Introduction

Today, Qur’anic studies are thriving, and there is not a year in which introductory or specialist essays do not appear, motivated by the desire to add something new to the ongoing debate on the Qur’an, not to mention the immense and constant literary production that preserves and celebrates all aspects of the sacred text of Islam. Not even this book, which has introductory aims, can avoid the need to clarify, according to the intentions of the author, how this umpteenth work on the Qur’an should be positioned within the production and the continuous debate that it fuels.

The bibliographical references show how remarkable the number of books and articles on the Qur’an has become in recent decades. The revolution induced by the publication of Quranic Studies by John Wansbrough (d. 2002) in 1977 added to this, with the reactions that followed that, overall, served the purpose of bringing the conversation on the origins of Islam and of the Qur’an back into the center of research, determining strongly (and sometimes polemically) contrasting lines of interpretation. These have stimulated research that has radically changed Qur’anic studies in the West.1

Before Wansbrough’s work, the panorama of Qur’anic studies had been fundamentally stable. The interpretative paradigm was based on the history of the Qur’an written by Theodor Nöldeke (d. 1930) and completed by his students before World War II. Specialized studies counted, with full confidence, on the Introduction to the Qur’an (1st ed. 1953) by Richard Bell (d. 1952), later revised and published in 1970 by William Montgomery Watt (d. 2006), or on the introduction by Régis Blachère (d. 1973), written in 1947, when the French production still had a role and a pervasiveness comparable to that of Anglo-Saxon production.2

In this situation, the Islamic historical narrative was fundamentally accepted: the Qur’anic text was ascribable to Muḥammad (570 circa–632), a prophet hailing from the Arabian Peninsula, and this was also so for those who spoke of the Qur’an in explicit terms as a book produced by Muḥammad, the man. Differences in approach, in terms of greater sympathy, as in the case of Watt’s studies on Muḥammad, differently modulated the relationship between the Prophet’s sincerity or responsibility in terms of the revelation, without altering the framework of formation and fixation of the text, as substantially accepted in the work by Nöldeke and by his students.

Said vision, more sympathetic and less prejudicially averse to Islam and Muslims, must have appeared to be an important novelty when it was put forth more and more frequently during the mid-20th century, in contrast with a previously critical attitude that had often been prejudicially negative towards Islam and the Qur’an. However, though the ecumenical attitude of Watt is appealing to our contemporary sensibilities, we can today recognize that his work and others like it are merely variations on a single theme: rehearsing the classical Islamic approach of imposing the biography of Muḥammad upon the Qur’an to make it more comprehensible.3

Wansbrough’s studies, and the studies of those who came after him, have changed this interpretative paradigm and have brought the theme of the origins of Islam and the Qur’an to the center of critical analysis with new lines of investigation.

The most recent production on the Qur’an, along these lines, in the wake of these novelties, has completely changed approach and perspective; additionally, the appearance of a growing number of Muslim scholars in the area of Islamic studies in the West has brought another novel element. The latter have often tried, together with non-Muslim colleagues, to follow a different course in the study of the Qur’an. Consequently, over the last fifty years, previous certainties have been swept away by new areas of Qur’anic studies or by the repositioning of old questions discussed with new methodologies.

On the one hand, with Wansbrough, and claiming to take inspiration from investigative techniques honed in other disciplines (in the case of Wansbrough, the methods of the Formgeschichte and the demythologization of the Scripture carried out by Rudolf Bultmann),4 a fundamentally skeptical approach considers the Islamic tradition unusable, because of its late dating and because it has been invalidated by various contingencies which arose at the height of the Islamic era. In accordance with this interpretation, external, coeval evidence and consonance with the surrounding religious environment of late antiquity is the preferred key to a correct interpretation of the origins of Islam and, therefore, of the Qur’an.

The strengths of such a viewpoint derive from the problematic nature and the late and apologetic character of Islamic literature overall. Today, though, the dating and the geographical position of the fixation of the Qur’an and of the tradition on Muḥammad proposed by Wansbrough (200 years after the death of the Prophet and in the Mesopotamian region) are untenable because they are refuted by the surviving manuscript evidence.5 This critical stance, cultivated by an increasingly reduced number of scholars, is accompanied by the skepticism derived from the old and traditional attitudes of Islamic studies that live on in certain philologic analyses or through some textual issues or phenomena that cannot be traced back to the Islamic confessional viewpoint. The religious attitude of the nineteenth-century authors, often of Christian or Jewish faith, is no longer so notably represented, but it is still evident in certain, more critical approaches and, in some cases, even deliberately anti-Muslim ones.

On the other hand, even in the area of Islamic studies, a confessional attitude, or in any case a quasi-confessional one, has gained ground. This attitude considers the Qur’an an exceptional theological and literary event, to a certain extent singular, and believes that many of its features can be explained utilizing, with some discernment, what is recorded in the Islamic tradition. Non-Muslim sympathetic scholars who deliberately want to expiate the old, negative, and preconceived judgements of more dated scholarship in Islamic and Oriental studies do not fail to make themselves heard, and they aim towards a relationship, or at least a dialogue with Muslims. Muslim scholars who study or teach in Western universities and who generally focus on literary aspects of the Qur’anic text to defend its originality and, in a less direct manner, its unique, if not sacred, character, may have different goals but a similar attitude.

Between these two extremes, many other intermediate positions uphold less clear-cut and more articulated viewpoints, and they contend with the identification of specific problems or characteristics. They avoid a polarization that determines positions that do not dialogue with each other and that struggle to find a common ground and, accordingly, fail in their attempt, in historical research, to move ahead and to build, piece by piece, shared knowledge.

The vast bibliography, with often centripetal directives, which aims towards segmented lines of research, often in contrast with others, is an inherent and almost inevitable problem in humanistic research, also in relation to the Qur’an. More than extreme specialization, it is the inability to move away from preconceived positions and the circularity of an investigation that believes it already has all the answers in its premises that represent the greatest pitfalls that preclude the possibility of reaching shared conclusions.

In writing this extensive introduction, my intention was to offer a non-confessional key to understanding the Qur’an, which took this polarization into consideration and aimed to assess the state of the research, highlighting the limits of various approaches and points upon which to build other avenues of research. The Qur’an, both because of its contents and because of its form, challenges each analysis and displays unique characteristics and aspects that continuously interrogate Muslim exegetes and critical Western analyses. The certain and sound answers that can be offered will not be many. Nonetheless, some major points can be anticipated.

I believe that few doubts can remain as to the fact that in the formative environment described by the Islamic tradition, in the Arabian Peninsula, a religious message connected to a prophet like Muḥammad did emerge which displayed many elements of continuity with the religious character of the region in late antiquity, and with novel and original elements connected to the formative environment and inherent to the creation of a new religious message. This message was recorded in writing in a sufficiently stable manner toward the middle of the seventh century in a form that roughly corresponds to the Qur’an we possess today. In contrast to the traditional Muslim approach to the canonization of the Qur’an, the text contains many elements that are susceptible to other interpretations. Among scholars, there is a diversity of opinion about the combination of oral and written processes that ultimately produced the text that was eventually promulgated as the official version.

A sound, critical point of view that is hopefully not disturbed by other factors cannot directly engage with the confessional viewpoint. These are, after all,...