What do we mean by THE Qur’an. On origins, fragments, and inter-narrative identity.

Emilio Gonzalez-Ferrin – University of Seville (Spain)

I.- On Historiographic metafiction.

II.- On qur’anic ‘fragments’: 1 + 1 + n = 1.
III.- On Beginnings vs. Origins: the task of the translator.
IV.- A case-study: violence and ğihād in the Qur’an.
V.- On Inter-narrative identity & social epistemology.

I.- On Historiographic metafiction.

There are two commonplaces hindering our clear understanding of qur’anic literary sets
in all their complexity, being the first one the canonization of its unity and compactness as the
Sacred Book of a Community, a fact that compels us to consider the Qur'an as a single, finished,
coherent literary whole, subject to the constraints of its owner. An untouched and untouchable
textus receptus. From there, and depending on whether it is either considered this book 'ours'
or 'theirs', further specifications in the kind of approach will be appearing. That is to say, a book
and its possible study are both stigmatized for its declared holiness and its cultural close
demarcation. This first commonplace does not differ so much from what can be said about other
holy books. But the second commonplace makes a great difference. It deals with a contextual
narrative fence built to surround that book, the canonization of a historiographical concept
unfailingly related to its writing: the absolute beginning of Islam -as such, normally without any
differentiation between religious system and culture- from the so called Arab conquest, forcing
us to arrange in order, and consequently, a series of juxtaposed events but here allegedly
dependent on this historiographical concept, the FATḤ, this sudden historical outburst.
Juxtaposed events, as I said, such as the collapse of Empires, the emergence of Arabic as a
cultured language, or the decantation of religious systems out of sectarian blurred borderlines.
That is to say: instead of describing a complex context from which a certain cultural result could
emerge –e.g. the compilation of texts following the need of narrating a world in progress-,
historians tend to put the cart before the horse. Thus, a commonly admitted story based in unity
and deterministic order of historical facts has its roots precisely in relation with that previous
first commonplace, the exceptional uniqueness and alleged unity of a book, at the very end no
more, and no less, than a long term palimpsest that only finally constituted a compilation of
various religious lectionaries (logia) in that very same Arabic language. The compilation that we
all know today as Qur’an.

On this regards, as Gerald Hawting puts it, expressions such as ‘the rise of Islam’, ‘the emergence
of Islam’, and ‘the origins of Islam’ may be ambiguous and understood differently by different
people (Hawting 2005:9), but they all tend, unanimously agreed, to consider that collection of
writings, the Qur’an, as a compact matrix or a literary unity on the roots of a historical turn. This
heavy burden of responsibility confers a distinctive character to our book and delimits what we
may call its ‘historiographic metafiction’, or a specific sort of narrative which also lay claim to
historical events and personages (Hutcheon 1988:5), as well as happened to be considered not
inserted in but causative and founder of a certain time and context. This historiographic
metafiction also reduces the literary value and scope of those qur’anic texts in a considerable
way, in the sense that its alleged unity forces not only an artificial demand for unforeseen inter-
narrative coherence, but also constrains chronologically in a single date –whatever it may be- a
whole possible wide range of writing epochs and geographies.

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These two intertwined commonplaces –i.e. qur’anic narrative unity and related FATḤ as starting
gun-, this cumulative twofold obsession, turned into stone to constitute the unusual otherness
of Islam. If we want to deconstruct, if we coherently put the horse before the cart, putting causes
and effects in order and disregarding the alleged unity of the qur’anic text, we should, first of
all, unfold this miscellany, this collection of texts and proceed to their separate contextualized
reading, avoiding any temptation to seek narrative coherences with the rest of the texts
compiled.

Certainly, along the history, some attempts at understanding and explaining the literary diversity
of the qur’anic texts have been carried out. Despite their apologetic character, these attempts
may show us some clues about the narrative inconsistence of this book as one unique literary
entity, as well as help us to consider it a collection of texts: the qur’anic science of An-nāsiḫ wa-
l-mansūḫ (What derogates or abrogates what?), for example, constitutes the irrefutable proof
of these narrative inconsistencies in its bold and vain attempt to achieve inter-narrative
coherence in the midst of this diversity of texts, while the innocent general ordering of qur’anic
chapters, suras, -from the longest to the shortest one- denotes a rejection or inability of either
chronological order or internal narrative coherence, and, for the same reason, the narrative
independence of each section. Besides, the classical quest for rhetoric top, the Balāġa, forced
an atypical use of the Arabic grammar, being one of its most important resources the Iltifāt -
described as a sudden grammatical shift- and reached its highest point with the miraculous
consideration of the Iᶜǧāz –inimitability-, i.e., sacralization of an irregularity.

These eloquent fissures highlighted in the very foundation of a general interpretation of the
book that concerns us now, may lead us to challenge what do we mean by THE Qur’an –should
one really consider it a single book?- and since when. The plausible coexistence of a plurality of
‘Qur’ans’ -sometimes loose (what will be considered afterwards as) suras, sometimes minor
narrative units, and other times sets of suras-, all of them subject to change and adaptation -
minor palimpsests- until their definitive unification and fixation –whenever these could have
taken place-, allows us to switch from the very concept of textus receptus to a plurality of texti
acceptati, or even collectio textorum, in which it is no longer necessary to locate a unique
discursive positioning or ideology, or inner inter-narrative coherence, or even a similar dating or
location. Quite the opposite, we would be able, at last, to search for and elucidate inter-narrative
diverse identities, probably in continuous confrontation. In other words: the collection
character, the inclusiveness of this qur’anic miscellany of texts prevents us from any claim for
internal narrative consistency and, vice versa, the lack of inner narrative consistence proves a
long and natural process of collecting different texts, all of them put together to constitute what
we call today Qur’an. But here we are talking about a long process of inclusion, trial and error,
codification, incompatible with the canonization of some dates -supposed birth and death of
prophets- and metahistorical processes -FATḤ, once again-.

II.- On qur’anic ‘fragments’: 1 + 1 + n = 1.

The discovery and media exposure in 2015 of what they called ‘new fragments’ of a
certain oldest qur’anic manuscript has moved the academic community to launch a new wave
of historiographical appreciations of the texts, until then, historically considered as qur’anic
‘fragments’. These media fragments, found at a Birmingham archive, are considered excerpts
from a larger textual unity related to the well-known Parisino-Petropolitanus Codex. Still, there
are other related texts easily readable and also considered as ‘fragments’; that is to say, ‘pieces’
from a previous totality -like the ones we can consult at the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin, for
example-, most of them belonging to the collections of Syriacist and Christian theologian
Alphonse Mingana (d1937), and gathered during the late 20’s of last century.

