The last four decades have witnessed significant progress in the scholarly understanding of the Qur’an. Nonetheless, contemporary scholarship is yet to produce a detailed historically oriented commentary on the entire Qur’anic corpus. Arguably the greatest interpretive, methodological, and expository challenges to this endeavour are posed by the long Medinan surahs found at the beginning of the corpus (Surahs 2–5). Reasons for this include their considerable length, their lack of an immediately apparent macrostructure, their frequent allusions to a great number of chronologically earlier Qur’anic proclamations, and the relative preponderance in them of legal and homiletic material, in addition to the narrative and eschatological registers familiar from many shorter surahs. Moreover, the Qur’an as a whole is punctuated by a great number of recurrent terms and phrases whose precise significance, contextual usage, and intimate correlations with earlier discursive traditions (the Bible, post-Biblical Jewish and Christian literature, and pre-Islamic Arabic poetry) remain to be fully and systematically gauged. The Medinan long surahs therefore constitute touchstones for the feasibility of any commentarial approach to the Qur’an as a whole: any exegetical protocol claiming to be capable of serving as a unitary framework for a full commentary on the Islamic scripture should first be demonstrated to be suitable to tackling these texts. Benefiting from the project team’s research into the Qur’an’s literary and compositional structure, Qur’anic law, and the Qur’an’s early reception history, QuCIP therefore aimed to deliver crucial groundwork for a model historical-critical commentary covering Surahs 1–2, whose basic format could subsequently be extended to other parts of the Islamic scripture.

Towards a Historical and Literary Commentary on Surahs 1 and 2 (Nicolai Sinai)

By way of a first milestone, Sinai produced an exegetical and intertextual dictionary of key Qur’anic terms and phrases that recur multiple times across the surahs in question and the remainder of the Qur’anic corpus (e.g., āmana, "to believe"; aslama, "to surrender"; āyah, "sign"; zakāh, "alms"; qalb, "heart"; dhakkara, "to remind"; khalada, "to remain forever"). Each entry consists of a short essay of up to c. 13,000 words discussing Qur’anic usage in addition to relevant evidence from pre-Qur’anic poetry, inscriptions, as well as Jewish and Christian traditions. Without such a dictionary, any commentary on the Qur’an would become hopelessly bogged down in constant digressions on particular terms and phrases, impeding any clear sense of literary progression in the surahs commented upon.

Based on this preparatory dictionary and drawing on the research of the other project members, Sinai went on to produce a model commentary on Surahs 1 and 2 that integrates intertextual, theological, literary, and redaction-historical perspectives and, like the dictionary, critically draws on interpretive resources found in pre-modern Islamic Qur’an scholarship. Each surah commentary follows a set template. An introductory overview discusses the respective surah’s compositional structure, date, and redactional development. A detailed verse-by-verse commentary including a new translation of the surah then provides a detailed and appropriately technical discussion of text-critical, lexical, grammatical, literary, redactional, and doctrinal issues.

Qur’anic Composition and the Qur’an’s Late Antique Context (Marianna Klar)

Marianna Klar researched how the Qur’an defines its structural units and thematic borders. Her publications explore, among other topics, the role that is played by shifts in rhyme and rhythm across otherwise unified expanses of Qur’anic text, and an exploration of how specific surah sections are unified by recurrent diction and other devices. These matters are addressed from the assumption that aspects of the Qur’an’s stylistics are comparable to other orally delivered texts such as the Psalms and pre-Islamic Arabic poetry. At the same time, Klar sought to identify how best to utilise the Arabic rhetorical tradition in order to illuminate such literary analyses. Within the wider context of late antiquity, Klar also examined the distinctive features of Qur’anic narrative against the background of other late antique literary traditions, drawing on the Qur’anic Adam narratives as a case study. Finally, Klar worked on extending a late antique contextualisation of the Qur’an from the domain of narrative into that of law by means of two case studies of Qur’anic legislation: one on marriage and divorce and the other on the distribution of battle spoils.

Legal Paraenesis in the Qur’an (Nora K. Schmid)

Schmid’s research focused on how legal knowledge is formed, articulated, and imparted to the believers through exhortations and moral reminders. Topics studied included paraenetic literary forms and tropes, their impact on the selection, organization, and disposition of legal material in the Qur’an, and the nascent Islamic community’s engagement with the process of legal-ethical decision-making as reflected in the Medinan surahs.

Hadith Literature as a Source for the Context of the Qur’an (Behnam Sadeghi)

The hadith literature is a significant yet underused source for understanding the origins and early interpretation of the Qur’an. However, the vastness and intricacy of the literature presents significant challenges. A single report may exist in dozens of versions, each transmitted through a different chain of transmission (isnād), thus implicating dozens of transmitters. Behnam Sadeghi’s work contributes to a better understanding of the individuals and communities engaged in transmitting reports about the Qur’an, its origins, its interpretation, and other topics. His research has produced a monograph determining the demographic trajectories of the communities that were involved in hadith transmission. Sadeghi also investigated the reception of the Qur’anic verses on menstruation during the first Islamic decades as attested by the hadith literature.