Best middle eastern literary criticism books according to redditors

I did a little google searching and found [this book] (http://www.amazon.com/Textual-Criticism-Quran-Manuscripts-Keith/dp/0739177532) which seems relevant to your question. I'd also check out the Journal of Qur'anic Studies which, from my observation, has received praise. It certainly exists.

1. Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism
   
   
2. Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society
   
   
3. Quran and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman's Perspective
   
   
4. Deconstructing the American Mosque: Space, Gender, and Aesthetics
   
   
5. The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam from the Extremists
   
   
6. How to Read the Quran
   
   

Islam is no different here from Christianity and Judaism, there are textual variants present in earlier manuscripts making the reconstruction of the original text impossible.

https://www.amazon.com/Textual-Criticism-Quran-Manuscripts-Keith/dp/0739177532

Like I said, there isn't much, and your ability to read them will depend on your capabilities. Keith Small's Textual Criticism and Qur'an Manuscripts is one example of an effort to apply textual critical studies to the Quran as well as Quranic Studies: Sources and Methods of Scriptural Interpretation which is a much more difficult read, but even more foundational (or you could even go and track down Geiger's original work, "Was Hat Mohammed aus dem Judentume Aufgenommen?" (Bonn, 1834)).

I think you might be interested in Classical Arabic Stories: http://www.amazon.com/Classical-Arabic-Stories-An-Anthology/dp/0231149239

If you're interested in gender issues, I'm going through Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society

It's a bit dated, but faaaantastic.

>And presumably you have a least some piece of evidence to back up the idea that the Jews understood the Sumerian creation myth as fiction. Can I see it?

Are you asking me if I personally have evidence of this? No, I don't. My information is second hand from books like this or this. From my understanding all of the cultures in the Middle East retold the myths around them in the context of their own culture. Essentially that these shared myths shaped the elements of their religions from their ceremonies to their ethics.

>Do you think the Romans didn't actually believe in their Gods

you can believe in gods without believing those stories are literal truth. It's not an either/or situation.

>since they were retellings of the Greek myths in the context of the Roman people?

You do realize that the Romans appropriated the religions of the people they conquered? Greece wasn't special in this regard. Also Roman religion was tied to the functions of the Roman government.

>Explain the "function" of a nauseating and detailed genealogy if it is not an actual genealogy.

It establishes the divine right of the Israel kings. It also establishes the origins of the Jewish people through connections with their mythological father.

Personally, I think you're trying too hard. Only for the most deluded fundies, religion does not function as a literal truth. Religion is a lot more than what it says about how the world works. They are often systems of ethics, ceremony, and culture as well and it does a disservice to treat creation myths as the same as a science textbook. It's far more comparable to a parable philosophical text thingermajig.

>Are you not aware of the History of both the Quran and the ahadith?

Well aware. It appears that you aren't.

There is no full manuscript that is from the time of the Prophet, and our first fragments of hadith collections come much later.

I have read many books on this topic, for example:

https://www.amazon.com/Textual-Criticism-Quran-Manuscripts-Keith/dp/0739177532

http://www.brill.com/qur-ans-umayyads

https://theauthenticbase.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/introduction-sciences-of-the-quran-yasir-qadhi.pdf

Resources for you:

http://www.islamic-awareness.org/History/Islam/Inscriptions/

http://www.islamic-awareness.org/Quran/Text/Mss/hijazi.html

http://corpuscoranicum.de/

Ozlem Belcim Galip holds a PhD in Kurdish Studies from the University of Exeter. She was Calouste Gulbenkian Postdoctoral fellow at the Oriental Studies at the University of Oxford where she also taught Kurdish. During her post-doctorate, she mainly worked on the representation of Armenian Genocide in Turkish and Kurdish novels. Currently, She is Marie Curie Fellow at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology and her research mainly concerns the activism of Kurdish migrant women in selected host European countries (France, Belgium, Sweden, Germany and the UK) in terms of artistic, literary and cultural practices in both the language(s) of the host countries and the women’s native Kurdish language. Her research interests include Kurdish and Turkish novelistic discourse, Armenian Studies, Kurdish-related research from gender and anthropological perspectives, cultural production and intellectual activity in diaspora.

Marie Curie Fellow

https://www.anthro.ox.ac.uk/people/dr-ozlem-belcim-galip

https://twitter.com/ozlemgalip

https://www.instagram.com/ozlembelcimgalip/?hl=en

She has the ongoing project with the title of "From Kurdistan to Europe: Kurdish Literary, Artistic and Cultural Activism by Kurdish Women Intellectuals” has been accepted by European Commission under Marie Curie Fellowship.

https://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/214093/factsheet/en

She is also working on a documentary with the title of "Anywhere on This Road"

She has the published book with the title of "Imagining Kurdistan: Identity, Culture and Society"

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Imagining-Kurdistan-Identity-Culture-Society/dp/1784530166

https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/imagining-kurdistan-9780857726438/

Unless you want purely faith-promoting works, I suggest looking at the academic side of Quranic studies:
You can read some interesting articles in the Journal of Qur'anic Studies by Edinburgh University Press.
Keith Small’s Textual Criticism and the Qur’an Manuscripts looks at small textual variants over the centuries. It hasn’t been updated yet with the recent find of one of the oldest known text that was found.
Another academic scholar to look into is Christopher Luxenberg (who writes under a pseudonym due to death threats) that looks at the Quran through textual and linguistics analysis. His book most popular book is The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran: A Contribution to the Decoding of the Language of the Quran.
For history, Patricia Crone’s Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World and From Arabia Tribes to Islamic Empire are very good. She summarized much of her research here.