The study of Islam's origins from a rigorous historical and social science perspective is still wanting. At the same time, a renewed attention is being paid to the very plausible pre-canonical redactional and editorial stages of the Qur'an, a book whose core many contemporary scholars agree to be formed by various independent writings in which encrypted passages from the OT Pseudepigrapha, the NT Apocrypha, and other ancient writings of Jewish, Christian, and Manichaean provenance may be found. Likewise, the earliest Islamic community is presently regarded by many scholars as a somewhat undetermined monotheistic group that evolved from an original Jewish-Christian milieu into a distinct Muslim group perhaps much later than commonly assumed and in a rather unclear way. The following volume gathers select studies that were originally shared at the Early Islamic Studies Seminar. These studies aim at exploring afresh the dawn and early history of Islam with the tools of biblical criticism as well as the approaches set forth in the study of Second Temple Judaism, Christian, and Rabbinic origins, thereby contributing to the renewed, interdisciplinary study of formative Islam as part and parcel of the complex processes of religious identity formation during Late Antiquity.

The present volume is the work of 25 scholars who represent various specializations important to the study of the Qur'an, including Arabic language, comparative Semitic linguistics, paleography, epigraphy, history, rhetorical theory, hermeneutics, and Biblical studies. The starting point of this work was a series of five international conferences on the Qur'an at the University of Notre Dame over the academic year 2012-13, although the commentaries contributed during those conferences have been carefully edited to avoid repetition. Readers of The Qur'an Seminar Commentary will find that the 50 passages selected for inclusion in this work include many of the most important and influential elements of the Qur'an, including: - Q 1, al-Fatiha - Q 2:30-39, the angelic prostration before Adam - Q 2:255, the "Throne Verse" - Q 3:7, the muhkamat and mutashabihat - Q 4:3, polygamy and monogamy - Q 5:112-15, the table (al-ma'ida) from heaven - Q 9:29, fighting the People of the Book and the jizya - Q 12, the story of Joseph - Q 24:45, the "Light Verse" - Q 33:40, the "seal of the prophets" - Q 53, the "satanic verses" - Q 96, including the passage often described as the "first revelation" - Q 97, the "night of qadr" - Q 105, the "Companions of the Elephant" - Q 112, on God and the denial of a divine son The collaborative nature of this work, which involves a wide range of scholars discussing the same passages from different perspectives, offers readers with an unprecedented diversity of insights on the Qur'anic text.

This multidisciplinary collective volume advances the scholarly discussion on the origins of Islam. It simultaneously focuses on three domains: texts, social contexts, and ideological developments relevant for the study of Islam's beginnings -- taking the latter expression in its broadest possible sense. The intersections of these domains need to be examined afresh in order to obtain a clear picture of the concurrent phenomena that collectively enabled both the gradual emergence of a new religious identity and the progressive delimitation of its initially fuzzy boundaries.