"NOTHING BUT TIME DESTROYS US" THE DENIERS OF RESURRECTION IN THE QUR`AN
In this posthumously published paper, Patricia Crone (d. 2015) examines a corpus of verses in the Qur`an in which the mushrikun, the supposedly pagan opponents of the qur`anic prophet, are portrayed as objecting to the doctrine of the resurrection, one of the central tenets of the Qur`an. In contrast to the traditional understanding of the mushrikun as idolaters ignorant of monotheism, the evidence of the Qur`an itself suggests that the mushrikun were familiar with the concepts of judgment and resurrection but were either skeptical about them or denied them outright. The Qur`an attributes statements to them that indicate that the resurrection was an ancestral doctrine they had come to reject, not a new teaching. Not only do the mushrikun appear to have been directly familiar with monotheistic concepts, but the Qur`an attributes statements to them that seem to reflect biblical phraseology. The author concludes that the most radical deniers may have represented a strain of eternalism or rationalism current in the late antique world in which the Qur`an was revealed.