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Stepping back from multiple cases of dubious authenticity, we may consider the following as the
most valuable and old qur’anic manuscripts:

- Codex Parisino-petropolitanus (BnF Arabe 328(c), and that Birmingham texts),

containing about 40% of what we may consider today as the qur’anic text, mainly
produced by five scribes, or translators, or collectors.

- The Sana'a manuscript, carefully studied by some of our good colleagues around the
Institute for Research on Early Islamic History and the Koran (Inārah).

- The Tübingen fragmenta.

- The Topkapi manuscript (the closest to the complete text of any contemporary
muṣḥaf of the Qur’an).

- And finally the Samarkand Kufic Qur’an, kept in the Hast Imam library, in Tashkent,
Uzbekistan.

I will not enter here to make the state of the matter, for there is a big deal of literature about it,
a lot of renowned colleagues that have already narrated the search and analyses of these
manuscripts, as well as there are some others dedicated to the most detailed study of variants,
errors, possible additions, and so on, with better or worse fortune.

What interests me particularly now is not the details or the narrative of a research but the crux
of the matter, which I prefer to wait a little longer to unveil. In this regard, I must recall some
ideas launched by our colleague Guillaume Dye that specially sparked my attention. It is about
what he once called: The paradox of the preface, in some of our private interchange of messages;
and I quote: <it is the paradox of some> scholars that note in their prefaces how late and
fabricated are some Arabic texts but they decide nonetheless to write the <same old> story, <at
the very end> close to the <official and orthodox> narrative of the Islamic sources.

A paradox related, in my opinion -and if such an abstraction is permitted- to the already old
dispute between Analytic and Continental Philosophy or -for the sake and purposes of what
concerns us now- the dispute between hyper-specialization and generalization, any of them, of
course, equally defensible or refutable, once taken to its extremes. I mean that after the
overcoming of the analytic fashion, and in the middle of an impassable jungle of hyper-
specialized papers, no one seems to dare offering whole visions of the Qur’an, of Early Islam, or
even Islam, except in the case of some ‘continental’ religionists. And here I’d like to bring up the
old sentence attributed indiscriminately to Konrad Lorenz or Mircea Eliade: that the foreseeable
future of knowing a lot about little is knowing everything about nothing. But here, at the end of
the day, I would be taking sides with the continental, which in turn can be openly criticized for
occasional excesses of hot air in which many generalizations use to end. The reason why I am
establishing this abstruse relationship of ideas it is because, above so many detailed and
particular studies on the subject (Analytic side) and many more general studies on the issue,
usually confessional and intra-community (here, Continental side, so to say), I have never read
or heard a clear idea or well-founded hypothesis about which is the first extant and complete
manuscript of the Qur’an, as we know it today. And here I should include a safeguard clause
because John Wansbrough did throw a general hypothesis on the issue, which by the way I share
roughly, with some caution, and with certain reservations that I want to express shortly
afterwards. Because Wansbrough comes to say, in fact, that there is no Qur’an more or less as
we know it today till the 9th century, a criterion shared in part by other colleagues (Wansbrough

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1978:119)(Crone 1987:204)(Nevo 1994:108), but generally refused today. Fred Donner, in his
turn, while arguing for an earlier date for the qur’anic collection, points out that had the Qur'an
been collected during the times of the FATḤ, the notorious ‘conquest’, there should be some
evidence of this narrative in the texts, and it seems that there is nothing about it (Donner
1998:60). In fact, and in my humble opinion, this could mean that the narration of qur’anic texts
is not directly related to specific events, or even a specific time. Only in the aforementioned
historiographic metafiction is this commonplace set. It is worth mentioning David Power’s and
Stephen Shoemaker’s approaches to the topic, in the sense of the possible separation between
myth and historicity. Both of them hit or allude at some kind of later literary construction in line
with what we want to highlight. While the first compares the ‘idiom of family’ shared by the
narratives of the three Abrahamic faiths (Powers 2009:225), the later points to a very late
narrative construction of Islam’s own assumed foundational prophetology (Shoemaker 2012).
At any case, and based on both chronological arcs of possible Qur’anic dating, what we may
conclude is that it is really difficult –or risky- to assume a single date for the whole Qur’an as a
unique book.

In order to see this from our point of view, we must assume that the crux of the question is
precisely what do we mean by Qur’an, and why do we assume that something can be named as
‘fragment’ without any clear idea of a previous totality, from which it must have been broken to
become a fragment. In other words: why do we insist on the mental prefiguration of a pristine
and complete Qur'an written, or descended, revealed, in the 7th century when everything points
to different textual configurations that belong to mostly finished entities, and disconnected. In
this Platonic way of analyzing short texts as if they were fragments of a complete, ideal and
previous one, we are playing the ‘ethical turn’ of Carlo Ginzburg in his masterpiece The Judge
and the Historian, applying Ethics and ideals to a bare scientific task. Imagining colorful
surroundings and stating with him that ‘no fragment is an island’ when, in fact, most of these
texts are precisely this, islands. It is most likely that those various hands who wrote the short
texts that we analyze today, perhaps they did not even have in mind that someday, someone
would collect them all together and get us to think that those short independent texts were
nothing but fragments of a previous totality.

My reflection here deals on a circumstance similar to what we may find in the called Sorites
Paradox: a philosophical caveat related to the concepts of ‘whole’ and ‘unity’, and more
specifically, ‘heap’ or ‘amount’. When do we have a ’heap of sand’, and when do I not have it
anymore? –Is asked at the Sorites Paradox principle-; When does it stop being a heap? In other
words: How many grains of sand must be removed so that it stops being a heap? That paradox
establishes that, if a heap keeps on being a heap even though I remove a grain, and then I
remove another, and another, and another, and so on, therefore it will keep on being a heap
with just one grain, for we don’t know which is the grain that makes the whole heap being that.
Following that paradox, and turning it into Platonic magic, any old short text containing a
qur’anic expression -i.e. what may be considered today as such kind of expressions, probably
because that sequence of words is included in today’s qur’anic corpus- is a ‘grain of the qur’anic
heap’, because we take for granted that, again, ‘no fragment is an island’ and the Platonic big
Book was there from the very beginning.

