Locating the Qurʾan and Early Islam in the ‘Epistemic Space’ of Late Antiquity
Locating the qur’anic event in Late Antiquity, understood not as a historical epoch but an epistemic space, the chapter focuses on textual strategies rather than on the transfer of semantic knowledge or extra-textual circumstances. Qurʾanic speech oscillates between literal and ‘allegorical’ expression. Among the last mentioned, typology, hitherto widely neglected—although perhaps the most representative textual practice in the late antique culture of debate—appears a useful key to the question of the qur’anic community’s rapid development of a theology of its own and its attainment of social coherence. Sifting the changing modes of qur’anic typology—from the ‘simple’ mode of restaging biblical events and the mimesis of biblical figures via the more demanding pattern of promise and fulfilment to the daringly innovative mode: mythopoiesis—allows us to trace the successive stages of the first listeners’ construction of a communal identity of their own.