Asbāb al-Nuzūl: The (Good) Occasions of Revelation

Asbab al-Nuzul constitutes one of the least studied genres of exegetical literature despite scholarly acknowledgment of its significance and its ubiquitous presence in many other genres of exegetical literature. The asbab al-nazul, sometimes defined as “occasions of revelation, " are composed of anecdotes concerning the circumstances that surround the revelation of particular sections of the Qur’an. One of the more significant features of the asbab literature is that it is inherently selective, imbued with clear judgments about which asbab are important or worth mentioning and which are not; this judgment, however, often occurs outside the text and without any justification offered to the readers. Through a multiplicity of anecdotes and asbab, Jews were joined to Meccan polytheists and to hypocrites in a manner that emphasized their otherness and collected these othered groups under the banner of their attempts to undermine Muhammad and, in so doing, elicit a consistent response to all these groups at once.