• 1 The present paper is a revised version of the presentation I gave at the Third Idéo Conference in (...)
• 2 Luxenberg, Syro-aramäische Lesart; Syro-Aramaic Reading.
• 3 For a brief and useful summary of eight of these various types of reviews, see King, “A Christian (...)
• 4 Luxenberg, Syro-Aramaic Reading, p. 323.
• 5 The only “historical” contextualization offered by Luxenberg, seemingly as an after-thought, is th (...)
• 6 King, “A Christian Qurʾān?”, p. 70, duly notes that the dictionaries of Bar ʿAlī and Bar Bahlūl, w (...)

1As any scholar who has been working on the Quran or Early Islam during the past two decades very well knows, there has been a long-standing debate over the nature/extent of the relationship between the Syriac language and quranic Arabic and/or between Eastern Christian writings and the verses of the Quran.1 Although this debate is not new, it had somewhat been set aside for most of the second half of the twentieth century, until it was unquestionably revived by the publication of Christopher Luxenberg’s Die syro-aramäische Lesart des Koran in 2000, followed by its expanded English translation in 2007.2 This now famous book sparked heated debates among specialists of Islamic and Semitic studies, and received numerous reviews ranging from overly-laudative to blatantly hostile ones.3 One of the shortcomings of Luxenberg’s study is that he fails to give any historical context to his hypotheses, which is to say that he claims the core of the Quran is of “Christian Syrian origins”,4 but he does not provide a plausible scenario to accommodate his claims.5 His entire monograph is based on an ad hoc philological comparative study between the Arabic of the Quran and the Syriac of modern dictionaries,6 making it quite a sterile environment to try and make sense of how the quranic text came into being.

• 7 Four important studies discussing a possible relation between quranic verses and Syriac literature (...)
• 8 Sinai, “Eschatological Kerygma”; Shoemaker, “A New Arabic Apocryphon”.

2However, many subsequent scholarly endeavours, while most definitely benefiting from the momentum created by Luxenberg’s book, have offered much more pondered and contextualized approaches to the question of the relationship between the Syriac milieu and that in which the Quran emerged. This was mainly achieved through a comparison between specific Syriac writings and relevant verses of the Quran. Among the different literary genres of the former, homilies have proven to be choice candidates for such comparative purposes, as will be briefly discussed hereafter.7 Indeed, these Syriac homilies or mīmrē (sing. mīmrō), especially those composed during the period of history referred to as Late Antiquity which roughly extends from the third to the eighth century ce, seem to offer pertinent parallels to the Quran as regards to contents (biblical narratives, parenetical discourses, etc.), form (versification, allusiveness, etc.) and context (both historical and cultural). But very recently, some questions were raised by scholars such as Nicolai Sinai and especially Stephen J. Shoemaker, who have asked whether it is correct to consider the Quran as a homily and have frankly stated that it is not.8

• 9 The fact that the Quran is more aptly described as a corpus (i.e., a gathering of texts of heterog (...)
• 10 By the Quran’s content, I mean the body of texts that this corpus is made of (individual suras or (...)

4In the following pages, I therefore wish to succinctly expose the main pros and cons of these two competing understandings of the Quran in order to respond to some of the objections raised by Sinai and Shoemaker, and by doing so, attempt to sketch a very broad definition of the homily, with a special focus on the Syriac homily. Having identified specific features of the mīmrō, a comparative study of the latter with parts of the quranic text will allow me to suggest that both share a number of common characteristics, which will then lead me to argue that the Quran, as a corpus, does in fact contain Arabic homilies among other literary genres.9 As such, as I will try to demonstrate hereafter, it has the potential to make us reassess some points regarding the Quran’s content (a point which is quite often discussed in modern scholarship, but not necessarily in a comparative manner), and context (which is much less so: for example, I will ask what the Quran can tell us about the composition of its audience, the interaction between the preacher and the audience, the process of preparation and oral delivery, and other related questions).10

• 11 I here leave aside the question of the relationship of quranic Arabic to the Syriac language, one (...)
• 12 He is mentioned in passing by Witztum, “Joseph among the Ishmaelites”, p. 425, in a footnote, but (...)
• 13 Martyn, Controversial Tracts.
• 14 Martyn, Controversial Tracts, p. 124.
• 15 Martyn, Controversial Tracts, p. 125. In the following pages, up to p. 132, Samuel Lee discusses p (...)
• 16 Martyn, Controversial Tracts, pp. 134–135. In the next pages up to p. 138, Samuel Lee compares sin (...)

