As has been said previously above, the idea of this volume emerged from two workshops conceived and organised by Asma Hilali that took place successively in 2012 and 2013 at the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London, entitled Fragmentation and Compilation: The Making of Religious Texts in Islam – A Comparison with Ancient Mesopotamia, Judaism and Christianity. The workshop included scholars working in the field of Islamic Studies, but also those working outside of the field, namely scholars of Mesopotamian texts, Judaism and Christianity, to help broaden the reflection on the concept of the fragment vs. the whole beyond Qurʾānic and Islamic Studies. The aim of the workshops was to explore the problematic of the fragment, particularly the relationship between individual ‘fragments’ and the ‘whole’ with which they are associated. Each contributor to these two workshops approached the concept or ‘problematic’ of the fragment within the context of their own research and specialisms.

The comparative and interdisciplinary perspective that both workshops promoted enabled a healthy dialogue between scholars working in very different aspects of Islamic Studies and beyond. The second workshop also focused on the techniques of citation, repetition, variation, selection and canonisation of religious fragments in early and mediaeval Islamic sources, with an opening perspective on Biblical Studies. Other key concepts raised in the workshops included the notion of ‘variants’ and what role they played in the creation and interpretation of texts, the question of ‘origins’ within Qurʾānic Studies, and the way in which other fields in Islamic Studies and beyond could contribute to an understanding of the problematic of the fragment.

Unfortunately this volume did not allow for all the papers presented in the workshops to be included, but many of the ideas discussed in the workshop raised interesting contributions to begin exploring the problem of the fragment. The different papers, both those included in this volume and those given in the workshops, provided a means for us, as editors, to begin to theorise how a fragment functions as a concept, and how fragments are studied and engaged with when they are encountered. This chapter will explore these ideas, and will draw on both the papers included in this volume and summaries of the papers presented at the workshops that not included in this volume.