Koranic Allusions: The Biblical, Qumranian, and Pre-Islamic Background to the Koran

“With this anthology, Ibn Warraq makes accessible to the public a collection of classic and modern articles—many of which have not previously been available in English—that examine Koranic source materials. This volume renders a great service to Islamic Studies today.”

—Pierre Larcher, professor of Arabic linguistics, Aix-Marseille University

 “Ibn Warraq’s anthologies have helped me and many of my colleagues considerably in our work. They have helped advance Koranic Studies for the last fifteen years and are indispensable research tools for a new generation of scholars. Ibn Warraq’s diligence has resulted in the recovery of the works of the great nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Semiticists and Arabists—especially German and French, almost forgotten, and certainly neglected. His probing questions and general skepticism of sources expressed in his introductions are worth pondering, and they should help refine our methodological principles.”

—Christoph Luxenberg, author of The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran

“Anyone who thinks that the aim of a modern Islamologist is to reconcile the Western scientific approach and the views of orthodox Islam should not buy this book! Although there is not a single polemical sentence in it, the problem remains that you cannot investigate the ‘sources’ of Koranic passages and the multifaceted religious milieu in which Islam emerged if you assume that the Koran is the direct and unalterable speech of God. But if we assume that Muslims—like all other human beings—are interested in their real roots, even if this should force them to re-examine their ‘collective memory,’ then Koranic Allusions and books like it certainly do them much more of a favor than those written by scholars who ‘mean well’ and, out of ‘respect for religious feelings,’ do everything to protect the Islamic world from the dangers of the West; which is to say: doubt, logical reasoning, and the disinterested quest for truth.”

—Markus Gross, historical linguist and coeditor of the Inârah series of anthologies

“How much in the Koran is history in the sense of ‘what really happened’ and how much is a fictitious story about ‘what should have happened’ becomes apparent when reading Ibn Warraq’s new anthology. He offers a collection of articles representing debates on a wide range of topics and a gamut of approaches. The findings of the researchers, some of them critical modern scholars, others luminaries of the past threatened by oblivion, cast serious doubts on almost every aspect of the ‘generally accepted’ political, religious, and linguistic history of early Islam: in the works of the ‘pagan’ poets we do not find any trace of paganism, one of them even represents a kind of biblical monotheism very similar to what we can find in the Koran; the Koran itself, its commentaries, and the biography of the prophet are full of biblical, in some cases even Haggadic allusions, and many of the ‘historical’ reports, for example, about the famous battle of Badr, turn out to be legends modeled after stories from the Old Testament. The genesis of Islam and the Koran thus seems to have been a long process in a very heterogeneous religious environment. This book will certainly help get the ‘Islamic Studies’ discipline out of its ‘academic enclave’ where reason and enlightenment never reached and the normal standards of historical research do not apply.”

—Karl-Heinz Ohlig, professor of comparative religion and history of Christianity, president of Inârah (Institute for the Research on Early Islamic History and the Koran)

Binding: Hardcover

Pages: 463