5The idea that the quranic text is somewhat related to Syriac writings,11 and more specifically, to Syriac homilies, is almost two centuries old since, as far as I know, the very first Western scholar to have suggested this theory, be it in a primitive form, is Samuel Lee (1783‒1852),12 a professor of Arabic at the University of Cambridge, who edited the Controversial Tracts on Christianity and Mohammedanism (1824) by the late Henry Martyn and added appendices to them.13 The second of these, in terms typical of nineteenth-century Orientalism, discusses the possible ways by which Muḥammad “obtained his information respecting the Scriptures and traditions of the Jews and Christians”14 and suggests that many of the Quran’s narratives were taken up by Muḥammad from “the books of the Syrians”, among which Ephrem’s (d. 373) works would have played a major role.15 Aside from a proximity in contents, Lee remarks that Ephrem’s writings and the Quran share a common form consisting of “a kind of rhythmus” which occurs “frequently in the Sermons of Ephrem”.16

• 17 Originally published in several parts in German in the journal Kyrkohistorisk Årsskrift; and subse (...)
• 18 Andrae, Les origines de l’islam, p. 145.
• 19 Beck, “Eine christliche Parallele”, pp. 398–405; augmented and translated into French as “Les hour (...)

6Almost exactly one century after Lee, Tor Andrae followed in his predecessor’s footsteps, although without mentioning him, in his Der Ursprung des Islams und das Christentum (1923‒1925),17 in which he compared quranic eschatology to that found in Ephrem’s homilies, thereby trying to show that these two corpora are rooted in “one and the same homiletic pattern”.18 A few years later, Edmund Beck also famously authored an article interpreting the quranic descriptions of the heavenly “houris” in light of Ephrem’s Syriac Hymns on Paradise.19

• 20 See, for instance, Gräf, “Zu den christlichen Einflüssen”, pp. 396–398, and especially p. 397 the (...)
• 21 Reynolds, The Qurʾān and its Biblical Subtext, pp. 232–233.
• 22 Reynolds, The Qurʾān and its Biblical Subtext, p. 249.
• 23 Those parts of the Quran which most aptly relate to Syriac homilies are biblical narratives or “re (...)
• 24 Reynolds, The Qurʾān and its Biblical Subtext, pp. 233–234.
• 25 Reynolds, The Qurʾān and its Biblical Subtext, p. 249.
• 26 Reynolds, The Qurʾān and its Biblical Subtext, p. 249. Although, as we will see further on, Reynol (...)

8Thereafter, apart from a few scattered and brief allusions to the homiletic features of the Quran,20 it will only be with Gabriel Said Reynolds’ 2010 book The Qurʾān and its Biblical Subtext that this subject will once again receive full scholarly treatment. Indeed, Reynolds devotes an entire chapter entitled “Reading the Qurʾān as homily” to the question of the Quran’s literary genre in which he notes that oftentimes the latter has been neglected in academia, and that had it not been the case, scholars would have certainly noticed that the Quran has a homiletic relation to the biblical corpus, or in other words, that the “Qurʾān’s relationship to its subtext […] is like the relationship of homily and scripture”.21 Building on Tor Andrae’s work and having insisted that “[T]he Qurʾān shares a number of telling commonalities with Christian homiletic, in particular with the tradition of Syriac Christian homilies”,22 Reynolds goes on to list a number of shared traits between both corpora which to my mind convincingly showed that one should certainly explore the writings of Syriac authors more pertinent than Ephrem, such as Narsai (d. c.502) or Jacob of Serugh (d. 521), for instance, as relevant parallels to certain parts (but not all) of the quranic text.23 Among these, it will suffice to mention the allusive nature of both Syriac homilies and narratives of the Quran which implies that their audience had prior knowledge of said narratives,24 the shared versification meant to facilitate recitation,25 and the related fact that both corpora were composed for “repeated public recitation”.26

