'The overwhelmingly central role played by the Qur'ān in Muslim piety' is an axiom that is recognised by both Muslims and outside observers. The book's profound and pervasive influence on all aspects of Islamic personal and communal life and its ubiquitous presence in Islamic sciences, arts, literatures, craftsmanship, devotional practices and everyday speech are richly attested. Less obvious and more difficult to gauge is its impact on the social, familial and political behaviour and on the spiritual and intellectual life of the average Muslim, although this, too, is easy to imagine. Whether the Qur'ān's significance for its followers is due to its irresistible attraction, inherent aesthetic appeal and persuasiveness, or to their 'Islamic' upbringing, schooling and socialisation, its overriding importance for the Muslim community is hardly in doubt. What follows is an attempt to examine the influence of the Qur'ān on such spheres of Arab/Islamic intellectual endeavour as philology, jurisprudence, theology/philosophy and literary production. Considerations of space will necessarily make this survey selective and incomplete.

When Basil: A Story of Modern Life was published in November 1852, the name of its author, W. Wilkie Collins, was familiar to a handful of readers and reviewers of his only two other works: a biography of his father, the late distinguished painter and Fellow of the Royal Academy, William Collins (1848); and a historical romance, Antonina (1850), which showed, among other signs of promise, that the RA's son had inherited 'a painter's eye for description'. Understandably, then, when reviewers were faced with the unenviable job of reviewing Basil alongside William Makepeace Thackeray's great historical novel, The History of Henry Esmond (published in the same month), many of them seized on what they knew about Collins's family background to draw an analogy between fiction and the fine arts. As Bentley’s Miscellany put it at the end of 1852:

Wilkie Collins's novels abound in melancholic male protagonists. These dispirited heroes are an important key to Collins's conception of gender difference, since they dramatise what he saw as an identity crisis plaguing mid-Victorian men. It may not be the case, as D. A. Miller once famously argued, that Collins saw all sensation as feminine, or that he set his heroes the task of conquering emotionalism of any kind. But in order to act, Walter Hartright, Franklin Blake, Ozias Midwinter and other Collins protagonists must at the very least overcome their persistent wallowing in sadness, loss, dejection and self-criticism. Such struggles can tell us a great deal about the psychological and cultural dynamics within which Victorian masculinity was constructed, about the historical shifts in gender norms that Collins helped both to articulate and to modify, and about the social transformations that his melancholic men portend.

Collins grappled most strenuously with a particular type of melancholia, a form of the malady that seemed - somewhat paradoxically - to fuel narcissistic excess. Although it may seem counterintuitive to believe that melancholia has an affinity with exaggerated narcissism, such an affinity has a long history in British cultural assumptions about male cultural elites. At least since the Renaissance, melancholia had been associated in British culture - and in European thought generally - with the man of genius. Borrowing lofty, flattering images of male melancholia from the Italian poets Torquato Tasso and Francesco Petrarch, sixteenth- and seventeenth century British writers construed such images as signs of male creative and intellectual power.

Some 1,400 years ago, when the Qur'ān was being revealed to the prophet Muhammad, his wife Umm Salama reportedly asked him why it was not addressing women. It seems she was not impressed by the fact that in the Arabic language, as in many others, the male gender is inclusive of the female and that in using it the Qur'ān was, in effect, addressing both. Of course if this had been an idle question on her part and nothing had come of it, the incident probably would not have found its way into Muslim tradition. Yet, not only does tradition record it, but many Muslims use it to explain the context in which the Qur'ān became the only scripture to speak directly to women.

Women in the Qur'Ān

Indeed, not only does the Qur'ān address women, but it frequently does so in a manner that should leave little room for doubt that it considers them equal to men. One example is Q 33:35: 'For Muslim men and women, for believing men and women, for devout men and women, for men and women who are patient and constant, for men and women who humble themselves, for men and women who give in charity, for men and women who fast (and deny themselves), for men and women who guard their chastity, and for men and women who engage much in God's praise; for them has God prepared forgiveness and great reward.' In spite of such verses, and the Qur'ān's counsel to read it for its best meanings, most Muslims continue to project sexual inequality, discrimination and even misogyny into it. Before considering why this is so, it seems appropriate to dwell for a bit on Umm Salama's question since it offers such compelling and potentially unending lessons for believers.

