Acknowledgments
The Ascetic Qurâan and Its Kharijite Readers has been in the making for a decade. It incorporates the ideas, arguments, and examples from my PhD thesis defended in early 2018 at Freie Universität Berlin. I revised and expanded my study for several years and gave it a new title. Since submitting it to Brill in 2022, I have made minor additional changes, mostly bibliographical updates. I am accordingly indebted to many erudite and supportive teachers, mentors, peers, and friends. I would like to express my gratitude to Angelika Neuwirth for many thought-provoking conversations during my studies and in my positions at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and at Freie Universität Berlin. Her scholarship on the Qurâan, Late Antiquity, and other areas of Islamic intellectual culture and literature provided a constant source of inspiration. I am also deeply grateful to Joseph Lowry, Devin Stewart, and Shawkat Toorawa for sharing their vast knowledge of the Qurâan, Arabic literature, and Islamic civilization with me. I was only able to complete this book because of their encouragement and good humor. They carefully read every single chapter of the manuscript in different stages of un-doing and re-doing. I am furthermore indebted to Nicolai Sinai. I benefited greatly from his admirable expertise on the Qurâan, Late Antiquity, and Islamic Studies, and I would like to thank him for his support over the past eighteen years, especially for the opportunity to be a member of the ERC project Qurâanic Commentary: An Integrative Paradigm (QuCIP) at the University of Oxford.
The Ascetic Qurâan and Its Kharijite Readers has also benefited from insightful input by many scholars whom I had the honor and pleasure to encounter during the writing journey and at various institutions. Islam Dayeh drew my attention to exciting publications on philology and intellectual history when this study was still a PhD thesis in the making at Freie Universität Berlin. Thanks to the network âPrinciples of Cultural Dynamicsâ at Freie Universität, I had the opportunity to spend five very productive months at Harvard University in 2016. I am also indebted to the former and current members of the QuCIP project, my friends and colleagues Marianna Klar, Saqib Hussain, Ohad Kayam, and Behnam Sadeghi, with whom I discussed several chapters during team meetings. I also benefited from conversations about Qurâanic Studies with Karen Bauer and about Islamic renunciation with Christopher Melchert. I am furthermore grateful to David Taylor for allowing me to attend his Syriac class at the University of Oxford. The Hill Museum and Manuscript Library (HMML) gave me the opportunity to further hone my Syriac skills by accepting me into their online Summer School for Advanced Syriac in 2021. Adam Gaiser, whom I had the pleasure of briefly meeting at a conference in Oxford in 2020, read a much earlier version of this book and made many compelling suggestions on how to improve the chapters devoted to the Kharijites. During the academic year 2022â2023, when I was Acting Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Hamburg, I had countless inspiring conversations with Hannah Hagemann about the thorny issue of historicity in the study of Kharijism. I would also like to express my gratitude to Alba Fedeli for her encouragement and advice regarding Qurâan manuscripts and to Thomas Eich and Stefan Heidemann for stimulating conversations.
Additionally, I would like to thank friends and peers without whose scholarly input and warm encouragement my PhD thesis at Freie Universität Berlin would not have been submitted in 2017. I am grateful to Hannelies Koloska, Nora Schmidt, and Tolou Khademalsharieh.
I am furthermore indebted to my friends and colleagues who are experts in Syriac Studies. Salam Rassi generously shared his knowledge of Syriac language and literature with me when I was revising the book for publication. Ana Davitashvili went through all my Syriac texts and transliterations.
Many other scholars and friends with whom I have exchanged ideas over the years are not mentioned by name in this note. I am more than grateful to have had the joy and pleasure to have conversations with them in Berlin, Hamburg, Oxford, Tübingen, and other places. My writing journey was also a journey in the literal sense. Besides discussing my ideas with numerous scholars at the institutions I worked for, I also had the opportunity to present them in various formats at international workshops and conferences and to publish them in collected volume projects. In 2023, I shared research from chapter 1 in a talk on the ascetic dimensions of brigand poetry in an online series convened by the Emmy Noether Research Group âSocial Contexts of Rebellion in the Early Islamic Periodâ directed by Hannah Hagemann at the University of Hamburg. Chapter 2 was inspired by and overlaps with an article about Arabian seers that appeared in 2016 in a collected volume I co-edited and another one on oaths that was published by Marianna Klar in a collected volume on Structural Dividers in the Qurâan in 2020.1 I also presented material from chapter 3 on various occasions, including, for example, a paper at the Annual Meeting of the International Qurâanic Studies Association (IQSA) in San Diego in 2019, and an online lecture entitled ââ¯âThose Who Pray Without Ceasingâ: Ascetic Reading and Recitation in the Qurâanâ in the Seminar âAfter Rome and Further Eastâ in June 2021. I would like to thank the conveners of the Seminar, Fanny Bessard, Phil Booth, Christian Sahner, and Yuhan Vevaina, for this opportunity. Reflections in chapters 6 and 7 were the point of departure for a forthcoming article on Kharijite typological thought.2 Material relating to sermons by renunciants integrated into chapter 8 is based on a German article on this topic that appeared in 2018.3 I spoke about scriptural enactment in the sermons of AbÅ« Ḥamza and presented material from chapter 8 at the Ibadi Studies Conference in Tübingen in 2021. Furthermore, a spin-off article inspired by chapter 8, which focuses specifically on the role of the Qurâan in Ibadite sermons, is about to be published in the conference proceedings of the Al-Mahdi Institute in Birmingham.4 I also compared asceticism in sermons attributed to renunciants and Kharijites in a lecture in the âIslam and Christian-Muslim Relations Seminarâ convened by Salam Rassi at the University of Edinburgh in 2023. These and many more opportunities for scholarly exchange gave my work decisive pushes forward. I am grateful for all of them.
At Brill, I would like to thank the editorial board of Texts and Studies on the QurʾÄn, Nienke Brienen-Moolenaar, and Sanne Hadfy-Kovács for their patient support and generous assistance during the review and production process of this book. The two anonymous reviewers made very helpful suggestions and detected some oversights, typographical errors, and mistakes, for which I am grateful.
Needless to say, all remaining mistakes are my own, of course, and probably the result of my stubbornness.
Finally, I would like to thank my family. This book is dedicated to my parents Maria and Hans-Jürgen, to whom I would like to express my love and gratitude. I am also grateful to my husband Feras for his encouragement, and to my sister Sarah, who is a pillar of support not only to me but also to the entire family.
Gotha, December 2024