October 2013
“To Every Prophet an Adversary”: Jewish Enmity in Islam
by David Nirenberg (University of Chicago)
In this study of the Qur’an and early Islamic tradition, David Nirenberg takes readers into “a world in which the claims of new revelation had to be justified and differentiated from those of the old.” Like Christian communities before them, Islamic communities “appropriated and adapted the texts and reading practices of their ‘predecessors,’ but also stigmatized some of those reading habits and their practitioners as damning or death-dealing, and this especially in the case of the Jews, considered as guardians of the founding scriptures.” Nirenberg makes the controversial claim that “the roles assigned to figures of Judaism in this process [of appropriation and stigmatization] were every bit as important in shaping Islamic ideas about how both scripture and cosmos should be interpreted, as they had been for the early Christians, from whom in this respect early Islam borrowed a great deal.” (137-38)
Read “To Every Prophet an Adversary”: Jewish Enmity in Islam.
With invited responses by:
Fred M. Donner (University of Chicago);
Robert Gleave (University of Exeter); and
Angelika Neuwirth (Freie Universitaet Berlin).
“To Every Prophet an Adversary”: Jewish Enmity in Islam is excerpted from Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition by David Nirenberg. Copyright © 2013 by David Nirenberg. With permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.