Study of the Qur'an is enjoying something of a renaissance these days. Recent political events have put Islam as a religion in the spotlight and this has meant that much greater attention has been paid to the cornerstone of that religion, the Muslim sacred text known as the Qur'an. This Cambridge Companion is thus one of a steady stream of publications aiming to make the Muslim Scripture and the debates about it accessible to a broader audience. The marketing blurb on the opening page claims that "scholarship in qur'anic studies. . .remains sequestered in specialised monographs and journals", and while this is certainly not the case (consider the introductions of Montgomery Watt and Richard Bell, Fazlur Rahman, Neal Robinson and Michael Cook to name but the most famous) it is true that the volume under review does do a very good job of presenting many of the more academic discussions in a very user-friendly way for the non-expert. In the introduction, for instance, McAuliffe illustrates the different ways in which one might approach the Qur'an with the example of three different persons who were born non-Muslim but who came to become deeply involved in the Qur'an for reasons of defending their own faith (Peter the Venerable), deepening their study of Islam (Ignaz Goldziher) and affirming their newly-adopted faith (Leopold Weiss/Muhammad Asad). This gives a very nice personal touch, which makes both her pieces (she uses the same ploy in her chapter on interpretations) a pleasure to read, but also enriches our insight into the various roles that the Qur'an has played and the diverse ways in which it has been read over the centuries.
The introduction is followed by five sections which represent the subject areas that the editor deemed most important for an appreciation of the Qur'an: formation of the Qur'anic text, description and analysis, transmission and dissemination, interpretations and intellectual traditions, and contemporary readings. These are all indeed crucial topics for imparting to the general reader or student an understanding of what the Qur'an is, of how it came to be and how it came to be known, and also of how it has been studied, interpreted and propagated throughout the ages. The only major criticism that one might make here is that so much attention has been given to its inception and reception, its interpretation and dissemination that precious little space is left for a basic exposition of the content of the Qur'an. Obviously aspects of its content are alluded to and remarked upon throughout the Companion, but a mere seventeen pages (including footnotes and bibliography) are allowed for the only chapter that is specifically devotes to "Themes and Topics" (chapter 4). Moreover, this chapter decides to take the view that since God is the primary subject of the Qur'an only God's nature and role in the world will be explained. This is, of course, a legitimate view--the author of this chapter, Daniel Madigan, is certainly right that "God is the centre of the text's attention" and he does an excellent job of illustrating the portrayal of God in the Qur'an. However, given that this was to be the sole place where the content of the Qur'an would be set forth, a broader presentation of the material would have been more appropriate. To take one example, the pagan opponents of Muhammad, who feature so prominently in the Qur'an, get no more than a handful of mentions: page 34 (a one-sentence reference to them as "hyperbolic products of intra-monotheist polemics"--totally unfathomable to a non-expert), page 94 (a one-sentence reference to the fact that "the legislative material is interspersed with verses contending against other groups of believers, pagans and hypocrites") and page 84 (one paragraph), which notes that the pagans and the People of the Scripture (Jews and Christians) are not meant to be strongly distinguished in the mind of the Qur'an.
