Nora K Schmid, “The Ascetic Barter in a Long Medinan Surah” скачать в хорошем качестве

Nora K Schmid, “The Ascetic Barter in a Long Medinan Surah”

This paper was presented at the conference 'The “Seven Long Ones” (al-Sabʿ al-Ṭiwāl): Approaches to Surahs 2–7 and 9', held at Pembroke College, Oxford (24-25 March 2025). The event was organized as part of the project 'Qur’anic Commentary: An Integrative Paradigm', which is funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 771047). Q 9 (al-Tawbah) figures in studies that deal with various topics, among them the potential reference in the surah opening to Muhammad’s farewell sermon (Rubin 1982), poverty and economics in the Qur’an (Bonner 2005), the redactional growth of the surah opening (Sinai 2017a), the surah’s endorsement of militancy and its link to Christian traditions (Sinai 2017b), and the motif of repentance (Reynolds/Moghadam 2021). In this paper, Schmid looks at the surah through the eyes of late antique and early Islamic ascetics and trace a common thread between seemingly disparate verses and sections of the surah. The sections address issues as diverse as militancy, hypocrisy, almsgiving, and charity (and its opposite: greed and avarice), eschatology, etc. She reconsiders the links between these sections in light of late antique ascetic ideas revolving around the concept of an eschatological barter and the refiguration of these ideas in the thought of early Islamic ascetics, among them notably Kharijites and renunciants. The imagined barter involves relinquishment in this world, which had a wide range of applications, and a delayed gratification in the world to come. Schmid argues that approaching the Medinan long surahs with premodern categories drawn from roughly contemporary traditions instead of modern ones may help us grasp overlooked semantic links within these complex compositions.