The Preacher of the Meccan Qur'an: Deuteronomistic History and Confessionalism in Muḥammad's Early Preaching

Abstract

There has been a trend in recent scholarship on the Qur'an to downplay the role of Muḥammad in delivering and preaching the Qur'an, such that one is almost presented with a disembodied Qur'an which has no relationship to his prophetic career. The disappearance of Muḥammad from the Qur'an, and the pretence that there is no preacher, allows for a radical rereading of the text, such that one can then claim not only that it is an outgrowth of a Christian preaching environment, but that the Qur'an's main audience was a Biblically-saturated community. However, there is also a more serious issue at hand. Our Fragestellung about what the Qur'an has to tell us about Muḥammad is problematic. It seeks to reconstruct his life in the manner of a nineteenth-century biography, outlining a linear and comprehensive life-story. The Qur'an is unlike the Gospels, we are repeatedly told: there is no sustained biography of Muḥammad there to be found, and no chronological order to its parts. Indeed, the mantra that the Qur'an does not tell us much about Muḥammad is now a truism in Qur'anic studies. However, the Qur'an is packed with information about Muḥammad: it is actually a record of his preaching. In this article I will investigate the most important details we can find in the Qur'an about Muḥammad, and assess the image of the preacher of the Qur'an as fashioned there. I will then develop the historical implications of my analysis, and show that when we analyse the information in the Qur'an we can obtain historical information about Muḥammad, his community, and their respective ideas. The analysis will be confined to the image of Muḥammad in the Meccan parts of the Qur'an: the topic of his image in the Medinan Qur'an is a matter for another study.