Reddit reply in r/AcademicQuran: why do so many analysts find the quran — January 26, 2025 · m9ak5k7 | Ali Shukri Amin

\>This plays into something confusing I've noticed about your comments. I might say something like, the Qur'an is rhymed prose, and your response would be, Muslims don't believe that the Qur'an is rhymed prose.

Do you think that the cultural or anthropological study of the Quran has a place in discussing the Quran, or is the Quran just a text that can be studied in isolation? I feel like you consider the historical and anthropological origins of the Quran without looking at the historical and anthropological impact of the Quran as well. That leads to this strangely distorted perspective where the Quran is just being acted upon but doesn't have any presence in Islamicate civilization. Perhaps there isn't a lot of literature on it, but from a human perspective the Quran has a massive impact on how those civilizations have operated on a day-to-day basis. You can't even walk down a street in most modern Muslim states without hearing the Quran. It is truly difficult to understate how much space it occupies in the public conscious even among irreligious or non-Muslims in these countries.

\>What I mean when I say that is that it is believed for theological reasons.

It isn't believed for theological reasons. The impact of the Quran on Islamicate civilization is massive. It's the most widely quoted text period and in public discourse.

\>Isn't this just clearly not true, though? Islamicate civilization has just as much a canon of texts as does Western civilization. Vast bodies of hadith, sira, tafsir (and the tafsir often add much beyond simply what the Qur'an says, e.g. the "occasions of revelation"/asbāb al-nuzūl), you have a vast legal literature, a vast collection of histories (Al-Tabari's maybe being the most famous; Al-Tabari would serve as a much more proper analogue for Herodotus), and so on and so forth. Look at the literature Sufi's have. Sure, Sufi's (like everyone else) may look to the Qur'an for validation of what they do, but there is a literature here that establishes a temporally and geographically widespread set of practices that is based on a vastly additional literature and tradition.

There is an Islamic canon but it isn't treated the same way the Western canon is. The Western canon has a wide variety of literature spanning thousands of years that is all used to create an intellectual narrative and philosophical tradition. Quite simply, the entire Islamic canon revolves around the Qur'an. Muslims don't get their origin myth from Tabari or ibn Kathir or hadith, they quote it from the Quran. It's rare to find a single Sufi who can quote a verbatim line of Mantiq al-Tayr or al-Manthawi but nearly every single Sufi can quote something from the Quran.

In the West, a well-read person might quote a line of Shakespeare from memory, the US Constitution, and reference something from Roman history. That kind of cultural and intellectual breadth is captured in Islamicate civilization around the Quran as a single textual point of reference and touchstone. This isn't just a modern phenomenon nor is it exclusive to hyper-religious areas.