Subproject by Hans-Peter Pökel

The project analyzes the entanglement between the “doctrine of the inimitability of the Qur’ān” and Christian Logos Theology. It studies the epistemic change of a Christian theologumenon through a detailed analysis of the works of a literary representative of Islamic and the works of the earliest representative of Christian Theology in Arabic language. From the view point of religious history this doctrine is not self-evident insofar that the latter Islamic view that the Qur’ān is theologically and semantically as well as aesthetically and rhetorically inimitable – which was accepted by later Islamic theology – has no counterpart in earlier monotheistic traditions.

The Qur’ān contains the so-called ayāt at-taḥaddi (Q 2, 23f.; 10, 38; 11, 13; 17, 88; 52, 33f.) but the earliest development of this theological doctrine can be located into the second/eighth century and was fortified with regard to the linguistic and aesthetic character of the Qur’ān by later philologians and theologians like al-Rummānī (d. 384/996), al-Bāqillānī (d. 403/1031) and al-Jurjānī (d. 471/1078). While the inimitable character of the Qur’ān is for later philologians and theologians a fact the earliest discussions were sophistically concerned about the question if the Qur’ān is inimitable at all. These earliest discussions will be contextualized with theological debates about the nature, the createdness and uncreatedness, of the Qur’ān which reflect older paradigms such as the early Christian conciliary debates about the nature of Jesus Christ. The doctrine of the createdness of the Qur’ān provoked for example Christian reactions like from Theodore Abū Qurrah (d. 830), bishop of Ḥarrān, who comprehended this doctrine as a challenge for the nature of the Logos on which he responded with polemical accounts in his writings.

The project analyzes the literary works of the polygraph al-Jāḥiẓ (d. 255/869) which are a fruitful source for the early theological debates about the miraculous nature of the Qur’ān. Al-Jāḥiẓ left a number of literary works which reflect the theological discussions in third/ninth century and which are analyzed and contextualized with the Arabic works of Theodore Abū Qurrah.