• 1 Some of the thoughts presented here had been discussed by the author before. See Neuwirth & Neuwirt (...)
• 2 Neuwirth, Der Koran als Text der Spätantike and in English, The Qurʾān, vol. 2/1, pp. 37-48.
• 3 Schmidt, Schmid & Neuwirth, “Denkraum Spätantike. Von einer Epoche zu einem Denkraum” and in Englis (...)
• 4 The Qur’an has been acknowledged as the mirror of an “event” only by some few scholars, e.g. Cragg, (...)
• 5 Sinai, “The Qur’an as Process”.

1It is a daring venture to join a conference about “The religious other in Qur’anic Tafsīr” with a paper where neither tafsīr in the sense of a scholarly or literary activity posterior to the Qur’an’s redaction, nor a clear perception of religious otherness is at stake.1 However, the invitation to our conference comes as a welcome occasion to advocate once again our view that the Qur’an is a “late antique text”,2 that demands to be relocated into an epistemic space, which it—historically—shares with early Judaism and Christianity.3 The “Corpus Coranicum” project furthermore proceeds from the assumption that the Qur’an is “double-faced”, both a response to earlier religious traditions current in pre-Islamic Arabia—thus an epistemic achievement in its own right—and a new message addressed to a growing community of believing, but still “unscriptured”, ummiyyūn, contemporaries of the Prophet. Although the Qur’an is manifest as a textual fait accompli, it is essentially the mirror of an event,4 rooted in time, of a real prophetical communication reflecting Biblical and post-Biblical models. As Nicolai Sinai has argued already in 2010, the Qur’an is a process.5 Not the progressive growth of a written text, however, but a progress in the elaboration of a theology which is embedded in a sequence of oral performances, manifest in the suras. Hence their isolated reading, and moreover their excerption, the perusal of randomly selected verses and verse groups is a highly problematic dealing with the Qur’an. The only sound approach to the Qur’an is the diachronic.

• 6 Griffith, “Al-Naṣārā in the Qur’an. A hermeneutical reflection”, p. 310. What Sidney Griffith label (...)

2This is not the accepted view. Sidney Griffith, the paragon of Christian-Islamic studies, has drawn in 2011 a different image: he identifies two major approaches to the Qur’an:6

• 7 Griffith, “Al-Naṣārā in the Qur’an. A hermeneutical reflection”, p. 310.
• 8 For an overview see Neuwirth, “Ein Versuch der historischen und forschungsgeschichtlichen Verortung (...)

3We would object to Griffith’s irenic judgment that the two approaches “are not mutually exclusive”.7 The terms synchronic/diachronic implies not only completely different images of the Qur’an. While synchronic approaches are purely textual analyses, diachronic reading presupposes the oral character of the text—the canonical form being only the result of its closure. The oral character takes into consideration not only references to historically older or contemporary extra-Qur’anic texts,—“intertexts”—but also the frequent resumption of earlier communicated Qur’anic texts (inner-Qur’anic intertexts). And since the oral layer is conditioned by the protagonists’—i.e., the prophet and his community—real experiences, contemporary politics and ideologies are equally expected to be mirrored in the Qur’an. So, both approaches described by Griffith are clearly distinguishable, not only in their techniques but moreover in their crucial presupposition: the one being interested in a plain, undramatic, fait accompli, the other in the process of genesis of two revolutionary innovations: a scripture and a community. It is exactly the blurring of these two approaches that has brought about the current crisis in Qur’anic scholarship.8

• 9 Griffith, “Christian Lore and the Arabic Qur’an. The ‘Companions of the Cave’ in Sūrat al-Kahf and (...)
• 10 Neuwirth & Hartwig, Der Koran, Bd. 2/2, pp. 640–747.
• 11 See Muraviev, “Three Martyrs of Chalcedon and the Persian Campain of the Emperor Julian”.
• 12 Neuwirth & Hartwig, Der Koran, Bd. 2/2, pp. 263–316.
• 13 Busse, “Antioch and its Prophet Ḥabīb al-Najjār”.

4We owe Sidney Griffith the observation that individual Qur’anic presentations of Christian topics like “The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus” might owe their particularly lively character to the community’s live experience of the feast of the saints, celebrated on August 4th and/or October 22nd.9 Further examples would be e.g. Q. 21:85–86 (sūrat al-Anbiyāʾ),10 where the commemorated martyrs and saints (Ismael, Idris, and Dhu l-Kifl) could perhaps be understood as Ismael, martyr of Persia (usually in union with Sabel and Manuel)11—commemorated on June 17th—and Elisa and Elijah—commemorated June 14th and July 20th, i.e. the period after Pentecost—or finally in Q. 36:13–32 (sūrat Yā Sīn),12 where the unnamed messenger sent to the aṣḥāb al-qarya can be identified with the martyr Abbibos of Edessa—commemorated on November 15th.13

• 14 Neuwirth & Hartwig, Der Koran, Bd. 2/2.

