Quranic studies
Quranic studies is the academic study of the Quran, the central religious text of Islam. Like in biblical studies, the field uses and applies a diverse set of disciplines and methods, such as philology, textual criticism, lexicography, codicology, literary criticism, comparative religion, and historical criticism. The beginning of modern Quranic studies began among German scholars from the 19th century.
Quranic studies has three primary goals. The first goal is to understand the original meaning, sources, history of revelation, and the history of the recording and transmission, of the Quran. The second is to trace how the Quran was received by people, including how it was understood and interpreted, throughout the centuries. The third is a study and appreciation of the Quran as literature independently of the other two goals.
Historical-critical method
Quranic studies employs the historical-critical method as its primary methodological apparatus. The HCM is an approach that "delays any assessment of scripture's truth and relevance until after the act of interpretation has been carried out". A common misconception about the term "critical" is that it implies criticizing a text. Instead, in the HCM, to read a text critically means:to suspend inherited presuppositions about its origin, transmission, and meaning, and to assess their adequacy in the light of a close reading of that text itself as well as other relevant sources... This is not to say that scripture should conversely be assumed to be false and mortal, but it does open up the very real possibility that an interpreter may find scripture to contain statements that are, by his own standards, false, inconsistent, or trivial. Hence, a fully critical approach to the Bible, or to the Qur’an for that matter, is equivalent to the demand, frequently reiterated by Biblical scholars from the eighteenth century onwards, that the Bible is to be interpreted in the same manner as any other text.By contrast, to read a text historically would mean to:
require the meanings ascribed to it to have been humanly ‘thinkable’ or ‘sayable’ within the text's original historical environment, as far as the latter can be retrospectively reconstructed. At least for the mainstream of historical-critical scholarship, the notion of possibility underlying the words ‘thinkable’ and ‘sayable’ is informed by the principle of historical analogy – the assumption that past periods of history were constrained by the same natural laws as the present age, that the moral and intellectual abilities of human agents in the past were not radically different from ours, and that the behaviour of past agents, like that of contemporary ones, is at least partly explicable by recourse to certain social and economic factors.
Textual criticism
Today, the field of applying the methods of textual criticism to the Quran is still in its infancy. The most significant development in recent years has been the digitization of early Quran manuscripts. In the same timeframe, the study of Quran manuscripts has also picked up.Companion codices
When Muhammad, the authoritative source of divine revelation among his followers died, it became necessary for the Companions to collect his teachings into a single authoritative document so that they would not be lost. Collections of his teachings were written down into codices, a type of document that is the ancestor of the modern book. The unit of division of these Quran codices was the surah, which is roughly equivalent to a chapter in a book today. The most important collection was the Uthmanic codex, which received its name due to it being canonized during the reign of the caliph Uthman around 650 AD, at which point it became the authoritative written codification of the Quran in Islam. Before this event, other Companions of Muhammad had also created their own, slightly different codices of the Quran. In Islamic history, codices have been attributed to Abdullah ibn Masud, Ubayy ibn Ka'b, and Abu Musa al-Ash'ari.File:Blue_koran_sanaa.jpg|thumb|A page from the Sanaa manuscript — the oldest and most comprehensive Islamic archaeological document to date.
The codex of Ibn Mas'ud and the codex of Ubayy ibn Ka'b are well understood, because they survived up until the eleventh century, and many Islamic authorities described their variants in detail. By contrast, very little is known about the codex of Al-Ash'ari. No manuscript of any of these texts has survived up until the present day, although the evidence that they once existed is strong enough that it has widely convinced historians. In addition to the description of these codices by several authorities in different times and regions, the discovery of the Sanaa manuscript, which is independent of the Uthmanic codex, has provided concrete manuscript evidence for a Quran that contains variants attributed to the codices of the Companions.
