The Second Coming of the Book: Rethinking Qur’anic Scripturology and Prophetology

Abstract

This dissertation aims to reassess the character of the Prophet Muhammad’s movement by rethinking major aspects of the qur’anic worldview. Specifically, the dissertation proposes a new interpretation of the Qur’an’s conception of scriptural and prophetic history, which may be called respectively its “scripturology” and “prophetology.” Previous scholarship often considers the Qur’an to espouse a monotonous historical vision in which God sends a series of prophets with essentially identical messages to various human communities. Furthermore, it is often claimed that the Qur’an depicts Muhammad and his scripture as the culmination of this history and thereby as representing a final dispensation destined for humankind. In contrast to this prevailing interpretation, I contend that the Qur’an envisages history primarily in a bi-modal way, i.e. as having two towering moments: the revelation of the Torah to Moses, and the sending down of the Qur’an to Muhammad. This contention is based on a hypothesis that forms the analytical core of the dissertation: I argue that the Qur’an, in its discourse on revelations, uses the term kitāb not as a label for all scriptures but as an exclusive appellation for the Torah and the Qur’an. That the Qur’an applies the term kitāb to the Mosaic and Muhammadan scriptures alone, I further argue, reflects its estimation of the Torah and the Qur’an as the only scriptures that embody consummate divine guidance on account of their comprehensive historical and legal instruction. Moreover, I show that the Qur’an ties the revelation of these two kitābs to God’s special regard for the descendants of Abraham: the Torah was sent down for the benefit of Israelites, and the Qur’an is meant primarily for the guidance of Ishmaelites. By recognizing and underlining the Qur’an’s Abrahamic exceptionalism, the dissertation recasts the significance of the Prophet Muhammad’s mission. In the qur’anic view, the mission of Muhammad does not represent the end of a universal history of dispensations so much as it constitutes the realization of the “Abrahamic dream” for Ishmaelites and thus the second major act in the drama of the Abrahamic covenant. The two-kitāb hypothesis and its corollaries enable fresh interpretations of many qur’anic passages, a process that has far-reaching implications for our understanding of the Qur’an. The dissertation’s final chapter outlines some of these implications. For example, I argue that the Qur’an regards not only Jews but also Christians to be Israelites, that it labels both communities as ahl al-kitāb because it considers the Torah definitive to both, and that early Islam gradually lost its genealogical focus on Abraham’s descendants during the Umayyad period.