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Written by a scholar of the Hebrew Bible and specialist in literary criticism and narrative analysis, this book explores the themes of polytheism, theodicy and revelation from the perspective of qur’anic passages that represent the narrative extension of the biblical tradition in the earliest stages of Islamic formation. Rather than a comparative analysis of parallel passages in the Bible and the Qur’an, David Penchansky’s work examines the in-between spaces–passages that ‘inhabit the borderland between the Islamic community and the surrounding culture’(xii)–looking for evocations of themes and concerns rather than direct textual parallels, harmonization or synthesis, and seeking to interrogate the disruptions and dissonances in the qur’anic text that work against harmony in order to bring to light ‘unresolved problems’(xv). The book is thus more about trying to uncover and recover aspects of pre-Islamic practices and …