Review

Reviewed Work(s): God, Muhammad and the Unbelievers: A Qur'anic Study by David
Marshall
Review by: Jane Dammen McAuliffe
Source: Die Welt des Islams, New Series, Vol. 43, Issue 2 (2003), pp. 292-294
Published by: Brill
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20140669
Accessed: 07-02-2017 11:11 UTC

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 292 LITERATUR/REVIEWS

auf Dauer ist. Kramers abschlie?ender Rat, die amerikanische gegenwartsbezogene

Nahostwissenschaft m?ge, um relevant zu werden, zuk?nftig davon ausgehen,
dass die Vereinigten Staaten eine im wesentlichen wohlt?tige Rolle in der Welt
spielen (S. 129), scheint mir bestenfalls ein Vorurteil durch ein anderes
ersetzen zu wollen.

Stefan Wild, Bonn

David Marshall. God, Muhammad and the Unbelievers: A

Qur'anic Study. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 1999.
ISBN 0-7007-1086-8; pp. xviii + 222. Bibliography, indices of
qur'anic passages, of biblical passages and a general index.

Few themes in the Qur'an are more pervasive than the following: If you reject
God's messengers, God will punish you. The narrative triad of God, messenger
and unbeliever appears repeatedly throughout the entire text of the Qur'an in
both elliptical and elaborated versions. The messengers themselves are mul
tiple, encompassing familiar biblical figures as well as a series of names
associated with ancient Arabian lore. Several generations of qur'anic scholars
have collected and studied these pericopes under the heading of "punishment
stories" or, to use Josef Horovitz' term, Straglegenden. A persistent feature of this
scholarship is the supposition that qur'anic references to pre-Islamic messenger
rejection scenarios function as a caique for the situation of Muhammad himself.
Read psychologically, the Prophet is assumed to have identified himself with
these earlier figures and to have struggled with the internal conflict generated
by having to regard many in his life and society as "unbelievers."
Given the prominence of this theme in the Qur'an and the attention it has
already received in previous scholarship, David Marshall set himself an ambi
tious task in choosing to study it. The results of his work are a well-structured
and clearly presented contribution to contemporary qur'anic studies. His book
begins with two chapters which situate the work within the corpus of Western
scholarly studies of the Qur'an, particularly this aspect of it, and within the
debates which have preoccupied those studies. Chapters three and four, which
constitute the study itself, divide the topic by its Meccan and Medinan itera
tions.
The author offers an especially lucid account of his own methodological
suppositions. These are explicitly shaped by the cognate discipline of biblical
studies, a field whose own procedural permutations have frequently generated
fallout among scholars of the Qur'an. For example, Marshall points to the place
narrative criticism has occupied within some forms of late twentieth-century
biblical scholarship, acting as an antidote to, or an expansion of, source-critical
studies. Yet more interesting is the author's alliance with the "situated scholar
ship" now frequently found in humanistic and social science disciplines. Acknowl
edging the preshaping or the perspectival formation that is understood to be an
inevitable function of one's gender, class, race, ethnicity or religion, recognizing
that "there is no neutral vantage-point from which texts can be read" because

? Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2003 Die Welt des Islams 43, 2
Also available online - www.brill.nl

