48 | CHAPTER 2
beginning of this book. Angelika Neuwirth’s Der Koran als Text der Spätan-
tike: Ein europäischer Zugang (2010) offers an extended reflection on the
Qurʾān not as an off- the- peg canonical text but in its becoming (“Entstehungs-
geschichte”), against the background of a Near East whose immediately pre-
Islamic phase has been the object of intensive research in recent decades.
Neuwirth presents the Qurʾān not as a spontaneously generated “Muslim”
monologue composed by a single author, but as an ongoing conversation
(during the Prophet’s lifetime) with rabbinic Jews, patristic Christians, and
others. The Muslim scripture becomes a voice in a late antique debate usually
seen as part of Europe’s origins. In this way, Neuwirth draws the Qurʾān
closer to the European tradition, at the precise moment (now) when large
and increasingly self- confident Muslim communities are establishing them-
selves at the heart of Europe.^118
European civilization makes little sense without the religious and philo-
sophical developments that occurred during the long late Antiquity. The re-
fusal of many in the Islamic world to acknowledge the late antique pluralism
to which the Qurʾān responds undermines their grasp on history and their
access to the context and contacts which are Islam’s birthright. Clearly, then,
the attempt to understand the pre- Islamic world of ideas offers a profoundly
serious, nonantiquarian reason—and one relevant to developments today—
for taking the period into consideration. The question remains, though,
whether even the long late Antiquity is a sufficiently broad stage for the in-
vestigation proposed. Is something “beyond late Antiquity” required? As we
shall see, Peter Brown’s apparently generous terminus at c. 800 ends up treat-
ing Islam as merely an extension of late Antiquity, rather than allowing it to
reach a stage of intellectual and institutional maturation comparable with
fully developed patristic Christianity, or capable of being used as an approach
to the Islamic world we know today. If, then, we are to have the full benefit of
studying early Christianity and Islam comparatively but not ahistorically, in
other words within a firm sociohistorical framework, we need an alternative
to the late antique paradigm. This is what I shall provide in the next chapter.
118 Neuwirth, Koran als Text [1:6] 14–15, 21–22, 62–63, 66–67, 76–80, 727, 730, 767–68.