A CRITICAL EVALUATION OF WESTERN SCHOLARS APROACH TO THE QURRA DURING THE EARLY PERIOD

This article tries to re-evalute Western scholars’ approach to the notion of qurrâ in early Islamic literature. They generally minimize the amount of qurrâ in early years of Islam during the life of the Prophet and his rightly guided caliphates. Therefore they consider that the reports which show the existence of a number of qurrâ are either produced by later Muslim scholars or it means ‘villagers’ (ahl al-qurâ) rather than ‘reciters’ (ahl al-qur’ân). Here we deal with the critical evalution of their approach. First of all we focused on the role of the qurrâ in the expedition of Rajî’ and Bi’ri Maûna. Then we attempted to analyse traditional information about them in the battle of Yamama. And finally we investigated their status in the battle of Jamal and Siffin together with some linguistic analysis of the term qurrâ. We have seen that the analysis of the orientalists make the issue more complex due to absence of historical approach to it. Therefore for the clarification of the role of qurrâ in early Islam one needs diachronic reading of historical data.