Reddit reviews The Quran in Its Historical Context (Routledge Studies in the Qur'an)

My story:

I became a Muslim over a decade ago because I thought the Qur'an was the word of God. I was under the impression it contained scientific miracles and I was ready to remake my life to what God wanted from me. After deciding to be a Muslim, I got married a few years later and continued to study the faith to become a better Muslim. I studied as much as my free time allowed. I didn't question the foundations of the faith for many years.

After ~8 years, I decided to increase my faith by studying what initially brought me into the religion. I noticed that a lot of the initial things that attracted me to Islam were extreme stretches of wording (I had learned more Arabic over the years) and I began to question more. I noticed that as I was gaining ijazah's in various works, each scholar would have radically different interpretations and I wondered how so many well-intentioned scholars could come to so many different conclusions from a supposedly clear book. I also got frustrated that many of my teachers would give me "honest" answers because my faith was "stronger" than other Muslims.

After Omar Suleiman's slavery followup video, my questions grew in intensity. He used one quote to prove his point that was not in it's proper context and I realized that the best "evidence" for his claims was incredibly weak. I knew I had to find the truth of the matter. Jonathan Brown's comments on slavery confirmed what I knew had to be true given how terrible the evidence was that a slave/master sexual relationship required consent.

This lead me down a path of questioning for years. Over time, I began to realize that the Qur'an spoke with the "scientific" knowledge of a basic, late antiquity person. The issue of abrogation always troubled me, as did the difference in tone throughout the Qur'an. I read as many different books of seerah in English as I could and I couldn't get it out of my head how the Qur'an's changes fit his life circumstances so frequently for a supposed message to mankind. I also found the arguments of the Qur'an sorely lacking. In addition, the various stories of the Qur'an like Dhul Qarnayn and Suleiman were retelling of fictional tales that grew over time. I began to realize the Qur'an perfectly fit into late antiquity and that it couldn't really transcend it. I also discovered the true history of the Muslim/Arab conquests was far more brutal than the whitewashed version my teachers gave me. I found that Muhammad could have been troubled and still been a charismatic person like St. Hildergard, Joan of Arc, or Joseph Smith. He wasn't as remarkable and unique as I thought. I also learned more about cognitive dissonance and how people will dig in further when evidence is presented that would refute their belief in a person. The hadith tradition, which only accepts known and good Muslims, was not historical enough to really examine Muhammad even if there is information to gather from it (see works by Motzki and Schoeler). When I read books about the i'jaz of the Qur'an, I found them very unconvincing as many more works are also quite remarkable (like the Illiad). I also found the belief in the miraculous preservation of the Qur'an was unfounded as well as its claims of divine origin (A,B, C) . Basically, everything about Islam is what I would expect from man, not an Omnipotent and Omniscient Being.

Hi there, I've just seen this, but you may be interested in the book The Qur'an in it's Historical Context edited by Gabriel Said Reynolds and featuring essays by Fred Donner, Robert Hoyland, Andrew Rippin and others who delve into the latest (as of 2007 when it was published) academic scholarship on precisely these questions.

As /u/kerat mentioned, the fringe-revisionist claim about the Quran being written two centuries after the fact is not held up by the evidence, particularly early manuscript evidence. That being said there are open questions about how our contemporary received mus'haf might have varied in that time period, particularly as we do not have the kind of manuscript databases for the Qur'an to examine variant readings the way that we have, for example, with the bible. I discuss some of these problems in an /r/askhistorians post Here and Here if it's of any interest.

The Qur'an in its Historical Context