Sometime towards the end of the sixth/twelfth century, a prominent preacher in Baghdād wrote the following:

There are two views about this verse: (1) Ibn Mas'ūd, al-Hasan and the majority say that it is Meccan. (2) It was reported on the authority of Qatāda to be Medinan. There are three different opinions about the occasion of its revelation: (1) a group of Quraysh, including al-Walīd b. al-Mughīra, al-'ds b. Wā'il and al-Aswad b. 'Abd Yaghūth; met al-'Abbās b. 'Abd al-Muttalib and said, 'O Abū l-Fadl, if your nephew had submitted himself to one of our gods then we would have believed in what he says and we would certainly have believed in his god.' So al-'Abbās came and told him [Muhammad] this and at that this sūra was revealed. Abū Sālih reported this on the authority of Ibn 'Abbās. (2) 'Utba b. Rabī'a and Umayya b. Khalaf met God's messenger and said, 'O Muhammad, we shall not leave you alone until you follow our religion and we follow yours. If ours is the right course, you will take your share of it. If yours is the right course, we will take our share of it.' At that this sūra was revealed. 'Ubayd b. 'Umayr said so. (3) The Quraysh said to the Prophet, 'If it please you we will follow your religion for a year and you will return to our religion for a year.' At that this sūra was revealed. Wahb reported it. Muqātil reported others to have said: 'This sūra was revealed about Abū Jahl and about “the mockers”. Of those about whom it was revealed, not one ever became a believer.'

Victorian theatre 1850–1880

Wilkie Collins liked the theatre, wrote plays and published highly theatrical novels, many of which he adapted for the stage, and his engagement with the theatre spanned the whole of his writing life. During the late 1840s he had been involved in private performances with John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, W. P. Frith and Edward Ward in the Collins family household in Blandford Square, and he first met Charles Dickens through amateur theatricals when Augustus Egg persuaded Collins to undertake the part of the valet in Edward Bulwer-Lytton's Not So Bad As We Seem, to be performed by the Guild of Literature and Art. Dickens's amateur performances were fuelled by his own enthusiasm for acting, while ostensibly aimed at raising funds for charitable or benevolent causes. His reputation (and often the reputations of his fellow-actors) ensured maximum exposure, turning the performances into significant public and private events rather than replicating amateur theatricals in the more homely sense of that activity. Through his involvement in Dickens's company Collins laid the ground for future theatrical collaboration with the novelist.

Collins also immersed himself in visits to the professional theatre, and had been a keen theatregoer since visiting the Paris theatres with Charles Ward in the mid-1840s. While much theatrical activity centred on the West End of London, there were also neighbourhood theatres scattered throughout the rest of the metropolis, concentrating more often than not on popular melodrama. Professional theatre was also strong in the provinces, with new theatres opening in such industrial centres as Liverpool and Manchester.

The Qur'ān, considered by believing Muslims to be a literal transcript of God's word as revealed to the prophet Muhammad (c. 570-632 CE), poses a number of interesting, and sometimes vexing, questions when we attempt to discuss its historical context. In one sense, the Qur'āan's theological status as divine word negates the very idea of it having a historical context at all, for it implies that the text is of eternal and unchanging validity. Muslim tradition even asserts that it had been revealed on several other occasions, to earlier communities via their prophets. This being so, the historical context in which a particular passage was revealed to Muhammad can be understood only as an accident, and has no real bearing on the meaning of a passage at all, which is immutable and intrinsic.

Despite the Qur'ān's theological status, Muslims over the centuries elaborated highly detailed traditions about the Qur'ān's historical context. This took the form of a vast biographical literature on the Prophet and his time which, loosely following traditional usage, we can call the sīra literature. The sīra literature was compiled by Muslim sages during the several hundred years following Muhammad's death in 11/632, and offers a richly detailed account of Muhammad's life, of his receipt of the revelations that are enshrined in the Qur'ānic text, and (although less fully) of the codification of the revelation in the years following his death to produce the text of the Qur'ān as we have it today. Most Western scholarship on the Qur'ān and its context has drawn heavily on the sīra literature for its basic documentation.

