This volume is a study in the history of the reception of the Qurn in the early Islamic centuries. It aims at taking scholarship beyond attempts at situating early qurnic exegesis within the confines of magisterial classical Tafsr, and offers a systematic investigation of the early interpretations of select qurnic passages against the backdrop of the interreligious milieu of the growing Islamic Empire.

By incorporating writings on the Qurn across different genres, not only by Muslim authors, but also by Arabophone Christian writers, this study maps the exegetical trajectories of key qurnic passages in the early Islamic period, thereby providing historical context for classical Tafsr works. Far from an imagined splendid isolation marred by occasional interreligious polemics, the picture we get is an exegetical feedback loop, with Christians relying on, as well as reacting to, Muslim data, and vice versa.

This study further argues that incorporating Arabic Christian readings of the Qurn inevitably enriches our understanding of the reception of the sacred text, and indeed helps us better capture the dynamism characteristic of the interreligious context of Qurn interpretation in the early Islamic centuries.

Autorentext
Mourad Takawi , University of Notre Dame, IN, USA.