Remapping Emergent Islam

This multidisciplinary collective volume advances the scholarly discussion on the origins of Islam. It simultaneously focuses on three domains: texts, social contexts, and ideological developments relevant for the study of Islam's beginnings -- taking the latter expression in its broadest possible sense. The intersections of these domains need to be examined afresh in order to obtain a clear picture of the concurrent phenomena that collectively enabled both the gradual emergence of a new religious identity and the progressive delimitation of its initially fuzzy boundaries.

Carlos A. Segovia is Lecturer in Qur'anic and Religious Studies at Saint Louis University-Madrid and founding Co-Director of the Early Islamic Studies Seminar: International Scholarship on the Qur'an and Islamic Origins.

1. Introduction - Carlos A. Segovia,Re-Assessing the Hypothesis of a Peripheral Jewish Background, 2. South Arabian Judaism, Himyarite Rahmanism, and the Origins of Islam - Aaron W. Hughes, 3. The Absence of the Messiah in the Qur'an and the Evidence of Jewish Eschatology - José Costa,An Encrypted Manichaean/Messalian Matrix?, 4. The Astral Messenger, The Lunar Redemption, The Solar Salvation: Manichaean Cosmic Soteri-ology in the Qur'an's Archaic Surahs (Q 84, Q 75, Q 54) - Daniel Beck, 5. Binitarianism, Messalianism, and the East-Syrian Background of the Early Quranic Milieu - Carlos A. Segovia,Measuring the World's Timeline= and Imagining the Afterlife at the Persian Court?, 6. The Jewish and Christian Background of the Original Islamic Calendar - Basil Lourié, 7. The Persian Keys to Quranic Paradise - Gilles Courtieu,Conceptual Quicksands, Meta-Narratives of Identity, Texts, and their Marginalia, 8. Extremist Shi'ism and Muhammad's Alleged Message - Mohammad Ali Amir-Moezzi, 9. Echoes of Pseudepigrapha in the Qur'an - Tommaso Tesei, 10. What Do We Mean by the Qur'an? On Palimpsests, Collections, and Inter-Narrative Identity - Emilio González Ferrín|Multidisciplinarity, innovative and theoretically sophisticated scholarship. Challenges the more conservative strands of scholarship within the historiography Situates the rise of Islam within the world of Late Antiquity.