General Introduction

It is traditional in a study dedicated to the question of cosmology in ancient cultures to begin by stating that the interest in the cosmos, its functioning, its origins, and its appointed end, have constituted a driving force for men since the dawn of humanity. Picturing the world can probably be regarded as a universal among human cultures. Yet, the singularity of this anthropological observation is certainly weakened by the redundancy with which it is conveyed in most monographs dealing with ancient cosmologies, not to mention the pompous semi-poetic style in which they are usually framed.

At the moment of writing this introduction, in a painful attempt at distinguishing myself from my glorious (and sometimes less glorious) predecessors, I feel suddenly caught up by the inevitable. The distinctive artificial sound of a new incoming email in my mailbox just rang out; probably another spam. Title: “The Universe Has an Urgent Message for You”, followed by a short text inviting me to click on a link to discover the pressing matter the Universe wants to discuss with me. Most importantly, the post-scriptum adds that this cosmic message has an “expiration date”; contemporary eschatology undoubtedly. Brave new world …

I am not fooled by the seeming improbability of the situation of course. The arrival of this message in my mailbox – though being the first of the kind – is probably explained less by divine providence than by four years of repetitive queries concerning the cosmos in my favourite browser and its impenetrable algorithm. The grotesqueness of the situation however inexorably gives rise to a reflection: since prehistorical times up until modern days, human beings have deployed a wealth of imagination to decipher, picture, and contemplate the complexity of the world surrounding them.

The Qur’ān obviously does not escape the rule and even makes the cosmos and its functioning one of its favourite themes of discussion. In its own rhetorical fashion, repetitive and allusive, the Qur’ān spends a considerable number of verses talking about Creation, its divine authorship and guidance, its appointed end and its eschatological re-creation.1

A study that seeks to grasp such a fundamental thing as the cosmological thought of the Qur’ān is bound to take into consideration the Qur’ān as a whole. Its authors indeed never provide a theory on the cosmos, nor do they try to express their view on the mechanism of the universe in a single passage. Cosmological arguments and motifs are rather scattered throughout the text in an allusive and non-systematic fashion. Our research thus begins with the confession of its paradoxical goal: making some systematicity emerge from a text that does not do systems.

Given that the study of “cosmology” can technically embrace everything extant in the cosmos from the constitution of the throne of God in the highest heaven to the coming into existence of ants – and the Qur’ān does speak of ants –, we had to narrow down our research to the more specific themes of “creation” and “contemplation”. Both notions lie at the heart of the Qur’ānic religious program and largely determine the cosmological images that come out of it.

The Qur’ān barely ever adopts a cosmological motif for the sole purpose of describing the universe. In fact, the common thread of our research will be to show that the Qur’ānic cosmology is entirely subsumed to the Qur’ān’s overarching theological claim. For its authors, the cosmos points towards the existence of a single God, who created and guides the universe on his own. This fairly simple theological message is conveyed by means of two intertwined strategies in the text, an ethical one and a doctrinal one. On the one hand, the Qur’ān constantly invites its audience to engage in the contemplation of Creation and to find in it the traces of the existence of its unique creator. On the other hand, the Qur’ān deploys a range of doctrinal arguments – mainly in the form of polemics – aiming at supporting the idea that the world is divinely originated and guided. Both theory (doctrine of creation) and practice (contemplation) thus point towards the same reality: the divine authorship and guidance of the universe. Our research concentrates on these two aspects of the Qur’ānic cosmological discourse.

We could have added to the themes of contemplation and creation, another theme tightly related to cosmology in the Qur’ān, namely eschatology. However, the question of Qur’ānic eschatology has been much studied over the past few years and we thus chose to orientate the research towards less investigated areas.2

Our study addresses the question of natural contemplation and creation and shows how in such matters the Qur’ān echoes late antique cosmological debates, especially Christian ones. Although the study frequently highlights Qur’ānic innovations in this regard, we argue that this “cosmological model” builds on previous Christian and Jewish cosmologies to produce an original cosmological discourse. Our research thus is characterized as an attempt to study the cosmology of the Qur’ān and unearth its late antique foundations.

Current state of the research in the field of Qur’ānic studies

As theorists of “the act of reading” rightly point out, texts are filled with “extratextual reality”, which can take “the form of references to earlier works, or to social and historical norms, or to the whole culture from which the text has emerged”.3 It is fair to say that when it concerns modern cultures, a philologist’s task – namely, reconstructing this “extratextual reality” –, already constitutes a tortuous journey. When it comes to ancient texts however, the journey often turns into a long and demanding penance walk. On the one hand, the “places of indeterminacy” (Unbestimmtheitsstellen) within ancient texts are much more numerous given the temporal, spatial, and cultural shortages between modern readers and the text they read. On the other hand, though the degree varies from one text to the other, a significant amount of the material that could help reconstruct this “extratextual reality” is lost for good.

In light of the current state of the research on the Qur’ān and Early Islam, the problem appears even trickier.4 The traditional and majority paradigm among scholars since Theodor Nöldeke’s pioneering Geschichte des Qorâns, was that the Qur’ān reflects the predication of Muḥammad in Mecca and Medina and the experience of the community around him.5 Yet, this so-called “Nöldekian paradigm”6 has been increasingly challenged in recent years.7 Numerous studies have pointed out that the traditional narrative of the emergence of Islam and the Qur’ān was mostly based on texts whose historical reliability was questionable for a number of reasons (time-lapse, location, motivation, apologetics, identity, etc.).8 In parallel to this, the strict application of historical-critical methods on the Qur’ān has allowed scholars to challenge numerous aspects of this traditional paradigm: identity of the authors, identity of the Qur’ānic audience, geographical origin, date of composition, etc.9 Contemporary scholarship has also highlighted substantial problems concerning the so-called “chronology of the Qur’ān”, i. e. the idea that the Qur’ān should be read according to the quadripartite division of the life of Muḥammad (Early Meccan, Middle Meccan, Late Meccan, and Medinan).10 Although this still constitutes a matter of lively debates among specialists, a reading of the Qur’ān primarily based on these traditional sources poses incommensurable methodological issues. We did not use this literary corpus within the framework of our study.

Most recent research in the field of Qur’ānic studies has probably laid the basis of a paradigm shift from a methodological point of view. We distinguish two different axes, an intratextual one and an extratextual one.

The intratextual approach consists in reading the Qur’ān for what it has to say about its own context of emergence. This approach relies of course on philological tools such as lexicography, textual criticism, etc. A number of elements about the origins of the text can be inferred from such a reading, but the Qur’ān often remains mysterious on its historical context of production. Not only has it been described as “ahistorical”,11 but the attempt to understand specific aspects of its argumentation are often hampered by its lack of systematism. Recent use of the methods of redaction criticism (Redaktionsgeschichte) in the field started offering a somewhat distinct narrative for the emergence of the Qur’ān than what the “traditional chronology” had suggested before. Indeed, whereas scholars had so far mostly understood the Qur’ān as the repository of Muḥammad’s ipsissima verba transmitted, collected, and compiled more or less faithfully by his companions, recent historical-critical studies on the Qur’ān have started to draw the contours of a redactional history that is simply incompatible with this view. Among other things, these studies suggest that the text went through a process involving manifold revisions, that its different...