Creating the Qur’an: A Historical-Critical Study

by Stephen J. Shoemaker

A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at . Creating the Qur’an presents the first systematic historical-critical study of the Qur’an’s origins, drawing on methods and perspectives commonly used to study other scriptural traditions. Demonstrating in detail that the Islamic tradition relates not a single attested account of the holy text’s formation, Stephen J. Shoemaker shows how the Qur’an preserves a surprisingly diverse array of memories regarding the text’s early history and its canonization. To this he adds perspectives from radiocarbon dating of manuscripts, the linguistic history of Arabic, the social and cultural history of late ancient Arabia, and the limitations of human memory and oral transmission, as well as various peculiarities of the Qur’anic text itself. Considering all the relevant data to present the most comprehensive and convincing examination of the origin and evolution of the Qur’an available, Shoemaker concludes that the canonical text of the Qur’an was most likely produced only around the turn of the eighth century.

Genres: History, Islam, Religion, Nonfiction

370 pages, Paperback

Published July 26, 2022

About the author

Stephen Shoemaker (Ph.D. ’97, Duke University) is a specialist on the history of Christianity and the beginnings of Islam. His primary interests lie in the ancient and early medieval Christian traditions, and more specifically in early Byzantine and Near Eastern Christianity. His research focuses on early devotion to the Virgin Mary, Christian apocryphal literature, and Islamic origins.

Prof. Shoemaker is the author of The Death of a Prophet: The End of Muhammad’s Life and the Beginnings of Islam (Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), a study of the “historical Muhammad” that focuses on traditions about the end of his life. He has also published numerous studies on early Christian traditions about Mary (especially in apocrypha), including The Ancient Traditions of the Virgin Mary’s Dormition and Assumption (Oxford University Press, 2002), a study of the earliest traditions of the end of Mary’s life that combines archaeological, liturgical, and literary evidence. This volume also includes critical translations of many of the earliest narratives of Mary’s Dormition and Assumption, made from Ethiopic, Syriac, Georgian, Coptic, and Greek.

Prof. Shoemaker has recently published a translation of the earliest Life of the Virgin attributed to Maximus the Confessor (Yale University Press, 2012), a pivotal if overlooked late ancient text that survives only in a Georgian translation. Currently he is finishing a book on the beginnings of Christian devotion to Mary and completing the translation of several eighth-century Christian martyrdoms from the early Islamic Near East. In addition, he is preparing a new critical edition of the early Syriac Dormition narratives.

Prof. Shoemaker has been awarded research fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Institute for Advanced Study, the National Humanities Center, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Reviews

[Kaya · Rating 2 out of 5]

It didn’t take more than a few pages for me to realise that I wasn’t about to read a groundbreaking new insight into the origins of the Quran, but I read on anyway and perhaps only gained the benefit of having read enough of the book to write a review and warn others off this profoundly strange and convoluted piece of research.

The basic thesis of Shoemaker’s book is that the orthodox story of the Quran’s compilation held by most western Quranologists (and most modern-day Sunnis), is overly contaminated by a purposeful re-telling of Muslim history by early scholars in order to justify the legitimacy of the Uthmanic codex, widely held to be the authoritative and essentially ‘unchanged’ version of the Quran as compiled during the reign of Caliph Uthman. So far so good - there is nothing wrong with re-examining old records in order to shed light on the compilation of one of history’s most important texts.

Given the author’s commitment to a ‘detached,’ secular reading of the sources in question, what baffled me was the bizarre and somewhat chaotic way that Shoemaker went about establishing his argument. I will limit myself to specific criticisms of just the first 1/5th of the book. The following are just some of the strange arguments he makes in favour of his thesis (which I ought to mention practically no Muslim OR secular study of the Quran throughout history has defended).

