Tommaso Tesei: Dhu-l-Qarnayn, Late Antiquity, and Rethinking Qur'anic Authorship

Comments · 262

• DR

  @draymusa · 4 years ago

  Having been trained in a traditional NELC approach to Islamic Studies, I find this very fascinating and refreshing.

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• HE

  @HexDominator · 4 years ago

  Loved the vdeio! can't wait to learn more from scholars in the field!

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• AD

  @adnanmahmutovic · 2 years ago (edited)

  Interesting conversation. As a writer, I often have issues with the way one discusses style. To be sure consistency and similarity are two features one goes to by default, but when I see some specific examples pointed out as showing inconsistency I cannot but react. One could use the same reasoning to question the style let's say many English poems. The default position that certain forms of variation necessarily mean something negative is, from the poetic perspective, dubious at best. To use an analogy from the natural world, it'd be like saying that a certain 'anomaly' must involve another origin than an evolutionary process. Again, I'm speaking from a creative writer's point of view. To use another analogy, let's say we look at one of Stephen Wolfram's cellular automata images. Weird inconsistencies in the patterns could lead one to argue the images were produced by different sets of rules, while we know it was always one single and often incredibly simple rule that produced incredible variation and richness. I tried addressing this a bit in my article "If suras were pulsating galaxies: a macro reading of the Quran."

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• TH

  @thelayman802 · 4 years ago (edited)

  &quot;Robust engagement with Christianity&quot; - fair enough. However, the most crucial aspect of the Qur&apos;an we tend to ignore—or perhaps forget to attend to—is the “absence” of the New Testament Christ in the Qur’an. That does indicate at least one thing, if nothing else, that the Qur’anic author was living at the periphery of the Christian communities rather than amidst learned and practicing Christians. The elements of Christianity found in the Qur’an, especially the Christian reading of the biblical stories, can also be interpreted from a sociological-historical angle as such tales and testaments of Christian lands that were reworked in the desert language in a process extending over centuries. A careful eye can indeed spot massive influence of Christianity on the Qur’anic text as well as context, but there is little that confirms a direct engagement with Christians. This can be elucidated, for instance, by turning to the fact that the Qur’an does not mention Paul, Peter, Judas, Joseph, or any other major figure of early Christianity—hero or villain—with the exception of Mary and John the Baptist. Similarly, the Qur’anic picture of Christianity lacks resurrection although it does have a virgin birth, which itself bears no obvious meaning if the sonship is taken out of equation. The entity of the church, moreover, does not find itself spoken of in the Qur’an. And above all, the New Testament itself remains a mystery to the narrator of the Qur’an, which is not recognized as a set of Scriptures but only a vague book, Injil, that becomes good news. <br> <br>And the second part of the problem we are faced with is: why create a historical context that exclusively centers on paganism? Was there a need to do so? The Qur’an teems with the echo of Arabian lore in its text (for instance, jinn, description of God with the analogy of olive tree and lamp, the oath formulae, poet and soothsayer, magic, and so on and so forth), which ascertains a desert mind versed in the pagan tradition at work in the background. Since the Qur’an is not a singularity of thought-process, but a multiplicity of ideas and religio-historical materials, it is self-evident that the historical context for the emergence of Islam was a mixed cultural and religious milieu, but one that had a predominantly pagan outlook. This is just another perspective, which may be as wrong as any other views rejected by the academia.

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• JU

  @julesc9875 · 1 year ago

  Tesei is lovely! Bring him back

• ZA

  @zalliumtradersltd2321 · 3 years ago

  You should also explorer and cover the Farahi Discourse.

• RA

  @Raqi799 · 2 years ago

  I know that Alexander was already associated with Gog and Magog in the work of Flavius Joseph written in the first century and also in some writings of christians scholars in the 4-5th century such as Jerome of Stridon who also included some eschatological aspect in this association. But I ask myself if we can find earlier texts whichs spoke about Alexander as the one who travelled until the end of earth ? Can we find such a story in the Alexander Legende of pseudo-Callisthene written in the 3 or 5th century ? Thank very much and sorry for my bad english.

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• SE

  @seanrodrigues12 · 4 years ago

  What’s the book on the Satanic verses that was referred to?<br><br>Thanks for a great interview guys! Keep up the good work

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• ST

  @Stephen-King2 · 2 years ago

  When you find evidence in history what really happened in holly books , the mystery veil is lifted and leftover is not so miraculous after all.

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• LO

  @lorenh763 · 10 months ago

  I think more attention and research should be given to Dan Gibson and the Petra origin hypothesis. It solves so many problem including the provision of Christian and pagan communities as needed to make sense of the quranic audience.

• AB

  @abuyasin-h7v · 3 years ago

  The Quran assumes its audience has knowledge of Christian sources, thus much is just alluded, and it mostly mentions certain points where it presents a different opinion

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• A.

  @A.--. · 4 years ago

  Don&apos;t say Inconsistent with other parts of Quran say different than other parts bescue the target audience and circumstances are different.

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