Studien Zur Komposition Der Mekkanischen Suren

The Qur'an is an orally composed poetical text which Muslimshave always known mainly in the form of oral recitation. Western scholarship however has hardly ever read it as literature, on account of the inaccessibility of its structure,and insteadhas used it mainly to mine theological or legislative statements. Angelika Neuwirth brings order to this supposed chaos by demonstrating meaningful compositional structures for the Makkan suras of the Qur'an. This 2nd edition has been extended to include a new study which examines the suras as pointing to a historical development in the preaching of the Qur'an and the formation of a community.