• 27 el-Badawi, The Qurʾān and the Aramaic Gospel Traditions, p. 7.
• 28 Sinai reintroduces Ephrem’s writings in the comparative mix (alongside Jacob of Serugh), while at (...)
• 29 Sinai, “The Eschatological Kerygma”, pp. 236 and 250.

9Picking up on Reynolds’ remarks, Emran I. el-Badawi stated that “[T]he Qurʾān shares the hermeneutical and literary approach of Syriac Christian homiletic works with which it must be considered in parallel”,27 although he did not put his words to action in his The Qurʾān and the Aramaic Gospel Traditions (2014), and Nicolai Sinai came to very interesting conclusions regarding parallels between Syriac homilists’ eschatology and that of the Quran in his 2017 article “The Eschatological Kerygma of the Early Qurʾān”,28 while at the same time emphasizing the main difference between the two, namely the fact that the Quran “styles itself as divine speech” whereas Syriac homilies often explicitly deploy “a human auctorial perspective”.29

• 30 Shoemaker, “A New Arabic Apocryphon”, p. 35. I thank Stephen J. Shoemaker for sending me a copy of (...)

10But the most critical of Reynolds’ proposition is certainly Stephen J. Shoemaker who, in a recent article, argues that “[I]t would be best to set aside entirely the early Christian homily as a possible analogue. The Quran simply does not possess the specific qualities that define a Christian homily and must instead be reckoned as something quite different”.30

• 31 As Shoemaker does concede in this instance, “[I]t is not at all clear just who it is that is ‘spea (...)

11Now it is certainly problematic that Reynolds has not addressed the important fact that contrarily to Syriac homilies, the Quran never has recourse to an outside divine or scriptural authority as it—seemingly31—presents itself as divine speech. Also, it is regrettable that Reynolds goes on to compare these two corpora of texts without ever attempting to define what a homily is in general or more specifically what a Syriac homily consists of. Nevertheless, these flaws should not prevent us from further exploring the possibilities that such a comparative study could yield. On the contrary, in the following section, I hope on the one hand to define the homily—albeit in broad terms—and on the other, to answer some of Shoemaker’s criticism.

• 32 Mayer, “Homiletics”, p. 570.
• 33 Shoemaker, “A New Arabic Apocryphon”, p. 35.

12In the following, I will attempt to identify some of the main characteristics that define the homily, since in the words of early Christian preaching specialist Wendy Mayer, the question of what exactly constitutes a homily is a “key problem”.32 Also, one of Shoemaker’s main points is that “The Qurʾān simply does not possess the specific qualities that define a Christian homily […]. The truth of the matter is that there is very little in terms of form or content that defines the phenomenon of the early Christian homily.”33 Before going into what scholars have said about what the homily is, I would like to look at it from the perspective of their authors/preachers and ask: how do they speak about their own work?

• 34 This noun primarily means “intercourse” or “company”, but also “instruction” (Liddell, Scott & Jon (...)
• 35 LSJ, Greek-English Lexicon, p. 1222.
• 36 Mayer, “Homiletics”, p. 571.
• 37 LSJ, Greek-English Lexicon, pp. 421–422.
• 38 Mayer, “Homiletics”, p. 571.

13The authors of what we, in the West, have come to call “homilies” use a limited set of words to refer to their writings within these same texts. From an etymological perspective, the English word “homily” comes from the Greek ὁμιλία (homilia)34—through Late Latin homilia—from the verb ὁμιλέω (homiléo) meaning to “speak” or “converse”,35 which finds a counterpoint in the Latin word sermo, from the verb sermocinor meaning to “converse”. Thus, both ὁμιλία and sermo indicate a conversation or dialectic.36 We also find the Greek verb διδάσκω (didasko) and Latin praedicare which indicate “instruction” or “teaching”, and “speaking” of an audience in the case of the former,37 and “proclaiming” for the latter38.

