His Scholarly Impact
Schwally is best known for his 2nd Edition of Nöldeke’s History of the Koran. Many Orientalists, e.g. Paret (1968), consider this as the definitive text in the field. More recently, Hans Kueng(2004,2008) refers to the importance of this work.
The three volumes of the 2nd Edition of the History of the Koran followed a lengthy and tortuous publication path. Nöldeke was approached by his publisher in 1898 to do a new enlarged second edition of his History of the Koran. (The 1st Edition was published in German in 1860 based on a previously written prize winning essay by Nöldeke in a French competition.) Because of his advancing age, Nöldeke then asked Schwally to take on this task and gave him full responsibility for the resulting text as being Schwally’s own. Volume One, Über den Ursprung des Korans, was published in 1909. After Schwally’s death in February 1919, his brother-in-law Professor Heinrich Zimmern, with editing assistance from Professor August Fischer, took Schwally’s manuscripts of Volume 2, Die Sammlung des Korans, to the publisher in Leipzig. Dr. Gotthelf Bergsträsser, Schwally’s successor at Königsberg, continued and reworked Volume 3. When Bergsträsser died in a mountaineering incident in Bavaria in 1933, Otto Pretzl, who was Bergsträsser’s pupil, continued on until final publication in 1938. The sixth reprint of this 837 page tome was published by Olms in 2008. The work is held in University libraries around the world. The Konrad Adenauer Foundation published a new Arabic translation of the 2nd Edition in 2004 in Beirut, Tarikh al-Quran, translated by Georges Tamer. Before that, a Turkish translation of the 2nd Edition by Muammer Sencer, Kur’an tarihi, was published by Ilke Yayinlari in Istanbul in 1970.
Schwally's next major activity was his many contributions to Tabaqat of Ibn Sa'd, published in Berlin.
Schwally is also widely published in other areas of Old Testament, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Islam together with a seminal paper on the topic of Holy War. His 1901 monograph Der heilige Krieg im alten Israel, was the first single comprehensive treatment of the topic, following on from prior work by Wellhausen and others. As well as publishing work on ancient texts, Schwally has published on contemporary Islam. His 1912 publication, Beitraege zur Kenntnis des Lebens de Mohammedanischen Staeder, Fellachen und Beduinen im heutigen Aegypten and the 1916 journal article Der heilige Krieg des Islams in religionsgeschichtlicher und staatsrechtlicher Beleuchtung are examples of this. He also contributed articles on International Affairs to newspapers such as the Frankfurter Zeitung.
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