What are Western scholars of the Qur'an doing? (2021-08-29) ​

0:00:01 in this video i want to share with you
0:00:03 an overview of quranic studies um where
0:00:07 they're at at the moment in the west and
0:00:10 the different approaches there are
0:00:12 and i'm going to share with you in a
0:00:14 second a video you can watch it here
0:00:16 it'll go straight into the videos about
0:00:18 eight minutes long it's produced by the
0:00:20 university of nottingham and they're
0:00:22 interviewing a chap called dr holger
0:00:24 zellington uh he's an academic at
0:00:27 cambridge university also professor in
0:00:29 germany he's a chronic scholar
0:00:32 and he very helpfully outlines uh
0:00:35 broadly the three schools of thought
0:00:37 that currently exists in western
0:00:39 scholars one is the traditionalist
0:00:41 school and this is an approach by
0:00:43 western scholars that pretty much sees
0:00:45 every verse in the quran having a
0:00:47 precise location in the prophet
0:00:50 muhammad's life
0:00:52 and then another school is the
0:00:53 revisionist school which finds little or
0:00:55 no connection with the traditional
0:00:57 islamic version of the history of the
0:00:59 events
0:01:00 and this school famously associated with
0:01:02 people like john wan's brother the
0:01:04 british gol in the 1970s who said
0:01:06 basically the quran nothing to do with
0:01:08 muhammad it was written much much later
0:01:11 centuries later connected with
0:01:12 mesopotamia and so on these are people
0:01:15 who you know severely challenge and
0:01:16 reject the muslim sources about the
0:01:19 quran and the life of the prophet and
0:01:22 then the third school
0:01:24 is the neo-traditionalist approach
0:01:27 and they see a lot of value in the uh uh
0:01:30 the traditional islamic narrative but
0:01:32 they might question one or two aspects
0:01:35 of it
0:01:37 and this video as i say will hopefully
0:01:39 give an overview of where chronic
0:01:41 studies are at the moment and this would
0:01:43 be of interest to you if you uh watch uh
0:01:46 what western scholars are up to in this
0:01:48 regard um now a friend of mine usman
0:01:51 sheikh is coming on blogging theology
0:01:52 i'm pleased to say on the 8th of
0:01:54 september
0:01:55 he's just completed post-graduate
0:01:57 research at the university of oxford and
0:02:00 his
0:02:01 supervisor is the author of this book
0:02:04 nicholas sinai is professor at the
0:02:06 university of oxford and a fellow of
0:02:09 pembridge college college and he's
0:02:11 written the book the quran a historical
0:02:14 critical introduction and i'll link to
0:02:16 it in the description below i'm about a
0:02:18 quarter of the way through it and he
0:02:21 understand falls in the
0:02:22 neo-traditionalist
0:02:24 camp uh that school of thought and uh he
0:02:27 was listening sheikh's supervisor at
0:02:29 oxford and he's a young german scholar
0:02:32 uh none of these people by the way apart
0:02:34 from muslim sheikh are muslims they are
0:02:36 western scholars who accept the
0:02:38 historical critical method hcm as i like
0:02:41 to call it
0:02:42 and this hcm the historical critical
0:02:45 method has some built-in assumptions
0:02:48 which i think are problematic highly
0:02:50 problematic for muslims and for others
0:02:52 uh jews and christians too actually for
0:02:55 example without going into too much
0:02:57 detail here but one of the principles of
0:02:59 this methodology is the denial of the
0:03:02 supernatural denial that god inspires
0:03:04 people inspires revelation or sends
0:03:07 prophets and so the way they look at the
0:03:09 crimes entirely in a secular way looking
0:03:11 at purely
0:03:14 history understood without any divine
0:03:16 eruption into the world so the prophet
0:03:20 muhammad is not a prophet in this
