A research project directed by Prof. Holger M. Zellentin and funded by the European Research Council

The Qur’an’s message to the populations of Mecca and Medina must be understood in the context of its sustained and critical engagement with the Jewish and the Christian traditions. QaSLA complements and redevelops this approach from the ground up by utilizing the Qur’an, in an inter-disciplinary perspective, as witness to the history of Judaism and Christianity, in two unprecedented ways. The Qur’an, firstly, will become the primary literary source allowing us to sketch the religious landscape of the Arabian Peninsula at the turn of the seventh century C.E. Secondly, the Qur’an’s testimony to the religious culture of its contemporaries will enable us to approach the development of Jewish and Christian culture throughout Late Antiquity from a new perspective.

QaSLA’s main innovation consists in turning the table on the predominant hermeneutics of Western approaches to the Qur’an, which tend to focus on the question of how the Qur’an is influenced by Judaism and Christianity. By taxonomizing the religious profiles reflected in the demonstrable interface between the Qur’an and its Jewish and Christian contemporaries, the project first reorients and then revamps this approach.

QaSLA initially analyses the affinity between the Qur’an and known forms of Judaism and Christianity surrounding Arabia in order to identify which cultural and ritual practices circulated within the peninsula, along with biblical, exegetical, homiletic, legal, narrative, theological, and poetic traditions. It furthermore employs the Qur’an as a new vantage point from which to reconsider broader late antique religious trends across the Middle East. QaSLA combines expertise across disciplines to create a novel local Arabian and an enhanced longitudinal Middle Eastern understanding of Rabbinic Jewish and Syriac, Ethiopic and Arabic Christian cultures. In a final step, the project then returns to portray the Qur’an in sharper contradistinction to more clearly defined forms of Judaism and Christianity.