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The Qur'an in Context: Historical and Literary Investigations, Historical and Literary Investigations into the Qurʾānic Milieu. Edited by Angelika NeuwirthNicolai Sinai Michael Marx, Leiden-Boston, Brill,  2010.Although recent scholarship has increasingly situated the Qur'ān in the historical context of Late Antiquity, such a perspective is only rarely accompanied by the kind of microstructural literary analysis routinely applied to the Bible. The present volume seeks to redress this lack of contact between literary and historical studies. Contributions to the first part of the volume address various general aspects of the Qur'ān’s political, economic, linguistic, and cultural context, while the second part contains a number of close readings of specific Qur'ānic passages in the light of Judeo-Christian tradition and ancient Arabic poetry, as well as discussions of the Qur'ān’s internal chronology and transmission history. Throughout, special emphasis is given to methodological questions.Angelika Neuwirth is professor of Arabic literature at the Free University of Berlin. She has published extensively on the Qur'ān and on contemporary Arabic literature. Nicolai Sinai is a researcher at the Corpus Coranicum project of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. He is the author of a recent monograph on the Qur'ān and early Qur'ānic exegesis. Michael Marx is currently administrative director of Corpus Coranicum. His main fields of interest are the Qur'ān, its transmission history, and interreligious polemics in Islamic culture.&#160;