• 39 Forness, Preaching Christology, p. 22, n. 1.
• 40 Sokoloff, Lexicon, p. 1633.
• 41 Sokoloff, Lexicon, p. 777.
• 42 Sokoloff, Lexicon, p. 701.
• 43 Payne Smith, Dictionary, p. 247. It has then come to mean more specifically the verse homily of tw (...)

14Now in the specific instance of Syriac authors, they use a variety of words to refer to a “homily” which appear to be “mostly interchangeable” according to Philip M. Forness.39 Still according to him, these are turgōmō, meaning “explanation, interpretation”, “translation” and “discourse, speech”;40 mamlelō for “speech, talk”;41 and finally, by far the most common one: mīmrō which means “speech, oration”42 and “sermon”43.

• 45 Manna, Qāmūs, p. 340; Costaz, Dictionnaire, p. 12.
• 46 The first is used 92 times in the singular and once in the plural; and the second is used 23 times (...)
• 47 Thus, in Abdel Haleem’s rendering of these words in Q. al-Takwīr 81:19 and Q. al-Burūǧ 85:17. See (...)

16It is interesting to note that Syriac to Arabic dictionaries give the nouns qawl and ḥadīṯ as two of the equivalents of mīmrō,45 which are words commonly used in the Quran,46 and usually quite plainly translated as “word” and “story”, respectively.47 One can wonder, though, if in some instances they could not be understood more specifically as the equivalent of the Syriac mīmrō, that is, as an “oration” or a “discourse” delivered by a preacher (in this case, Muḥammad or someone else from the early community of proto-Muslims or Believers) in front of an audience, in a liturgical context. These two cases, for instance, would be quite fitting (respectively Q. al-Ṭāriq 86:13‒14 and Q. al-Qalam 68:44):

• 48 Mayer, “Homiletics”, p. 570.
• 49 Mayer, “Homiletics”, p. 571.
• 50 Mayer, “Homiletics”, p. 571.

17To come back to Mayer’s definition of the Christian homily, she insists on the fact that “[A]t the most basic level […] all we can claim is that a homily is something that conforms to a few essential conditions”.48 What are these “essential conditions”? According to her, the “defining characteristic of the Christian homily” is precisely orality.49 Apart from what we could be tempted to call the “self-referential” terminology that we have just discussed (i.e., a homily referring to itself as such), and which unequivocally points to an oral setting, distinctive marks of orality in the written documents manifest themselves through direct address, or use of the second person, to mention only two.50 Thus, in an introduction to his retelling of the biblical narrative of the Tower of Babel in his Homily on the Tower of Babel (vv. 69–70), Jacob of Serugh directly addresses his audience in the following manner:

• 52 The Quran also similarly addresses “discerning ones” or, in its own words, “people who reason”. Se (...)

18Such marks of orality, which strongly suggest a liturgical Sitz im Leben, are also not infrequent in the Quran as it regularly addresses its audience, at times using the same imperative as the Syriac homilist, such as in Q. al-Ḥaǧǧ 22:73: “O, people, here is a parable, so listen carefully! (Yā ayyuhā al-nās ḍuriba maṯal fa-stamiʿū lahu)…”52

• 53 Mayer, “Homiletics”, p. 572.
• 54 Shoemaker, “A New Arabic Apocryphon”, p. 36: “Paraenesis was a common style of literary discourse (...)
• 55 Rice, “Preaching”, pp. 494–501.
• 56 Costaz, Dictionary, p. 12. Daniel Reig’s modern Arabic/French, French/Arabic Dictionary (entry 597 (...)
• 57 Here again, see Boisliveau, Le Coran par lui-même, pp. 159–160, who considers that this word refer (...)
• 58 See in particular Q. Yūnus 10:57 and Q. al-Naḥl 16:125.
• 59 On this subject, see Reynolds, “‘Une exhortation pour les pieux’”, pp. 184–185 and 187.