0:03:22 understanding he is just a man and the
0:03:24 quran is treated like any other book in
0:03:26 history the bible or any other ancient
0:03:29 text
0:03:30 now this is obviously highly problematic
0:03:32 from a muslim position however
0:03:35 um there are um many as i've been
0:03:37 reading but many interesting
0:03:38 observations and insights still to be
0:03:40 gained from the historical critical
0:03:43 approach so i actually do recommend this
0:03:45 it's uh the level is aimed at a kind of
0:03:47 undergraduate level i guess i found it
0:03:49 quite challenging as a relative newcomer
0:03:52 to some of this scholarship um but it's
0:03:55 absolutely fascinating lots of gems of
0:03:56 knowledge in here and
0:03:58 he's lots of powerful um rebuttals of
0:04:02 the revisionist approach so he asserts
0:04:05 that based on the best evidence muhammad
0:04:07 did indeed exist uh he says also that
0:04:10 the series that we have in the quran 114
0:04:14 surahs on page
0:04:15 48 for example after a long discussion
0:04:18 which i won't go into the simplest
0:04:20 explanation for this would appear to be
0:04:22 the assumption that the sirs took shape
0:04:24 during the life of the muhammad of
0:04:26 muhammad so he's saying basically the
0:04:28 series we have in the quran the 114
0:04:30 chapters are uh the chapters that
0:04:33 muhammad himself had during his own
0:04:35 lifetime and he uses good historical
0:04:37 reasons why we should believe that and
0:04:40 that of course is in contrast to the
0:04:42 revisionists uh who would reject that
0:04:46 so um
0:04:47 he mentions uh coming back now to the
0:04:49 video i'm about to show you dr holger uh
0:04:52 mentions other fascinating projects that
0:04:54 are underway he talks about the corpus
0:04:56 chronicum
0:04:57 nice latin phrase there this is a bunch
0:05:00 of scholars in berlin in germany and
0:05:02 there's an on a massive online project
0:05:04 to
0:05:06 produce a scholarly edition of the quran
0:05:08 online talks about that and other
0:05:10 schools of thought based in america
0:05:14 and so on i won't go into all that it
0:05:15 says eight minute video
0:05:17 very accessible
0:05:19 and um i hope you enjoy as much as i did
0:05:22 until next time
0:05:24 the field of quranic studies is a very
0:05:27 wide one in
0:05:29 western society today
0:05:32 and to introduce the breadth that is
0:05:35 involved in quranic studies i have dr
0:05:38 holger zellentine
0:05:42 holger
0:05:43 the quran a single book the study of the
0:05:46 quran takes many forms
0:05:49 can you try and take us through
0:05:52 the breadth of quranic studies
0:05:55 i will do my best and
0:05:57 i think the the best way to give a very
0:06:00 brief lay of the land
0:06:02 is by using
0:06:03 the three categories that a colleague of
0:06:05 mine in stanford behnam siddiqui
0:06:07 has put forward
0:06:10 he argues well that's basically within
0:06:11 the western
0:06:13 schools
0:06:14 three
0:06:14 approaches to the quran
0:06:16 the first being traditionalist the
0:06:19 second being revisionist the third being
0:06:22 neo-traditionalists
0:06:23 now what he means by that is that
0:06:26 the
0:06:27 traditional study of the quran
0:06:29 approaches the quran through muslim
0:06:31 tradition through the
0:06:33 traditions attributed to the prophet
0:06:35 muhammad
0:06:36 through the
0:06:37 Music
0:06:40 traditional way in which the
0:06:42 individual servers are related to the
0:06:44 life of muhammad
0:06:45 and to
0:06:47 other
0:06:48 early
0:06:49 muslim traditions now
0:06:51 the key factor here is that the quran is
0:06:55 attributed exactly word by word
0:06:58 to the prophet into specific
0:07:00 moments in his life
0:07:02 and that is the traditional school and
0:07:04 for the most part uh western even
