Qurʾānic ummī: Genealogy, Ethnicity, and the Foundation of a New Community

The Qurʾānic term ummī and the corresponding adjectival construct, al-nabī al-ummī, have been the object of much interest on the part of modern scholars of the secular discipline of scriptural studies, an interest that goes back at least to Abraham Geiger’s Was hat Mohammed aus dem Judenthume aufgenommen? (1833). Scholarship on the meaning and origins of this term, however, is an exceptional case in that it virtually unanimously rejects the mainstream traditional interpretation of the phrase nabī ummī as “illiterate prophet.” But this unanimity would hardly be surprising if one takes into account the fact that out of the six instances of the term’s attestation in the Muslim scripture, the traditional interpretation does not fit the context in at least three of them; this is an observation that, contrary to the popular opinion, was not lost on mediaeval Muslim exegetes, who, to quote Norman Calder, showed “they are as capable as their European counterparts of taking context into consideration.”