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You might be interested in this discussion, from
The Qur’an: a historical-critical introduction - N Sinai
Against the background of this fairly detailed discussion of two additions to surah 37, let us attempt a general overview of observations that may support a claim to have detected a case of secondary embedding in a Qur’anic surah.51 To begin with, any textual segment that is conjectured to constitute a later insertion must be removable from its current position in the text without leaving behind an unbridgeable gap. We have seen that this condition is met by Q 37: 102 and 37: 112–113. It is also satisfied by Q 3: 7–9, discussed as a potential post-prophetic addition at the end of Chapter 2. By way of a further requirement, it ought to be possible to identify the motive on account of which a supposed addition was made. For instance, the verse or verses in question may serve to interpret or modify a statement made elsewhere in the original text, or they may serve to supplement the latter by incorporating some later doctrine or practice. Thus, Q 37: 102 exonerates Abraham as well as ascribing a more central narrative role to his son, while 37: 112–113 clarify the identity of the son in question and reject an interpretation of the episode that would have undermined the Qur’an’s consistent emphasis on individual moral responsibility.
Even when a given verse or verse group satisfies the two minimum requirements just presented, it is preferable for hypothetical reconstructions of secondary interpolations to be based on at least some additional considerations. These may consist in stylistic and lexical peculiarities that set a putative insertion off from its literary environment and can be linked with a later period of the Qur’an’s genesis. We have seen that both Q 37: 102 and, to a somewhat lesser extent, 37: 112–113 display a conspicuous surge in verse length. If we make the assumption, justified below in Chapter 5, that Qur’anic verses tended to become longer over time, marked differences in verse length indicate different periods of composition. The phenomenon is illustrated by Q 73: 20 and 74: 31, arguably the two most obvious cases of later interpolation in the entire Qur’an.52
Apart from exhibiting a noticeably higher verse length, a passage flagged up as a potential insertion may also display diction or doctrinal content that indicates a later date of origin than its literary environment. Here, too, Q 37: 112–113 provide an illustration: as we have seen, the only two parallels that similarly contradict the Rabbinic teaching of Abraham’s hereditary merit, using some of the same key terms, are Q 2: 124 and 57: 26, which are likely to be much later than the body of surah 37 – at least if one accepts the standards for a relative dating of Qur’anic material that are developed in the next chapter. One of the considerations adduced in connection with Q 3: 7–9 in Chapter 2 also fits under this bracket: as argued there, v. 7 envisages that the Qur’anic revelations form a closed textual corpus that is marked by irreducible ambiguity, a view that may reflect the perspective of the early Islamic community soon after Muhammad’s death.
The case for an insertion can also be made in terms of the immanent incongruity – whether in content, style, or literary form – between a given verse or verse group and the literary environment in which it is located. For instance, the content of a passage suspected of being a later insertion may stand in tension with statements made in the remainder of the surah, or a presumed addition may appear to be structurally out of place or intrusive. An observation of the latter kind was presented in connection with Q 37: 112–113: the couplet occurs after the refrain of the Abraham episode and thus disrupts the dominant structure of an otherwise mostly symmetrical narrative cycle.
Ultimately, any claim to the effect that a certain verse or group of verses forms a later addition to a surah ought to be based on a cumulative case invoking as many of the above considerations as possible. Even though the outcome will be inevitably probabilistic, the hypothesis of secondary interpolation none- theless constitutes an important part of a Qur’anic scholar’s explanatory toolkit. As we have seen, even a cohesive text like surah 37 may very well be found to contain minor interpolations that were motivated by the need to clarify and reinterpret certain portions of text or to interweave them with later doctrines and ideas. In studying a Qur’anic surah, one must not only be sensitive to indications of unitary composition but equally be prepared to discover in its literary brickwork traces of later maintenance and expansion. Whether such additions were made during the lifetime of Muhammad or possibly after his death will need to be assessed on a case-by-case basis, although many of the secondary insertions that scholars have so far identified can very well be imagined to have occurred during Muhammad’s prophetic ministry.