0:07:06 critical scholars have followed that
0:07:08 broadly they've constructed the quran as
0:07:10 being partially given in makkah
0:07:12 partially in medina
0:07:14 and have even found a way to give an
0:07:16 internal
0:07:18 sequence of the service and that is what
0:07:20 uh is called a traditionalist
0:07:23 um
0:07:24 now the revisionists
0:07:26 were a school
0:07:28 that basically was brought into being by
0:07:30 this uh
0:07:31 work of wansbro a british scholar um who
0:07:35 said well if you look at the quran we
0:07:37 cannot really use the muslim sources we
0:07:40 have to discard any of the muslim
0:07:42 evidence and we have to maybe look at
0:07:44 its origins say hundreds of years later
0:07:47 in in mesopotamia a quite radical move
0:07:51 he had a it was very smart uh scholar
0:07:53 and he has lots of interesting insights
0:07:55 but of course he went a bit too fast
0:07:57 people tend to do and this revisionism
0:08:00 meaning to radically take the
0:08:02 traditional muslim narrative out of
0:08:04 quranic studies
0:08:06 has probably found its peak in the
0:08:08 famous book by patricia carone and
0:08:10 michael cook
0:08:11 called hagarism which also tried to
0:08:13 discard the traditional evidence and
0:08:15 to
0:08:16 re-frame the quran as a much later
0:08:19 document that is so revisionism in its
0:08:22 in its purest
0:08:24 of course any western scholar who does
0:08:26 not accept a traditional narrative is
0:08:28 somehow revisionist because one revises
0:08:31 what is being
0:08:33 put forth
0:08:34 the third category therefore is very
0:08:36 interesting it is the
0:08:37 neo-traditionalists
0:08:38 which would say well you know the um
0:08:42 people like wensbroe and crony had good
0:08:45 reasons to go too far but they went way
0:08:46 too far
0:08:47 and a critical historical study nowadays
0:08:51 would actually
0:08:52 move quite a bit along the lines of the
0:08:55 traditional muslim narrative not to say
0:08:57 that it's true word by word but to say
0:08:59 well the broad concepts of a sequence of
0:09:03 revelation of a sequence of uh also
0:09:06 iteration and and reduction then would
0:09:09 be historically verifiable which makes
0:09:12 them neo-traditional as they go back not
0:09:14 all the way but part the way to the
0:09:16 um
0:09:18 to the way that the quran has always
0:09:19 been understood so those are the three
0:09:22 broad schools
0:09:24 traditionalists
0:09:25 revisionists and neo-traditionalists
0:09:27 according to just this free apartheid
0:09:29 structure i think it's even a bit more
0:09:31 complex because there would be people
0:09:33 somewhere in between you know say
0:09:36 neo-traditionalism and revisionism
0:09:38 but
0:09:39 there is
0:09:40 actually
0:09:42 i think a very
0:09:43 rich discussion now going on in quranic
0:09:46 studies that
0:09:48 can be mapped quite nicely onto this
0:09:50 this paradigm
0:09:52 and
0:09:52 Music
0:09:54 the
0:09:55 three schools
0:09:56 that probably are the most active today
0:09:59 are
0:10:01 one um a school around the uh project of
0:10:05 the corpus chronico in berlin uh
0:10:07 initiated by professor angelica neuward
0:10:10 and founded with the
0:10:11 brandenburges academy of schaften
0:10:14 this is a massive online
0:10:18 project that collects
0:10:22 many of the quranic manuscripts we have
0:10:24 it collects
0:10:26 sources that are pertinent to specific
0:10:28 servers it gives you a transcription a
0:10:29 translation
0:10:31 it's a multi um
0:10:32 a year undertaking
0:10:35 that
0:10:36 does two things one it shows the quran
0:10:38 as in all its complexity
0:10:40 but it also comes from an approach that
0:10:43 sees the quran as
0:10:45 given in sequences as
0:10:47 being brought forth
0:10:48 as
0:10:49 along the traditional lines of
