Carlos A. Segovia - The Quranic Noah and the Making of the Islamic Prophet: A Study of Intertextuality and Religious Identity Formation in Late Antiquity

Over the past decades the field of early Jewish and Christian studies has been witness to a fascinating number of new, challenging proposals, hypotheses, methods, and insights. Almost everything previously believed about, say, the development of Jewish sectarianism in the Second Temple Period, the emergence and variety of the earliest Christian groups, the gradual formation of rabbinic Judaism, and/or the partings of the ways between Christianity and Judaism has been carefully re-examined and explained by putting forward diverse yet innovative scholarly approaches.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of the field of early Islamic studies, although some undeniable progress has been made in recent years. Still in its infancy because of the overly conservative views and methods assumed by most scholars working in it since the mid-19th century, this is a field in which the very basic questions must now be addressed with decision.

We still lack, for example, a critical edition of the Qurn. We do not know when exactly its textus receptus was established, even though a few new suggestions have been made in recent years. Nor have we been able to locate with accuracy the beginnings of Islam as a new, independent religion. The discovery of two South-Arabic inscriptions from the mid-6th century in Marib (present-day Yemen) and Muraygn (Saudi Arabia) that invoke God as the Merciful and Jesus as his Messiah instead of his Son, thus displaying the very same Christological formula contained in the Qurn, is certainly astonishing in this respect. So too is the fact that the first non-quranic mention of the word Islam occurs in the inscriptions of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, which dates to the last decade of the 7th century. Likewise, it is difficult to say anything about the historical Muammad if we move beyond the traditional account of Islams origins, and we definitely need to do so, given the overly literary nature of the earliest Islamic sources and the very late date when they were composed. To neglect these and other related issues would be like explaining the emergence of the earliest Christ-believing groups by exclusively relying on the author of Luke-Acts, who offers a rather monochrome picture of Christian beginnings centred upon what s/he retrospectively imagined as Pauls mission; or like accepting the Mishnaic and Talmudic legends about Yavneh as the actual birthplace of rabbinic Judaism.

In short, the dawn and early history of Islam must be studied afresh as part and parcel of the complex process of religious identity formation in late antiquity. But in order to achieve some success in this appealing task, we must go all the way and make use of the theoretical notions and the methodological tools provided by the new social-science and literary methods (critical discourse analysis, narrative theory, semiotics of religion, deconstructionist historiography, etc.) set forth in the study of Second Temple Judaism as well as the study of Christian and rabbinic origins. And to re-examine both the quranic narratives on prophecy and the early Muslim representation of Muammad as the Prophet of Islam seems to me a good place to start.