Nevertheless, and having in mind that the final compilation of the current version of the
complete Qur’an is really late, should we consider any of this qur’anic texts as a fragment, simply
because today is included in the current qur’anic text? Well, only if we admit and depart from a
previous unity. And this is a genuine theologem, a religious/canonical reasoning only based in
faith that gave birth to a cultural stroma, i.e. a network of connected data assumed as well
grounded but, at the end of the day, supported by each other. The notorious question of qur’anic
‘fragments’ and why we should not be calling ‘fragment’ to anything that is not proved to be

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fragmented from a previous bigger unity, unless that complete unity may appear as such before
our own eyes, is in the basis of a Historical-logical controversial quiz: the date and causes of
Islamic origins, as well as its connections with this early religious literature in Arabic obsessed
with the idea of rejecting the fatherhood of God and announcing both the end of the world and
the salvific ‘coming of a Comforter’. Stretching our metaphorical Sorites paradox a bit more, I
think I could accept an early dating of the Qur’an if we may call Qur’an to any of those ‘small
texts’ that we were calling ‘fragments’ so far. If a heap is still a heap removing every single grain
of sand until there is only one, then a Qur’an is every single short text that may include those
references in Arabic language that may be referred to as ‘qur’anic’ simply because they will be
one day, long afterwards, included in the canonical collection. Likewise, just like we may assume
that the heap is the final sum of a lot of different grains of sand, I would tend to think that all
this early and short Arabic religious lectionaries are Qur’ans that finally constitute a Qur’an as a
result of the collection of all these previous Qur’ans.

In fact, if this were a lesson in Islamic theology and I had to explain in symbolic terms the complex
interpretation that may save us from complete skepticism, I would use a cinematic example:
that of Tarkovsky’s film Nostalghia in which a magnificent and brilliant crazy man called
Domenico surprises everyone by announcing his alternative explanation of why one plus one
equals one. The example he uses is that of the drop of rain water falling into his hand, one, which
on contact with the new fallen drop, one, constitute a single resulting drop, one, and the same
thing happens with the next drop, and successively. And this is the explanation of the cryptic
subtitle of this section –i.e. 1 + 1 + n = 1-, and I can only add now that the various hands
responsible for the final collection of the qur'anic texts -finally united till constitute what we can
nowadays know as Qur’an-; these hands, I said, did not have to be working simultaneously at
any case, nor know each other, or therefore constitute a coordinated team of scribes. The very
concept of qur’anic palimpsests may explain a long history of diverse authorship, inclusivism and
translations, until reaching a final point of no return: the venerable asepsis and final inviolability
of the resulting collected text under the dogmatic form of its inimitability: iᶜǧāz al-qur’ān. In that
long history of our work in progress, our palimpsest, there is, of course, a place for previous
diversity of languages, now homogenized under the mubīn criterion, the Arabic language as
formal code. However, it does not matter how much time could have passed between the first
short Qur'ans –i.e. early monotheistic discourses denying the fatherhood of God in Arabic or
Syriac, afterwards Arabized-, and the definitive Qur'an. The question is that this one, most
probably, was only available and in use from the year 800 on (Wansbrough dixit): the very
collection speaks clearly of his originative diversity offering us a chapter distribution that –as we
said- only responds to formal criteria, in that way of ordering the suras from the longest to the
shortest.

Likewise, the classical division of qur’anic sciences, the ᶜulūm al-dīn, includes some eloquent
disciplines that speak by themselves of the perplexities that may attaint any wise person trying
to understand the literary context of those different texts -asbāb al nuzūl– or even to accept the
evident inner contradiction of several passages –we quoted earlier an-nāsiḫ wa-l-mansūḫ– due
to the logical circumstance that, of course, these texts, now upgraded to chapters –and only
afterwards considered as ‘fragments’-, were not intended to appear altogether with their
explicit narrative specificities due to these different hands, dates, contexts, original languages,
now turned into inner contradictions, to the delight of slanderers, and causing headaches to the
poor apologists, obstinate in the difficult physical embodiment of the Platonic idea of a Book.

In short, I would like to highlight some aspects that have come out in these previous reflections:

- That after a myriad of hyper-specialized studies focusing on every tiny aspect of

Early Islam, we should dare sometimes to propose general interpretations that may

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 lead to new paradigms of interpretation unless we are forced to maintain the
Nöldeke / medini paradigm for reasons of faith, academic debit or external funding.

- These new paradigms are not at all mere whims or pretensions of enfant terrible:
they are absolutely needed because the whole narrative describing Early Islam is in
many aspects still supported by the scaffolding of religious myth, of those referred
to as Theologem.

- If we avoid calling ‘fragments’ to certain texts prior to the canonical Qur'an, this
significant gesture will introduce into our minds the idea that most likely should be
presented as one of those new paradigms in the history of Early Islam: that unity
was subsequent to diversity. Something that should be applied not only to textual
transmission, but to Islam in general.

- Descending for a moment to the specific, any scholar who approaches those sets of
texts cited at the beginning may conclude that the longer the text in question is, the
later it is. In addition, the newer the text, and therefore the more extensive, it has
more possibility to include other juxtaposed small texts in that long natural ‘carried
forward’ process. Similarly, we can conclude that the historical narrative of the
qur’anic constitution process is not about transmission but compilation; not textus
receptus but collectio textorum. In my opinion, John Wansbrough pointed in this
direction when he claimed that the Qur’an was composed after the year 800: he did
not mean of course those small Qur’ans generally referred to as ‘fragments’, but the
canonical text widely distributed after the cultural Arabization of Baghdad.

- At the very end, reading as a whole that referred process of literary compilation, of
narrative inclusion, of translation (especially from Syriac language), it stands out in
a natural way that the use of the word Islam until almost the 9th century is probably
a retronym, a decontextualized use of later terms. The evident development of
intra-Christian / intra-Jewish and probably Christian / Jewish narratives in these
texts also points in this direction, and all together leads me to the conclusion that
before the 9th century Islam could not do anything because it was precisely Islam
what was being done.

III.- On Beginnings vs. Origins: the task of the translator.

Retronyms, palimpsests, verifiable realities vs. theologems, texts vs. fragments, diversity
followed by unity, multiplicity of war tumults in an era of change that will later be considered a
change of era, all this entails the necessary consideration of history as a set of narratives, as well
as the need to bear in mind the human subsequent correction of those narratives in something
that I have previously called 'retrospective narration'. Now, I would like to focus on the second
commonplace I highlighted earlier, i.e. the unnatural outburst of the whole Islamic world
depending on the very concept of FATḤ, a process linked to the similarly unnatural divine unity
of a text –the first commonplace- as ‘intelectual author’. The literary dimension of early Arabic
and Islamic chronicles –whatever this may mean- was in part long ago highlighted by French
medievalist Rachel Arié, while stating that the narratives about the conquest of North-East Africa
and Spain belong more to the religious tradition than to History (Arié 1984:368), a description
that can undoubtedly be extend to the East. Arié’s perception was long afterwards
complemented in a certain way by Jonathan P. Berkey with his brief description of the topic: the
earliest surviving Muslim sources are comparatively late, and so reflect less what happened than
what later Muslims wanted to remember as having happened. This is a point which has been a

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staple of at least Western scholarship since Ignaz Goldziher’s pioneer study of hadith
(Berkey2003:59).

