THE QURʾĀN IN HISTORY: MUHAMMAD’S MESSAGE IN LATE ANTIQUITY 1

La tarda antichità fu un periodo di profondi cambiamenti che coinvolse l’Europa, il mediterraneo e il cosiddetto Vicino Oriente, dal IV-V al VII-VIII secolo. Questo paradigma è ormai ampiamente utilizzato negli studi islamici, dagli studi coranici, dove Angelika Neuwirth ha ampiamente scritto sul tema delle basi bibliche della rivelazione coranica come mani-festazione dello scritturalismo tardo antico, agli studi storici relativi al Co-rano e all’Arabia preislamica, come nel libro di Aziz al-Azmeh The Emer gence of Islam in Late Antiquity , che riprende il filone di studi instaurato da Julius Wellhausen e Toufic Fahd. Sono pienamente d’accordo con la ne-cessità di inserire l’Islam, la sua nascita e il suo sviluppo storico, religioso e filosofico nel contesto della tarda antichità, ma è necessario sottolineare quali temi hanno fatto dell’Islam una nuova religione rispetto al giudaismo e al cristianesimo. Questo è il tema del presente articolo che si articola nei seguenti momenti: 1) una breve rassegna critica della letteratura sulla tarda antichità; 2) il rapporto tra gli imperi – romano, bizantino e sasanide – della tarda antichità e il trionfo del monoteismo; 3) il concetto di hanifiyya . La conclusione è che il messaggio coranico trasmesso da Maometto ha diviso la storia in due parti: prima e dopo la venuta della verità . Late Antiquity describes a period of profound transformations that in volved Europe, the Mediterranean world and the so-called Near East, from IV-V to VII-VIII centuries. This paradigm has now become widely used in Islamic studies, from Qurʾānic studies, where Angelika Neuwirth has ex-tensively published in the past on the subject of the biblical underpinnings of the Qurʾānic revelation as a manifestation of late antique scripturalism, to historical studies related to the Qurʾān and pre-Islamic Arabia, as in Aziz al-Azmeh’s book The Emergence of Islam in Late Antiquity , which takes up the trend of scholarship established by Julius Wellhausen and Toufic Fahd. I completely agree with the need to put Islam and its historical, religious, philosophical birth and development in the context of the Late Antiquity, but what is at stake is to emphasize which themes made Islam a new religion with respect to Judaism and Christianity. This is the focus of the present paper which deals with: 1) a brief critical survey of the literature on Late Antiquity; 2) the relationship between the empires – Roman, Byzantine and Sasanid – of Late Antiquity and the triumph of monotheism; 3) the concept of hanifiyya . The conclusion is that the Qurʾānic message conveyed by Muhammad broke the history into two parts: before and after the coming of truth.

1 A preliminary version of this article has been presented at the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) conference in San Antonio, TX (15-18/11/2018) in the panel "Beyond the Written Word: Unity and Diversity across Transmission and Transformation of Medieval Textual Traditions in the Arabian Peninsula" organized by Corrado la Martire (Thomas-Institut, University of Cologne). The final version of this article has been revised and prepared for publication by Corrado la Martire with the permission of Massimo Campanini's family.
Late Antiquity describes a period of profound transformations that involved Europe, the Mediterranean world and the so-called Near East, from IV-V to VII-VIII centuries. This paradigm has now become widely used in Islamic studies, from Qurʾānic studies, where Angelika Neuwirth has extensively published in the past on the subject of the biblical underpinnings of the Qurʾānic revelation as a manifestation of late antique scripturalism, to historical studies related to the Qurʾān and pre-Islamic Arabia, as in Aziz al-Azmeh's book The Emergence of Islam in Late Antiquity, which takes up the trend of scholarship established by Julius Wellhausen and Toufic Fahd. I completely agree with the need to put Islam and its historical, religious, philosophical birth and development in the context of the Late Antiquity, but what is at stake is to emphasize which themes made Islam a new religion with respect to Judaism and Christianity. This is the focus of the present paper which deals with: 1) a brief critical survey of the literature on Late Antiquity; 2) the relationship between the empires -Roman, Byzantine and Sasanid -of Late Antiquity and the triumph of monotheism; 3) the concept of hanifiyya. The conclusion is that the Qurʾānic message conveyed by Muhammad broke the history into two parts: before and after the coming of truth.

