The One and the Many
The Early History of the Qur'an
Will be published approx. on 22. March 2022
Book
Hardback
328 pages
978-0-300-25132-6 (ISBN)
Description
A revelatory account of early Islam's great diversity by the world's leading scholar of early Qur'anic manuscripts
"There is no one better placed than Francois Deroche to write the history-and tell the story-of how the Quran went from words uttered by Muhammad to inviolable canonical scripture. This is a meticulous, lucid, and fascinating book."-Shawkat Toorawa, Yale University
According to Muslim dogma, the recited and written text of the Qur'an as we know it today scrupulously reflects the divine word as it was originally sent down to Muhammad. An examination of early Islamic sources, including accounts of prophetic sayings, all of them compared with the oldest Qur'anic manuscripts, reveal that plurality was in fact the outstanding characteristic of the genesis and transmission of the Qur'an, both textually and orally.
By piecing together information about alternative wordings eliminated from the canonical version that gradually came to be imposed during the first centuries of Islam, Francois Deroche shows that the Qur'an long remained open to textual diversity. Not only did the faithful initially adopt a flexible attitude toward the Qur'anic text, an attitude strikingly at odds with the absolute literalism later enforced by Muslim orthodoxy, but Muhammad himself turns out to have been more concerned with the meaning than the letter of the divine message.
"There is no one better placed than Francois Deroche to write the history-and tell the story-of how the Quran went from words uttered by Muhammad to inviolable canonical scripture. This is a meticulous, lucid, and fascinating book."-Shawkat Toorawa, Yale University
According to Muslim dogma, the recited and written text of the Qur'an as we know it today scrupulously reflects the divine word as it was originally sent down to Muhammad. An examination of early Islamic sources, including accounts of prophetic sayings, all of them compared with the oldest Qur'anic manuscripts, reveal that plurality was in fact the outstanding characteristic of the genesis and transmission of the Qur'an, both textually and orally.
By piecing together information about alternative wordings eliminated from the canonical version that gradually came to be imposed during the first centuries of Islam, Francois Deroche shows that the Qur'an long remained open to textual diversity. Not only did the faithful initially adopt a flexible attitude toward the Qur'anic text, an attitude strikingly at odds with the absolute literalism later enforced by Muslim orthodoxy, but Muhammad himself turns out to have been more concerned with the meaning than the letter of the divine message.
Reviews / Votes
"With four decades of painstaking manuscript research behind him, there is no one better placed than Francois Deroche to write the history-and tell the story-of how the Quran went from words uttered by Muhammad to inviolable canonical scripture. This is a meticulous, lucid, and fascinating book."-Shawkat Toorawa, Yale University"A masterful and clearly written synthesis of Deroche's pioneering and pathbreaking scholarship on early Islamic manuscripts over the past three decades."-David Stephan Powers, Cornell University
"The author engages in true investigation . . . connecting the Qur'anic text, the theory of 'readings,' and different layers of tradition in their historical context with his observations from manuscripts of the seventh and eighth centuries. He thus shows that, from the time of the Prophet until about the tenth century, a plurality was at work in various ways, revealing an approach to the Qur'an and its transmission very different from the literalism that has been observed."-Jean-Marc Balhan, Revue Etudes
"A summary of the author's life's work: Deroche is a master of manuscripts, and very artfully takes the reader through the earliest ones."-David Cook, Rice University
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Cloth over boards
Illustrations
23 b-w illus.
Dimensions
Height: 221 mm
Width: 150 mm
Thickness: 31 mm
Weight
510 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-300-25132-6 (9780300251326)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Francois Deroche, professor at the College de France, is the world's foremost authority on early Qur'anic manuscripts and a leading scholar of the history of the Arabic book. Malcolm DeBevoise has translated more than forty works from French and Italian in every branch of scholarship. He is a three-time winner of the French-American Foundation translation prize for nonfiction.