Tribute to the Islamologist Paul Gilliot

Dominican Islamologist Claude Gilliot died this Saturday, March 15, 2025, at the age of 85. International figure in the exegesis of the Koran, he lived a large part of his life in the Middle East and contributed, by his hundreds of publications, to change our understanding of the training of the Koran in its socio-cultural context.

With a peasant and whole temperament, he never allowed himself to be intimidated by the risks that his scientific work or his positions often made him run. He was for more than fifty years just as comfortable in Dominican clothes in the corridors of the Sunni University of Al-Azhar (Cairo), or in the secular grounds of the University of Aix-Marseille, of which he was a emeritus professor.

Islam of sources

For him, Islam was a religion of reason, in a very sense of “reasonable”, and it attributed to that its contemporary success, as well as an acute awareness of transcendence evacuated from our Western cultures. He conceptualizes the “Islamic monopropheism”that is to say the indefinite resumption of a kind of original revelation updated by the different prophets of biblical history, including Jesus, to Mohammed himself.

Trained in Arabic mainly in Lebanon with the Jesuit Fathers, he conducted his research to Beirut and for thirty years in Cairo, to the Dominican Institute of Eastern Studies which is the counterpart for Islam of the Biblical and Archaeological School of Jerusalem. He worked there in particular in tandem with Father Georges Anawati (1905-1994), a figure inspiring the lines of Vatican Council II on Islam and its consequences in interreligious dialogue.

In the Western academic world as with Muslim intellectuals, Claude Gilliot made it possible to clarify the mechanisms of the HADITHS transmission chains (Aḥādīṯ) in Islam to go back to the sources of the formation of the Koran. It establishes, from only Arab sources, decisive aspects of the life of the Prophet or how the Mecca sections of the Koran were composed within a Judeo-Christian group. From a better understood Islam of origins, he explained the crucial role played by the exegesis of the Koran in the institutionalization of Islam.

The “old -fashioned researcher”

This “Little peasant”as he always described himself, anchored in the language and peasant culture of Calaisis, was associated with Arabic, author of two doctoral theses, German teacher, graduate in sociology, experienced Latinist, linguist, editor, and Dominican preacher. He spoke of popular Arabic, that of the Cairo markets, with a slight refined tone, as he deciphered the most obscure Koranic terms. He put as much zeal, as a priest, to accompany a catechumen as to convince a opponent in an international conference.

Hard worker, with a monastic devotion for the humble and meticulous study, he defined himself as “Old -fashioned researcher”. Several protruding contributions from his immense and scholarly work will be republished in 2025 under the title Studia Koranica (3 vol., Ed. Mehdi Azaiez) at Brill.