Introduction: The paradigm of late Antiquity
The paradigm of Late Antiquity is now widely used in Islamic studies, from Qurʾānic studies to religious studies. In an important article, Angelika Neuwirth argued that the Qurʾān must be interpreted historically in relation to the Arab, Semitic and Mediterranean cultural environment in general which interacts in a broad thought world and epistemic space (Denkraum) of Late Antiquity 2 . She also criticised the tendency of modern scholars to reproduce the premodern view of Islamic history as momentous but foreign and somewhat outside the forces exerted by Late Antiquity on Western and Euro-pean history. Aziz al-Azmeh stressed the contextual process of the rise of Islam as an integral part of the history of Late Antiquity yet emphasising the indigenous character of the Arabs' transition from paganism to monotheism 3 .
My interest, however, is to single out some peculiar elements and features of Islam. I agree with the benefit of placing the Islamic kerygma and its historical, religious, philosophical development in the broad framework of Late Antiquity, a period of profound transformations involving Europe, the Mediterranean world and the socalled Near East between approximately 250-750 C.E., but the issue I will deal with is to emphasize which aspects made Islam a new religion with respect to Judaism and Christianity. It is still useful to discuss the theses of those who, like John Wansbrough, regarded impossible to read the Qurʾān as a historical source. A scholar who writes under the name of Christoph Luxenberg challenges this thesis with a study of the language of the Qurʾān and posits under the Arabic text a Syro-Aramaic subtext, much of it derived from Syriac Christian lectionaries 4 . Gabriel Reynolds argues that the Qurʾān is an original work in literary and religious terms, but also a work which heavily depends on its audience's knowledge of the Bible and the traditions that developed from the Bible. Patricia Crone and Michael Cook consider the core of Muhammad's message to be little more than a reproposition of Jewish messianic themes 5 . These studies seek to analyse their influence on the origins of Islam, with a number of largely mutually exclusive hypotheses, but their approach has in common that they have attracted accusations in various ways of being orientalist efforts to rob Islam, Muhammad and the Qurʾān of its originality giving it to Judaism and Christianity. Farid Esack defined the approach of some of these scholars as voyeuristic, claiming no confessional or ulterior motive in approaching the Qurʾān other than that of examining the material in the interest of scholarship, and argued that no reading of a text is innocent, even less if it is a holy text 6 . While such judgment sounds woefully ungenerous and belittles the work of these scholars and their very different theories and views, at the same time it shows how difficult it is still to conduct research on the Qurʾān without risking being exposed to criticism 7 .
Reconsidering Late Antiquity in a critical way and discussing the related literature leads us to reassess Peter Brown's seminal work which brought Late Antiquity to the attention of scholars across the borders of disciplines 8 . He stressed a few points: 1) Paganism survived for a long time, until Hellenic pagan philosophy underwent a long-prepared triumph of monotheism. Emperor Julian remodelled the pagan Weltanschauung and used the term 6 F. Esack, The Qur'an. A User's Guide. A Guide to its Key Themes, History and interpretation, One World, Oxford 2007 2 , p. 9. 7 A survey of the Qurʾān reveals that the elements of Biblical tradition, whether Jewish or Christian, are modified and adapted to an original framework that is distinct from those of the Torah and the New Testament (D. Stewart, Reflections on the State of the Art in Western Qurʾanic Studies, in C. Bakhos, M. Cook, Islam and its Past: Jahiliyya, Late Antiquity, and the Qur'an, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2017, p. 5). From a theological point of view, that the Qurʾān contains many Christian or Jewish elements is obvious and of no surprise, being Islam according to the Islamic dogma the last monotheistic revelation receiving, transforming and correcting the previous monotheistic narratives. The contrary would have been strange. On the other hand, the sceptical Syriacist school, including John Wansbrough, Patricia Crone, Michael Cook and Andrew Rippin, bestowed an evidently biased and unjustified credit upon external -Jewish and Christian -sources which are, obviously, prejudicial and mostly anti-Islamic and thus neither objective nor trustworthy sources, even less objective and trustworthy than the so much criticized internal -Muslim -sources. Fred Donner (Narratives of Islamic Origins: The Beginnings of Islamic Historical Writing, Darwin Press, Princeton 1998, 2-3, 22-24) gave a substantial contribution to demystify these assumptions. 8  Hellenismos to include all the theoretical and practical achievements of Neoplatonic philosophy (Plotinus, Porphyry and Proclus), leading to monotheistic or henotheistic themes in his philosophical writings. This trend has continued in history at least until the X century, as the case of the philosophical city of Harran with its star worshippers demonstrates 9 .
