Two Faces of the Quran: Quran and Mushaf

The Qur’ān is usually regarded as a canonical text, constituting the fundamental document of Islam. This paper proposes a new approach: regarding the Qur’ān as the communication process between the Prophet (pbuh) and his community, which allows for recovery of its dramatic character. It also enables us to reclaim its cultural context by tracing out the processes of “negotiation”, “appropriation”, or “rejection” of earlier Jewish and Christian traditions. The Quran thus emerges as the testimony of a revolutionary late-antique religious paradigm. Stress on strong oral-written interchange and “communication process” as a scenario for development and composition of the Qur’ān in interchange with Jewish and Christian traditions, reminds us close relationship between the written and oral Quran that continued into later Islamic times. Overriding importance of the oral Quran is stressed as unframed or mediated Word, because against frame of any narrative scenario the entire Quran is speech as a meta-speach. On the other hand, the Quran should be regarded as a highly rhetorical, frequently meta-textual document reflecting the situation of the ongoing debates at the time of its formation. In case of Islam, the oral communication of divine Word in Quranic theologumenon precedes over the composed text of the later written mushaf - though this oral communication has also an exegetical reality.