Karachi is a very surprising city. You can find different kinds of surprises on every step, be it a mudhole, a crack on the road, or a book. The last one happened to me a week ago, when I was wandering around in a very famous chain bookstore in Karachi.
Usually, bookstores in Pakistan have strict selection rules; you can’t find all types of books here. Some years ago, I asked the same bookstore for a book from Oxford, but it was denied because of its content. That’s why it surprised me to find this book on the shelf. Despite its high price, I bought the book.
Written by Mohammad Salama, God’s Other Book: The Qur’an between History and Ideology, published by the University of California Press, carries a title that is quite self-explanatory. What surprised me even more was that it stands in continuity with the broader revisionist trend in Qurʾanic and early Islamic studies — a trend generally not very welcomed, discussed, or easily accessible in Pakistan as a Muslim-majority country.
The book does not merely discuss the Qurʾan as a religious text; rather, it questions the intellectual frameworks through which the Qurʾan has been studied in modern academia. Salama critically engages with modern Qurʾanic scholarship, especially approaches that heavily place the Qurʾan within the framework of late antiquity, Biblical traditions, and comparative religious studies, sometimes at the expense of the Qurʾan’s own Arabic linguistic and cultural environment.
One of the most interesting aspects of the book is that it is not written in the sensationalist style often associated with popular revisionist literature. Instead, it is deeply academic, theoretical, and intellectual in tone. Salama appears less interested in attacking religion itself and more interested in critiquing the ideological assumptions behind both Western academic scholarship and modern Arab intellectual responses to Islam and the Qurʾan.
At the heart of the work lies an argument that modern scholarship has often failed to appreciate the independent literary and intellectual universe of Arabic culture before and during the rise of Islam. According to Salama, the Qurʾan should not be understood merely as a text reacting to Biblical traditions or borrowing from neighboring civilizations, but also as a text deeply rooted in the Arabic poetic, rhetorical, and cultural imagination of its own environment.
For readers familiar with the history of Orientalism and revisionist Islamic studies — names such as John Wansbrough, Patricia Crone, Michael Cook, Christoph Luxenberg, Fred Donner, or Gabriel Reynolds — the broader intellectual context of the book becomes immediately recognizable. Yet Salama’s approach differs from many earlier revisionists because he attempts to reposition Arabic literary tradition itself back into the center of the discussion.
Whether one agrees with the book or not, it remains an important reminder of how the study of the Qurʾan has evolved in modern academia. In many Muslim societies, discussions around Qurʾanic history are often reduced to apologetics versus attacks on faith. This book, however, belongs more to the world of intellectual history, literary criticism, and the politics of knowledge production.
What struck me most was not necessarily the arguments themselves, but the fact that such a book was sitting quietly on a shelf in Karachi, waiting for readers in a city where serious academic discussions on Qurʾanic studies rarely enter the public sphere. Perhaps that is the real surprise of Karachi: amid the chaos, contradictions, noise, and decay, one occasionally still encounters ideas.
