Schmid (Nora K.), The Ascetic Qur’an and Its Kharijite Readers, Leiden, Brill, ("Texts and Studies on the Qurʾān; 24"), 2025, 450 p. ISBN 978-9004547971

Author

Nora K. Schmid is Dr. Research assistant at the University of Tübingen. She holds a PhD in Arabic Studies from the Free University of Berlin (2018). She has previously occupied research positions in the Corpus Coranicum project (Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 2007–2012) and in the Collaborative Research Center 980 “Episteme in Motion: Transfer of Knowledge from the Ancient World to the Early Modern Period” (Free University, 2012–2018). In 2016, she was a Global Humanities Junior Fellow at Harvard University. Her research interests include the Qur’an as a late antique text, Arabic asceticism, and the intellectual and literary traditions of pre-Islamic Arabia. She is a co-editor of the volume Denkraum Spätantike: Reflexionen von Antiken im Umfeld des Koran (Wiesbaden 2016).

Presentation

Research on Islamic asceticism frequently highlights practices and ideas described in premodern Islamic literature on renunciation (zuhd). This study redirects our attention to the Qur’an’s ascetic dimension and its reception in the poems and sermons of the Kharijites, an early Islamic group known for extreme piety. It sheds light on the Qur’an’s engagement with late antique ascetic ideas, notably regarding scriptural reading and recitation. In their reception of the Qur’an, the Kharijites developed practices of reading and recitation characterized by the interiorization and enactment of scripture. This book offers a new view of the religious culture of the first and early second centuries of Islam through the lens of an understudied group and its attempts to put the Qur’an into practice.

Credit photo (British Library) : The Battle of Nehrevan (658 A.D.), between Ali and the Havaric (Kharijites). Ali, mounted on Duldul, is wielding his double-bladed sword, Zulfikar. A miniature painting from a manuscript of Maktel-i Ali Resul, a mesnevi poem on the martyrdom of Huseyin. Source : Maktel-i Ali Resul. Shelf mark: Or. 7238. Place and date of production: Turkey, late 16th or early 17th century.

Contents

Acknowledgments
List of Figures
Note on Translation, Transliteration, and other Formal Conventions

Introduction

Part 1 Ascetic Reading/Recitation in the Qur’an

1 Asceticized Arabia

2 Competing Recitational Paradigms in the Qur’an

3 Ascetic Dimensions of Reading/Recitation in the Meccan Suras

4 Internalizing and Enacting God’s Word: Ascetic Striving in Late Meccan and Medinan Suras

Part 2 The Kharijites Reading/Reciting the Qur’an

5 Kharijite Origins between Myth, History, and Poetry

6 Internalization of Scripture and Kharijite Identity Formation

7 Scriptural Reading/Recitation and Enactment of the Qur’an in Early Kharijite Poetry

8 Scriptural Reading/Recitation and Enactment of the Qur’an in Sermons of Kharijites and Renunciants

Conclusion: Asceticism in the Qur’an and Kharijite Compositions

Appendix 1: A Tentative Classification of Late Antique Asceticism
Appendix 2: Select Sermons
Bibliography
Index