19Mayer is very sceptical about further defining the homily and the rest of the criteria she gives are qualified as either “problematic” or “inadequate”.53 However, alongside orality, another definite and related characteristic of the homily—although, as Shoemaker rightly observes, it is also a shared feature of New Testament writings and biblical apocrypha54—is the fact that it is inherently related to preaching (quite naturally, as it is delivered by a preacher), and therefore to paraenesis (i.e., exhortation).55 Indeed, another way of translating the Syriac term mīmrō in Arabic is by using the word mawʿiẓa56 which appears in several instances in the Quran as something—often translated precisely as an “exhortation”57—which is bestowed upon the “Pious” (li-l-muttaqīn) or the “Believers” (li-l-muʾminīn) and which contains a great benefit for them (“a healing”, “guidance and mercy”).58 As such, it is not unlike Jacob of Serugh’s foregoing use of mīmrō in the sense of something destined for the “discerning ones” and which is “full of every profit”. But above all, it is telling that the purpose of this medium’s rhetoric is to convince its audience in order to ultimately convert them.59

• 60 Mayer, “Homiletics”, p. 570.

20Therefore, based on the very “essential conditions” of what defines the Christian homily—namely orality and paraenesis (and the ways in/for which they are used)—I would argue that contrary to what Shoemaker says, in some cases the Quran “does possess the specific qualities that define a Christian homily”. I would even go further and say that according to some of its so-called “self-referential” terminology (in some of its uses of the words qawl, ḥadīṯ and mawʿiẓa), at times the Quran actually defines itself as a homily. Shoemaker also states somewhat paradoxically that “[T]here is very little in terms of form or content that defines the phenomenon of the early Christian homily”, quoting Mayer’s statement that the homily’s “shape is elastic and changes with regional cultural conditions and with time”.60 If parts of the quranic corpus can be considered as Arabic homilies from the seventh century ce, it is then no surprise that they would not have the exact same “form or content” as Greek homilies from the fourth century or Syriac homilies from the sixth century.

• 61 Shoemaker, “A New Arabic Apocryphon”, p. 35. Italics mine.
• 62 Cummingham & Allen, “Introduction”, pp. 1–20.
• 63 Cummingham & Allen, “Introduction”, p. 1. Italics mine.
• 64 Lipatov-Chicherin, “Preaching as the Audience Heard It”, p. 278.
• 65 Forness, Preaching Christology, p. 41.
• 66 Lipatov-Chicherin, “Preaching as the Audience Heard It”, p. 278.

21Also, it is not entirely true that Christian homilies cannot be further defined, and the studies that have attempted to do so, be it in broad terms, tend to invalidate Shoemaker’s objection, as well as a second one according to which “[T]he formal poetic structures of this homiletic tradition demanded texts that had been carefully composed prior to oral delivery”.61 Thus, in the introduction to their edited volume entitled Preacher and Audience. Studies in Early Christian and Byzantine Homiletics,62 Mary Cummingham and Pauline Allen begin their general definition of a homily as a work “prepared beforehand or delivered impromptu at ceremonies”.63 Furthermore, in his “Preaching as the Audience Heard It” article, Nikolai Lipatov-Chicherin suggests an interesting scheme of the process of transmission of homilies from oral to written which starts with the two following actions preceding its oral delivery: the “preliminary sketches and drafts” made by the preacher, as well as the homily’s “prepared text written in advance and learned by heart”.64 Nevertheless, as Forness rightly observes in his recent monograph, this scheme is “idealized” and reality was often more complex as certain preachers were highly trained and did not require to go through these two first steps, instead delivering their homily directly without prior composition.65 When Shoemaker concludes his second objection by saying “[I]f Muhammad’s Qurʾan were a memra [i.e., a Syriac homily], then it almost certainly must have been a written document from the very start”, this is simply not true. Some passages of the Quran might have been delivered orally in a spontaneous manner as the Islamic tradition contends, while others might have been aligned with Lipatov-Chicherin’s first two steps, his scheme also allowing for the possibility of ulterior modifications (as step three is the stenographic record of the preacher’s words as they were uttered; step four is the transcript of the stenographic record into ordinary script; step five is the first edited version prepared for copying by scribes, etc.).66

• 67 Forness, Preaching Christology, p. 25: “These approaches fit roughly into three categories: (1) co (...)