6Contrary to the presently prevailing view, that highlights Syriac intertexts that recently published “Corpus Coranicum” Commentary shows,14 that not Christian lore and Christian thought, but topical, even political, problems prevail. Assessing the suras as protocols of real communications and real debates we have to search for their Sitz im Leben, their social and ideological embedding.

• 15 This is a general quest pursued in Byzantine literature as well, see Forness, Hasse-Ungeheuer & Lep (...)
• 16 Howard-Johnston, The Last Great War of Antiquity; see also his preparatory work on the subject: Wit (...)
• 17 Perrin & Stuckenbruck, Four Kingdom Motifs before and beyond the Book of Daniel, especially the con (...)
• 18 Neuwirth & Hartwig, Der Koran, Bd. 2/2, pp. 751–860.
• 19 Neuwirth & Hartwig, Der Koran, Bd. 2/2, pp. 640–747.
• 20 Neuwirth & Hartwig, Der Koran, Bd. 2/2, pp. 507–599.
• 21 Ghaffar, Der Koran in seinem religions- und weltgeschichtlichen Kontext.
• 22 Neuwirth & Hartwig, Der Koran, Bd. 2/2, pp. 61–207.

7Meccan suras, replete with narratives show less interest in the stories of individual protagonists as such than in an overarching discourse of their context, which in Mecca is the quest for the just ruler.15 In middle Mecca, the community should have been alerted to the ruler problem by real historical events: the long-lasting military conflict between two powerful rulers of the time, the Byzantine emperor Heracleios, and his Sassanian rival Chosrow.16 Heracleios claimed for himself an active role in the then widely upheld imperial eschatology,17 while Chosrow was aware and supported Jewish messianic claims—two mythifications of history. Three lengthy suras, sūrat al-Kahf (Q. 18)18, as well as sūrat al-Anbiyāʾ (Q. 21)19 and sūrat al-Naml (Q. 27),20 involving Biblical and non-Biblical ruler figures, mirror the community’s commitment to the quest for the just ruler, as has been convincingly argued in the CC project by Zishan Ghaffar.21 A forth one, sūrat al-Isrāʾ (Q. 17) discusses a related issue, divine promises of rulership.22 Sūrat al-Naml even presents Heracleios in the guise of an ideal Biblical ruler; stratagem that allows for utterances of criticism.

• 23 The two liturgies of St. Chrysostom and St. Basil (Greek) are available in “Die Heilige und göttlic (...)
• 24 The Shemaʿ-prayer consist of three Biblical portions: Deut. 6,4-9, 11,13-21, and Numbers 15,37-41; (...)

11We are referring not to Syriac, but to Byzantine and Jewish models, namely: the initial part of the Christian worship: the introit, Greek enarxis, of the liturgies of both St. Chrysostom and St. Basil,23 and of the Jewish creed, the Shemaʿ Israel, which is obligatory to enounce during the Synagogue service.24 They have found their counterparts in sūrat al-Fātiḥa (Q. 1) and sūrat al-Iḫlāṣ (Q. 112) of the Qur’anic corpus.

• 25 Nöldeke & Schwally, Geschichte des Qorāns, pp. 110–117; Winkler, “Fatiha und Vaterunser”.
• 26 Arkoun, “Lecture de la Fātiḥa”.
• 27 Arkoun, “Lecture de la Fātiḥa”, p. 47.
• 28 Arkoun, “Lecture de la Fātiḥa”, p. 47.

12The Fātiḥa has been studied extensively by earlier scholars25—still detached however from its political background. Thus even one of the more innovative scholars of Islam, Mohamed Arkoun, in 1982,26 restricted his investigation to textual data. He distinguishes between two manifestations of the text, first, as the utterance of the Prophet, in the history of the proclamation, enonce 1, “whose specific context we are however not able to reconstruct”,27 and, second, “the codified Qur’an as the basis of a long tradition of exegesis whose many levels of meaning would need to be studied”28—in view of the masses of diffuse material a tedious task. Arkoun therefore opts for a purely theoretical, a-historical, linguistic-critical analysis of the Fātiḥa, studying it “like any other classical Arabic text”. His method prefigures a lot of today’s positivist scholarship.

