Book Review: Muhammad Mustafa al-Azami: The History of the Qurʾanic Text from Revelation to Compilation: A Comparative Study with the Old and New Testaments

How do we know that the Qurʾan revered and recited by Muslims around  the globe is the same one that the Prophet Muḥammad, peace be upon him, recited to his companions? Can it be that the Book considered by more than a billion people to be the literal word of Allah has been tampered with? It is primarily in answer to this question that Muhammad Mustafa al-Azami first published this monumental work in 2003, now released in its second edition and bearing a handsome new cover.
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Answers to such queries were once self-evident to most Muslims, as they considered it self-evident that a Book memorized, recorded, and publicly recited from the time of its revelation until the present by whole communities in each generation could have been changed, whether purposely or by accident. But in an age when recognition of Islamic intellectual tradition itself has been obfuscated, the query has gained import and polemical force—especially as confronted by Orientalist scholarship, which takes as a guiding presupposition that the Qurʾan’s claim to revelation is vacuous. One resurgent trend in such scholarship is the suggestion that the text we now know as “the Qurʾan” was composed hundreds of years after the death of the Prophet Muḥammad, peace be upon him, based on Jewish prototypes, and was back projected by his followers.

From his introductory remarks, Azami makes no attempt to hide his intent to face such challenges head-on; the book itself, he mentions, was spurred into print by Toby Lester’s provocative article “What is the Qurʾan”, which argued that the Muslim assertion that the Qurʾan is a Divinely revealed text cannot be defended in a scholarly fashion. Rising to the challenge, Azami has established with his detailed research and eloquent prose that Lester’s claim was completely misguided.

Journal of Islam & Science, Vol. 8 (Summer 2010) No. 1​

Zacharia al-Khatib