The main difference between the codices of Uthman and Ibn Mas'ud is that the codex of Ibn Mas'ud did not include Surah al-Fatihah, or the final two surahs of the Uthmanic codex, known as the Al-Mu'awwidhatayn. The codex of Ubayy includes all the surahs of the Uthmanic codex, but it also possesses another two beyond them.
Canonization
Tradition holds that the Quran was canonized by the caliph Uthman around 650 AD, which immediately became the standard Quran. In recent decades, a new controversy has emerged over the timing of this canonization event, and whether it took place during the time of Uthman or under a later caliph. Behnam Sadeghi and Mohsen Goudarzi classify members of the field into four camps on this issue: traditionalists, revisionists, skeptics, and neo-traditionalists. Traditionalists accept the traditional account of the formation of the Quran. Revisionists hold that canonization either happened later, or that it did not prevent substantial additional revisions afterwards. The skeptics are simply agnostic about the historicity of the traditional accounts. Neo-traditionalists accept the main details of the traditional account, but do so on the basis of critical historiography and not a trust of traditional sources.Recent radiocarbon, orthographic, and stemmatic analyses Quranic manuscripts converge on an early canonization event and that copies of the canonized text were sent to Syria, Medina, Basra, and Kufa.
In the decades after the canonization, a "rasm literature" emerged whereby authors sought to catalogue all variants that existed in copies or manuscripts of the Quran that descended from the Uthmanic standard. Among the most important of these include the Kitab al-Masahif by Abī Dāwūd the al-Muqni' fi Rasm al-Masahif by al-Dānī. Such works, though, due to their lateness, do not reflect a number of the consistent variants in the earliest manuscripts.
Variants / Readings of the Qur'an
Because the Uthmanic Quran did not standardize the dotting of the skeletal Arabic text, variant ways to do this emerged in different cities. These different styles of dotting are called qirāʾāt. Prominent reciters developed their own readings starting as early as the first half of the early 8th century. Ultimately, while many of these were created, only seven were canonized by Ibn Mujahid in the 10th century, these being known as the seven readers. Three readings were chosen from Kufa, and one each from Mecca, Medina, Basra, and Damascus. The reading of each teacher was independently attested through two transmissions, called a riwāyah, these typically being direct students. A century later, Al-Dani canonized two specific transmitters for each of the eponymous readers. In the 15th century, Ibn al-Jazari canonized three more readers, giving us the modern ten recitations. Although variation between these is largely in the dotting, a few differences occur also with the rasm of Uthman, especially in Abu Amr's reading. Most variants only affect the form of the word, but a minority also impact the meaning. Common variants are dialectical, or concern noun formation, the singular versus plural, different verb stems, etc. Today, the reading of Hafs through Asim is the most popular in the Muslim world, having been canonized in the 1924 Cairo edition.Recent studies indicate that there is a common oral ancestor to all the canonical readings that dates to the seventh century, after the reign of Uthman.
Print editions
The Cairo edition, published in Egypt in 1924, is the dominant print edition of the Quran today. It follows the Hafs reading. Earlier but lesser-known print editions also once existed, including the Hinckelmann edition, Marracci edition, both from the late 17th century, and notably the Flugel edition, established in 1834 and remaining in use until the Cairo. Most physical copies of the Quran are high resolution prints of an originally handwritten Quran by a calligrapher, but this too is derived from the Cairo edition. The orthography of the Cairo edition is largely faithful to what is found in seventh-century manuscripts, although not entirely:This is especially the case for the use of letter ʾalif, which is used to write the ā significantly more often in modern print editions than is typical for early manuscripts. But there are also several other innovative orthographic practices compared to early manuscripts. For example, the nominative pronoun ḏū is consistently spelled و ذ in modern print editions, while in early manuscripts it is consistently followed by an ʾalif, ا و ذ.So far, no critical edition of the Quran exists. The creation of one is the major goal of the Corpus Coranicum project has, though so far, it has focused on publishing text editions of early manuscripts.