This book is a massive collection of essays concerning the meaning of the Qur'an. Some essays are translated for the first time here into English: among them, those by Barth, Philonenko, and Geyer. The collection has value as a selection of Orientalist scholarship; it is also a snapshot into the professional trajectory of its editor, Ibn Warraq and its publisher, Prometheus.
The book was announced in 2002 and reviewed around the `web but I only caught a copy in January of 2003. It starts with two introductions. The first introduction, Ibn Warraq's own, is a sprawling overview of Arabic philology and Qur'anic scholarship. The second introduction is Toby Lester's Atlantic Monthly article... which you can get for free online.
So already we can see the problems with the book, and with its editor and publisher. It is published a year after the publisher promised it, and it is too long, and it contains material that can be found elsewhere, and it contains speculations that are extremely debatable within the field. A decade later, this author will put out "Which Koran?" which, as I've reviewed elsewhere, incorporates all these problems to an unforgiveable extent.
However, and this is what distinguishes this book from "Which Koran?": it also contains articles that cannot be found elsewhere (easily) and cannot be done without.
Part 2 concerns the archaeology of Islamic sloganeering - and it has just the one article, Yehuda Nevo's "Toward a Prehistory of Islam". This starts this book off with a nuclear bang. This article in 1991 forced scholarship to take a second look into the development of *popular* "Islam". Later in 2003, Prometheus put out Nevo's "Crossroads To Islam", which supercedes this article, but this article forms an effective "trailer" for the best part of that book.
Part 3 handles the language of the Qur'an - and is really multiple sub-parts. Here, too, there is external material you will need to make sense of the articles. The sub-text of the first sub-part is Arthur Jeffery's "Foreign Vocabulary". To that Mingana's article leads up, and then Margoliouth's article amends it. The sub-text of the next sub-part is the claim of Vollers that the Qur'an was not written in "irab" (noun-declensions). Kahle attempts to rescue Vollers and then Rabin disputes Kahle-Vollers (one problem here, though, is that this whole argument is likely moot as of now). Then come some speculative essays that add little to my understanding.
Part 4 started with some nice stuff about possible sources for the Qur'anic haggada: Essenic (Bishop, Philonenko) and Coptic (Bishai). Part 4 closed with a mini-part featuring Koebert's work on sura 22 and the "talbiya" pilgrimage-prayer. There we are, again, missing some context: in this case "Eine von 1 Kor. 15.27f beeinflusste talbia" in Biblica 35 (1954). Here, additionally, are some translation-decisions and outright typoes which drove me to my wit's end. Once I figured out what was going on, which literally took me years, I ended up agreeing with his reading of sura 22; but I remained unconvinced that 1 Cor. 15.27 can be located in Arabic ritual outside the tafsir / hadith tradition of the late Umayyad era (Qatada etc). For this: Manfred Kropp, "Tripartite formulas in the Qur'anic corpus" (2011), 259.
The whole of Part 5 is a waste of time. Mainly it demonstrates the lack of Orientalist agreement over The Verse of Jizya and the meaning of Furqan, alongside additional flights of scholarly fancy.
In part 6, J Barth explains the hiccups in the Qur'an, albeit in the order of revelation and not the canonical order. He is sometimes, I think, wrong but is awesome for sura 25. In part 8, Geyer lays out the strophic structure - the innate poetry - of suras 26, 51 among others (once more, it follows up someone else's work not reproduced here - this time it's DH Mueller's "Propheten", 1896, which handles 11, 44, 69 &c). In part 8 is also a Wellhausen miscellany, "Zum Koran", among which is a translation of a para-Qur'anic qasida by one "Samuel" and the start of a commentary. The rest of parts 6 and 8 is speculative - again. Well, there's part 7, which just rips off Bell's (discredited) commentaries; and there's an introduction by Ibn Rawandi to the work of Lueling (and Luxenburg), but I consider Lueling and Luxenburg to be fringe.
Finally, part 9 has the paleography of physical Qur'anic books. Grohmann lays out that they exist; Gerd-R Puin explains some of the controversy. I liked Gerd-R Puin's essay; I just wish he'd had more time with the manuscripts.
To sum up, a hefty portion of this thick book is redundant for honest researches into the Book of Allah. The redundant essays tend toward showing how little we know of the Qur'an - they are just illustrations of ignorance. Given that Ibn Warraq's argument at the outset was that these pericopae were unintelligible even when the Qur'an was compiled, and given that Ibn Warraq started out even before this book as an anti-Islamic essayist: I can't help but feel that the editor put in this backfill not for the reader's benefit, but for the activists'.
I don't know about you, but this annoys me, it makes me feel sucker-punched. I wanted a book about Islamic scholarship. In many places, this *is* a scholarly book. But that's not good enough for the activists; the activists want me to oppose Islam. I can do that, or not, just fine without the dubious help of dubious articles. There are enough GOOD articles out there for that purpose.
So I'm subtracting a star for the bloat and above all for the tendentiousness of that bloat. But I still have to give this book a four. It is a necessary work; and even more necessary if read alongside the other work of Arthur Jeffery and Yehuda Nevo.
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