If we talk about literature and the outburst of things, it is appropriate to make use of authors
who have dealt precisely with literary questions, and therefore now I would like to bring up
Edward Said. According to him, there is a great and deep gap or difference between the origins
and the beginnings of something, in our case, Islam. Origins and beginnings differ as much as
memory and events: origins are passive –narrated- while beginnings are active –causatives,
factitives-. Origins have to do with Coleridge’s suspension of disbelief, poetic faith, and refer to
a posteriori myth-making and retrospective narratives of facts, described in its best clothes,
while beginnings reflect the laborious, ambiguous and uncertain step by step of any new-born
entity. The beginning A leads to B, (Said 1975:6) […], it is an act of historical understanding (Said
1975:32) while Origin is primeval, but that, like Paradise, is lost forever (Said 1975:280). Said
recover a concept minted by Giambatista Vico to define that narrative of origins: repilogamenti,
the final set of epitomes or compendia probably more connected to the author’s global vision
of the thing than to the genuine and dark beginning of that very thing. At the very end, origins
most probably have to do with literature –as Rachel Arié pointed out earlier- and beginnings
with this darker and uncontrolled way in which life and history tend to proceed. As Ernest Renan
wrote, precisely while thinking about the Islamic origins, toutes les origines sont obscures, les
origines religieuses encore plus que les autres. (Renan 1851:1063)

Now, following this Saidian distinction between origins and beginnings, it is already time to focus
on the beginnings, leaving the origins for the apologetics and the novel –that is precisely the
way Suliman Bashear described the narrative about the origins of Islam: riwāya, novel (Bashear
1984)-, and considering the set of events that surrounded certain changes in the 7th century’s
Middle East in their proper causes & effects order. It has to be said that the denominations about
who did what in those times and latitudes have been changing at breakneck speed in recent
decades. The FATḤ concept is maintained, but the adjectives change from the very old 'Muslim
conquest', through the 'Islamic conquest' to the intermediate 'Arab conquest'. It is evident that
the first one, ‘Muslim’, made reference to people of a very specific faith, something really
difficult to support so early and which converts the expression 'Muslim conquest' into a genuine
retronym. 'Islamic conquest' generates ambiguity in its turn: if it is about Islam-religion it is still
as retronym as 'Muslim', and if it refers to Islam-culture, it is very difficult to talk about it before
the foundation of Baghdad, almost at the entrance of the 9th century. And as far as 'Arab
conquest' is concerned, it leads us to define what an Arab is in those times -the beginning of the
7th century-, with two inter-related quibbles.

The first one has to do with the sources: If we decide to use Arabic sources, we jump immediately
from the crude beginnings to the poetic origins and retrospective narratives, among other things
because the earliest Arab sources are later than that foundation of Baghdad (762). If we decide
on the 7th century chronicles, the variety of denominations and different war events should lead
us to reject any attempt to find a unified movement of conquest, of FATḤ. With no exception,
all the tumults related in the various chronicles of the 7th century are written in the third person
of the verb, describe a general disorder that in no way resembles an organized conquest, and
are using a very varied denomination of causers: Jews, Saracens, Maghritae, Children of Hagar,
Tayyaye, Sons of Ishmael, Arabs, Chaldeans, Assyrians, Children of Ishmael, Tajiks, Jewish clans,
Hagarens, the people of Gog and Magog are some of them, usually surrounded by a literary style
of those times that have been called Age of Spirituality. The second quibble is based on the way
these 7th century chronicles have been translated. Picking out one single denomination in order

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to represent the whole –let us say, for instance, Arabs- poses the problem of why not have
chosen another –let us say, for instance, Jews-. Here, the task of the translator must be applied
to version as honestly as possible a multiform reality. It is very probable that the most honest
here is precisely not to translate, following here the advice of Daniel Boyarin and his ‘task of
untraslator’, or maintaining the various original denominations so as not to induce non-existent
generalizations in the reader (Barton & Boyarin 2016).

Here some terminology proposals can be located, as when Patricia Crone and Michael Cook
offered the term Hagarens, or more recently in the case of Fred Donner and his believers. All of
these undoubtedly are honest proposals to circumscribe a bit more a complex reality. But most
probably the best way to convey a complex reality is to respect its complexity as such, while
describing it, and that is why I would always go back to Boyarin and his 'task of untraslation' in
order to version the 7th chronicles without translating the name of the peoples involved in the
actions described. Its variety and diversity would help to perfectly describe that process there,
already described: from the unexpected real diversity (beginnings) to the narrative unit (origins).

IV.- A case-study: violence and ğihād in the Qur’an.

Moving a few steps further, I would like to focus now of that obsessive link between
Qur’an, community of believers and FATḤ -conquest and war at the heights of a religious ideal-
as the supposed essence of the whole Early Islamic pack, still maintaining an explicit distrust –a
genuine disbelieve- in the historical viability of a sudden outburst that supposedly caused the
collapse of Empires and provoked a disruption in the Mediterranean lake –as Henri Pirenne
watched it (1959:149)-, forging the endemic consideration of an Islamic alienation in later
historical narrations. And so, we can ask ourselves consequently about the Qur’an as source in
all these narratives of violence, land control, and caesaropapism intrinsically linked to the figure
-in my opinion, absolutely decontextualized in those years of 7th century– either of the
prophet/statesman or afterwards the caliph. All this considered, even though it will be difficult
to clearly identify what could constitute genuine, old, and verifiable descriptions, given the
relatively late final date of these qur’anic narratives. At any case, and due to its consideration as
radical source of whatsoever related to Islam, it will be interesting to search for FATḤ clues in
THE Qur’an.

The first relevant notion here is that in the midst of all this mess of different qur’anic narratives,
different types of violence can be distinguished. In a way it can be simply another datum that
points to the diversity of narrative subjects, but it can also be something quite more interpellant:
Can we find religious violence, or perhaps notions of organized conquest, as it perfectly persists
in the retrospective narratives of the late Arab chronicles? Is the Qur’an aligned with the warrior
directionality of the Bible’s first narrative books, for instance, aiming at reaching a goal
predisposed by God -in the Bible, the Promised Land, in the Qur'an, perhaps a generalized
conquest-?

Because, by all means, there is war as well as violence in the Qur’an, just as, likewise, there is
war in the Bible. But just as in the Bible the term ḥerem oscillates between prohibition and
destruction all along its narrative distribution, generally appearing related to an obvious
expansive war provoked by a specific people on the march to its promised land -however literary
it may be, this is how it is expressed in the texts-, the alleged qur’anic Arabic equivalent to ḥerem,
-let us say ğihād-, presents a much greater problem: on the one hand, ğihād is hardly
translatable by war, and on the other there is a great deal of terms unequivocally relatable with

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the idea of war and/or violence, terms that can hardly be connected with scheduled FATḤ of any
sort. In short: ğihād with no war, war hardly ever directly connected with religion. Anyway, let
us review these variations -as a case-study to approach the qur'anic texts as a possible chronicle
source-, keeping in mind the suspicion that ğihād as Holy War could be an extra-qur'anic
requirement, while the qur'anic skirmishes hardly serve to theologically arm a good FATḤ.

