Tradition Reaffirmed: Neuwirth’s Defense of the Qur'an’s Early Text

This excerpt is from Angelika Neuwirth's contribution to The Cambridge Companion to the Qur'an (Cambridge University Press), where she discusses the controversial issues surrounding the emergence of the Qur'an and critiques the revisionist theories proposed by scholars such as John Wansbrough, Patricia Crone, Michael Cook, and Christoph Luxenberg. Neuwirth affirms the traditional view of the Qur'an as an early fixed text, challenging the alternative theories that question its authenticity and origins.

The presentation of Qur'anic developments in this chapter presupposes the reliability of the basic data of traditional accounts about the emergence of the Qur'an, assuming the transmitted Qur'anic text to be the genuine collection of the communications of the Prophet as pronounced during his activities at Mecca (about 610–22 CE), and again at Medina (1/622 until his death in 11/632). It is true that the earlier consensus of scholarly opinion on the origins of Islam has, since the publication of John Wansbrough’s Quranic Studies and Patricia Crone and Michael Cook’s Hagarism, been shattered, and that various attempts at a new reconstruction of those origins have been put forward.

As a whole, however, the theories of the so-called skeptic or revisionist scholars who, arguing historically, make a radical break with the transmitted picture of Islamic origins, shifting them in both time and place from the seventh to the eighth or ninth century and from the Arabian Peninsula to the Fertile Crescent, have by now been discarded, though many of their critical observations remain challenging and still call for investigation.

New findings of Qur'anic text fragments, moreover, can be adduced to affirm rather than call into question the traditional picture of the Qur'an as an early fixed text composed of the suras we have. Nor have scholars trying to deconstruct that image through linguistic arguments succeeded in seriously discrediting the genuineness of the Qur'an as we know it. These include the work of Christoph Luxenberg, who views the Qur'an as an originally Syriac–Arabic mélange later adapted to the rules of classical Arabic, and Günter Lüling, who reads the Qur'an as a collection of hymns composed in a Christian Arabic dialect and later revised to fit the grammatical rules newly established in the eighth and ninth centuries. Whereas Lüling’s reference to the earlier hypothesis by Karl Vollers, who had identified the original language of the Qur'an as broadly dialectal, points to a yet unresolved problem, Luxenberg’s assumption of a Syriac–Arabic linguistic mélange as the original language of the Qur'an lacks a methodologically sound basis.

The alternative visions about the genesis of the Qur'an presented by Wansbrough, Crone, Cook, Lüling, and Luxenberg are not only mutually exclusive, but rely on textual observations that are too selective to be compatible with the comprehensive Qur'anic textual evidence that can be drawn only from a systematically microstructural reading.