Writing in Henry Mayhew's encyclopaedic London Labour and the London Poor (1861-2), Andrew Halliday gives a vivid impression of the numerous types of physical disability which could be encountered on the capital's streets in the mid-century. Although the Mendicity Society had recently cleared the streets of many imposters, a number of beggars continued to use their bodies as a source of income, and, in the spirit of this work's incessant drive to impose order on the disorderly, Halliday proceeds to list them:

When their conditions are genuine, Halliday considers these individuals as 'certainly deserving of sympathy and aid; for they are utterly incapacitated from any kind of labour'. Those who exhibit their deformed, maimed or impaired bodies simultaneously provoke revulsion and compassion, and seem to inhabit a quite different sphere from those who encounter them in the street.

Wilkie Collins was a popular and prolific novelist whose career spanned most of the second half of the nineteenth century. It began in 1850, when Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray and Charlotte Brontë were at the height of their powers and George Eliot was still to publish a work of fiction, and ended in 1890, as the Victorian novel itself was drawing to a close, in the era of Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling and George Gissing. Collins published more than twenty novels, numerous short stories and perceptive and witty pieces of journalism. He collaborated closely with Dickens during the 1850s and 1860s and was involved with Dickens in dramatic productions as well as adapting his own work for the stage. He was a busy and hard-working professional writer who negotiated a rapidly changing literary marketplace and was able to make use of new forms of publication and distribution of fiction at both national and global levels.

Collins's popularity as a compelling storyteller, a 'master of suspense' who inaugurated the sensation novel and played a key role in shaping detective fiction has remained undiminished. Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical version of The Woman in White played to packed audiences in London's West End during 2005, and Sarah Waters's novel Fingersmith, which reworks Collins's signature themes of deception and substitution, was shortlisted for both the Man Booker and the Orange prizes in 2003. Meanwhile, in contemporary criticism Collins's reputation has moved from the margins to the mainstream.

Qur'ānic inscriptions are ubiquitous, found on buildings and objects produced in many media throughout the Islamic lands from the earliest times to the present. The first example of Islamic architecture, the Dome of the Rock built by the Umayyad caliph 'Abd al-Malik (r. 65-86/685-705) in Jerusalem in 72/692, is decorated with a long band of Qur'ānic verses. So are many recent buildings, such as the mosque built in 1983 at the King Khaled International Airport north of Riyadh. These Qur'ānic inscriptions are, quite naturally, used more frequently in religious settings, especially mosques and their furnishings. But they were not exclusive to such sites, and buildings like the Alhambra Palace in Granada also bear Qur'ānic inscriptions deemed suitable for a ceremonial setting. Nevertheless, Qur'ānic inscriptions were not commonly found in utilitarian contexts, where the mundane function of the object might compromise the sanctity of the text. Despite their ubiquity, the study of Qur'ānic inscriptions is a relatively new field, and this chapter begins with a survey of the subject and its history before turning to the question of how and why patrons and artisans selected specific Qur'ānic texts and adapted their form to decorate these myriad objects.

Friedrich Schwally's revision of Theodor Nöldeke's Geschichte des Qorāns, parts one and two, published in 1909 and 1919 respectively, presented the current status of Western scholarship on the Qur'ān's formation at the beginning of the twentieth century. W. Montgomery Watt's revised edition of Richard Bell's Introduction to the Qur'ān, published in 1970, provided a new stock-taking of the then widely accepted wisdom on the topic. A comparison of the two works, however, reveals little development in the intervening half century as far as their main topics are concerned. Yet this interlude of relative scholarly calm contrasts sharply with the turbulent decades that followed. From the 1970s onwards several assertions about the origin and formation of the Qur'ān have been the object of detailed revision and the results of these studies more often than not have challenged the accepted wisdom. The year 1970 can thus be considered a watershed in the scholarly history of this research, and Watt's book can serve as a suitable point of reference for a sketch of the more recent developments. In the following, some of these alternative accounts will be introduced taking the primary issue which each of them tackles as a starting-point. The portrayal of each account focuses on its premises, methods and results.