From among those terms unequivocally relatable with the idea of war and/or violence in the
qur’anic collection, I have selected the ones that are most relevant to me: five concepts that I
would like to comment on and then to contrast them with the illustrious concept of ğihād and
its possible meaning in the qur’anic texts. Following King Fu’ad edition (1925) and with the
inestimable technical assistance of Hanna E. Kassis (Kassis 1983), the terminological distribution
of what we outline here is the following (again: five results plus ğihād, shortly afterwards):

1.- From the root -and therefore semantic field- ḤRB: 6 total occurrences.

- Verbal noun ḥarb -war-: 4 occurrences.

- Verb III yuḥarib –to fight-: 2 occurrences.

2.- From the root QTL: 170 total occurrences.

- Perfect active qatala –(he) killed-: 19 occurrences.

- Imperfect active yaqtul –(he) kills-: 34 occurrences.

- Imperative uqtul –kill!-: 10 occurrences.

- Perfect passive qutila –was killed-: 17 occurrences.

- Imperfect passive yuqtal –is killed-: 3 occurrences.

- Verbal noun qatl –slaying, killing-: 10 occurrences.

- Verbal noun qatlā –slain-: 1 occurrence.

- Verb II qattala –to slaughter-: 5 occurrences.

- Verb III qātala –to fight-: 67 occurrences.

- Verb VIII iqtatala –to fight against the other-: 4 occurrences.

3.- From the root ḌRB: 58 total occurrences.

- Perfect active ḍaraba –stroke, beated-: 22 occurrences.

- Imperfect active yaḍrib –strikes, beats-: 15 occurrences.

- Imperative iḍrib –strike!-: 12 occurrences.

- Perfect passive ḍuriba –was struck-: 6 occurrences.

- Verbal noun ḍarb: 3 occurrences.

9
4.- From the root B’S: 73 total occurrences.

- Participle active bā’is - wretched-: 1 occurrence.

- Perfect active ba’asa -did evil-: 40 occurrences.

- Verbal noun masculine ba’s -to do evil, fig. to battle-: 25 occurrences.

- Verbal noun feminine ba’sā’ –tribulation-: 4 occurrences.

- Adjective ba’īs –dreadful-: 1 occurrence.

- Verb VIII ibta’asa –to despair-: 2 occurrences.

5.- From the root ḪṢM: 18 total occurrences.

- Adjective ḫaṣim –contentious-: 1 occurrence.

- Verbal noun ḫaṣīm –opponent-: 3 occurrences.

- Verbal noun ḫaṣm –rivalry- : 3 occurrences.

- Verbal noun ḫiṣām –dispute- : 2 occurrences.

- Verb VI taḫāṣama –Disputing-: 1 occurrence.

- Verb VIII iḫtaṣama -to battle for-: 8 occurrences.

It does not make much sense to waste here time and lines in picking out every possible meaning
in that terminology, especially because what interests me now is precisely an overview. For
anyone interested in a more exhaustive development of the above, nothing can be easier than
following the correlative quotes that appear in our reference Kassis 1983. At any case, among
the many possible particular considerations that we could comment on here, I am especially
interested now in the following few –the qur’anic quotes expressed, in its case, as conventionally
corresponds: chapter –sūra- number, followed by the verse –Āya- number:

- Although ḥarb is the clearest term for ‘war’ in Arabic as well as in qur’anic Arabic,
among its few occurrences (4+2, as we saw) in the qur’anic texts there is only one
possible connection with any religious hue, (2:279), and not to war in his name but
as a warning, as a threatening tool in order to help people to give up ‘facing God’ –
bi-ḥarb min Allāh…-

- The semantic field related to the root ḌRB is too vague and widespread as to be
conclusive. Although it may appear meaning ‘to strike’ or ‘to beat’ in a battlefield or
as an isolated act of violence, a broad majority of its occurrences are left out of any
violent allusion due to the Arabic's frasal play, according to which it can appear to
allude simply 'travelling' -ḍaraba fī-l-arḍ, ‘he beats the ground’, or figuratively ‘he
travels’-, and it can also appear as to mark, to stamp, or as many other different
meanings.

- Regarding B’S, ‘to do evil’, the very concept is too vague and in too many
occurrences related to ethical considerations.

10
- So, as far as the violence in the Qur'an is concerned, we will have to settle for three
concepts: one is the aforementioned ḥarb –war-, in fact, not as numerous as one
might expect (again, 4+2), if we are supposed to be dealing with generalized war
narratives (FATḤ).

- The second should be the terms related to the root QTL, to kill, at the very end really
explicit and numerous with its 170 total occurrences. Out of these 170 occurrences,
57 appear as a proscriptive clause, as a reminder of 'you will not kill', while 34 out
of those 170 include known personages –Moses, Jesus, Joseph, the Prophets and so
on- either to quote their times and criticize how someone evil slew or tried to slain
‘an innocent’ or as a parabolic example to move the hearts of the listeners / readers.
This gives the total figure of 79, many of them paraphrasing what appears explicitly
in 2:85, ‘then there you are killing one another, and expelling a party of you’, in my
opinion, much more a description of the tumults of the times than a clear
conquering ideology by force. In other records, traces of genuine tribal barbarism
appear, as in 7:127, ‘we shall slaughter their sons and spare their women’. Finally,
the minority group closest to what we look for -organized religious violence-
constituted by almost a dozen occasions, makes use of this root qtl and associates it
with the expression fī sabīl Allāh, ‘in God’s way’. Sabīl is a very common term in the
Qur'an. It appears on 176 occasions, among which in 102 times it is related to the
word God. Actually, sabīl is the most earthly way to mark a ‘way’, since it would be
much more ethical to express it as ‘path’ with the term ṣirāṭ, which, in its turn,
appears less frequently, in a total of 45 occurrences, normally in association with
‘straight’ to form ‘the straight path’, aṣ-ṣirāṭ al-mustaqīm. None of the occurrences
of this expression, aṣ-ṣirāṭ al-mustaqīm, can be related to violence, unlike the
expression fī sabīl Allāh, ‘in God’s way’, which, in its turn, appears in 11 occurrences
to create the formula ‘to fight in God’s way’ connected precisely with the verbal root
here analyzed, QTL. In short, we can conclude that 'killing in the way of God' appears
11 times in the set of qur'anic texts, evidently none of them connected with the
word ğihād, and normally as a bare decontextualized mantra. Fī sabīl Allāh, ‘in God’s
way’, never appear close to the root FTḤ in any of its possible forms, a root that
does appear, on the other hand, in 29 occasions, generally associated with the idea
of ‘opening’, and very especially as the formula yawm al-fatḥ, usually translated as
‘the Day on Victory’ but always as synonymous with yawm al-dīn or ‘last day’, to say
it briefly.

