The Qur'an in Context 2

This is underscored by Sydney Griffith, himself intimately familiar with pre-Qur'anic Syriac literature:

Hermeneutically speaking, one should approach the Qur'an as an integral discourse in its own right; it proclaims, judges, praises, blames from its own narrative center. It addresses an audience which is already familiar with oral versions in Arabic of earlier scriptures and folklores. The Qur'an does not borrow from, or often even quote from these earlier texts. Rather, it alludes to and evokes their stories, even sometimes their wording, for its own rhetorical purpose. The Arabic Qur'an, from a literary perspective, is something new. It uses the idiom, and sometimes the forms and structures, of earlier narratives in the composition of its own distinctive discourse. It cannot be reduced to any presumed sources. Earlier discourses appear in it not only in a new setting, but shaped, trimmed, and re-formulated for an essentially new narrative.

fn30: Sydney Griffith, "Christian lore and the Arabic Qur'an: the 'Companions of the Cave' in Surat al-Kahf and in Syriac Christian tradition," In Reynolds (ed.), The Qur'an in its Historical Context, (London, 2008), 116.

Nicolai Sinai and Angelika Neuwirth, "Introduction" in The Qurʼān in context: historical and literary investigations into the Qurʼānic milieu / edited by Angelika Neuwirth, Nicolai Sinai, Michael Marx (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 13.