FEDÂİLÜ' L-KUR'ÂN TÜRÜ VE SOSYO-POLİTİK ÖNEMİ

Fadâil al-Qur'ân i s the usual title given to chapters in various hadith compilations or to individual works that deal with the "excellences" or "virtues of the Qur'ân." It is a sub-category of a rather voluminous literature in Islam called fadâil or manâqib ("virtues" or "excellences"). In general, the fadâil material has not been studied in depth, usually dismissed as praise or hagiographie literature that is not worthy of the historian's serious attention. In this paper, I seek to show that both the religious and the social historian may profitably mine the fadâil al-Qur'ân literature for valuable insights into, for example, early attitudes towards writing conventions in the mushafs, manner of recitation, the probity of accepting wages for teaching the Qur'ân, and the authoritativeness of oral vs. written transmission of the Qur'ânic text. It also shows that vestiges of these issues encoded in fadâil al-Qur'ân traditions have broader implications for the reconstruction of the religiousand intellectual milieu of the formative period of Islam. To this end, this article will discuss the contents of some of the principal compositions in the fadâil al-Qur'ân genre, seeking to trace in diachronic fashion a continuum and evolution in the kind of issues with which this literature deals. Our proposed study will also allow us to refine and qualify a body of received wisdom regarding the nature of the fadâil al-Qur'ân traditions and their origins.