- The third one, surrounding the verbal root ḫṣm and its 18 total occurrences, it is
much the same in the sense of meaning personal conflict but with a slight significant
difference: the final sense of ‘disputation’ and ‘quarrel’ that uses to imply -especially
in its verbal form VIII, iḫtaṣama, with the nuance of ‘facing each other’, refers to a
hypothetical future time in which, with the end of the world in front of us, the
confrontations between factions will not mean anything after all. Obviously, a scope
of meanings in no way convincing to locate a religious guideline of conquest.

- This is, in short, the panorama of violence that can be traced in the qur'anic
narratives. Clearly, insufficient to draw an agenda of conquest under prophetic

11
 inspiration. However, it is not exactly the image that the translations of the qur’anic
collection show, a bunch of versions usually contaminated by that metafiction to
which we alluded at the beginning, the need to make the texts say more than they
imply in their bare understanding. Because in most of the translations not only is
mixed and confused terminologically all that variety of nuances around these five
different semantic fields, but moreover they are linked, without exception, to a sixth
Arabic root, ǦHD, with which it is hardly possible to establish any relation and that,
in the end, full of meaning in medieval Islam -retrospective narration-, went on to
designate itself as Holy War -ğihād- and semantic engine of all the other terms
shown here.

In point of fact this term, ğihād, which appears as such throughout the qur’anic texts, acquires
a greater relevance precisely because of the ease with which any possible connection with the
sense of war is dismantled, opening new ways of interpretation that we will see next1.

The root ǦHD yields a total of 45 occurrences in the qur’anic collection. The first suspicion of its
primary meaning is based on the repeating five times the same expression starring the term
ǧahd, ‘oath’: ‘they have sworn by God the most earnest oaths’ (5:53, 6:109, 16:38, 24:55, 35:42).
Compromise, oath, endeavor will be the semantic limits of this root that appears with certain
profusion, 35 times more, conforming form III of the verb with five different flexions: ǧāhada
(Perfect active), yuǧāhid (Imperfect active), ǧāhid (Imperative), ǧihād (Verbal noun, only 4 times,
9:24, 22:78, 25:52, 60:1) and muǧāhid (Participle active). Now I am going to select different
fragments to highlight some possible errors of interpretation related to this semantic field that
includes the term ǧihād. On this occasion, I prefer to include the Arabic text because I am
interested here in the complete phraseology to adjust more adequate interpretations. Equally,
I will incorporate two apparently distorting elements: every time the word related to ǧihād or
its verb appears I will not translate it but I will include the XXXXX mark with the sole purpose of
highlighting its non-translation. In that way I follow Daniel Boyarin’s suggestion and his 'task of
the untranslator' with a single objective: that the possible meaning of the term appear in our
mind without the induction of usual translations. The second distorting element is related to the
qur'anic concept of HǦR, usually translated as ‘to emigrate’, but I am interested in questioning
here as well. The idea that I have in mind at this moment is to advance through a series of
examples until the reduction to the absurd of the habitual translations that relate the root ǦHD
with violence. And given that such a concept appears on many occasions together with the cited
concept of emigrating, the final proposal will affect both concepts equally.

Let us see, for instance, one typical occurrence of the concept in 2:218:

1
Of course, the bibliography on ğihād and Qur’an is very extensive and this is not a paper on exhaustive
historiography or state of the art. At any case, it is really difficult the even mention the topic and avoid
thinking on monographies as Michael Bonner (2006), Jihad in Islamic History. Princeton U.P., Andrew G.
Bostom (ed.) (2005), The Legacy of Jihad. Islamic Holy War and the Fate of non-Muslims. Prometheus
Books, David Cook (2005), Understanding Jihad. University Of California Press, Reuven Firestone (1999),
The Origin of Holy War in Islam. Oxford U.P., Gilles Kepel (), Jihad: Expansion et déclin de l’islamisme.
Paris : Gallimard, Gabrielle Marranci (2006), Jihad Beyond Islam. Oxford : Berg, or Laurent Murawiec
(2008), The Mind of Jihad. Cambridge U.P.

12
 َ ‫ﺳ ِﺑﻳ ِﻝ ﱠ ِ ﺃُﻭ ٰ َﻟ ِﺋ َﻙ َﻳ ْﺭ ُﺟﻭﻥَ َﺭ ْﺣ َﻣ‬
ِ‫ﺕ ﱠ‬ َ ‫ﺇِ ﱠﻥ ﺍﻟﱠﺫِﻳﻥَ ﺁ َﻣﻧُﻭﺍ َﻭﺍﻟﱠﺫِﻳﻥَ ﻫَﺎ َﺟ ُﺭﻭﺍ َﻭ َﺟﺎ َﻫﺩُﻭﺍ ِﻓﻲ‬
Indeed, those who have believed and those who have emigrated and XXXXX in God’s way, those
expect His mercy.
In the most common versions of the Qur'an in other languages, the indissoluble pair ‘emigrate
and fight’ uses to appear there, but I want to question this translation progressively. So, let's see
the following example in 3:142:

‫ﺃ َ ْﻡ َﺣ ِﺳ ْﺑﺗ ُ ْﻡ ﺃَﻥ ﺗَ ْﺩ ُﺧﻠُﻭﺍ ْﺍﻟ َﺟ ﱠﻧﺔَ َﻭ َﻟ ﱠﻣﺎ َﻳ ْﻌ َﻠ ِﻡ ﱠ ُ ﺍﻟﱠﺫِﻳﻥَ َﺟﺎ َﻫﺩُﻭﺍ ِﻣﻧ ُﻛ ْﻡ َﻭ َﻳ ْﻌ َﻠ َﻡ ﺍﻟ ﱠ‬
َ‫ﺻﺎ ِﺑ ِﺭﻳﻥ‬
Or do you think that you will enter Paradise and God does not know who among you XXXXX and
who knew how to wait (lit. ‘who were toe patients’, ‘who had patience’).
Here, any violent definition of the ǦHD concept becomes more complicated. It does not appear
its usual pair 'emigrated', but the author places ǧāhadū in correlation with aṣ-ṣābirīn: "those
who knew how to wait". I understand a serious incompatibility between being patient, knowing
how to wait to win Paradise, and to fight. But let's continue with 8:72:

