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Scepticism as method in the study of Quranic origins: A review article of Stephen J. Shoemaker, Creating the Qur’an: A Historical-Critical Study (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2022)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 April 2025
Abstract
This paper presents a review article of Creating the Qur’an by Stephen J. Shoemaker, a monograph that is highly critical of Quranic studies as practised in the Western academy today, arguing, among other things, that Islamic studies scholars need to learn from scholarship in other fields, namely history of religions and biblical studies, and that the Quran as we know it today, in both form and content, is a product of the early eighth century, and was propagated by the Umayyad caliph ʿAbd al-Malik. The article discusses these claims and puts them in the context of methodological issues concerning the study of early Islam and the origins of the Quran in particular.
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- Review Article
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- © The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of SOAS University of London
References
1 This almost exclusive interest in origins is not unique to the study of Islam. Orientalists followed the lead of biblical scholars, who similarly lost interest in their own scriptures once canonized. “It could be said that historical criticism addressed itself almost entirely to the question of how we came to have the Bible, and when it had solved this problem, saw little else for the biblical scholar to do”, John Barton, “Historical-critical approaches” in Barton (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Biblical Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 10.
2 Régis Blachère, Introduction au Coran second edition (Paris, 1991), 3. Similarly: W.M. Watt, and R. Bell, Introduction to the Qur’an (Edinburgh, 1970), 109.
3 Le Coran des historiens, ed. Mohammad Ali Amir-Moezzi and Guillaume Dye (Paris: Cerf, 2019).
4 Devin Stewart, “Reflections on the state of the art in Western Qurʾanic studies”, in Carol Bakhos and Michael Cook (eds), Islam and Its Past: Jahiliyya, Late Antiquity, and the Qurʾān (Oxford, 2017), 6.
5 The reference is to the foundational work in Western studies of the Quranic text, the Geschichte des Qorans by Theodor Nöldeke, especially in the second edition, with the assistance of Friedrich Schwally, Gotthelf Bergsträsser, and Otto Pretzl, Geschichte des Qorans (Leipzig: Dieterich’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1909); The History of the Qur’an, trans. Wolfgang Behn (Leiden: Brill, 2013). Schwally revised the section on the collection of the Quran.
6 Aaron Hughes, “New methods, old methods in the study of Islam: on the importance of translation”, in Abbas Aghdassi and Aaron W. Hughes (eds), New Methodological Perspectives in Islamic Studies (Leiden: Brill, 2023), 16.
7 Shoemaker puts the reviewer in the awkward position of appearing hypercritical or obsessive in fault-finding. However, a full accounting of his arguments is beyond the scope of any one review; even his brief summary of Welch’s EI article contains enough minor misrepresentations to make a concise and coherent critique impossible, and one risks looking vindictive or worse if one attempts to explain all of one’s objections. As this review article will I hope make clear, perhaps the best one can say is that anyone interested the topics treated would be well advised to look at the sources Shoemaker cites before accepting his statements (in this case, Welch in “Ḳurʾn”, EI2 vol. V, pp. 404–6, and Creating the Qur’an, 23–5).
8 Les fondations de l’islam. Entre écriture et histoire (Paris: Seuil, 2002); Aux origines du Coran. Questions d’hier, approches d’aujourd’hui (Paris: Téraèdre, 2004).
9 Ibn Shabba, Tārīkh al-madīna al-munawwara, ed. Shaltūt (Medina, 1979?), iii, 992–3.
10 De Prémare, Aux origines, 74.
11 Ibn Shabba, Tārīkh al-madīna al-munawwara, ii, 710.
12 Ibn Saʿd, Kitāb al-ṭabaqāt al-kabīr, ed. ʿAlī Muḥammad ʿUmar (Cairo: Maktabat al-Khānjī, 2002), V 311–2.
13 Sayf ibn ʿUmar, Kitāb al-ridda wa-l-futūḥ, ed. Qāsim al-Sāmārrāʾī (Leiden: Smitskamp Oriental Antiquarium, 1995), 50.
14 Sayf, Kitāb al-ridda wa-l-futūḥ, 50.
15 Claude Gilliot, “Collecte ou mémorisation du Coran. Essai d’analyse d’un vocabulaire ambigu”, in Rüdiger Lohlker (ed.), Ḥadīṯstudien – Die Überlieferungen des Propheten im Gespräch. Festschrift für Prof. Dr. Tilman Nagel (Hamburg: Verlag Dr. Kovac, 2009), 77–132.
