What the study asks
People of the Book is a graduate study by Dr. Micah Ben David Naziri examining the religious communities named in the Qurʾān in order to reconstruct the historical meaning of islām in its earliest setting. Its central argument is that the Qurʾānic language of submission and faith must be read in relation to the actual Jewish, Christian, Nazarene, Sabian, and other communities addressed by the text, rather than assumed to denote a fully formed later confessional identity.
The project situates Qurʾānic origins inside Late Antiquity, compares traditionalist and revisionist approaches to early Islam, surveys Jewish sectarian diversity and the wider Arabian religious milieu, and then returns to the Constitution of Medina as a key witness for understanding communal identity and political belonging.
Study architecture
- Historical-critical method and the religious milieu of Late Antiquity
- Traditionalist and revisionist scholarship on Islamic origins
- Modern analysis of hadith literature
- Jewish sectarian expressions and the Qurʾānic audience
- Ḥimyar and Arabian Judaism
- Pharisees, Essenes, Sabians, Nazarenes, and People of the Gospel
- The Qurʾānic mushrikūn
- What Muhammad and the Qurʾān meant by islām
- The Constitution of Medina and the meaning of a common ummah
Why it matters to Hashlamah
The study provides part of the historical foundation for Hashlamah’s argument that Jewish–Muslim encounter need not begin from the assumption of two civilizations that were always isolated from one another. The project instead asks what becomes possible when the earliest sources are read in their plural, sectarian, and shared Near Eastern context.