Abstract

This article traces the beginnings of critical Qur'anic Studies to the nineteenth-century scholars of the so-called Science of Judaism school. Until the 1930s, when the rise of the Nazis violently suppressed Jewish scholarly activities in Germany and elsewhere, generations of scholars such as Abraham Geiger, who is better known as an early leader of the Jewish Reform Movement, dedicated their lives to the study of the Qur'an and established a new discipline: Qur'anic Studies. These scholars, in many ways pioneers in their fields, authored a series of significant studies that contextualized the foundational documents of Islam with Rabbinic literature and were the first to undertake an unbiased study of early Islamic writings.