The Unknown Known: Some Groundwork for Interpreting the Medinan Qur'an

As scholars have now amply demonstrated, the Qur’anic corpus exhibits firm links with a multitude of late antique traditions. Especially Syriac literature, which has been mined with renewed vigour over the course of the last decade or so, has turned out to be a veritable wellspring of intersecting material that appears far from running dry.1 Its relevance is not confined to miscellaneous narratives but extends to Qur’anic eschatology, which constitutes the very epicentre of at least parts of the Qur’an.2 In keeping with such findings, the Qur’an is now increasingly being described as a “text of late antiquity,” as the title of a recent monograph puts it.3 This novel placement of the Qur’an is sometimes accompanied by an emphasis on “the struggles of the classical mufassirūn to understand significant elements of the Qur’ān,”4 suggesting that even the earliest layer of the Islamic tradition approaches the Qur’an from across a significant cultural and linguistic gap. Hence, quite irrespective of whether or not one accepts the traditional dating and localisation of the Qur’an’s emergence, it may well seem that the Qur’anic corpus is a text that, properly understood, is more solidly anchored in the world of late antiquity rather than belonging with the subsequent Islamic tradition, despite the latter’s highly creative and sophisticated efforts at exegetical appropriation. The Qur’an, so it might appear, is a text that precedes Islam as we know it, and Islam a post-Qur’anic phenomenon.