16 One could of course think that reports have been suppressed in order to propagate a particular version (that of al-Zuhrī). Such a theory would require addressing at least two major problems. First, by what mechanism could state authorities have enforced such a prohibition on the writings and teachings of historians, hadith scholars, and Quran commentators and others? Second, given that our sources contain all kinds of divergent and highly controversial material, some of it directly related to major schisms in the community, can we imagine that “they” censored only material related to Quranic origins? Or, more broadly, that certain topics were proscribed, when all kinds of other contentious material circulated freely?
17 Non-ʿUthmānic codices are usually associated with a Companion of Muhammad, most famously Ubayy ibn Kaʿb and Ibn Masʿūd. These versions are said to have enjoyed much popularity, usually in a particular region (e.g. Ibn Masʿūd in Kufa). However, Ibn Shabba and others mention various anonymous codices as well.
18 De Prémare, “ʿAbd al-Malik b. Marwān and the process of the Qurʾān’s composition”, in Karl-Heinz Ohlig and Gerd R. Puin (eds), The Hidden Origins of Islam (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2010), 208. De Prémare refers to Arthur Jeffery, Materials for the History of the Text of the Qurʾān (Leiden: Brill, 1937), 10. Neither gives the full text or translation of Abū Ḥayyān.
19 Abū Ḥayyān, al-Baḥr al-muḥīṭ (Cairo, 1328 [1910–11]), vol. 7, p. 274.
20 Mohammed Ali Amir-Moezzi, The Silent Qur’an and the Speaking Qur’an, trans. Ormsby (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 54 and 189 n. 46.
21 Fred M. Donner, Narratives of Islamic Origins: The Beginnings of Islamic Historical Writing (Princeton: Darwin Press, 1998), 39 ff.
22 William A. Graham, Divine Word and Prophetic Word in Early Islam: A Reconsideration of the Sources, with Special Reference to the Divine Saying, or So-called “Hadîth Qudsî” (The Hague: Mouton and Co., 1977); “The earliest meaning of ‘Qur’ân’”, Die Welt des Islams 23/24, 1984, 361–77.
23 The potential pitfalls of assuming a one-size-fits-all biblical model are demonstrated by Devin Stewart’s “Wansbrough, Bultmann, and the theory of variant traditions in the Qurʾān”, in Angelika Neuwirth and Michael Sells (eds), Qurʾānic Studies Today (London: Routledge, 2016), 17–51, in which he argues that John Wansbrough’s application of Rudolf Bultmann’s form criticism, while not on the face of it unreasonable, turns out to falter due to the very different nature of the sources.
24 François Déroche, Qurʾans of the Umayyads: A First Overview (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 96–7.
25 E.g. Déroche, Qurʾans of the Umayyads, 137, who in turn cites Donner, “The Qurʾān in recent schoalrship”, in Gabriel Said Reynolds (ed.), The Qurʾān in its Historical Context (London: Routledge, 2008), 42.
26 E.g. “De Prémare has carefully analysed the relevant reports in his many publications, and here we will effectively summarize their information, leaving readers more interested in the details to consult his works” (272, n. 12) and similarly for Hamdan at n. 6. (Studien zur Kanonisierung des Korantextes, Wiesbaden, 2006; “The second Maṣāḥif project: a step towards the canonization of the Qurʾānic text”, in Angelika Neuwirth et al. (eds), The Qur’an in Context, Leiden: Brill, 2010, 795–835.)
