The Preacher of the Meccan Qur'an: Deuteronomistic History and Confessionalism in Muḥammad's Early Preaching
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There has been a trend in recent scholarship on the Qur'an to downplay the role of Muḥammad in delivering and preaching the Qur'an, such that one is almost presented with a disembodied Qur'an which has no relationship to his prophetic career. The disappearance of Muḥammad from the Qur'an, and the pretence that there is no preacher, allows for a radical rereading of the text, such that one can then claim not only that it is an outgrowth of a Christian preaching environment, but that the Qur'an's main audience was a Biblically-saturated community. However, there is also a more serious issue at hand. Our Fragestellung about what the Qur'an has to tell us about Muḥammad is problematic. It seeks to reconstruct his life in the manner of a nineteenth-century biography, outlining a linear and comprehensive life-story. The Qur'an is unlike the Gospels, we are repeatedly told: there is no sustained biography of Muḥammad there to be found, and no chronological order to its parts. Indeed, the mantra that the Qur'an does not tell us much about Muḥammad is now a truism in Qur'anic studies. However, the Qur'an is packed with information about Muḥammad: it is actually a record of his preaching. In this article I will investigate the most important details we can find in the Qur'an about Muḥammad, and assess the image of the preacher of the Qur'an as fashioned there. I will then develop the historical implications of my analysis, and show that when we analyse the information in the Qur'an we can obtain historical information about Muḥammad, his community, and their respective ideas. The analysis will be confined to the image of Muḥammad in the Meccan parts of the Qur'an: the topic of his image in the Medinan Qur'an is a matter for another study.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".