THE academic study of the Qur’an, it has often been remarked, lags far behind the study of the Bible while being, at the same time, closely modelled after it. Not only are the resources available to scholars of the Qpr’an much more limited than those available to their biblical-scholar counterparts, but the depth of methodological experimentation in dealing with the scriptural text has been severely limited in comparison. This situation is illustrated by consideration of the sheer quantity of scholarship that has been produced and the number of scholarly landmarks that exist in the field. Modern biblical scholarship fills a library many times the size of that devoted to the Qur’an. Each subdiscipline of biblical studies has its own set of “classics.” By contrast, it is still possible to point to individual works in the history of the study of the Qlr’an and declare them the pivotal texts that provide the foundations for all later studies.
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