22If on the most basic level, certain passages of the Quran can qualify as homilies based on some of its terminology through which it possibly qualifies itself as a homily, on traces of orality such as addresses to its audience and on its definite paraenetic features, what results could be inferred from further comparative investigations? In what follows, I will succinctly list some of the main points that characterize the early Christian homily, which I have divided into two categories—content and context—following Forness’ tripartite categorization of Cummingham and Allen’s identification of ten approaches to understanding sermons,67 alongside more specific remarks regarding Syriac homilies, which in turn invite comparisons with the Quran.

• 68 Cummingham & Allen, “Introduction”, pp. 4–5.

23The first point is very brief but is worth mentioning as it is a striking characteristic of the Quran: the identity of its preacher is never disclosed. That is to say that although later Muslim exegesis will claim that Muḥammad is the recipient of the quranic revelation and that he is the one who addresses or preaches it to his audience in Mecca and in Medina, none of this information is to be found in the corpus itself. Therefore, as is the case with the Quran, it is telling that a great number of Greek and Syriac homilies are equally anonymous. Otherwise, until about the 900s of the common era, when laymen started preaching homilies, the person delivering the homily always had a religious affiliation, whether he was a patriarch, a monk, a priest, or a bishop (Jacob of Serugh, for example, was both of the latter).68 I stress this point to ask whether it is possible to consider that the person (or persons) delivering the texts of what would later become part of the Quran might have taken on one such religious rank.

• 69 Cummingham & Allen, “Introduction”, pp. 6–7.

24Second, as regards the genre of the homilies, as I alluded to earlier (with the case of the Syriac turgōmō, meaning “explanation, interpretation”), a homily is predominantly a commentary on a more or less lengthy passage from Scripture; and therefore, it is no surprise that most homilies are exegetical “in that they comment on or use Biblical texts”.69 For instance, Jacob of Serugh devotes an entire (polemical) section (against Jews) of his aforementioned Homily on the Tower of Babel (vv. 257–296) to the question of the interpretation of one single verse from the Book of Genesis (namely, 11:7: “Come let us descend”) which he introduces in the following manner:

• 71 A point duly noted by Reynolds both in his monograph The Qurʾān and its Biblical Subtext, for exam (...)
• 72 Dye, “Pourquoi et comment se fait un texte canonique?”, p. 98.
• 73 On this subject, see Gilliot, “Des indices d’un proto-lectionnaire”, p. 312.
• 74 Manna, Dictionary, p. 509, gives the word tafsīr as its Arabic equivalent.

25Now, as is well known, a great part of the Quran is made of retellings—one could safely say exegeses—of biblical narratives, mainly through allusions, as is the case with Syriac homilies.71 This raises the question of whether or not one can consider, as Guillaume Dye has recently suggested, that the Quran’s biblical narratives were originally commentaries of scriptural lessons contained in a lectionary.72 In this regard, it is interesting to look at the quranic verses which use the intensive b y n Arabic verbal root for “to make clear”, but which also has the more relevant meaning of “to explain” in the sense of to “interpret”,73 as has the Syriac word pūšōqō used by Jacob of Serugh in the above verses.74 One might certainly compare the wording and context of the following passage of the Q. al-Māʾida 5:15:

• 75 That is, “punishment stories”. See Horovitz, Koranische Untersuchungen, pp. 10–26.

