Im Rahmen der Vortragsreihe der Sektion Manuskriptkulturen der Doktoratsschule

Asma Helali, Islamic Sources and New philology: From the text to the paratext

The academic trajectories of modern and contemporary Western Islamic Studies are often rooted in the Orientalist traditions of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Scholars such as historians and philologists specializing in Semitic languages focused their studies on the sources of Islamic thought, particularly the so-called “foundational texts,” namely, the Qurʾān and prophetic traditions (hadith). Continuing along this trajectory, historians in the past two decades have devoted significant attention to situating Islamic texts within the belief systems of 7th-century "late antiquity." They have developed conceptual and theoretical frameworks aimed at interpreting Islamic sources as documentary texts. This approach has raised two major methodological issues, which will be discussed in this paper: the historicity of Islamic sources and the categorization of religious genres. Employing the methodologies of the New Philology, this paper shifts the focus of textual analysis from the text itself to the paratext, offering a reconsideration of a central concept in Islamic Studies: the religious genre.