27 Nicolai Sinai, “When did the consonantal text of the Quran reach closure? Part I”, BSOAS 77/2, 2014, 282.
28 Sinai, “When did the consonantal text”, 283, following al-Nawawī (d. 1277), who wrote a commentary on Muslim’s Ṣaḥīḥ.
29 “On notera que le mot sūra (notamment dans le Coran) ne veut pas nécessairement dire « sourate » – il fait simplement référence à un écrit, même bref. S’agit-il, dans ce contexte, sinon exactement des sourates 2, 4 et 3, au moins de textes approchants, ou est-il simplement question de sections de ces sourates (par exemple un texte centré autour de Q 2: 63–74 pour l’écrit de La vache) ? On évitera de se prononcer.” (Guillaume Dye, “Pourquoi et comment se fait un texte canonique ? Quelques réflexions sur l’histoire du Coran”, in Christian Brouwer, Guillaume Dye, and Anja van Rompaey (eds), Hérésies. Une construction d’identités religieuses, Brussels: Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 2015, 90.)
30 Georges Tatar (ed.), Ḥiwār islāmī masīḥī fī ʿahd al-khalīfa al-maʾmūn 813–834 (Strasbourg: Faculté de théologie protestante, 1977), 117.
31 Chase Robinson, ʿAbd al-Malik (Oxford: Oneworld, 2005), 104.
32 Fred M. Donner, Muhammad and the Believers: At the Origins of Islam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 206–08.
33 Shoemaker does qualify his reading of Brockopp (p. 298, n. 22), but as the latter states his own view on the Quran later in the article, Shoemaker’s statements are misleading (Jonathan Brockopp, “Islamic origins and incidental normativity”, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 84/1, 2016, 32–7.
34 The “Sanaa palimpsest” is a remarkable and unprecedented discovery for the history of the Quranic text, but its differences from the ʿUthmānic muṣhaf are relatively modest. It contains variations unknown to the early sources, but those variations are of precisely the same kind and frequency as those reported for the other codices. For example:
There are additions, omissions, transpositions, and substitutions of entire words and sub-word elements (morphemes). A large number of these variants involve “minor” elements of language such as suffixes, prefixes, prepositions, and pronouns. Many variants involve changes of person, tense, mood, or voice (passive or active), or the use of different words having the same root. (Behnam Sadeghi and Mohsen Goudarzi, “Ṣanʿāʾ I and the origins of the Qurʾān”, Der Islam 87, 2012, 20.)
35 I can only admire the self-assurance that permits one to write “let it be noted that the collective findings of memory science and the study of oral cultures have indeed effectively proved the wholesale inauthenticity of [pre-Islamic] poetry as preserving the actual words of any pre-Islamic poets” (p. 297, n. 110), without reference to any sources or showing any evidence of being familiar with the poetry itself and the debates around its authenticity. Shoemaker is apparently unaware, for instance, that there are indeed references to the kitābs of poets before Islam. I have no particular position on the topic, but I would question the presumption that a handful of contemporary social science studies permits one to render summary judgement on a complicated subject so far removed in space and time.
36 John Wansbrough, Quranic Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 20–27. Devin Stewart treats Wansbrough’s treatment of the Shuʿayb narratives in “Wansbrough, Bultmann, and the theory of variant traditions in the Qurʾān”.
37 The discussion is a typical one of classification: is “Meccan” to be taken temporally (i.e. before the Hijra) or geographically (i.e. revealed in Mecca, and what do we understand by that, Mecca proper or its environs, etc.), and so on. al-Itqān, ed. Muḥammad Abū l-Faḍl Ibrāhīm (Saudi Arabia: Wizārat al-shuʾūn al-islāmiyya, n.d.) I, 23 (nawʿ 1).
38 Le Coran des historiens, vol. i, 733–918.
39 BSOAS 77/2, 2014, 273–92 and BSOAS 77/3, 2014, 509–21.