26This verse might be viewed as exposing the agenda of parts of the quranic corpus: the biblical narratives found therein are homiletical explanations or interpretations of previous Scriptures by way of an anonymous divine “messenger” (by and large, these quranic homiletical scriptural exegeses—which are part of what have been called Straflegenden75—aim to warn Men of their impending demise lest they repent urgently, as will be discussed below).

• 76 See for example Q. al-Nāziʿāt 79:45 for the first word and Q. Yā-Sīn 36:6 for the latter. For a br (...)

27Besides being exegetical, according to Cummingham and Allen, homilies also have an ethical component to them, such as warnings. Jacob of Serugh’s eschatological homilies are filled with warnings of the impending Judgment—and as a preacher he is also a warner, which is exactly how the anonymous quranic messenger is characterized in several instances (munḏir; and see the related “warnings” or nuḏur).76

• 77 Cummingham & Allen, “Introduction”, p. 7.

28This brings me to a third related characteristic of the homily which is its rhetoric. In the sense of “to convince by speech”, rhetoric is used by all homilists, inter alia to “persuade the hearer to conversion”.77 In his first explicitly eschatological Homily on the End (v. 235), Jacob of Serugh writes: “May every Man run towards repentance” (nēʿrūq kul nōš la-tyōbūtō), urging his audience through his words to convert before the impending End.

• 78 Reynolds, The Qurʾān and its Biblical Subtext, p. 251.

29This much can also be said of the quranic preacher who, time and time again, insists that Men should urgently repent and convert before the coming of the eschaton. For instance, the following quranic verse (al-Taḥrīm 66:8) which bears an eschatological promise of Gardens for the Pious starts with the following exhortation: “O you who believe, turn to God in sincere repentance!” (Yā ayyuhā al-laḏīna āmanū tūbū ilā Allāh tawbat^an naṣūḥan). As Reynolds rightly observes, “[I]n the Syriac homilies, as in the Qurʾān, the fundamental medium of exhortation is eschatology”.78

• 79 Cummingham & Allen, “Introduction”, pp. 8–9.
• 80 Reynolds, The Qurʾān and its Biblical Subtext, p. 251: “The Qurʾān’s anti-Jewish rhetoric, for exa (...)

30Other notable rhetorical devices used by Christian homilists include repetition, and one of the homilists’ most common rhetorical ploys is polemic, against Jews, pagans, and heretics;79 all of which assuredly can equally be said of the Quran.80

• 81 Forness, Preaching Christology, p. 25.
• 82 Among many other scholarly studies on this subject, see Hoffmann, The Poetic Qurʾān.
• 83 Forness, Preaching Christology, p. 26.
• 84 Peters, “The Quest of the Historical Muhammad”, p. 300.

31Fourth, with regards to their stylistic features, according to Forness, the vast majority of Syriac homilies from Late Antiquity are written in metrical form (only six homilies out of hundreds are written in prose) and they “exhibit many characteristics of oral composition”.81 This much can certainly be said of the quranic corpus whose poetic characteristics have long been studied in Western studies82 and as briefly mentioned earlier, similarly does contain traces of oral composition. Moreover, the poetic form of Syriac homilies “likely contributed to the dearth of contextual information” contained therein which explains why they do not include discussions regarding contemporary events.83 One could possibly advance the same explanation to account for the fact that the Quran is a “text without context”;84 that is, a text which strikingly contains close to no reference to contemporary events, places, or people.

• 85 Forness, Preaching Christology, p. 55.

32It is also interesting to note that the Syriac homilies’ poetic form was used both for practical reasons (i.e., to be memorized more easily by the preacher) and to appeal to larger crowds. Jacob of Serugh’s homilies, which mostly take a poetic form, were thus enticing both to laymen and fellow educated theologians.85 These might also be two reasons for the Quran’s constant rhyme and rhythm.

• 86 Cummingham & Allen, “Introduction”, p. 10.
• 87 Griffith, Mar Jacob of Serugh on Monks and Monasticism, p. 81.
• 88 These homilies offer a good reason to object to another of Shoemaker’s points: “The emphasis on sp (...)
• 89 Jacob of Serugh, Homilies on the Solitaries, p. 7.