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 LITERATUR/ REVIEWS 293

"we cannot block out all our prior assumptions," Marshall identifies himself as
a Christian and admits that "the fact that I am a Christian has certainly shaped
the way I have read the Qur'an (p. 6)."
In a move that also marks this author's willingness to be clear and direct with
his readers, Marshall makes several critical choices for which some scholars of
the Qur'an will fault him. (1) He confronts the assumption that seeking the
"original meaning" of the Qur'an is a hopeless quest, mired in the mud of
epistemological presuppositions that are no longer intellectually fashionable.
His arguments here, which again show their indebtedness to biblical scholar
ship, are worth reading, even if they leave one longing for the inevitable
rejoinder, the continuing dialectic of the fuller debate. (2) He accepts, in the
main, the traditional account of Islamic origins and regards the Qur'an as
textual attestation to those events, quoting a description of it as "a contempo
rary and authentic record that responds constantly to Muhammad's situation ..."
(p. 15). This pledge of allegiance places him squarely within an older genera
tion of scholarship and against the revisionist challenges that have been
addressed to it during the last quarter century, challenges which themselves are
being continually refined and restricted. (3) Not surprisingly, Marshall is also
willing to accept the chronological classification of qur'?nic s?ras and verses
that was developed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by Gustav
Weil and Theodor N?ldeke and partially modified by R?gis Blach?re. These
three judgments shape decisively the scope and results of Marshall's work.
A fourth decision, to restrict his attention to the Qur'an itself and to exclude
from consideration the centuries-long commentary (tafslr) tradition is less
consequential for the main argument of his study but quite consistent with the
other three presuppositions. Marshall draws a firm line between the text and its
commentaries, a division which has been questioned by those who see much
more interconnection in the evolution of both text and tafslr. Rather than
treating these as two entirely independent genres, at least in their very earliest
periods, scholars like Angelika Neuwirth are sensitive to the presence of
interpretive interpolations within the qur'?nic corpus itself.
Building upon the classification of Mecca/Medinan chronology and its sub
divisions, the author charts the changes in the "triangular drama" that plays
itself out between God, Muhammad and the unbelievers. Key to the earlier
stage is the progressive redirection of the Prophet's loyalties, steering him away
from any compassionate identification with those former friends and allies who
continue in their unbelief: "the messengers all ultimately submit to God's
command to disregard human ties with unbelievers, however close, where these
conflict with loyalty to God" (p. 105). For the later stage Badr provides the
critical juncture. Finally, the long-awaited punishment of contemporary unbe
lievers occurs but it is not the total destruction visited upon those peoples who
opposed Muhammad's predecessors. And the agency is different: against c?d
and Tham?d, the peoples of H?d and S?lih, God alone had acted. At Badr,
Muhammad and the believers became the agents of God's destructive acts.
Consequently, after Badr the expectation of direct divine intervene recedes and
the God-Muhammad-unbelievers triad realigns itself. As both Horovitz and
Paret had remarked previously, the punishment narratives occur far less fre
quently in the Medinan period. Marshall, citing Q 63:8 ("Might belongs to God,
and to the messenger, and the believers"), suggests that the "functional gap"
between God and Muhammad, and even between God and the umma, narrows.

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294 LITERATUR/REVIEWS

In fighting the unbelievers, Muhammad and his community model the behavior
of God. Now they see with his eyes and they embody his castigating might.
Marshall concludes his book with three short appendices: one on his assessment
of the historiographical relationship between the Qur'an and the slra, another
on the implications of this analysis of the punishment narratives for contempo
rary relations between Muslims and non-Muslims and a third on some biblical
qur'?nic comparisons. In this third piece, Marshall returns to his self-descriptive
as a Christian and delves into explicitly theological territory. His insights here
are remarkably interesting and anchor his entire effort in its larger context of
Christian-Muslim dialogue. For despite his determination to avoid the tafslr
literature Marshall has, in fact, penned a contribution to that genre. This book
is a Christian, or Christian-formed, thematic commentary on a key topic within
the Qur'an. Without too much of a stretch, it can be connected with a relatively
recent development within the Islamic exegetical tradition, al-tafslr al-mawdul,
the effort to group passages of the Qur'an judged to pertain to a particular
topic and to interpret them in themselves and in their relation to each other.
This exegetical subcategory utilizes, in a new form, the classical hermeneutical
principle of "interpreting the Qur'an by the Qur'an" (al-tafslr al-Qur?n bi-l
Qur?n). As a Christian commentary, Marshall's book continues the category of
contributions made by scholars like Kenneth Cragg, William Montgomery Watt
and Wilfred Cantwell Smith, sensitive readers of a scripture not their own but
one to which they bring erudition and a strong religious sensibility.

Jane D?mmen McAuliffe, Washington, D.C.

Jane D?mmen McAuliffe (ed.): Encyclopaedia of the Qur'an.

Volume One A-D, Leiden-Boston-K?ln 2001, Academic
Publishers Brill, ISBN 90 04 11465 3, XXIII + 557 p., Euro
180-, $ 221
The aim of this Encyclopaedia of the Quran (henceforth: EQ) is explained by
the general editor in her preface. The EQ wants to create "a reference work that
would capture this century's best achievements in qur'?nic studies" and it in
tends to stimulate "even more extensive scholarship on the Qur'an in the de
cades to come". As far as the readership is concerned, the EQ is meant "to make
the world of Qur'?nic studies accessible to a very broad range of academic
scholars and educated readers" (all quotations p. X). The first volume shows the
EQ to be a dictionary of Qur'?nic terms, concepts, personalities, place names,
cultural history and exegesis, supplemented with essays on some of the most
important themes and subjects within Qur'?nic studies. Its primary aim is to
provide a non-specialist public with the best information specialists can offer. As
the names listed as Associate Editors, as Assistant Editors, and as members of
the Advisory Board prove, the General Editor and the publishing house suc
ceeded in drawing on an international elite of specialists which will guarantee
that the EQ represents the highest standard of contemporary scholarship. This
impression is fully borne out by the names of the authors of the articles in the
first volume and by the high standard of the entries themselves.

? Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2003 Die Welt des Islams 43, 2
Also available online - www.brill.nl

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