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This multidisciplinary collective volume advances the scholarly discussion on the origins of Islam. It simultaneously focuses on three domains: texts, social contexts, and ideological developments relevant for the study of Islam's beginnings -- taking the latter expression in its broadest possible sense. The intersections of these domains need to be examined afresh in order to obtain a clear picture of the concurrent phenomena that collectively enabled both the gradual emergence of a new religious identity and the progressive delimitation of its initially fuzzy boundaries.
List of contents
1. Introduction - Carlos A. Segovia,Re-Assessing the Hypothesis of a Peripheral Jewish Background, 2. South Arabian Judaism, Himyarite Rahmanism, and the Origins of Islam - Aaron W. Hughes, 3. The Absence of the Messiah in the Qur'an and the Evidence of Jewish Eschatology - José Costa,An Encrypted Manichaean/Messalian Matrix?, 4. The Astral Messenger, The Lunar Redemption, The Solar Salvation: Manichaean Cosmic Soteri-ology in the Qur'an's Archaic Surahs (Q 84, Q 75, Q 54) - Daniel Beck, 5. Binitarianism, Messalianism, and the East-Syrian Background of the Early Quranic Milieu - Carlos A. Segovia,Measuring the World's Timeline= and Imagining the Afterlife at the Persian Court?, 6. The Jewish and Christian Background of the Original Islamic Calendar - Basil Lourié, 7. The Persian Keys to Quranic Paradise - Gilles Courtieu,Conceptual Quicksands, Meta-Narratives of Identity, Texts, and their Marginalia, 8. Extremist Shi'ism and Muhammad's Alleged Message - Mohammad Ali Amir-Moezzi, 9. Echoes of Pseudepigrapha in the Qur'an - Tommaso Tesei, 10. What Do We Mean by the Qur'an? On Palimpsests, Collections, and Inter-Narrative Identity - Emilio González Ferrín|Multidisciplinarity, innovative and theoretically sophisticated scholarship. Challenges the more conservative strands of scholarship within the historiography Situates the rise of Islam within the world of Late Antiquity.
About the author
Carlos A. Segovia is Lecturer in Qur'anic and Religious Studies at Saint Louis University-Madrid and founding Co-Director of the Early Islamic Studies Seminar: International Scholarship on the Qur'an and Islamic Origins.