• 29 For previous attempts to date the sura, i.e. to contextualize it, see Nöldeke & Schwally, Geschicht (...)

14Before considering the extra-Qur’anic matches however, let us look for a Sitz im Leben of the Fātiḥa in the Qur’an itself, where it is reflected under a veiled name: sabʿun min al-maṯānī. The middle Meccan sūrat al-Ḥiǧr (Q. 15:87) in its final section proclaims triumphally: wa-la-qad ātaynāka sabʿan mina l-maṯānī wa-l-Qurʾāna l-ʿaẓīm (We have given you seven of the oft-repeated and the mighty Qur’an).

• 30 Neuwirth, Studien zur Komposition der mekkanischen Suren, pp. 250–253.
• 31 Neuwirth, Studien zur Komposition der mekkanischen Suren, p. 260.

15Final sections in middle Meccan suras usually feature an “affirmation of the Qur’anic revelation”.30 In sūrat al-Ḥiǧr, however, the concluding section, rather than featuring the anticipated model, presents the affirmation of both the Qur’an’s divine origin and that of a further text, labeled sabʿun min al-maṯānī.31

• 32 Horovitz, Koranische Untersuchungen, pp. 26–27.
• 33 See for Uri Rubin’s proposal to understand sabʿun min al-maṯānī as seven punishment stories, Neuwir (...)

16What does maṯānī mean? It is obviously a Qur’anic coinage, derived from ṯanna, a word occurring in the Qur’an only twice, an Arabized form of Hebrew Mishna, or Aram. Maṯniṯa, thus meaning “something that is repeated or to be repeated”.32 In Q. 15:87 it is used eponymically, as an attribute replacing the object itself, which would be “the units, the verses” of the second divinely given text. Although this interpretation is not univocally accepted in modern scholarship, it appears to be the most plausible one; alternative options having been convincingly refuted.33

• 34 On the number see Rubin, “Exegesis and Ḥadīth. The Case of the Seven Mathānī”, p. 150. Rubin refers (...)
• 35 Horovitz, Koranische Untersuchungen, p. 27. The poem reads: qataltum ḫayra man rakib al-maṭāyā /…/ (...)

19It is interesting to note that the identification of the sabʿun min al-maṯānī with the Fātiḥa must have been clear already to the redactors of the Qur’an. It is true, if we treat the Fātiḥa like the rest of the suras, i.e. overleap the basmala as an initial verse, we would count six, not seven verses. To reach 7 all the same, the redactors invalidated their own principles, by either exceptionally counting the basmala as a verse or by subdividing the long last verse into two, certainly because of the Fātiḥa’s amount of seven verses was a canonical data. They may also have been unaware that seven is not necessarily numerically intended, but often used to denote an ideal number below 10.34 Little later, the maṯānī were spontaneously identified with al-Fātiḥa: several poetical encomia mention among the virtues of a deceased person his liturgical observance: thus, Abū al-Aswad al-Duʾalī (d. 69/689) praised ʿAlī to have recited certain long suras of the Qur’an plus the maṯānī, the Fātiḥa.35

• 36 Montgomery, “The Empty Hijâz”.
• 37 Griffith, “Christian Lore and the Arabic Qur’an”; Neuwirth & Hartwig, Der Koran, Bd. 2/2, pp. 749–8 (...)
• 38 See also Neuwirth & Hartwig, “The Virgin Mary in the Liturgical Fabric of the Qur’an”.
• 39 Ghaffar, Der Koran in seinem religions- und weltgeschichtlichen Kontext, pp. 75–110.
• 40 About the other suras names, see Kandil, “Die Surennamen in der offiziellen Kairiner Koranausgabe u (...)

21It is no accident that this discovery of the introit to the communal prayer occurs in the Middle Meccan period. Recent attempts at a closer determination of the Middle Meccan suras which al-Fātiḥa has to be assigned to, have opened new perspectives: the continuous situation of war, waged between the Byzantines and the Sassanian Persians, which the Qur’an repeatedly comments upon, should not have been without impact on the political thought nor the aesthetic curiosity of the early community. Now, Byzantine culture did not need to be searched outside the habitat of the community, but could be observed in Arabia as well.36 Several liturgical novelties in the middle Meccan Qur’an seem to have originated in contacts with Byzantine practitioners, e.g. the special regard for the feasts of Christian saints, that Sidney Griffith has considered (see above),37 or the introduction of the person of the virgin Mary in a sura of hymn-like shape, reminding closely of famous Byzantine hymns on Mary,38 to name only a few. The community’s interest in the contemporaneous Byzantine ruler, Heracleios, who is present in the Qur’an in the guise of a Biblical ruler, Salomon, has been discussed by Zishan Ghaffar.39 Why not assume that the introduction of a communal service with a proper introit also was inspired by the new closeness of Byzantium to the minds of the believers? The sura’s name, “the opener”,40 would be a perfect indication of its function of the service’s beginning.

