The “Seven Long Ones” (al-Sabʿ al-Ṭiwāl):
Approaches to Surahs 2–7 and 9
Convened by Marianna Klar and Nicolai Sinai
Pembroke College, Oxford, on 24 and 25 March 2025
Presentation
In traditional Muslim scholarship, seven surahs of the Qur’an (Q 2–7 and Q 9) are singled out as “the Seven Long Ones” (al-sabʿ al-ṭiwāl). Their demarcation from the rest of the corpus is indeed fully warranted: running to between 39,236 (Q 2) and 16,497 (Q 9) transliteration letters, the size of these seven compositions stands manifestly apart from that of other Qur’anic surahs, all of which encompass less than 12,000 transliteration letters each. The conference here outlined will examine different interpretive approaches to the interpretation of these seven macrosurahs and debate possible models for their genesis. Speakers are encouraged to give consideration to the potential utility of adjacent academic disciplines like Biblical studies, Rabbinics, or Patristics, if used critically and selectively, as well as to the contribution that traditional Muslim scholarship might make to the historical and literary study of the Qur’an.
Due to their exceptional length, the surahs under consideration give rise to unique methodological challenges. Perhaps most importantly, their compositional structure and unity is less immediately obvious than that of many shorter texts in the corpus. To be sure, scholars like Neal Robinson and A.H. Mathias Zahniser have identified important aspects of literary coherence and compositional organisation in Surah 2 and, to a lesser extent, also in Surahs 3–5. The field is nonetheless very far from approximating any sort of agreement on the question of whether the seven surahs at hand do indeed exhibit significant macrostructural features or even how these might be validly determined. This is strikingly exemplified by the relative profusion of at least partly incompatible accounts of the macrostructure of Surahs 2 or 5.
One especially salient issue impinging on the question of the compositional structure of the “Seven Long Ones” arises from the claim, by scholars like Richard Bell or Karl-Friedrich Pohlmann, that these texts exhibit traces of significant editorial activity. Assuming that at least some degree of redactional analysis is warranted, how is this to be reconciled with observations of literary or thematic coherence, and how should scholars generally envisage the gestation and redaction of the “Seven Long Ones”? Does Marianna Klar’s tentative proposal that surahs such as Q 2 might have coalesced out of a number of shorter, individual speeches, stand up to scrutiny? Might the scholarly analysis of other works of ancient or late antique literature, such as the Bible or the Talmud, hold useful paradigms or methods? If so, how would these need to be adopted to the distinctive features of the Qur’an? Is pre-modern Muslim scholarship apt to contribute to contemporary scholarly conversations about the structure and redactional history of Qur’anic macrosurahs – for instance, by offering vital textual observations or serviceable analytic categories?
The seven macrosurahs include texts that have been traditionally identified as Medinan (Q 2–5, 9) and others customarily considered to be Meccan (Q 6 and 7). This gives rise to the question of whether traditional assumptions about Qur’anic chronology are analytically helpful in coming to terms with the literary and philological complexity of the long surahs. Is it adequate to retain the entrenched assumption of much Western scholarship, critically assessed in a recent PhD by Emmanuelle Stefanidis, that the Qur’anic corpus can be re-arranged into a diachronic sequence of individual surahs? Or should analysts perhaps envisage much more firmly the possibility that the seven macrosurahs could have developed and grown in parallel, whether during the lifetime of Muhammad or after his death? How would the hypothesis of concurrent gestation affect the interpretation of overlaps or contradictions within one and the same surah or among the “Seven Long Ones”? How do Qur’anic doublets, recently subjected to scrutiny by Gabriel Reynolds, sit within this paradigm?
A final axis of analysis concerns the relationship of the seven macrosurahs to the remainder of the Qur’an. It is evident that they share a considerable part of their lexicon and phraseology with other parts of the Qur’an, though it is of course equally feasible to highlight distinctive usages, such as the programmatic statements about the Muslim ummah in Surahs 2 and 3. Some of the seven macrosurahs’ literary devices, like the use of terminological recurrence or a serial deployment of vocatives, are likewise attested in other parts of the Qur’an. How, then, to explain the much greater size and compositional complexity of the “Seven Long Ones”? This will, again, bring into question the explanatory value of traditional assumptions about the diachronic order of the Qur’anic proclamations, such as the distinction between Meccan and Medinan surahs.
Programme
Monday 24 March 2025
9.00–9.15 Registration and welcome remarks
9.15–10.00 Shuaib Ally, “Similarity through Difference: Studying al-Sabʿ al-Ṭiwāl through Mutashābih al-Qurʾān Literature”
10.00–10.45 Karen Bauer, “The Qur’an’s Emotional Community of Believers from Mecca to Medina: Comments on Virtue, Eschatology, and the Structure of Q 7 and Q 9”
11.15–12.00 Julien Decharnaux, “The Cosmological Sign Passages in the Seven Long Ones: An Unpopular Genre?”
12.00–12.45 Salwa El-Awa, “‘Disjointedness’ and the Problem of Long Surah Structure: Q 2 as a Case Study”
2.00–2.45 Mohsen Goudarzi, “The Curious Case of the Medinan Gospel: Jesus and the Scriptures”
2.45–3.30 Saqib Hussain, “The Rabbis of Q 2 and Q 7”
4.00–4.45 Marianna Klar, “Patterns of Late Antique Text Production and the Plausibility of an Evolutionary Hypothesis for Q 2”
4.45–5.30 Ilkka Lindstedt, “The Fate of the Medinan Jews in Light of the ‘Constitution of Medina’, the ‘Seven Long Ones’, and the Sīra Literature”
Tuesday 25th March 2025
9.15–10.00 Joseph Lowry, “Signs and Ritual Law in Sūrat al-Anʿām (Q 6)”
10.00–10.45 Gabriel S. Reynolds, “Theodicy and Hellfire in Surah 3”
11.15–12.00 Sohaib Saeed, “Sūrat al-Anʿām (Q 6) as Mufassir and Mufassar”
12.00–12.45 Nora K. Schmid, “The Ascetic Barter in a Long Medinan Surah”
2.00–2.45 Emmanuelle Stefanidis, “Does Sūrat Yūnus (Q 10) Belong to the Sabʿ al-Ṭiwāl? Traces of a Pre-ʿUthmanic Codex in the Exegetical Tradition”
2.45–3.30 Nicolai Sinai, “Aspects of the Redactional History of Surah 2”
4.00–4.45 Marijn van Putten, “For God’s Sake or For Rhyme’s Sake? Re-evaluating Kaplony’s ‘Documentary Hypothesis’ of the Qur’an”
4.45–5.30 Holger Zellentin, “The Divine Authorship of the Mishnah in the Qur’an and in the Rabbinic Tradition”