0:10:52 um
0:10:55 first the meccan and the median phase
0:10:57 and which it sees very critically but
0:10:59 still um as basically accurate let's see
0:11:02 the people in berlin of course many more
0:11:05 are part of that but it's based in
0:11:07 berlin
0:11:08 now a second group of scholars that
0:11:10 i am personally affiliated with uh
0:11:13 is
0:11:14 located around the work of gabriel said
0:11:16 reynolds at the university of notre dame
0:11:19 who has current support from the melon
0:11:21 foundation and runs the quran seminar
0:11:25 and here we also come together and
0:11:27 discuss individual servers
0:11:29 but
0:11:30 more with an emphasis on the
0:11:34 quran as a text as a whole
0:11:36 the way we have it
0:11:39 many people not all by no means all but
0:11:41 many people affiliated with this project
0:11:43 a bit more reluctant to say we can see
0:11:46 those layers of the ground we can see
0:11:47 the sequence probably most of us would
0:11:50 say well obviously it is a text it is
0:11:52 has many many
0:11:53 stages to it but we're not yet sure
0:11:56 enough how to lay them out and me
0:11:58 personally coming from the background of
0:12:00 jewish studies
0:12:01 um i'm a bit very about you know any
0:12:05 precise attribution of a sequence i'm
0:12:07 saying okay now this all makes sense but
0:12:08 maybe we're holding the telescope the
0:12:10 wrong way around
0:12:12 so this school sees the quran as a whole
0:12:16 and sees sequence but isn't is a bit
0:12:19 uncertain about it
0:12:21 and
0:12:22 so i would say whereas um
0:12:25 you would you could basically
0:12:27 uh put the corpus chronicom in berlin
0:12:30 within the neotraditionalists
0:12:32 the uh project of reynolds i think you
0:12:34 can place somewhere in between
0:12:36 neotraditional and revisionists
0:12:39 there's a third school that has
0:12:42 received lots of attention
0:12:44 also located in germany the university
0:12:46 of zubrikind it's called the inara group
0:12:48 the you know enlightenment group
0:12:50 somebody needs to be enlightened in
0:12:51 their view and
0:12:52 it's uh
0:12:54 don't want to be too critical about them
0:12:56 there's wonderful scholars affiliated
0:12:57 also with that group but they are most
0:13:00 extreme in their revisionist
0:13:02 uh approach and they try to take the
0:13:05 quran really out of
0:13:07 its context even try to take muhammad
0:13:09 out of the quran
0:13:11 and they
0:13:13 probably are most
0:13:16 clearly represented by the work of
0:13:18 christoph luxembourg
0:13:20 a scholar who wants to
0:13:23 radically
0:13:24 re-phrase the quran and to
0:13:27 make it a document that is entirely
0:13:30 dependent on previous sources so this is
0:13:32 probably the most extreme of the
0:13:34 revisionist school
0:13:37 thank you holger for giving us that
0:13:38 wonderful panorama
0:13:40 of where quranic studies is at in the
0:13:44 west today
0:13:45 and the different approaches
0:13:48 for myself as someone who's not a
0:13:50 quranic scholar
0:13:52 uh
0:13:54 what i am
0:13:55 most fascinated to learn from you is
0:13:58 that
0:13:59 all of these investigations are not
0:14:02 being carried out by lone individuals
0:14:05 but they're being carried out by teams
0:14:06 of scholars working in great
0:14:08 collaborative projects
0:14:10 and
0:14:11 well in christian studies we've seen
0:14:13 that in things like the jesus seminar
0:14:16 but it's still a way of working
0:14:19 that
0:14:20 so few of us are actually involved in so
0:14:23 thank you number one
0:14:25 for giving us the overview of quranic
0:14:27 studies
0:14:28 and thank you for scholars in other
0:14:30 areas of theology and religious studies
0:14:32 for maybe calling to mind that we should
0:14:34 we too should be working in teams
0:14:37 absolutely thank you