Any scholarly attempt to understand the Qurʾān should at least include, if not be based on, the meaning of the text as it was meant to be first heard, and how it was meant to be first read. The Qurʾān was first heard from the mouth of the prophet, and it was first read when it was put to writing – first as individual passages, then as rudimentary and eventually completed sūras, and finally as the completed Muṣḥaf, the final edition of the collated text, which displays an increasing sense of literary self-awareness as a written text. For the enterprise of retrieving the meanings of this original Qurʾān, it is tempting to try to exclude the entirety of the sīra and tafsīr literature, the lives of Muhammad and the traditional Muslim interpretation of the Qurʾān. It has often been pointed out that this literature was written over a hundred years after the prophet's death, and therefore reflects its own time more so than that of the Qurʾān. However, the attempt of excluding this literature will always be a circular, incremental, and ultimately incomplete process – the Muslim tradition, after all, has transmitted both the text of the Qurʾān and much of its meaning, often based on an impeccable philological basis. Any attempt to reconstruct the Qurʾān's original meaning, hence, can take leave from tradition only in local and tentative ways, investigating, piece by piece, the traditional understanding of each word, each semantic unit and each sūra in the Qurʾān, sifting what is historically verifiable from that which is not.

Especially over the past decade, some headway has been made in this respect by including more fully the linguistic, literary, and cultural context of the Qurʾān. Aspects of this method, which I have called elsewhere the “Syriac turn” in Qurʾānic studies, have long been pursued by traditional Muslim exegetes. Some philological excesses, however, were also committed, and we have to insist on due caution when trying to understand to what extent the Qurʾānic community stood in dialogue with the Rabbis and the Church Fathers of its time.

Simultaneously, we have recently seen clear advances in establishing a critical basis for a diachronic Qurʾān, based on the Qurʾān's inner chronology: the sequence of its sūras in their entirety or of individual segments within them. Yet the very fact that nearly all modern attempts to establish a critical chronology of the Qurʾān resemble some of the traditional sequence of the sūras as presented by Muslim tradition has so far obviated any agreement on the subject matter.