َ ‫ﺇِ ﱠﻥ ﺍﻟﱠﺫِﻳﻥَ ﺁ َﻣﻧُﻭﺍ َﻭﻫَﺎ َﺟ ُﺭﻭﺍ َﻭ َﺟﺎ َﻫﺩُﻭﺍ ِﺑﺄ َ ْﻣ َﻭﺍ ِﻟ ِﻬ ْﻡ َﻭﺃَﻧﻔُ ِﺳ ِﻬ ْﻡ ِﻓﻲ‬
ِ ‫ﺳ ِﺑﻳ ِﻝ ﱠ‬
Indeed, those who have believed and emigrated and XXXXX with their wealth and lives in God’s
way…
Did ‘they fight with their wealth and lives’? Can we seriously think of translating here ǧāhadū
here as ‘to comply with the Holy War’, when it comes linked with the expression ‘with their
goods and lives’ and knowing -we saw it before- that the first meaning of that root is swearing,
committing (‘swearing for their life and assets’, or ‘compromising their lives and assets’, for
example)? Let's move forward with the following example, 9:16:

ِ ‫ﺃ َ ْﻡ َﺣ ِﺳ ْﺑﺗ ُ ْﻡ ﺃَﻥ ﺗُﺗْ َﺭ ُﻛﻭﺍ َﻭ َﻟ ﱠﻣﺎ َﻳ ْﻌ َﻠ ِﻡ ﱠ ُ ﺍﻟﱠﺫِﻳﻥَ َﺟﺎ َﻫﺩُﻭﺍ ِﻣﻧ ُﻛ ْﻡ َﻭ َﻟ ْﻡ َﻳﺗ ﱠ ِﺧﺫُﻭﺍ ِﻣﻥ ﺩ‬
‫ُﻭﻥ ﱠ ِ َﻭ َﻻ‬
ٌ ‫ﺳﻭ ِﻟ ِﻪ َﻭ َﻻ ْﺍﻟ ُﻣﺅْ ِﻣﻧِﻳﻥَ َﻭ ِﻟﻳ َﺟﺔً ۚ َﻭ ﱠ ُ َﺧ ِﺑ‬
َ‫ﻳﺭ ِﺑ َﻣﺎ ﺗَ ْﻌ َﻣﻠُﻭﻥ‬ ُ ‫َﺭ‬
Do you really think that you will be left to yourselves and that God does not distinguish those
who among you XXXXX and those who do not take other than Him, his prophet and believers as
intimates? God is acquainted with what you all do.
Well, one would tend to think here that the good believer is concerned if God has accounted for
those unimportant things for less wise eyes, things related to faith. So, again, ǧāhadū does not
seem like a good translation. I understand that if it were to undertake the Holy War, it would be
a somewhat more visible action. Let us proceed, 16:110:

َ ‫ﺛ ُ ﱠﻡ ﺇِ ﱠﻥ َﺭﺑ َﱠﻙ ِﻟﻠﱠﺫِﻳﻥَ ﻫَﺎ َﺟ ُﺭﻭﺍ ِﻣﻥ َﺑ ْﻌ ِﺩ َﻣﺎ ﻓُ ِﺗﻧُﻭﺍ ﺛ ُ ﱠﻡ َﺟﺎ َﻫﺩُﻭﺍ َﻭ‬
‫ﺻ َﺑ ُﺭﻭﺍ ﺇِ ﱠﻥ َﺭﺑ َﱠﻙ ِﻣﻥ َﺑ ْﻌ ِﺩﻫَﺎ‬
ٌ ُ‫َﻟ َﻐﻔ‬
‫ﻭﺭ ﱠﺭ ِﺣﻳ ٌﻡ‬
Then, indeed your Lord, to those who emigrated after they were tempted and thereafter XXXXX
and were patient, indeed, your Lord, after all that, is Forgiving and Merciful.
Same double quibble: first of all, to emigrate after being tempted? And between an improbable
‘migration’, as cure against temptations and the fact of being patient –again, ṣabarū-, does it

13
really fit, in that correlation, to undertake the Holy War? It is not at all the general tone of the
verse. Next one, 29:8:

‫ْﺱ َﻟ َﻙ ِﺑ ِﻪ ِﻋ ْﻠ ٌﻡ َﻓ َﻼ‬
َ ‫ﺍﻙ ِﻟﺗ ُ ْﺷ ِﺭ َﻙ ِﺑﻲ َﻣﺎ َﻟﻳ‬
َ ‫ﺳﺎﻥَ ِﺑ َﻭﺍ ِﻟ َﺩ ْﻳ ِﻪ ُﺣ ْﺳﻧًﺎ ۖ َﻭ ِﺇﻥ َﺟﺎ َﻫ َﺩ‬ ِ ْ ‫ﺻ ْﻳﻧَﺎ‬
َ ‫ﺍﻹﻧ‬ ‫َﻭ َﻭ ﱠ‬
‫ﺗ ُ ِﻁ ْﻌ ُﻬ َﻣﺎ‬
It is true that We commanded the human being to honor their father and their mother. But if
they XXXXX you to make you associate with Me that of which you have no knowledge, do not
obey them.
This is one of the most illustrative examples: the subject of the sentence lead by ǧāhadā is ‘your
parents’. Should we be translating it as ‘if your parents undertake the Holy War against you in
order to make you associate with Me…’? Another illustration, 25:52:

ً ‫َﻓ َﻼ ﺗ ُ ِﻁﻊِ ْﺍﻟ َﻛﺎ ِﻓ ِﺭﻳﻥَ َﻭ َﺟﺎ ِﻫ ْﺩ ُﻫﻡ ِﺑ ِﻪ ِﺟ َﻬﺎﺩًﺍ َﻛ ِﺑ‬

‫ﻳﺭﺍ‬
So do not obey the disbelievers, and XXXXX with it strongly.
Throughout the whole sura, a series of pronouns appears to refer to the central concept of the
whole narrative: furqān, the criterion to distinguish good from evil. In this verse, I highlighted
this pronoun –bi-hi-, which appears immediately after our ǧāhid-hum. It is simply impossible to
translate it here as ‘Holy War’, unless you want to imply that the unbeliever must be hit with the
criterion -furqān-. Another, 47:31:

‫َﻭ َﻟ َﻧ ْﺑﻠُ َﻭ ﱠﻧ ُﻛ ْﻡ َﺣﺗ ﱠ ٰﻰ َﻧ ْﻌ َﻠ َﻡ ْﺍﻟ ُﻣ َﺟﺎ ِﻫﺩِﻳﻥَ ِﻣﻧ ُﻛ ْﻡ َﻭﺍﻟ ﱠ‬

َ ‫ﺻﺎ ِﺑ ِﺭﻳﻥَ َﻭ َﻧ ْﺑﻠُ َﻭ ﺃ َ ْﺧ َﺑ‬
‫ﺎﺭ ُﻛ ْﻡ‬
And We will surely be testing you until We come to know who among you all XXXXX and who are
the patients, as well as We will be testing what you do.
Again, muǧāhidīn and ‘patients’ -ṣābirīn- appearing correlatives in the text and rendering totally
incompatible a translation in which the value of war and patience at the same time is indicated.

