ABSTRACT
What these studies have called into question is the traditional account about the redaction and publication of a unified and for once authorized final version of the Qur'an corpus through which the text came to occupy the rank of a Scripture bearing an intrinsic logic of its own. By focusing on this final phase, by ranking it as the crucial event in Qur'anic genesis, however, an epistemological course has been set: The literary image of the Qur'an reflecting a text still in progress, indeed, displaying a unique microstructural diversity due to its evolution out of an extended process of a liturgical communication, becomes blurred, being eclipsed by its macrostructural weight, by the social importance of the henceforth normative corpus and its ideological implications for the construction of the community's identity. Andrew Rippin has lately proclaimed the macrostructural approach an appropriate basis for the "reading (of) Scripture in the 21st century,"2 a manifesto which in my view overleaps important steps of inquiry still badly missing. The issue of the canonicity of the Qur'an will therefore be taken up anew, though with the changed objective of shedding light on its implications for the text itself. Too little attention, it seems, has been paid until now to the cognitive aspects of canonization: Does canonization necessarily mark a punctually definable turning-point in the development of the text, whose growth has thereby come to an end? Or may canonization be understood as an extended process which should even appear mirrored in the text itself? What essentially new qualities does the corpus in the community's
view acquire after its literary fixation, after the authorization of a final version?
