Qur’ān and Late Antique Midrash 91 Standing under the Mountain: Jewish and Christian Threads to a Qur’anic Construction 103 Mapping the Sources of the Qur’anic Jesus 159 The Natural Theology of the Qur’ān and Its Late Antique Christian Background: A Preliminary Outline 183 III Early Islam and the Qur’ān: Social, Political, and Religious Contexts 209 Q 2:102, 43:31, and Ctesiphon-Seleucia 209 Prophecies Fulfilled: The Qur’anic Arabs in the Early 600s 237 The Sasanian Conquest of Ḥimyar Reconsidered: In Search of a Local Hero 265 Contextual Readings of Religious Statements in Early Islamic Inscriptions 281 The Gods of the Qur’ān: The Rise of Ḥijāzī Henotheism during Late Antiquity 303 “One Community to the Exclusion of Other People”: A Superordinate Identity in the Medinan Community 331 List of Contributors 383