• 41 See Rippin, “Occasions of Revelation”, pp. 569–573. For reflection on the genesis and historicity s (...)
• 42 Rubin, “Exegesis and Hadith”; Bellamy, “Some Proposed Emendations to the Text of the Koran”, pp. 56 (...)

22The method of reconnecting Qur’anic texts to their social and ideological context, exploring the Sitz im Leben, is presently seldom applied in Qur’anic studies. Under the rubriquet “asbāb al-nuzūl”41 it had been a corner stone of classical Islamic exegesis, that fell into discredit only in modernity –a fate shared with the sīra. While skepticism vis-à-vis the historicity of sīra details maybe justified –the a priori discarding of a historical and thus political setting for individual text units is a grave intrusion into the meaning of the text, which –not only– in the case of al-Fātiḥa would blur the significance of a major achievement of the community, indeed a turn in their liturgical life. As a matter of fact, to limit the scholarly horizon to the Qur’an’s textual manifestation, as Uri Rubin has practiced,42 closes the door before the identification of essential implicit dimensions of the text.

• 44 The word ʿālamīn—a contraction of ʿālamiyyīn—is an artificial word, a play on words, in fact, that (...)

26They both start out with a doxology: colon 1 eulogēmenē hē basileia matching verse 1: al-ḥamdu li-llāh and continue with essential elements of a hymn: the reference to the eschatological kingdom (basileia and mālik yawm al-dīn); and the idea that God rules over the present and eternity (nyn kai aei kai eis tous aiōnas ton aiōnōn and rabb al-ʿālamīn44). It is noteworthy, however, that the mention of the trinity in colon 2 is replaced by three divine attributes al-raḥmān / al-raḥīm / mālik <malik> yawm al-dīn, verses 3 and 4). Semantically, al-raḥmān al-raḥīm, verse 3, is matched by the antiphonic kyrie elēson, colon 6.

• 45 On the Basilios-liturgy see Engberding, Das eucharistische Hochgebet der Basileiosliturgie.

28This summary comparison of the two texts does not intend to claim that there is a direct dependence of the Fātiḥa on the liturgy of St John Chrysostom; a comparison with other Christian liturgies45 or with the most ancient form of the synagogue service would perhaps have led to quite a similar result. The key point is the genre of speech; the opening of any service in the monotheistic environment of the Fātiḥa had to be solemn enough to do justice to the ceremonial occasion, and was required to incorporate a number of standard topics in order to establish communication between the community and God. It relied on the tenor of a litany, on the one hand, and the combination of hymn and supplication, on the other. In availing itself of these typological characteristics, the Fātiḥa fulfils these conditions; indeed, by virtue of its brevity and its climax with the triple petition for true guidance, it even exceeds them.

• 46 Al-Suyūṭī (d. 911/1505), al-Durr al-manṯūr fī al-tafsīr bi-l-māʾṯūr, vol. 1, p. 13.

29Various hadiths express certainty that this text was one of a kind: a particularly touching example being the following:46

• 48 The replacement of sacrifice by verbal worship is one of the markers of Late Antiquity, see Stroums (...)

30But is it only attraction, the adoption of a Byzantine-style introit to the ritual prayer, that is documented in al-Fātiḥa? Is there not also a rejection of a Christian theologoumenon implied? Pursuing the two texts of al-Fātiḥa and St. Chrysostom’s introit further we come across, another rhetorically striking parallel: The anaphoric iyyāka naʿbudu wa-iyyāka nastaʿīn in verse 5 has a rhetorical counterpart in the second (sacrifice-related) part of the Christian liturgy: se hymnoumen, “Thee we praise”, Chr. Arabic: iyyāka nusabbiḥ, se eulogoumen, “to Thee we give honor”, iyyāka nubārik, soi eucharistoumen, “to Thee we give thanks”, wa-iyyāka naškuru. Both cases of emphatization are unique in their respective texts. Yet their function is different: The Greek anaphoric verses se hymnoumen etc, though resounding in the Qur’anic iyyāka naʿbudu, are not simply praise, but relate to sacrifice. In the course of the Christian liturgy, they accompany the offering of the sacrificial gifts—understood as a human-divine exchange. In the verse iyyāka naʿbudu a different kind of exchange is at stake: the (unbloody), verbal service of God, naʿbudu, is sufficient to entitle the pious to ask his support, nastaʿīn, which will consist in his guidance. Sacrifice is replaced by verbal worship.48

• 49 The term has been introduced by Münz-Manor & Thomas Arentzen, “Soundscapes of Salvation: Resounding (...)

