Marcin Grodzki
Studia Religiologica, Volume 48, Issue 3, 2015, pp. 245 - 257
https://doi.org/10.4467/20844077SR.15.018.3789The article briefly presents the scholarly theory on the historical and dogmatic origins of Islam by the modern French researcher Bruno Bonnet-Eymard, with an attempt to classify its place in the modern field of Islamic studies. The result of over thirty years of Bonnet-Eymard’s work is his translation of the first five Qur’anic suras into French, with their comprehensive critical edition, prepared on the basis of his own philological, historical and theological exegesis. Bonnet-Eymard, who belonged to the Islamicist sceptical school, attempts to read the Arabic Qur’anic text also from the perspective of other Semitic languages – mainly Hebrew and Syriac. Regardless of the flaws and merits of Bonnet-Eymard’s exegesis, it is surely a valuable source of scholarly insights, conclusions and linguistic remarks that cannot be overstated for modern critical studies of the Qur’anic text.
Marcin Grodzki
Studia Religiologica, Volume 54 Issue 1, 2021, pp. 45 - 62
https://doi.org/10.4467/20844077SR.21.004.13928The paper considers the form, status, and importance of the Qur’anic message in the first two centuries of Islam. The argument is that the term “Qur’an” could not have originally referred to the final body of revelation in a text form. Rather, the concept of the Qur’an must have functioned among the faithful as a term for oral transmission before the scripturalization of the revelation, and it is this oral function of the Qur’an that is primal to its literate function. It seems that just as in Judaism and Christianity, in Islam the process of remembering, passing on, collecting, and codifying the textus receptus, along with its stabilization and sacralization, was a centuries-long self-propelled operation shaped primarily by the oral tradition (especially in the presumed culture of illiterate people).