1) Shoemaker points out that the first generation of Muslims had not required an externally imposed compilation of the Quran by some authority, i.e. they considered the Quran self-authenticating and only after some decades felt the need to compile the Quran into a unified codex. I don’t see how this seems to prove the point that he makes, given that practically any Muslim or scholar of the Quran could easily respond by saying that the early Muslims had heard the verses of the Quran directly from Muhammad (saws) and thus did not need any other authority to support the authenticity of the verses they had memorised or scribbled down.

2) Like another review here points out, Shoemaker draws many links with the compilation of the Bible, and at another points refers to the idea that it would have been impossible for a compilation of the Quran to be as quick as it was. My response here is, why not? Given that the Quran became the authoritative text to Muslims from the very beginning of Islam, rather than developing out of a thousand-year-long process of multiple authorship and translation, it is not surprising that early Muslim authorities worked quickly to authorise a unified Quranic text. Furthermore, he makes utterly bizarre statements like the following: ‘It is worth underlining that in the case of the Christian gospels, the tradition actually is fully unanimous in ascribing these writings to the figures in question - something that the Islamic tradition did not successfully achieve.’ I’m not even sure how to respond to this because it makes virtually no sense to compare the attribution of authorship to a few 1st century men with the authorship of God or at the very least Muhammad (saws). Why would the Islamic tradition even have wanted to be unanimous in ascribing authorship to one or two men in particular? It is strange that the author criticises the notion of the unified Uthmanic codex but then seems to suggest that Muslims had ‘failed’ in attributing the Quran’s compilation to one specific person (which the narrative of the Uthmanic Quran in fact does.’

3) Perhaps the biggest flaw in this book’s methodology is the sheer naivety with which Shoemaker refers to extreme and partisan sources IMMEDIATELY after decrying the use of orthodox Sunni sources in mainstream Quran scholarship. He refers to the fact that Leo III claimed the Quran had been doctored according to imperial tastes, something impossible in the case of the Bible due to the fact it had been translated into so many different languages by so many different people. This is certainly the strangest argument made so far - firstly, why refer to an extremely polemical Christian source if one ought not to refer to orthodox Sunni sources? Even if early Sunnis had a vested interest in defending the narrative of the unified Quran, it is not hard to believe that their views on the Quran’s compilation are more likely to be reliable than the comments of a Byzantine emperor with zero knowledge of Quranic scholarship in history. The author makes similar issues in his use of quite extreme, modern-day Shia sources which would be considered heretical by even the most hardline Shia scholars. Even worse, it is hard to see how Emperor Leo’s point even defends the author’s thesis given that it clearly states how the Bible had been translated (which by default means ‘edited’) and passed about by so many different peoples who, with the benefit of hindsight, we can see have constantly doctored and mistranslated verses even to the present day. It is always worth reminding such ‘scholars’ that there is no equivalent to the ‘King James Bible’ in Islam. The fact that we have Quranic codices dating back to merely decades after the Prophets death, which retain the same consonantal structure used today, is enough to dispel such a weak argument.

Until now I have referred to just a few strange points employed by the author that don’t seem to advance his argument whatsoever. But perhaps the most overriding objection to this entire piece of work is the fact that he consistently refuses to provide any kind of qualification and specific detail to his sweeping statements about the invalidity of orthodox scholarship on the matter. He refers to huge inconsistencies in early Quranic manuscripts while refusing to explain what they are or how they might be problematic to someone assuming the orthodox position - surely if those orthographical inconsistencies were so problematic we would have seen a systematic study of them that proves the inauthenticity of the Quran by now? Furthermore, he tends to make statements that betray and obvious ignorance of broader knowledge of the topic; for the sake of not being hypocritical I will give an example rather than simply condemning him (as he does to various orthodox scholars throughout the work). He refers to a saying which is supposed to mean ‘collect the Quran as the angel Gibreel collected it,’ or something of the like. He translates here the imperative ‘allif’ as ‘collect’ when allif can have such divergent meanings of ‘get to know,’ ‘become acquainted with,’ or even ‘to tame, domesticate.’ In other derived verbal forms it can mean ‘to reconcile,’ ‘to consist of,’ and more. Despite the fact it could mean ‘collect,’ (and if it does, it is not certain how this advances his argument either), to ignore the much more resounding ‘get to know’ is quite concerning for someone committed to a ‘broad’ assessment of the material he purports to be examining.