31Back to al-Fātiḥa: Are its liturgy-references intended “comments” on an earlier text? Or is the Fātiḥa rather a new composition made up of elements from out a residue of liturgical expressions, transmitted irrespective of their origin, a “soundscape”?49 We will come back to that challenging new concept in our final short discussion of the Medinan sūrat al-Iḫlāṣ.

• 50 See Specker, Gottes Wort und menschliche Sprache; and Neuwirth, “Das islamische Dogma der ‚Unnachah (...)

32Later Medinan suras reflect a new meta-discourse. Beyond their semantic message, they start to be involved in a hermeneutical contest, a muʿāraḍa.50 Once the challenge had been addressed to the opponents of the Prophet, to present something equal in rank to the Qur’anic suras, the claim of the inimitability of the Qur’an was a ubiquitous hidden agenda.

• 51 For a discussion of the first part of the Shemaʿ see also Marx, “Ein Koran-Forschungsprojekt in der (...)

33The tension is palpable in sūrat al-Iḫlāṣ (Q. 112), “The Pure Belief”. It is a synopsis of three creeds, represented by the single voice of the Qur’an itself, although the two other voices can still be heard in it, see the synopsis.51

• 52 Munk, Die Welt der Gebete, pp. 134–139.
• 53 The reading wāḥid is already attested in the Codex of Ibn Masʿūd, see Ḫatīb, Muʿǧam al-Qirāʾāt, vol (...)
• 54 Riffaterre, Semiotics of Poetry, p. 92.

34It is difficult not to hear the beginning verse qul huwa llāhu aḥad, “Say: He is God, one”, as a free translation of the Jewish credo, Shemaʿ Yisraʾel, YHWH elohenu YHWH eḥad, “Hear Israel: the Lord, our God, is one” (from Deut. 6,4), a frequently used “motto”, essential in Jewish prayer.52 The key-word “one”, eḥad, resonates unmistakably in the Arabic text with aḥad, “one”. This “polyphony”, of two texts in “one” is achieved through an “ungrammaticality”. Following classical commentaries,53 Arabic grammar would require the adjective wāḥid in place of the noun aḥad. But is this only a violation of a grammatical rule? According to the theoretician of poetics, Michael Riffaterre,54 ungrammaticality denotes a verbal phenomenon that, by standing out from a certain text, makes reference to another text, where this form is “normal”. What initially appears as an irregularity shows itself, through knowledge of the “other text”, to be a bridge between two texts that mutually illuminate each other.

• 55 On the concept see Hauschild & Drecoll, Lehrbuch der Kirchen- und Dogmengeschichte, pp. 80–82.

37This verse, a reproduction of the important theological concept homoousios, Greek for “equal in nature” not only inverts the Nicene Creed’s statement of the essential likeness of Christ with the Father,55 homoousios to patri, but also goes beyond it to epistemically exclude the mere thought that any created being could be equal to God – to say nothing of the essential likeness of a son.

• 56 Münz-Manor & Arentzen, “Soundscapes of Salvation”, pp. 36–55.

38The two credos that have been glued together here, nowhere else can be found in a joint context. How then did they make their way into the Qur’anic discourse? Here we have to speculate. Thanks to two modern “transconfessional” scholars, Ophir Münz-Manor and Thomas Arentzen, who studied the analoga between Christian Greek hymns and Hebrew piyyutim,56 we have become familiar with a new venue of transmission, beyond the hitherto cherished imagination of vertical “adoption” of forms and sounds, and thus also ideas, from an authoritative predecessor. This is the more democratic, horizontal-imagination of partaking in a more general pool, a “soundscape”, of accumulated ideas and impressive phrases—current but unlabeled and unnamed—elements so persuasive that they time and again offered themselves for re-use. In the case of Q. 112, they go back to the creeds of the Jews and Christians respectively, but their essential elements should have had acquired the status of ubiquitously known epitomes of their respective beliefs.