2) The Hellenism of Julian, Plotinus, Porphyry and Proclus was totally pagan, but paradoxically it became the basis and the indispensable conceptual framework of Christian theology. Julian separated himself from Constantinian Christianity and embraced Hellenism, not properly paganism. Interestingly, Julian admired the same cosmic and celestial harmony which led later philosophers to theorize the Trinity.
3) Late Antiquity was an epoch of awe, growing superstitions and loss of meaning in the universal order as willed by the gods. Therefore, asceticism was considered a useful mean of escaping from the vanity of the world. In this landscape, redemption and salvation became fundamental: Christ was the prototype of the redeemed man. However, many contradictions arose from the harsh conflict between Chalcedonians or Dyophysites and anti-Chalcedonians or Miaphysites, and indeed from all Christological controversies. According to Peter Brown, emphasizing -as did Pope Leo I's doctrinal statement to Flavian of Constantinople -the humble and human element in Christ shocked the Greek reader, because it threatened to leave God's work of salvation unfinished and, in Brown's words: to condemn human nature itself to the position of an untransformable residue, a bitter dreg at the bottom of the unbounded sea of God's power. 10 4) I believe that Christological controversies inoculate an insoluble contradiction within the very idea of the oneness of God. Islam resolved this conceptual drama reaffirming the centrality of tawhīd, which the Umayyads placed front and centre in any state-commissioned public manifestations of their vast imperial power. 5) Moreover, in the culture of Late Antiquity, Brown continues: Following these largely sharable assumptions, Aziz al-Azmeh's book The Emergence of Islam in Late Antiquity: Allah and His People deserves particular attention. Al-Azmeh emphasized the common Semitic background of rituals and astral cults, drawing on Édouard Sayous's argument of the sideral paganism of the Arabs, whose indestructible symbol remains the Black Stone of the Meccan Kaʿba 12 . Moreover, he argues that Semitic religiosity involved: the establishment of a deity in a 'house', and its designation as Lord of the House (rabb al-bayt), the house being in some circumstances transportable. This bears comparisons with Israelite usage of the Tabernacle, mishkan, but it is also attested widely as, for instance, in a Thamūdic inscription at Madāʾin Sālih mentioning mr'byt', as well as in poetry. The Meccan Kaʿba was, of course, the most famous of these houses, at least to posterity. 13 Even more important is al-Azmeh's discussion of the relationship between Judeo-Christianity and paleo-Islam. Quoting alleged Manichean clues in the Qurʾān (i.e., Q. 5: 116), the Marianist cult of a Trinity consisting of God, his Son Christ and Mary, and the Docetist doctrine that Jesus was not crucified but replaced on the cross by an eidolon or simulacrum or, as the Qurʾān says, only a likeness of that was shown to them (Q. 4: 157-158, Arberry's translation), al-Azmeh holds that: In Scriptural terms, what we have are echoes of folk midrāshim and of the two Testaments ... In the final analysis, the Qurʾān tells us more about Judeo-Christian ideas and motifs in circulation than the dogmas of Judeo-Christian groups can tell us about the Qurʾān. One must be careful not to conclude from the concordances noted by von Harnack and others that Muhammad was connected to any specific sect and be aware of the heterogeneity of the fragments he adopted. 14 Likewise, he continues saying that Qurʾānic Biblicism did not amount to a Biblisation of the Qurʾān, but rather involved the Qurʾānisation of Biblical figures 15 . Furthermore, he writes: Borrowings and quotations are in fact adaptation to a new context of sentiments, topoi, stories, and ideas in circulation, and that it is not the availability of Biblical and similar material that accounts for their Qurʾānic presence, but the requirements of the new scripture in process of composition which led to appropriation. 16 Allāh's genealogy is the third point dealt with by al-Azmeh in the fifth chapter of his book. Here he is less convincing in my opinion because, although it is true that God in the Qurʾān is called in an almost sequential order first as Rabb, then as al-Rahmān and finally as Allāh, this is by no means evidence of an evolution from a vague 14  divine entity (al-Rabb) to a monotheistic person (Allāh). First, the three names are not mutually exclusive in the Qurʾānic text and appear in different sūras revealed at different times (bearing in mind also the practical impossibility of establishing a rigorous chronological sequence of the sūras); secondly, as al-Azmeh argues, there was a period when Muhammad's disciples worshipped two gods together (al-Rahmān and Allāh at the same time) while later the two gods became the one God, Allāh. This thesis goes back to Nöldeke and to Jacques Jomier 17 . Their assumptions are intriguing, but without a solid basis. Verse 17:110 -Say: "Call upon God, or call upon the Merciful; whichever you call upon, to Him belong the Names Most Beautiful" -could simply mean that the same deity had two names and not that there were two deities. Indeed, it seems that in northern Arabia, a god, or God, was typically referred to as the merciful 18 . However, it is important that al-Azmeh recognizes that the Qurʾān contains a self-consistent way to monotheism independent from external conditioning of the Judeo-Christian environment.