Overall I would recommend this work as an example of how NOT to present a counter-narrative of the Quranic text. Much better is Marjin van Putten’s work on Quranic Arabic and the origins of the text’s linguistic idiosyncrasies and discrepancies.

[Ethan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Whereas Christianity and the Bible have been subjected to all sorts of textual and historical-critical criticism, Islam and the Qur'an has been less so. This work is the attempt to apply a history of religions perspective to the origins of the Qur'an.

The author outlines the history of historical-critical reception of the origins of the Qur'an and sees a lot of uncritical acceptance of the narrative proffered in Sunni Islam: Uthman collected the recollections of the Prophet shortly after his death.

The author will systematically explore the evidence to give more credence to another story preserved in Islamic tradition: it was Abu Bakr who was responsible for the compilation and standardization of the Qur'an in the eighth century, and the Qur'an did not feature prominently in the faith of Believers in the seventh century.

The author has many strong arguments. The evidence from the Christians who first encounter Islam indicates grappling with many things but the conspicuous absence of conversation about the Qur'an in the seventh century. The Hijaz was on the periphery of the world and did not have a lot of Christian influence and only a few small groups of Jewish people in the days of Muhammad; furthermore there is no evidence, and much contrary evidence, to the suggestion of widespread literacy in the Hijaz in the days of Muhammad. Likewise there is much in the Qur'an which makes a lot more sense in a Levantine context than an Arabian one and appropriate evidence is adduced.

I would have accepted the argument based on all of this evidence on its own, but the author will always go further in criticism based on the history of religions conclusions reached on the basis of speculation regarding the "real story" of how the Gospels and other texts of the New Testament came to be. The author speaks of evidence to show the complete unreliability of oral memory. I understand how this might persuade the history of religions crowd; and whereas confessionally I would be tempted to go along in resistance to Islam, I have so little confidence in how the history of religions ideology has been used to explain early Christianity that I cannot maintain much confidence in its application to early Islam.

But you don't need a history of religions ideological approach to be able to see and appreciate how the Abu Bakr story has more to commend it than the Uthman one. I am even more inclined than the author to believe a lot of things in the Qur'an do derive directly from Muhammad and his teachings, but would agree the Qur'an as currently composed is self-consciously done in comparison and contrast to Christianity in an aggressive stance against Christianity as the forces of Islam had conquered significant territory in Roman Empire.

So there's probably good reason why Islamic scholars and authorities have resisted subjecting the Qur'an and early Islam to the forms of criticism to which the Bible and Christianity have been subject for years. It would likely turn out even worse for them.

[Tony Gualtieri · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a study of the Qur'an as an historical object. It uses both external and internal evidence to assert that the Qur'an as we know it is the product of Abd al-Malik and Al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf and their project to create a universal text. Most of the text is concerned with proving that the traditional narrative of the Qur'an's creation is impossible to reconcile with the evidence.

[Loay Leon Hady · Rating 2 out of 5]

Echo of all that came before

This took a while to get through.

Basically lots of: this is how it worked for Christianity’s compilation of the Bible, so it must apply to the Qur’an too.’

If you are convinced by the following type of argument ‘If we look again to the early Christian gospels for comparison, it is no wonder that later Christians eventually ascribed the composition of these texts to… the twelve disciples. Undoubtedly for similar reasons, the later Islamic tradition ascribed the establishment of the Qur’an to the immediate successors of their founder, much as the Christians did.’

The next argument is some minority Shia’s say that Ali spearheaded the first Qur’an compilation attempts, only reverting to the idea of the Uthmanic codex out of political necessity.

There’s a generally used Islamic notion that 90% of Muslims are right 90% of the time. There’s always ben off- shoots and cults, modernisers and madmen in the other 10 and 10. Some have even held a tune that the revealing angel of scripture Gabriel, went to the wrong person, should not have gone to The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, and only mistakenly did so, when Ali should have been the chosen recipient.

