Today, Qur’anic studies are thriving, and there is not a year in which introductory or specialist essays do not appear, motivated by the desire to add something new to the ongoing debate on the Qur’an, not to mention the immense and constant literary production that preserves and celebrates all aspects of the sacred text of Islam. Not even this book, which has introductory aims, can avoid the need to clarify, according to the intentions of the author, how this umpteenth work on the Qur’an should be positioned within the production and the continuous debate that it fuels.
The bibliographical references show how remarkable the number of books and articles on the Qur’an has become in recent decades. The revolution induced by the publication ofQuranic Studies by John Wansbrough (d. 2002) in 1977 added to this, with the reactions that followed that, overall, served the purpose of bringing the conversation on the origins of Islam and of the Qur’an back into the center of research, determining strongly (and sometimes polemically) contrasting lines of interpretation. These have stimulated research that has radically changed Qur’anic studies in the West.1
Before Wansbrough’s work, the panorama of Qur’anic studies had been fundamentally stable. The interpretative paradigm was based on the history of the Qur’an written by Theodor Nöldeke (d. 1930) and completed by his students before World War II. Specialized studies counted, with full confidence, on theIntroduction to the Qur’an (1st ed. 1953) by Richard Bell (d. 1952), later revised and published in 1970 by William Montgomery Watt (d. 2006), or on the introduction by Régis Blachère (d. 1973), written in 1947, when the French production still had a role and a pervasiveness comparable to that of Anglo-Saxon production.2
In this situation, the Islamic historical narrative was fundamentally accepted: the Qur’anic text was ascribable to Muḥammad (570 circa–632), a prophet hailing from the Arabian Peninsula, and this was also so for those who spoke of the Qur’an in explicit terms as a book produced by Muḥammad, the man. Differences in approach, in terms of greater sympathy, as in the case of Watt’s studies on Muḥammad, differently modulated the relationship between the Prophet’s sincerity or responsibility in terms of the revelation, without altering the framework of formation and fixation of the text, as substantially accepted in the work by Nöldeke and by his students.
Said vision, more sympathetic and less prejudicially averse to Islam and Muslims, must have appeared to be an important novelty when it was put forth more and more frequently during the mid-20th century, in contrast with a previously critical attitude that had often been prejudicially negative towards Islam and the Qur’an. However, though the ecumenical attitude of Watt is appealing to our contemporary sensibilities, we can today recognize that his work and othe
