The term “Late Antiquity” constitutes a relatively new European approach to the Qur’an. It situates the origins of Islam within a larger geog-historical context of the cultures of the Near East which preceded it, including Jewish, Christian, pagan, and syncretic traditions. This position challenges Muslim historical narratives of the genesis of Islam, which present it as a break with all existing traditions. Proponents of Late Antiquity contend that such periodization is informative and enlightening since it avoids the accusations of direct textual plagiarism from Jewish or Christian texts advanced by Orientalists and proposes instead a study of the Qur’an as an original text that draws on narratives and figures of the Biblical tradition in an intriguing and vigorous manner. Angelika Neuwirth’s foundational study, Der Koran als Text der Spätantike. Ein europäischer Zugang (The Qur’an as a Text of Late Antiquity: A European Approach” is the first of its kind to connect the Qur’an to this larger context. Praised by Deutschlandradio Kultur as a book that will “re-organize all the myths and misunderstandings that have crept into interpretations of the Koran over the course of the centuries on the part of Muslims,” and commended by Andrew Rippin as “unrivalled by any other work that has appeared for probably the past 100 years, in its overall scope, analytical depth, unified vision and intellectual rigor,” Neuwirth’s argument that the Qur’an is a product of the so-called Late Antiquity has gone incontestable since its initiation in Western scholarship in the last decade. But what exactly is “Late Antiquity”? And what does the Qur’an have to do with it? This paper takes this question as its central thesis. More specifically, the paper argues that if historical investigations of ‘continuity’ and ‘discontinuity’ in the genesis of Islam must submit to a Eurocentrist mapping of the contours of such history, how could one assess the validity of this mapping beyond the existing structures of Eurocentric historiographic boundaries? Is the historical past, especially that of a non-European text belonging to an alien culture, considered a progression toward an ostensible goal? Or is it, rather, a recounting of an intelligible totality? To ask the question more directly, if the history of Islam’s origin is a document that constitutes itself in relationship to other documents and historical contexts, what makes the judgement of such history veritable? What makes it relative or constructed? And for whom?