Take the latter and now imagine you compiled every minor variant within the 10% world and tried to string together an alternate book or series of events, you’d get something like this book - a bizarre version almost; imaginative at times with more jumps and twists than an drunken parkour runner and just as many bumps.

What else can the writer do though? This is what academia is: do something new and justify it. Thus jt Ignores all the sources that convey 90 of 90 and go for the niche within 10s and flaunt it.

If you want to give it its best argument it’s something like: what Muslims claimed happened in 30 years with Uthman (majority notion through time) took around 90 years with Al Hajjaj - (minority notion through time) even though he says : ‘It is true that Motzki has made a solid argument that some basic version of the tradition of an ʿUthmānic collection goes back to al-Zuhrī (d. 741–42).’

In later chapters he questions radiocarbon dating as a basis, but makes allowance for accepting it if it proves that the text alluding to be the Quran was actually a pre-Quranic text that Muslims used, which he accepts as a possibility.

Basically , anything goes except the norm that Muslim scholars throughout history have deduced.

This type of Academia always wills away the divine, and celestial will and characters. Not interested in angelic support or God’s own preservation as possibilities: the divine when they write about it always seems more divvy because they remove all elements of what can be termed miraculous or etheric activity.

Further it ignores the oral tradition of Quranic preservation and basically argues if there’s no text… it can’t be true. Memorisation isn’t good enough apparently. And the chapter commenting on the last 100 years of memory studies, is so out of context for the time of the Qur’an’s revelation it’s a non-starter.

Basically someone who wanted to carry the torch for Patricia Crone. Ce la vie

[Paul Clark · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Sunni Moslem story of the Qur’an’s origins is that it is the word of Allah as revealed to the prophet Muhammad over a period of more than two decades. It was memorised by his followers, but after a number of them died in battle, the first Caliph, Abu Bakr, ordered that it be written down and compiled. This process was completed under the third Caliph, Uthman, who ruled from 644-656 CE. According to this version of events, the first complete copy of the Qur’an was produced within 20 years of Muhammad’s death.

The dominant paradigm in academia follows the Sunni Moslem account quite closely, minus the supernatural bits. Shoemaker, however, rejects this view and says the Qur’an was almost certainly compiled much later, under the ninth Caliph Abd al-Malik, who reigned from 685–705.

In the early chapters, reading this book felt like dropping in on a family argument as Shoemaker attacks the views of those academics with whom he disagrees. As a lay reader, it is difficult for me to assess the competing claims and counter-claims, but Shoemaker lays out his arguments and evidence clearly and at some length. He makes a strong case for a revisionist understanding of the origins of the Qur’an.

Shoemaker’s reasons for rejecting the “scholarly Sunnism” paradigm:
• In a lengthy chapter on the radio carbon dating of early copies of the Qur’an, Shoemaker rejects the argument that we have radiometric proof of early composition.
• He looks at what we know about the cradle of Islam, the Hijaz region, which includes Mecca and Yathrib (a.k.a. Medina). He argues that this region, which was almost entirely non-literate and contained few if any Jews and Christians, was incapable of producing such a sophisticated text as the Qur’an. He also notes that much of the Qur’an would have been incomprehensible to anyone without a solid knowledge of Christian and Jewish lore, a knowledge completely lacking in Muhammad’s audience in the Hijaz, geographically and culturally isolated as it was.
• He examines philological evidence that suggests the Qur’an is mostly written in a dialect of Arabic spoken well to the north of the Hijaz.
• Inspired by Bart Ehrman’s Jesus Before the Gospels, Shoemaker has two chapters dealing with the science of memory. It is clear that, without a written Qur’an to check what they remembered, it simply wouldn’t have been possible for Muhammad’s early followers to memorise his exact words. Human memory doesn’t work that way. Even remembering the gist would often be beyond them. Similarly, studies of how oral cultures preserve their historical memory indicate that the act of remembering is an act of reconstruction, and that cultures constantly evolve as they are passed on. Remembering happens in the present, not the past, and is always coloured and shaped by the present.
• An interesting idea that I hadn’t encountered before: some students of the New Testament have suggested that the gospels were written as memoranda: something akin to teachers’ notes, an aide memoire to help preachers. Such memoranda are fluid and change as new copies are made. If this view is correct, Matthew’s gospel, which develops and adds to Mark’s, wouldn’t have been seen as a separate document but as essentially the same thing. Shoemaker says this may have been true of many of the early written documents that were later compiled to make the Qur’an.
• He stresses the strong Christian influence on the Qur’an. This, he says, means that much of it was written after Islamic doctrine evolved following contact with the Christian subjects of the Arabs’ growing empire.
• The Qur’an is “invisible” in the early decades of the Islamic empire. We don’t have a single reference to it anywhere. This means it almost certainly wasn’t completed within 20 years of Muhammad’s death.