Reviewing The Moonstone for the Athenaeum in July 1868, Geraldine Jewsbury noted that Wilkie Collins brought his readers to tears as the novel ended - not by uniting the English hero and heroine but by dividing three South Asian men. These men are Hindu priests who have together travelled to England and back, violating caste restrictions to restore a sacred Hindu diamond to its shrine in remote Kattiawar:

Although critics often identify sentimentality as politically evasive, the sympathy that Collins evokes for the Hindus here is politically charged. In a novel published on the tenth anniversary of the rebellion that Victorians termed the 'Indian Mutiny' - an uprising that generated racial hatred towards South Asians among the British - Collins humanises figures commonly represented as bestial by his contemporaries and identifies as their rightful property a valuable diamond looted by British forces in Seringapatam fifty years before the main action of his story is set. Depicting the 1799 Siege of Seringapatam in his Prologue, Collins prefaces The Moonstone with an instance of British violence against Indians and suggests that their later acts of violence against Britons are marks of retribution triggered by an original, imperial crime.

Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical spectacular The Woman in White opened in London in September 2004. Posters featuring a back-lit, white-clad woman had appeared on buses and Tube trains for months before, and the casting of Michael Crawford (the most famous star in Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera) as the first Count Fosco seemed to lodge Collins's novel firmly in Lloyd Webber world. The official publicity paid its dues to Collins but acknowledged that the story had been appropriated to a familiar repertoire - 'a love story to which a layer of unrequited love [Marian for Walter] has been added for the musical' - and the evening clearly offers a branded 'Lloyd Webber' experience, complete with souvenir tapestry kits and pill-boxes. Nonetheless, the modern musical Woman in White was strongly shaped by the contexts and forms of Collins's writing, sensation fiction and the mid-Victorian practices of writing and publishing popular fiction. Far from being a travesty of the 'original' novel or a postmodern rerendering of Victorian Gothic, this new musical version can be viewed as a natural offspring of Collins's novel and its first set of contexts. My emphasis in this chapter will be on the continuities between Collins's novels in their first intertextual setting and in their many and varied versions in film, radio and television, with a focus on the British Broadcasting Corporation, and in novels. In addition to the publishing history of the texts themselves, the history of Wilkie Collins in the twentieth century encompasses some of the earliest silent films, the changing traditions and conventions of British radio and television drama, and the historical fiction of Sarah Waters, James Wilson and other 'contemporary Victorian' writers. It forms a crucial part of the continuities and shifts in the significance of the 'Victorian' across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.

The role of religion in building bridges between communities is under greater scrutiny today than it was in the 1970s and 1980s. In the present period, religion has assumed a critical responsibility in defining the guidelines for life in a civil society in which a modern notion of inclusive citizenry is at odds with a community of the faithful defined as religiously exclusive. Monotheistic traditions like Judaism, Christianity and Islam are notoriously exclusivist in their theologies and discriminatory in their laws. In order to meet the challenge of all-encompassing secularisation, religious scholars are engaged in exploring the scriptural resources of their respective traditions to provide relevant textual references and their accompanying interpretations that can accommodate the demands of plurality in human religious commitments. This chapter undertakes to examine Islamic scriptural sources to demonstrate that the Qur'ān and its interpreters were fully aware of the need to provide principles that could guide co-existence among religious communities so that people could learn to live together in harmony and peace.

Taking pluralism to mean the acknowledgement and affirmation that various spiritual paths are capable of guiding and saving their adherents, the basic argument to be made about the relation between the Qur'ān and pluralism is that Muslim scriptures capture the real experience of the early community as it struggled to balance tolerance with exclusive truth claims that provided the nascent Muslim community with its unique identity among communities of the faithful.