Throughout this list of examples, two correlations become evident: ǦHD and 'migration', on the
one hand, and ǦHD and 'to have patience’ on the other. At all times, the three terms combined
are marking an ethical differentiation of the believer, and not, in any case, a bellicose attitude
with which those passages tend to be translated. But we may add another point of reference to
more cautious translations and commentaries that may finally lead to understand why I also
underlined and highlighted the term ‘migration’ or ‘to migrate’ -hāǧara- in all its occurrences: it
is simply due to the work in progress of prof. Mette Bjerregaard regarding precisely this term.
Due to this already quoted historiographic meta-fiction, the translation of hāǧara uses to
depend on another theologem, i.e. the myth of a foundational migration from Mecca to Medina
in 622. Well, prof. Bjerregaard shows in a very convincing way that those muhāǧirūn, then, could
be those who agreed to take upon themselves the act of forsaking and renouncing, thus, clearly
marking a difference in piety and faith, and moving away from the "physical" way in which the
term was understood so far. It would not be a usual trip, but a spiritual one, a renunciation.
Whereupon, migration, effort and patience would be the three axes of the believer, always
appearing together in the qur’anic texts, and not ‘migration and Holy War’ as in the less
successful translations.

And so, by ‘untranslating' ǦHD, it seems evident that the gap left behind -XXXXX - in the texts
quoted cannot, in any case, be filled with the very later concept that Islamic historiography
coined as a counterpart to the term 'crusade': Jihad as holy war. Between that retrospective

14
narration and the willful task of mixing all the possible warlike terms of the qur'anic texts, and
then recapitulating them under the epigraph Jihad, the long tradition of translators feeds a
general bewilderment and an equally general idea of absurd narrative coherence in a collection
of texts that were no meant to appear together, but it was time, perhaps chance, or the will to
forge a unity after diversity, who at last managed to compile THE Qur’an, finally ready for its
canonization.
At the end of the day, our ‘author’s Thesis’ here is quite simple: that there are many Qur’ans
inside the Qur’an, and that the idea or story of what we understand today by ‘Jihad’ is not at all
Qur’anic. But here I’ll need to go a little further in the very idea of inter-narration.

V.- On Inter-narrative identity & social epistemology.

My determination to subvert the normative values of identity construction and
representation <writes Ajit Maan> resulted in inter-narrative identity. Inter-narrative identities
result from throwing off inherited structures of self-representation, undermining normative
identity practices, and disrupting authoritarian fictions of a unified self. (Ajit K. Maan 2015:viii)

As far as I’m concerned, my attempt to propose a plausible explanation of the progressive

codification and canonization of the Qur'an from a random collection, is inserted precisely in
both that process that prof. Maan describes as inter-narrative identity, and in the explanations
of what is understood as social epistemology. If the inter-narrative identity delimits unexpected
unification processes without a monitoring will, in reality in those same terms the social
epistemology is based while focusing on a wide range of sources that should be taken into
account in the study of knowledge as a collective achievement. The whole history of religious
systems and their foundational literatures is based on the exceptional nature of some primal
human beings and the custody of their legacy by later generations. While proposing the de-
exceptionalization of these historical processes, what I intend to emphasize is precisely the
humanization of such processes. To substitute the concept of transmission for evolution,
adaptation and inclusion.

The history of the qur'anic text, of the qur’anic texts that little by little were grouped till
constituting THE Qur'an, is narrated departing from a historiographic meta-fiction sustained by
faith -in some cases- or under suspicion of falsification and artificiality -in other cases-.
Sometimes a single collecting process monitored by a specific group of scribes is imagined, and
at other times the meta-fiction is expanded by constructing a circle of mutual inertial references:
the Qur'an explained from the Hadiths, these from the Sira and this one from the Qur’an. Finally,
a whole exceptionality is constructed by the mere fact of assigning a unique and single historical
outburst: the omni-comprehensive and omni-explanatory FATḤ.

That is to say: the whole is more than the sum of the parts, the whole is always posterior to
these parts and what is more important, both inter-narrative identity and social epistemology
depart from a shared consideration: there is no need of constructive, counterfeiting, compiler
will in the process that finally constituted THE complete set; THE Qur'an as we know it today,
departing from all these previous narrative materials. This is how the alienating strangeness of
Islam is built, and that is why this alienation and strangeness are artificial: there was never an
Islamic matrix without connection to the rest. In fact, the Qur’anic texts are undoubtedly linked
to their contexts as they lived a ‘carried forward’ process in the history of the many religious
polidoxies in the Middle East. A few lectionaries in Syriac could have been Arabized, and over
time other texts could have also been added with a similar subject matter but with a different
thematic approach. But the final result, that collection of texts that we now call the Qur'an, some

15
of them repetitive and redundant, throws a contrastive conclusion: given some previous
canonization processes - Judaism and Christianity, especially - based on an officiality that left
out everything considered ‘heterodox’, in the process of canonization of the Qur'an all points to
a different modus operandi, a mere inclusive compilation. A certain simplistic ‘ecumenism’ in
the sense of accepting any Arab or Arabized narrative that dealt with exemplary themes and
characters, with only one content limit: Neither God has a partner, nor does he have children.

Finally, and by way of conclusion, three main proposals can be highlighted in these
considerations about what do we mean by THE Qur’an: a methodologic one, while dealing with
Early Islam -unity goes later than diversity-, a therapeutic and pedagogical call –the need to use
sources and materials contemporaries to the events described and avoiding calling the things
appeared in those sources with later names-, as well as a possible denominative clear distinction
between causes and effects in History –nunc pro tunc-: before the 9th century Islam could not
do anything because it was precisely Islam what was being done, as I wrote before. Moreover,
it is not the Qur’an which created or launched Islam, but vice versa. A lot of literature has already
been written in the field of intellectual history focusing on the contextualist approach in the
history of ideas named mainly by Quentin Skinner -and his Contextual Shift-, Reinhart Koselleck
-and his Conceptual History- and so on. Islamic studies as such, and Early Islam studies in
particular, cannot be left out of the debate of ideas, or avoid general visions enclosing itself in
the stank compartments of hyper-specialization. If, little by little, the limits of religious
confessionalism and its apologetics in Islamic studies are being overcome, they cannot be
replaced by a similar academic confessionalism and its own apologetics, equally limiting.
Everything is always to be done, and knowledge cannot advance without continually revising.

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