u/Rurouni_Phoenix

I want to do a deep dive into Luke-Acts and I am looking for recommendations for academic sources and/or commentaries.

I have heard some who say that Luke 1-2 contain stylistic elements which indicate that these sections of Luke's gospel were not original to it but were composed as separate works by different hands and incorporated into the text at a later date. What elements within these two chapters indicate a Palestinian origin and how confident are scholars that these sections of Luke were not original to the text but were written by different authors? Alternatively, how strong is the evidence that they were originally part of the text?

Do we have examples from hadith, tafsir or other sources which explain how Mary died? Is there more than one tradition, similar to how early Christians were divided on whether or not Mary physically died, was martyred or was taken alive into heaven?

On May 9, 2021, I sat at my kitchen table in front of my old laptop around midnight and began building something that had been festering in the back of my mind for several weeks: a community dedicated to the discussion of academic Islamic Studies. I never imagined 5 years later the thing that I had thrown together in about two hours would become one of the most influential Islamic Studies communities online.

I had been on Reddit back in 2021 for over a month and had been looking for a sub which discussed the Quran from an historical critical perspective like r/AcademicBiblical did for the Bible, but no such community existed. I saw that there was a desire for such communities from posts years earlier on AB and I realized there was a market for this idea, so I decided to be the crazy fool who'd stick out his neck and take the risk to make it myself.

At the time of this writing, we are a community of roughly 20,000 individuals. Within the first day of AQ’s existence there were only two or three followers, but in the 24 hours that followed there were over 600 followers due to the assistance of the moderator team over at r/AcademicBiblical who were willing to let me put up an advertisement for this crazy idea of mine.

Those early days were chaotic, but u/OtherWisdom from r/AskBibleScholars who I think was an admin at AB around that time helped guide me that first week along the path of being an admin on the sub by giving me practical advice in management, something which I was only vaguely familiar with from earlier online experience. Wisdom’s assistance in some ways foreshadows what would happen nearly 3 weeks later when I encountered my very first mod appointment, a guy named u/chonkshonk who has always been an invaluable aid to me in managing the sub along with everybody else who would hold the roles of moderators in later times.

Chonk and everybody else have been great friends to me these last 5 years and have greatly assisted me in managing the sub, something that is sometimes very hard to do due to the fact that I have chronic migraines and other health issues that make being online for extremely long periods of time personally taxing. So to my team of moderators, thank you guys so much for being with me and helping me run this community for the last half decade. I couldn't do it without you and I'm so glad to have all of you here with me in this great endeavor of ours.

I also want to extend my thanks to every single scholar and influencer who has participated in an AMA with us over these last 5 years. It's one thing to read the books and the articles and to watch the video interviews of our academic heroes, but it is a completely other thing to get to talk with them in person and interact with them face to face (well, about his face-to-face as you can get in an online forum setting). Thank you not only for interacting with us on this community, but for all of the academic material which you have made available to us both now and into the future. You all are an inspiration to us as we navigate through the worlds which you have opened up for us.

And of course, I want to extend my thanks to each and every one of you reading this post because at the end of the day YOU are AcademicQuran and without you this community would not even exist. Thank you all so much for your quality contributions and interactions over here because you all are the electricity that makes this battery run. I am so glad to have a well-informed and inquisitive audience because it is those who read and contribute to the sub that make this community great.

Because of all of you, AcademicQuran has become one of the bright stars in the constellation which makes up the online community of academic Islamic Studies. AQ and all of the other countless communities and influencers are the driving force which has brought the academic study of Islam from a niche topic of the humanities to the mainstream of religious studies, becoming equal to that of biblical studies.

And that constellation is not one color, one creed or one nation, but it is an international, multiracial and interfaith body that while consisting of many different parts is striving towards the same goal: the promotion of the academic study of Islam and the dissemination of scholarly knowledge to the general public. And I am proud to say that 5 years on, the bright star that is AcademicQuran continues to burn and burn brightly.

In the beginning I was the one who built AcademicQuran with my own hands, and in time I've had hundreds of thousands of other hands helping me in this great construction project. And I can assure you all that building is far from being finished. We've got so many years and discoveries ahead of us and so many great conversations to have, my friends.

So come on: let's keep on building.

Sunni Islam is known for opposing images of Muhammad and other sacred figures, but where do scholars believe that this idea originated from? Has there been academic study done on Hadith prohibiting the creation of images in an attempt to discover possible origins? Could the idea go back to the historical Muhammad?

Is there some kind of symbolic significance towards the color of Jesus' clothing in the Hadith being described as yellow? Is there possible Christian parallels to this idea?

Hello, everyone! I'm making this post on behalf of Professor Dost because his Reddit account is too recent and doesn't have enough karma to create threads although he should be able to respond to your questions with his own account.

Suleyman Dost is Assistant Professor of Late Antiquity and Early Islam. He works primarily on inscriptions and other documentary sources from late antique Arabia and Ethiopia. His research also covers the historical context in which the Qur’an emerged as well as the history of its textual transmission. Before joining the University of Toronto, Dr. Dost was an Assistant Professor at Brandeis University and held a year-long fellowship at ANAMED Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 2017 and has been a vocal advocate for the Hijazi origin of the Quran.

Professor Dost is the author of numerous papers such as "Pilgrimage in Pre-Islamic Arabia: Continuity and Rupture from Epigraphic Texts to the Qur'an" (2023) in the journal *Millennium* and "The Arabian Context of Muḥammad’s Prophethood", published in the book *Theology of Prophecy in Dialogue* (2025), as well as the author of the PhD thesis "An Arabian Qur'ān: Towards a Theory of Peninsular Origins". This year, Professor Dost has published his most recent work *Before the Qur'an: Material Sources at the Advent of Muslim Scripture*

In this thread, you will submit your questions to Professor Dost today and he will respond to them on Monday and Tuesday. All questions must conform to the rules of the subreddit and any violations or trolling will not tolerated.

With that said, let the AMA commence!