John Medows Rodwell

Background

The Rev. John Medows Rodwell (1808–1900) was an Anglican clergyman and orientalist whose 1861 English translation of the Qur'an (second edition 1876) arranged the suras in chronological order — his arrangement drawing on "the ancient chronological list printed by Weil," Muir's list, "and especially... Nöldeke, in his Geschichte des Qôrans" (Rodwell 1861, Preface). G. Margoliouth's introduction to the corpus edition judges it "one of the best that have as yet been produced... scholarly without being pedantic," and singles out the chronological arrangement as letting the reader "trace the development of the prophet's mind" from early inspiration to "the less spiritual and more equivocal rôle of warrior, politician, and founder of an empire" (Margoliouth, introduction).

Positions held in this wiki

• Qur'an Preservation vs Textual History — the nineteenth-century in-corpus anchor of the view that the Qur'an is "a text with a reconstructible human history." His Preface states the critical account compactly, from Muslim sources: the traditional sura order "is not chronological, neither is there any authentic tradition to shew that it rests upon the authority of Muhammad himself"; the "scattered fragments of the Koran" were collected under Abu Bekr by Zaid ibn Thâbit "from date leaves and tablets of white stone, and from the breasts of men"; variant readings in the copies "naturally and necessarily sprung up," until Othman "determined to establish a text which should be the sole standard," dispatched official copies to the chief military stations, and "all previously existing copies were committed to the flames" (Rodwell 1861, Preface). Even the standardized arrangement, he adds, follows no system beyond "placing the longest and best known Suras first," so that "anything approaching to a chronological arrangement was entirely lost sight of" (Preface).

Key works in our corpus

• The Koran, trans. J. M. Rodwell, with introduction by G. Margoliouth — complete: Margoliouth's introduction, Rodwell's Preface, the chronologically re-ordered translation with notes, and a select bibliography of English Qur'an translations from Sale (1734) onward.

Principal critics / interlocutors

• Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī — the classical insider systematization of the same transmission reports, read confessionally: the collection and standardization demonstrate providential guarding, not textual contingency. Rodwell's Preface and the Itqān tradition work from largely the same Muslim sources to opposite conclusions.
• Modern scholarship supersedes Rodwell in detail: his own Preface concedes the scheme's limits — Muir's rival chronological list leaves 21 suras "not yet been carefully fixed," and Rodwell leans on Nöldeke as "a standard, which ought not to be departed from without weighty reasons" (Preface) — and manuscript-based study has since displaced re-ordering as the discipline's center of gravity.

See also

• George Sale — his early-modern predecessor; Rodwell's edition's bibliography lists Sale's 1734 translation as the head of the English tradition.
• Keith E. Small — the contemporary comparative continuation of the text-critical approach.
• Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī — the classical epistemological frame the text-critical view engages.