The Christian Elephant in the Meccan Room: Dye, Tesei, and Shoemaker on the Date of the Qurʾān

Abstract

A great number of qurʾānic passages exhibit demonstrable intersections with Christian traditions, and sometimes the Qurʾān even addresses Christians directly. Guillaume Dye, Tommaso Tesei, and Stephen Shoemaker have recently argued that this is difficult to reconcile with our current lack of evidence for organized Christian communities in the pre-Islamic Ḥijāz. Accordingly, all three scholars maintain that much of the Qurʾān ought to be decoupled from the preaching of Muḥammad (whose historical existence they do not deny). While recognizing the pertinence of the explanatory challenge identified by Dye, Tesei, and Shoemaker, this article suggests that the problem may be somewhat less acute than it is made out to be. The article then proceeds to a critical examination of the alternative scenario for the genesis of the Qurʾān that is offered, in different variations, by Dye, Tesei, and Shoemaker. This scenario is found to give rise to a number of explanatory difficulties of its own that have not so far been satisfactorily addressed. By way of an appendix, the article includes an extended critique of Shoemaker and Dye’s claim that the Jesus-and-Mary pericope in Sūrah 19 most likely reflects a post-conquest Palestinian milieu.