As-Salāmu ʿAlaykum all,

I’ve been busy writing my next article over the past while or so. Now that it’s finally ready, I’m sharing it with anyone who might be interested. I would recommend reading the PDF as the footnotes are easier to access, and have a lot of important information:

– Web Link (I’ve been told they’re having some issues with the images which they are working on)

– PDF Link

This piece is intended to sketch out a rough “confessional approach” to Qurʾānic intertextuality. It covers a lot of different sorts of interactions and highlights a historical/theological method for how they could be understood by Muslims.

The reviewers at Yaqeen have been enormously helpful in providing feedback on how tone and specific arguments may be improved to appeal to the average reader. The review process was also fairly rigorous, which I think is a welcome change to how Muslims have been publishing about apologetics to date. We additionally had some other anonymous reviewers external to Yaqeen who provided extremely useful comments without which the utility of the article would have no doubt suffered.

Having said that, more “academic” readers should keep in mind that the article is supposed to appeal to a broad audience. Sometimes we entertain arguments we (or I) don’t personally hold if only to provide a few alternative solutions to complement our main arguments. Regardless, I think this article does bring some new contributions which we hope everyone would find useful.

With those disclaimers out of the way I had some points to make about the article itself. I can possibly think of an eighth category to add to the article which covers instances where the Qur’an’s stories overlap with non-revelatory accounts that were circulating after Jesus, but don’t contain any historical impossibilities (as opposed to, say, the Syriac Legend of Alexander / the Alexander Romance). I wouldn’t really know what to title this category, but I guess some examples would be parallels with canonical or even early apocryphal gospels (i.e. these documents aren’t revelation, but plausibly contain historical data), as well as (I guess more controversially) stories of saints such as the seven sleepers.

What’s next?

There were a few more topics I would eventually like to cover in future articles, such as:

1. A positive argument from Qurʾānic intertextuality (probably up next, as a part 2 to this article). This is going to cover a lot of ground (history, literature, analytic philosophy) so I expect this to take a while.
2. Qurʾānic Cosmology (in light of intertextuality etc)
3. Dhū-l-Qarnayn (probably long overdue, but I don’t think Yaqeen is the right place to cover this so it might be delayed). Anyhow, I tentatively think it belongs in the same category as the Alexander Romance parallel discussed in our article (an instance of ‘historicization’).

Thoughts / relevant feedback welcome.