Forms and Functions of Legal Discourse Intertextuality in Works of Jewish and Islamic Law and Literature – Quotations, Allusions, References, and Plagiarism

During the pilgrimage to Mecca in the year 10/632, Muḥammad is said to have delivered an oration to a large audience of believers. Since the event occurred shortly before his death, the oration is commonly known as the Farewell Sermon. Different variants of the Farewell Sermon have been preserved in a number of historical texts, ḥadīṯ compendia, and literary works. The sermon includes mostly ethical and legal material: it abolishes blood revenge and the law of retaliation, usury, and pre-Islamic intercalation practices, and it regulates marital duties and rights. This paper discusses the Farewell Sermon’s intertextual and rhetorical links to the Qurʾān and late antique legal paraenesis. The sermon quotes the Qurʾān and shares a number of formal and thematic features with late antique paraenetic texts, such as the Judeo-Christian apocryphal Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs and Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount in the New Testament (Matthew 5-7). The intertextual and rhetorical links that connect the Farewell Sermon to earlier forms of ethical and legal orations in biblical and post-biblical traditions suggest that this form of oral legal instruction was pervasive, and that it played an important role in early Islamic times, before the emergence of the Islamic legal disciplines. Islamic jurists and preachers later entered into competition in the field of legal knowledge formation; the original link between paraenesis and legal instruction was therefore deemphasized. In this paper, I explore the literary past of the Farewell Sermon as it emerges from the sermon itself, and I analyse the specificities of the ideas and rulings incorporated into the text in light of their late antique background.