Critical outcomes
Coming to the constructive part of this paper, five points are of particular relevance to demonstrate the rationale of placing the Qurʾān in Late Antiquity. the pre-Islamic (so-called jāhilī) Weltanschauung of Arabia. The case of Philo of Alexandria is interesting. At first glance, Philo's heritage does not seem to be present either in the apologetic quarrels between Muslims and Christians in VII and VIII centuries, nor in the process of formation of Islamic theology, the kalām, with the two main tendencies of Muʿtazilism and Ashʿarism 19 . However, if Philo is considered in the framework of late Neoplatonism, the perspective partially changes. Neoplatonism, marked in particular by Plotinus, greatly influenced Islamic philosophy (falsafa). Rather, we might ask whether Philo first theorized in Judaism a full monotheism whose origin was therefore philosophical. We know that Philo's mystical-philosophical translation of Judaism brings its monotheism in closer relationship with the Hellenistic and Persian astral religion, where the Sun represents the One God whose Logos radiates as the stream of light and is divided into different powers, represented by astral deities, in and through whom One God exercises his providence or government of the world 20 .
2) Arabia was not that empty cultural wasteland that later Muslim historiography described for obvious apologetic purposes: not only were strong henotheistic or perhaps monolatric religious tendencies widespread (aside from Christianity and Judaism), but jāhiliyya itself was not merely a stereotypical and wholly other paganism, but, 3) Similarly, Neuwirth and others have pointed out that Late Antiquity will not be taken as an epoch but as an epistemic space, a Denkraum, where battles are fought between neither political foes nor the contesting empires, but where textual controversies are staged between confederates and opponents from diverse theological realms. The transfer of knowledge was first of all a hermeneutical venture 22 . 4) In any case, monotheism in Late Antiquity developed in the context of the one empire, one God paradigm, from ancient Rome to Byzantium, from second Rome to Persia 23 , with the overwhelming shadows of Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar. 5) At the beginning of the seventh century, the messianic and eschatological expectations began to intensify within the Jewish communities of Byzantium, and as for the Christians of this era, the Jews also expected the imminent end of the world and the advent of the Messiah 24 .

Universalism of empires and the birth of monotheism
It is important to emphasize even more that the final victory of monotheism in Late Antiquity was prepared for and aided by the universalism of the empires: Roman, Byzantine and Sasanid -and of course the earlier Hellenistic empire of Alexander the Great. Although I do not share Fowden's interpretation of Constantine as a universal crusader 25 , undoubtedly the legacy of the classical and global empire of the first Rome and the universalism of second Rome and Persian empires paved the way for the homogeneity of Late Antiquity in the Mediterranean and Near Eastern world, in which monotheism found a truly favourable environment to thrive.
The category of pagan monotheism, used by scholars such as Polymnia Athanassiadi and Michael Frede, stressed the fact that, in its process of universalisation and unification, Late Antiquity produced a complementary process of syncretism and hierarchization of the gods which integrated the multiple deities of the late Roman world into a single monotheistic pyramidal structure 26 . Certainly, in my opinion, it was more a henotheistic process than a monotheistic one: however, a clear tendency towards a sort of unification of divinity is detectable throughout all the Late antique Mediterranean cultural framework.
The concept of one empire, one God provided the political-theological framework for religious transformations. Giovanni Tabacco theological monotheism and the monarchy correspond to each other in a broad unitary reality through the sacralization of power under the guise of Christianity. Biblical images were used to characterize the Christian emperor (Constantine in particular) -friend of God and new Moses, builder of a new allegiance between religion and politics 27 . The pristine roots of this ideology go back to Alexander the Great who embodied the idea of a cosmopolitan universal monarchical power 28 .
