The Exceptional Qur’an:

Publisher: Gorgias Press, New Jersey, USA: 2021, 331pp. ISBN: 9781463207298.

Johanne Christiansen is based in Denmark. Her first publication listed in the long bibliography was in 2015. The research for this book was carried out when she was PI for part of a project on Ambiguity and Precision in the Qur’an based at the Section of Biblical Exegesis, Faculty of Theology, University of Copenhagen, led by Professor Thomas Hoffmann. She also acknowledges, among others, help given by Professor Joseph E. Lowry.

Her research is patient, thorough, methodical and meticulous. Her transliteration of Arabic is near perfect, and her quotations from the Qur’an plentiful and clearly analysed. In chapter five, she gives parallel studies of similar ‘Legal Exceptions’ found in Late Antiquity, the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament and discusses how the Qur’an relates to ‘Late Antique Culture.’ This is one of the main current interests of European (especially German) scholars in their study of the Qur’an, for example in the Corpus Coranicum project based in Berlin https://corpuscoranicum.de but in this book it only occupies five pages. The ‘index’ – actually a list of Qur’anic and Biblical references – devotes five pages to Qur’anic references and less than one to Biblical references.