alt="" target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#fb3_img_img_85b60e02-26f1-5efd-be3c-b447bc2a3951.jpg"/>n, including several instances within a relatively compact sequence in sra 2 on topics such as the new moon (2:189), charity (2:215), the prohibited month (2:217), wine and gambling (2:219), orphans (2:220), and menstruation (2:222).11 As the German physicist Werner Heisenberg had famously remarked, “What we observe is not nature herself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning”;12 the speaker in the Qur’n is not simply Allh, but Allh as produced in the Companions’ questions of him. If we read the Qur’n as a twenty-three-year series of responses to the changing lives of its audience, the Companions suddenly appear to have a degree of agency in determining the Qur’n’s content—and even its delivery, as tradition suggests that the revelations briefly ceased due to poor fingernail hygiene among the Companions. The revelations did not include women as addressees until one of Muammad’s wives asked him why, after which the voice of the divine became more inclusive.
The Companions are said to have behaved carefully in Muammad’s presence, fearful that they could end up as the subjects of a verse;13 nonetheless, the Qur’n is filled with their traces. The Qur’n does not usually name them; those for whom the Qur’n called Muammad ibukum are rendered almost invisible as individuals. Names of figures whom later history records as important, such as Ab Bakr or ’Al, are absent from the verses. The Qur’n does not give us the names of Muammad’s parents or wives or biological children. The only people from his lifetime to be mentioned by name in the Qur’n are Zayd, identified in tradition as Muammad’s adopted son Zayd ibn Haritha (33:37), and a figure called Ab Lahab, “Father of Flames” (111:1), presumed by interpretive tradition to have been Muammad’s despised uncle. But the Qur’n does make reference to people who took part in the first Muslim community, such as the mention in 80:1–2 of an unidentified blind man who went to see Muammad. Tradition outside the Qur’n names him as Ibn Umm Maktum, and an incident from his life is now part of the divine revelation.
In one episode, the scribe to whom Muammad was reciting a verse excitedly remarked, “Blessed be Allh, the best of creators.” Muammad then told the scribe that “Blessed be Allh, the best of creators” actually belonged in that verse, at the exact point at which the scribe said it. The scribe’s outburst can be found at the end of 23:14.14 Incorporating stories of the early community into my Qur’n, I lose my sense of the Qur’n as a singular text that preexisted the created universe, awaiting its delivery to one man in installments. Instead, the Qur’
alt="" target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#fb3_img_img_85b60e02-26f1-5efd-be3c-b447bc2a3951.jpg"/>n, including several instances within a relatively compact sequence in s