چکیده:
This book, by Angelika Neuwirth (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2014) published by OUP in association with The Institute of Ismaili
Studies, contains forty pages of front material, 430 pages of text,
including notes at the end of each chapter, and another forty pages
divided among the bibliography, index of Qur’anic citations, index
of Biblical and Post-Biblical citations, and a general index. The text
is a collection of articles that were written between 1990 and 2012,
some of which have been substantially revised for this collection,
and many of which are translations of German publications. The
author, who has been acclaimed with honorary doctorates and
academic prizes, including the Iranian book of the year award for
her Der Koran als Text der Spätantike , and, most recently, the
prestigious Leopold-Lucas prize, holds a chair for Arabic philology
as professor at the Freie Universität in Berlin, and is director of the
Corpus Coranicum project.
خلاصه ماشینی:
"Neuwirth’s work to its value for Islamic apologetics, for its greatest worth lies in demonstrating how our understanding of the Qur’an is enriched beyond measure when due attention is given to both: (1) the cultural background of the Hijaz in the wider landscape of late antiquity, especially to the religious and literary lore that gives context to the divine revelation of the Qur’an, and (2) the manner in which the Qur’an was gradually revealed, and was recited by Muslims as they formed a community whose knowledge of what had been revealed earlier further contributed to the context in which subsequent revelations were given by Allah to his final prophet, Muhammad (ṣ).
The second section, "The Liturgical Qur’an and the Emergence of the Community" contains five essays that treat various ways in which social cohesion was generated in the early Muslim community through its relation to the Qur’an, including the recitation of the Qur’an, the establishment of the prayer, and the twin roles of the Fātiḥah as opening of the canon of the scripture and in the recitation of the formal prayer; the setting up of the qibla and its shift from Jerusalem to Mecca, the allusions to the Decalogue in Sura Isrā’, and the overturning of the Arabian ethos of tribal accountability in favour of an ethos of raḥmat and individual responsibility before God to help others in need."