Abstract

The focus of this paper lies on the Islamic approach to the Qurʾān, the exegesis of the text, and the significance of Qurʾānic revelation for Muslim societies (“Sitz im Leben”) for centuries up to the present day, paying also some attention to the history of the European perception of the Qurʾān, from which ultimately modern Western Qurʾānic research emerged. As an introduction, the specific formal and thematic features of the Qurʾān, Islam’s Holy Scripture, are explained and the history of the Qurʾānic text is summarized. The last topic is the historic, social, and literary contextualisation of the Qurʾān as well as its aesthetic dimension (e.g. the “audible” and the “visible” Qurʾān as artistic manifestations). The discussion includes a review of recent scholarship, which has developed some pioneering new concepts about early Qurʾānic textual history and the (re)location of the Qurʾān in its historical context in Late Antiquity.