33First, regarding the composition of the homilists’ audiences, it should be noted that early Greek homilists such as Hermas (fl. c. second century) and Origen (d. c.253) preached to recent Christian converts from pagan and Jewish backgrounds.86 Jacob of Serugh preached before both lay audiences (of both men and women) and monastic communities, as is evident from his “manual of ascetical […] theology”,87 the Homilies on the Solitaries.88 In the latter, he frequently “addresses his audience in the singular, [although] in most cases it is likely that he intends the singular to speak to any solitary [i.e., ascetic] who encounters the text”,89 instructing them in different matters, such as in this instance of his first Homily on the Solitaries (v. 341):

• 91 For both these traditional views, see Rubin, “The shrouded messenger”, pp. 96–107.

34In a forthcoming article, I have compared these particular Homilies on the Solitaries to Q. al-Muzammil 73 and Q. al-Muddaṯṯir 74 at length, and for this paper’s present purpose, I will only limit myself to asking whether one can possibly consider that the introductions to these suras are in the same way actually intended for an audience of “solitaries” or ascetics referred to in the second person of the singular rather than to Muḥammad, as has been traditionally understood by both Muslim exegetes and most Western academics.91 These are the introductory verses of Q. al-Muzammil 73:1–2:

• 92 Dye, “Ascetic and Nonascetic Layers”, pp. 580–597.

35Recently, Dye has also suggested that two parallel quranic passages, namely Q. al-Muʾminūn 23:1–11 and Q. al-Maʿāriǧ 70:22–35 address both laity and ascetics, respectively, as the first instance lists quite general instructions for lay Believers, which could actually be a rewriting of Q. 70:22–35 as an earlier list intended for ascetics, or monks (on subjects such as unceasing prayer, continence, etc.).92

• 93 Forness, Preaching Christology, pp. 42–53. Category e) lies beyond the scope of the present study, (...)

36Second, I will end with some general remarks about the preparation, redaction, and transmission of the homily. As Forness explains in his monograph work on Jacob of Serugh, there are five practices associated with a homily from its oral delivery to its preservation as a written text: a) its delivery; b) its recording; c) its redaction; d) its collecting; and e) its circulation.93

• 94 It seems likely that Q. al-Baqara 2, for instance, originally circulated as an independent text, a (...)

40As for d), in general, during Late Antiquity, homilies were gathered into collections according to authorship, monastic questions and/or concerns, or biblical exegesis. One example of the latter is the fact that, for example, all the homilies on a figure such as Joseph would be gathered in one collection. This particular example inevitably brings to mind the case of Q. Yūsuf 12 which is the only chapter of the quranic corpus to contain narratives on only one subject: It could be viewed as a single collection of stories surrounding his person, and one that originally might have been an independent gathering of texts related to Joseph, which was later included in the Quran at the time of its final edition.94

• 95 As we have seen, in the case of homilies, certain characteristic features of orality have been edi (...)
• 96 For instance, we know that in the case of homilies, their preaching took place in three locations: (...)

43Furthermore, I hope to have demonstrated the potential usefulness of comparing the Christian homily, and especially Syriac homilies from Late Antiquity, to the Quran as the former can offer a framework for better understanding the latter on questions of exegetical form, allusiveness, lack of discussions regarding contemporary events, and many other such themes. Furthermore, a comparison of Syriac homilies and the Quran can and should invite us to look further into such questions as the process of edition of the quranic text,95 or even what can be deduced about the location of the quranic preaching from different passages.96 We should also investigate common traits such as polemics and the ways in which both corpora address their (often imagined) adversaries, and to tackle issues that have been raised in homily studies but not necessarily in quranic studies although they are indeed relevant and important. These include, but are not limited to, the need to pay more attention to the techniques of preaching, to the interaction between the preacher and the audience, and to the editorial process preceding the formation of the quranic canon.