So how, according to Shoemaker, did the Qur’an come to be written?

He agrees with the standard view that Muhammad created a community of monotheistic and eschatological believers in the early years of the 7th century. He took control of the Hijaz and later extended his rule to pretty much the whole of Arabia. After his death, his followers carved out a powerful empire that would extend to Syria, the Levant, Mesopotamia and eventually all of the Middle East.

Shoemaker accepts that Mohammad’s followers will have done their best to remember and pass on his message, though they would have had trouble memorising even the gist of what he said, never mind his exact words. As their empire grew, the early Moslems encountered and were influenced by Christian and Jewish ideas, which seeped into their collective memories of Mohammad’s message.
In different parts of the empire, different groups wrote down parts of what they believed to be Muhammad’s words. They may also have included a number of pre-Muhammadan texts. Different sets of written texts were collected together, and there may even have been collections that claimed to be complete.

Eventually, much later than traditionally believed, Caliph Abd al-Malik made the decision to create a single, authoritative version of the Qur’an, suppressing all alternatives. In this, he was completely successful. The Islamic world, to this day, has just one version of the Qur’an, which is revered by all different sects. Nothing remains of any alternatives.

Shoemaker’s book isn’t aimed at those who are new to the topic. I would recommend that anyone wishing to understand the origins of Islam start with something like Tom Holland’s In the Shadow of the Sword or one of Michael Cook’s books, such as his Muhammad in the Past Masters series or his The Koran: A Very Short Introduction. However, this book is an excellent next step for those who wish to dig deeper. Shoemaker makes a strong case for his hypothesis, which seems to be rigorous and based on a sound understanding of the available evidence.

[MF · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book. My only criticism is that Shoemaker bends over backwards to retain a Muhammad of the Hijaz which is clearly untenable by the evidence he himself presents.

[Yash Rakhiani · Rating 5 out of 5]

The most well researched book I've read on the origins of Islam... thoroughly impressed by the arguments put forward by shoemaker. A MUST READ!

[Don Gubler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enlightening. Great scholarly work.

[Gordon Goodwin · Rating 1 out of 5]

He's just wrong, and is not able to convincingly handle the many impossibilities of a Levantine origin of the Quran.

[Waddellski · Rating 5 out of 5]

was great

[Potkin Azarmehr · Rating 5 out of 5]

objective and informative

A good objective and informative read not influenced by grants and the usual academia job security concerns.
Recommend for read

[Krolby · Rating 4 out of 5]

Question for author: how did Muhammed know about Christianity and Judaism if he didn't have contact with Jews and Christians? I mean, how can he make Abrahamistic monotheism an important part of his religion if he knows nothing or almost nothing about it.

If we say he didn't know about Christianity and Judaism, why is the Abrahamistic religious tradition so prominent in the Quran if Muhammed's followers only got to know about Christianity and Judaism after they conquered the Middle East? Why would they give such an important role to something their prophet didn't preach about?