As regards the fourteen individual chapters apportioned across these five sections, their authors are in general to be commended for managing with a high degree of success to discuss quite complex ideas and debates in their contributions while at the same time making them still readable and comprehensible to a general audience. And indeed even for experts, it will still be worthwhile to peruse this volume, since the editor has picked authors who are leaders in their field and the material they put out for us is very fresh and up to date. Nevertheless, this is a review and I am expected to highlight failings as well as hail successes and so I shall mention some problems that the non-expert will have to bear in mind when using this volume and note a couple of shortcomings that are bugbears to me personally. In the former category I have first to say that the authors, in their drive to include the latest research, have sometimes not been mindful of the fact that this can be very difficult territory for a neophyte to chart. This manifests itself in references that are too allusive and cryptic (such as that noted above on pagans as "hyperbolic products of intra-monotheist polemics") and in theories that are only very summarily sketched out without a guide as to their validity (thus in chapter three Motzki reviews in quick succession the "alternative accounts" of Wansbrough, Lling and Luxenberg on "the Qur'an's formation" with no comment as to what we are to make of these hypotheses--what prompted them, are they plausible or not, on what basis are we to evaluate, accept or reject them, etc). Secondly, as noted above, the beginner will have to keep at hand another introductory work that will give them a more substantial overview of the content of the Qur'an, since this is lacking in this Companion. Thirdly, this work tends to strike a slightly apologetic note. This is not really a criticism, it is of course good that the authors display sympathy with the text they are writing about, but it means there is occasionally a degree of defensiveness or evasiveness in explaining some aspects of the Qur'an. For example, McAuliffe chides the nineteenth-century German Qur'an scholar Theodor Nldeke for falling prey to the presumption that "scripture. . .will have a narrative structure" and for his remarks that in the Qur'an "nowhere do we find a steady advance in the narration" and "the connection of ideas is extremely loose" (5). Now it may be that he is wrong to impute negative connotations to these characteristics, but they are certainly valid observations and talking of "genre discrimination" and of "a form of textual reception that is utterly foreign to contemporary (i.e. our) expectations of linear narrative function" (6) does not help us much in understanding the Qur'an's attitude to narrative. Examples of linear narrative are easy enough to find in classical Arabic literature (and in pre-Islamic Arabic literature too if we accept that it has been preserved well enough in later anthologies), so it is not that the concept was unknown to the Arabs. Moreover, some Qur'anic accounts, such as that about Alexander the Great (Dhu l-Qarnayn), do possess a more linear narrative (he goes to the land of the setting sun, then to the land of the rising sun, then to the land between the two mountains where he builds the wall to keep out Gog and Magog, then prophesies about the future - interestingly this follows the progression of the narrative in the Syriac Alexander legend, though massively abbreviated), so explanations like "the Qur'an is primarily sound not script" (6), while potentially meaningful for reception history, do not properly engage with the issue. This perhaps also accounts for the authors' unwillingness to tackle (as oppose to summarise) alternative theories of the Qur'an's development and significance to the extent that one of them simply avers, without clarification, that "the theories of the so-called sceptic or revisionist scholars. . .have by now been discarded" (100), which is news to most of us who work in the field.
As for my own personal bugbears, I have extremely few that would constitute actual errors, as opposed to differences in opinion and interpretation. The only one I could find that particularly grated on me was the recurrent statement that "in the first century and even later Arabic was written in a scriptio defectiva," "without distinguishing between consonants of a similar shape," that is, "a number of consonants were rendered by a single homograph that only later was differentiated through points placed above or below the letter form" (47, 68, 99; cf. pp. 32, 116-117, 146, 212). Now it is well known from papyri and inscriptions that these diacritical points were used from as early as the year 20 after the Hijra (641 AD); though the dots are not used all the time as in later Arabic, they are used on the same letters as in later Arabic, and so it is evidently the same system. This might seem a minor quibble, but it is important, for the authors in this Companion are claiming that it is a defective script that explains deviant readings and the difficulty in establishing a canonical text of the Qur'an. But the question is rather why, given that there did exist a system of diacritical marks that was used for official correspondence and personal inscriptions, it was not employed for writing early Qur'ans. Having said that, I notice that the two earliest Qur'an fragments the Companion includes do actually have some diacritical marks (figs. 2-3), so this whole question needs to be examined very carefully. Anyway, there are some indications that the Qur'an was treated as a special case. For example, the pre-Islamic practice of not writing medial a was changed before or during the reign of 'Umar I (634-44), deploying aliph for this purpose (freed up by the decline in the use of hamza, which aliph had originally represented), but the pre-Islamic practice is followed in early Qur'ans (though sometimes ya and waw are used), perhaps indicating a very conservative attitude towards the writing down of the Qur'an.
Caveats and reservations notwithstanding, this is an excellent addition to the Cambridge Companion series; it is fresh, readable and comprehensive, and I will certainly be recommending it to my students to read.