Dear members of the lists,
after “Islam III – From the 19th Century to the Present” of the 3 volumes on Islam in the Kohlhammer series “Die Religionen der Menschheit” (Vol. 25.1-3) was published last year, “Islam I – Origin, denominations, dynasties” (2023, 443 p.) is now available. The volume edited by the Erlangen Arabist and Islamic studies scholar Georges Tamer deals in three large sections with the beginnings and basic elements with the subchapters “Pre-Islamic Arabia” (Gerald Hawting), “Muhammad” (Georges Tamer), “The Koran” (Georges Tamer) , “The Hadith” (Andreas Görke) and “Islamization” (Lutz Berger), then denominations with reference to the “Sunnis” (Patrick Franke), “Shiites (12s, 7s and Zaidis, Alawites)” (Heinz Halm), ” Charijites and Ibadites” (Abdel-Hakim Ourghi) and “Anatolian Alevis” (Robert Langer) and finally the dynasties and empires: “Umayyads to Seljuks” (Anna Ayşe Akasoy), “Ayyubids, Crusades and cultural transfer with Europe – the Islamic world in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries” (Daniel Potthast), “The Fatimids” (Verena Klemm), “The Mamluk Sultanate” (Stephan Conermann), “The Safavids” (Colin P. Mitchell) and “The Ottomans” (Christoph Herzog). An index and list of abbreviations conclude this impressive, highly recommended standard work. From the point of view of Religionswissenschaft (Study of religion), it is important that the thematically separate contributions “Muhammad” and “The Koran” are to be read conceptually as a unit. While Western research on Muhammad and the Koran is presented in the article on “Muhammad”, the article on the Koran deals with Islamic Koranic exegesis. It seems that research has reached a point that will become a lasting challenge for both Islamic and Christian theology. In the long term, the Islamic interpretation of the Koran will have to reconcile its understanding of revelation from the Koran as a pure-format transcript of revelation with the existence of textual variants, as a research group led by ʿAbd al-Maǧīd aš-Šarfī found in the five-volume Arabic work: al-Muṣḥaf wa -qirāʾātuhū (Casablanca 2016). The authors see the great achievement of their work in having included the relevant information contained in classical works about the genesis of the text of the Koran, in particular the readings (qirāʾāt). Other areas of interest are occasions for revelation (asbāb an-nuzūl), abrogation (nasḫ), repetitions (tikrār) and the division of the Koran copy into sections (taqsīm al-muṣḥaf). In addition, the introductory volume offers an almost complete overview of Western Koranic research in Arabic, including the works of outsiders such as Günter Lüling (1928-2014) and Christoph Luxenberg’s book on “The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran” (2004). If you add the 24-volume publication “Mausūʿāt at-tafsīr al-maʾṯūr” (Beirut 2017) and perhaps even the isrāʾīliyyāt reports, which have been largely neglected by Muslim commentators, completely new perspectives open up for future Koran research by Muslims. The work of Angelika Neuwirth and her research group on the Koran as a text of late antiquity poses new challenges for Christian theology. They call for a historical-critical reappraisal of the history of dogma, in particular of Christology and the “doctrine of the Trinity, which, like all early church dogmas in their undoubtedly Hellenistic language form, must be translated into a modern language, which today’s official theology has not yet achieved, because it ‘lives on in the ‘language house’ of the Hellenistic-philosophical language, which people in the 21st century generally do not understand.'” (Hubert Frankemölle: God believe – Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Freiburg [et al.] 2021, p. 465). With this hope for new research I combine the wish that the still outstanding volume “Islam II” will soon be published and that this 3-volume standard work will be completed.Best regards from Hannover
Peter Antes
Prof. Dr. Dr. Peter Antes
Institut für Religionswissenschaft
Leibniz Universität Hannover
Appelstr. 11 A
30167 Hannover
privat: Bodenstedtstr. 11
30173 Hannover
Tel.: 0511-880242
e-mail: antes@irw.uni-hannover.de