Roger Arnaldez stressed that:

With Alexander the Great's empire a sort of cosmopolitanism was born and undoubtedly it influenced the consolidation of the monotheistic idea in the Greek environment. The world, the cosmos is tantamount to a big city. It is one, well-ordered in the unity of its Law. Who governs it is equally one, source of a perfect wisdom's order? It is the only One God. 29
More recently, also Giovanni Filoramo argued that:  2016, p. 121. It is worth remembering the voice of Santo Mazzarino, a prestigious historian of the Roman world, who, on the contrary, supported a fluid continuity between Roman culture and Christianity in Late Antiquity. Mazzarino's thesis cannot be shared because, on the one hand, he underplayed the creativity of the "pagan" culture of Plotinus or Porphyry or Apuleius who seem to be of no value in relation to Augustine or Origen, while, on the other hand, he underplayed the resilience of "paganism" whose survival is attested at least until the 8th century in the East (remember for instance the Qurʾānic Sabeans In this framework, Muhammad's message was characterized by three interrelated elements: 1) the claim of a radical monotheism against the Christian Trinity, clearly considered as tritheism, and the claim of religious universality against Jewish ethnic exclusivity -the chosen people; 2) the belief that the long prophetic history, from Adam to the seal of the prophets, Muhammad, had come to an end; 3) the eschatological, albeit not messianic, approach of the Last Day, so assertive in the Meccan phase of revelation and still important in the Medinan phase, while the political umma grew and built a sort of Islamic state in Arabia.

Islam as furqān
Addressing the broader question of whether the Arabs of Muhammad's time and earlier were conscious that they were Arabs (al-ʿArab) and replying that no Arab aimed more at a religious function than at ethnical awareness, Peter Webb addressed the issue of jāhiliyya/hanīfiyya. He mainly worked on al-Masʿūdī3 3 . Webb argued that the elaboration of the concept of jāhiliyya was a retrospective effort by 3 rd /9 th century Arabs to reject their own self-image in pre-Islamic Arabia by obscuring its polytheism. In other words, in Webb's opinion, there were many more hanīfis in Mecca than is reasonable to assume. I believe there were probably henotheistic tendencies in Mecca and an inclination to worship one supreme God (Hubal or Allāh) was present when Muhammad began to preach, although it must be reiterated that any exaggeration in one way or another must be avoided. Once again Aziz al-Azmeh discussed the issue of hanīfiyya arguing that, even though there is little evidence that the early Muslims were designated as hanīf and that the term is perfectly understood without resorting to Syriac, there is no binding term by which the paleo-Muslims referred to themselves (others are sābī or muhājirūn) 34 . From a historical point of view, he is right in arguing that the paleo-Muslim community evolved over time and that this evolution was marked by conflicts. Muslim narratives are therefore reliable. However, what really matters is the evidence of the Qurʾānic text, which points to the definition of Islam as a natural religion.
Hanīf/hanīfiyya are well-known terms (for example, in Q. 6: 37 reference is made to Abraham, and in Q. 30: 30 to the natural religion of mankind). Abraham was neither a Jew nor Christian, but he was a pure monotheist (hanīf) devoted to God (muslim 35 ). The idea underlining this surprising statement is that Islam is the natural religion: Set your face to [the true] religion (dīn), as a man of pure faith (hanīf), the nature (fitra) God impressed upon men (fātara ʿalay-ha) 36 . Being hanīf and muslim at the same time, Abraham professed monotheism as the pristine and universal religion of humanity, beyond and before any religious denomination. From an Islamic point of view, prophetic history represents a continuous process of recovering the original monotheism which, through Abraham, father of all believers, passed to Moses, Jesus and finally to Muhammad and the Arabs, the last carriers of the universal message.
