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The articles brought together in this volume deal with Muslim perceptions and uses of the Bible in its wider sense, including the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament as well as the New Testament, albeit with an emphasis on the former scripture. While Muslims consider the earlier revelations to the People of the Book to have been altered to some extent by the Jews and the Christians and abrogated by the Qurʾān, God's final dispensation to humankind, the Bible is at the same time venerated in view of its divine origin, and questioning this divine origin is tantamount to unbelief. Muslim scholars approached and used the Bible for a variety of purposes and in different ways. Thus Muslim historians regularly relied on biblical materials as their primary source for the pre-Islamic period when discussing the creation as well as the history of the Israelites and the prophets preceding Muhammad. Authors seeking to polemicize against Jews and Christians were primarily interested in the presumed biblical annunciations of Muhammad and his religion and / or in perceived contradictions and cases of internal abrogation in the Bible. These various concerns resulted from and had an impact on the ways in which Muslim authors accessed the scriptures.
This collection shows that Adangs and Schmidtkes work is still fresh and crucial for the ongoing conversation on JewishMuslim relations. The first three chapters are surveys that provide the reader with sufficient background material on the Torah in the Quran and early traditional Muslim views of the corruption (ta?rif) of the Hebrew Bible and of Judaism itself. These chapters would offer graduate students a sound guide for entry into this field. An extensive and impressive bibliography of all the works previously listed in the individual articles has been assembled with both primary and secondary sources, providing researchers with an excellent resource to begin or continue their own work in this field.
David D. Grafton, Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations, February 17, 2022
Camilla Adang is Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Tel Aviv University.
Sabine Schmidtke is Professor of Islamic intellectual history at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, USA.