Creating the Qur’an: A Historical-Critical Study

Abstract

In this work, Stephen Shoemaker writes about an under-researched topic: a critical perspective on the Qur’an’s historical origin. He follows the historical-critical methodology of religious studies and biblical scholarship in order to untangle the thorny issues regarding its date, transmission and composition. His intention is to seek ‘to understand the world behind the text and how the text came to be in the first place’ (3). In the first two chapters, Shoemaker explains his rejection of the traditional narrative about the ʿUthmānic recension, and instead argues that it was ʿAbd al-Malik (d. 86/705) who, ‘with the assistance of al-Ḥajjāj, standardized the Qur’an in the unvarying form that has come down to us today’ (43). He envisages different regional codices of proto-Qur’ans, one of which was ʿUthmān’s, that were later collected, collated and edited under ʿAbd alMalik. In his argument, Shoemaker demonstrates fluency with contemporary scholarship, on which he builds, and he enlists witnesses from within and without the Islamic tradition with persuasive force. Chapter 3, on radio-carbon dating, explains the unreliability of this approach for establishing accurate time-frames. Chapter 4 concerns the Hijaz in Late Antiquity, and builds particularly on Patricia Crone’s Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam. Shoemaker contends that Mecca and Yathrib were economically insignificant and culturally isolated, thereby rejecting the belief, propounded by W. Montgomery Watt, that they were important hubs on a trade route. Furthermore, the audience of the Qur’an must have been educated and familiar with biblical and post-biblical traditions. This does not fit with the central Hijaz, which had no significant Christian population at all, thus indicating that the Qur’an’s origins lie elsewhere. Shoemaker examines the linguistic environment of the Qur’an in Chapter 5. He draws on studies of Arabian rock inscriptions and, in examining the so-called Hijazi dialect, locates its origin in the Levant.