In Muhammad's Meccan milieu, hanifiyya alluded, lato sensu, to those religious souls who desired a more spiritual and transcendent idea of God. That Muhammad himself has been a hanīf before receiving the revelation and becoming a rasūl is an intriguing hypothesis. It represents a middle ground between the traditional and not always demonstrable Muslim bias that Muhammad, being the op. cit., Q. 3: 67. Obviously, the term muslim does not mean here the historical Muslim, but properly the natural monotheist. 36 Q. 30: 30. greatest of all prophets, must have always been a monotheist, and the stark assertion that he was previously a pagan. The Qurʾān has the unique characteristic of being self-aware (as Daniel Madigan argued), that is to speak of itself as this Qurʾān 37 , but above all because it claims to be a furqān that is a discriminating event 38 , which cuts history in two: before and after the truth. Although the paradigm of Late Antiquity itself runs the risk of emphasizing the element of continuity at the expense of rupture and fracture, Peter Brown (a non-islamologist who recognizes his debt to Patricia Crone), acutely perceived that: Muhammad cut the inhabitants of the Hijaz loose from the ties of tribal custom and threw them into the Fertile Crescent. His message developed as a protest against the Bedouin way of life ... The Arab tribal ideal had been wholeheartedly extrovert. 39 The Qurʾān breaks (faraqa) neatly the time of before and after Muhammad's revelation and Hegira 40 . The Hegira (hijra) -the migration of Muhammad from Mecca to Medina (622 C.E.) -was a physical and political act. First, the Qurʾān says: And those who are wronging themselves, the angels will take them and ask them: Which was your condition? They will say: We were 37 D. Madigan, The Qurʾān's Self Image. Writing and Authority in Islam's Scripture, Princeton University Press, Princeton 2001, pp. 101-105. 38 For example, in Q. 25: 1. 39 P. Brown, op. cit., 1989, p. 190. 40 The history of the study of this term is long and fascinating. It started as one of the central claims of those -like Richard Bell in the fifties -who saw Cristianity as a central factor in the rise of early Islam. The debate on the term furqān has been reopened by two articles: F.M. Donner, Qurʾānic Furqān, in "Journal of Semitic Studies" 52 (2007) oppressed on the earth. The angels will say: Was not God's earth wide enough so that you might have emigrated in it? The refuge of those people will be the Gehenna, an evil place indeed! Except for the men, women and children who, being oppressed, were not able to find a way and were not guided on the straight path. Perhaps God will pardon them because God is Merciful all Pardoning. But who emigrates on the path of God will find in the earth many places to stay therein, and who comes out from his home and emigrates towards God and Its Messenger and death overtakes him, his wage is a promise from God, because God is Forgiving Merciful. 41 Tariq Ramadan strongly emphasized the conceptual and orthopractical breakdown of the Hegira: Hijra is also the experience of liberation, both historical and spiritual. Moses had liberated his people from Pharaoh's oppression and led them toward faith and freedom. The essence of Hijra is of exactly the same nature: persecuted because of their beliefs, the faithful decided to break away from their tormentors and march to freedom. In doing so, they stressed that they could not accept oppression, that they could not accept the status of victim, and that basically the matter was simple: publicly speaking the name of God implied either being free or breaking free ... Hijra is the exile of the conscience and of the heart from false gods, from alienation of all sorts, from evil and sin. Traditions clearly converge in stating that the Hegira was a choice that could have positive or negative results, whether that intention was good or bad. Who -Muhammad in the first place -has acted with piety and justice will obtain through the Hegira a good that will hamper the return to mistake. When the goal is achieved, the Hegira is no longer needed: Muhammad will stay in Medina and never come back to Mecca. Muhammad prayed to God that his companions would not come back to Mecca, complaining of those who had died without making the Hegira. In the life of the Prophet, Mecca performs the same function as Egypt: it is the place where the Qurayshites (instead of the Pharaoh) exercise an oppressive power; therefore, it must be abandoned. The Hegira is the moment of the affirmation of Islamic monotheism against the polytheistic jāhiliyya of Mecca. The exodus of Muhammad produces a polarity between Mecca and Medina equivalent to the polarity between Egypt and the promised land in Judaism. In Islam, however, the point is not to return to a land that was said to have been previously occupied (Palestine by Jacob and his sons), but to a place from which one can begin to move forward and to spread the message (risāla) all over the world.

Conclusions
In this article I have tried to show that it is useful for a correct interpretation of the Qurʾān and a fair assessment of Muhammad's message to fit them into the broad framework of Late Antiquity. However, Islam claims -and indeed it is -to be a rupture (furqān) in the religious history of monotheism. Much work remains to be done to clarify the formation of Islam and the Qurʾān in their historical developments. My remarks are simply preliminary steps on a long path that I hope to pursue in the future.