ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the religious leaders named in the Qurʾān, first in the context of the Qurʾān itself and then in light of the rabbinic, the Syriac-Christian, and the Judeo-Christian legal cultures. The contextual analysis determines the meaning of the Arabic terms 'aḥbār' and 'ruhbān' with more precision and to establish their semantic field as the overseer of, respectively, a Jewish and a Christian community. The identification of the Qurʾān's aḥbār and ruhbān with the respective overseers over the Jewish and Christian communities, thus, is more than an exercise in lexicography. The chapter illustrates how the Qurʾān's intentional distortion of rabbinic tradition generates a polemical message for a Medinan audience that was sufficiently familiar with Jewish discourse. Indeed, Sozomen's History illustrates the rapprochement of the development of monasticism and the bishopric in an Arabian context very well.
