An Outlook

The Outlook offers a very brief restatement of key findings and then considers which questions this volume raised, and how they may be addressed in future scholarship. Issues include the role of Middle Eastern law more broadly and Arabian legal culture more specifically; questions of orality and of translations of the Bible; the relationship of the Qur’an with specific types of Judaism and Christianity; the importance of epigraphy and of traditional Islamic sources for the study of the Qur’an and of pre-Islamic Arabia; the value of the insights of the later Islamic jurists for the understanding of the Qur’an; and the relationship of Islamic jurisprudence with ancient Arabian as well as with Jewish, Christian, especially Byzantine, and plausibly Aksumite law.