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This book is the first of two volumes that aim to produce something not previously attempted: a synthetic history of Muslim responses to the Bible, stretching from the rise of Islam to the present day. It combines scholarship with a genuine narrative, so as to tell the story of Muslim engagement with the Bible.
Covering Sunni, Imami Shi'i and Isma'ili perspectives, this study will offer a scholarly overview of three areas of Muslim response, namely ideas of corruption, use of the Biblical text, and abrogation of the text. For each period of history, the important figures and dominant trends, along with exceptions, are identified. The interplay between using and criticising the Bible is explored, as well as how the respective emphasis on these two approaches rises and falls in different periods and locations.
The study critically engages with existing scholarship, scrutinizing received views on the subject, and shedding light on an important area of interfaith concern.
About the author
Martin Whittingham, Das Zentrum für muslimisch-christliche Studien, und Universität Oxford, UK.
Report
"... a unified and coherent intellectual history of Muslim engagement with the Bible. The book will prove a valuable resource for anyone wishing to step into that history and as a point of departure for more focused treatments of individual Muslim authors and/or genres of Islamic literature."
Diego Sarrió Cucarella, Islamochristiana 46 (2020) 533-535
"Brimming with fascinating detail, copiously footnoted with references to primary and secondary literature throughout, and carefully argued, A History of Muslim Views of the Bible is a most welcome, and indeed much needed contribution to the topic of Muslim engagement with the Bible. It not only sets the stage for future, perhaps more narrowly focused contributions to the field but manages to detect behind the copious data it examines a grand narrative of Muslim attitudes to the Bible."
Saqib Hussain, University of Oxford, Review of Qur'anic Research 8 (2022) no. 1, https://doi.org/10.5913/rqr2022v8.01