• 57 Ritter, Die Geheimnisse der Wortkunst (Asrār al-balāġa) des ʿAbdalqāhir al-Curcānī. It is striking (...)
• 58 See Neuwirth, “Das islamische Dogma der ‚Unnachahmlichkeit des Korans‛, pp. 126–128.
• 59 See Radscheit, Die koranische Herausforderung.

39To fully valorize the subtle composition of Q. 112 we need to reconsider the challenge of Iʿǧāz. Our way of historical illumination of the structure of Qur’an texts at first glance stands at a far remove from inner-Islamic exegesis. Yet, inner-Islamic exegesis does attribute the highest significance to the structure of the discourse. The classical scholar of rhetoric al-Ǧurǧānī based his defense of the uniqueness of the Qur’an predominately on “structure”, naẓm, that is, the “meaningful linking of word signs to the communication of an intention”.57 He brings to a point a central characteristic of the Qur’anic language: its particular pathos due to conscious rhetorical molding. The social frame of this success is, in al-Ǧurǧānī’s view, that of a contest. In agreement with the literary genre of his tractate on “inimitability”,58 he thinks in particular of the rhetorical triumph over verbally gifted rivals of the Prophet. What he describes as a trump card of the Qur’anic style, however, the impressive figures of word and sense in the individual verses, stands out all the more if one contrasts it with familiar older formulations from the Jewish/Christian predecessor texts. In both Q. 1 and Q. 112, we see a tendency to eclipse the Christian and Jewish texts taken as challenges, through the heightening of expression. It was not only that contemporary opponents, as the “challenge verses” might suggest,59 that were to be overcome, but also, and above all, it was necessary to confront the powerful traditions of the predecessor religions on the same level. These earlier traditions are not simply silenced but seriously addressed. The careful reshaping although thereby devaluating of a negatively classified rival creed, cannot be regarded as a simple attempt at supersession, but rather as an expression of serious recognition.

• 60 Neuenkirchen, “La Fātiḥa: une introduction liturgique à la prière commune?”.
• 61 Neuwirth & Neuwirth, “Sūrat al-Fātiḥa,” pp. 331-357; Neuwirth, “Sūrat al-Fātiḥa (Q. 1)”.
• 62 Luxenberg, Die syro-aramäische Lesart des Koran, and in English, The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Ko (...)

41It was only after concluding the manuscript of our contribution that we came across the article “La Fātiḥā: une introduction liturgique à la prière commune?” by Paul Neuenkirchen.60 The title announces a reflection of the status of al-Fātiḥa, which figures as the first sura of the Qur’an: is it meant to be the opening text of the “book” or is it a prayer apart from the Qur’an? This question had been raised before, though investigated as a problem of Qur’anic textual studies: is the Fātiḥa a sura like any other or is it something generically different: a communal prayer that was introduced during the period of the communication of the Qur’an and which was respected as such by the redactors of the canonical text who put it in the canon’s beginning? This thesis is supported by the Sitz im Leben of the Fātiḥa within the Qur’an itself: our contribution—which resumes earlier presentations like Neuwirth (1991, 2015)61—argues that the Fātiḥa is embedded in the Qur’anic communication itself, since a sura from the middle Meccan period (Q. 15) unambiguously points to the Fātiḥa as being already in use, to be recited together with other Qur’anic suras, in the assemblies of the earliest community. Neuenkirchen who reads the Qur’an according to Christoph Luxenberg’s thesis as a construct fashioned after the model of a qeriono, a Syriac lectionary,62 does not focus on Qur’anic discourses. His frame of investigation is not the Qur’an in statu nascendi, as a “scripture in progress” but rather Early Islam. For him thus, not the Qur’anic Fātiḥa but the text of the Fātiḥa as part of the canon needs a Sitz im Leben. He therefore turns to the post-Muhammadan hadith-literature which entails reports about the circumstances of the Fātiḥa’s recitation in the early Muslim community. Here some traits seem to point to a recital practice after Syriac liturgical models (like the concluding of a recitation with “amen”). Following the Syriac track further he notices textual similarities between the Fātiḥa and individual passages of Syriac liturgy—actually Syriac equivalents to the Greek enarxis text that we adduced as a generic model, in no way the origin of the Fātiḥa. Neuenkirchen falls prey to a (but now rather outdated) preconception (the Qur’an’s “secondary”, Syriac origins). He is blind for the diversity and mutual exclusiveness of approaches to the Qur’an. Thus, his extensive bibliography is equally haphazard and seems to have been of little benefit for the author.