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About RIIFS | Publications | Journal (BRIIFS) | Nashra | Conferences | Guest Speakers | Feedback on Islam |
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Copyright © 2003 Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies. All rights reserved.
BRIIFS
vol. 5 no 2
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Walid
Saleh Recent books discussed in this article
include: Mohammad Abu-Hamdiyyah, The Qur’an: An Introduction (London:
Routledge, 2000), 136 pp., Hb. ISBN 04 152225086, Pb. ISBN 04 15225094;
Issa Boullata, ed., Literary Structures of Religious Meaning in the
Qur’an, Curzon Studies on the Qur’an (Richmond: Curzon Press,
2000), 393 pp., Hb. ISBN 07007 12569; Michael Cook, The Koran: A Very
Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 174 pp.,
Pb. ISBN 0 19 285344 9; Reuven Firestone, Jihad: The Origin of Holy War
in Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 208 pp., Hb. ISBN 0
19 512580 0; Roberto Tottoli, Biblical Prophets in the Qur’an and
Muslim Literature, Curzon Studies on the Qur’an (Richmond: Curzon
Press, 2001), 213 pp., Hb. ISBN 07007 13948; and Uri Rubin, Between
Bible and Qur’an: The Children of Israel and the Islamic Self-Image
(Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 1999) , 318 pp., Hb. ISBN 0 87850 134 7. The field of Qur’anic studies
is currently witnessing a vogue among scholars not seen since the high
days of the German School on the eve of World War II. This proliferation
of scholarship is taking place at a time when no consensus exists on a
central core of works to define the field--let alone on a program to train
future scholars. Yet, as I shall argue, our knowledge of the Qur’an has
continued to expand solely through studies conducted in the tradition of
the German School,1 which maintains that the Qur’an reflects the
career of the Prophet Muhammad and that it was codified at an early date.
This review article will reaffirm the central significance of the German
School as representing the most scholarly approach to the Qur’an. The
dire state of Qur’anic studies in recent years is readily apparent if we
compare the large number and high quality of introductory works on the New
Testament or the Hebrew Bible to those on the Qur’an. Readers wishing to
learn about the New Testament face the daunting task of picking from tens
of titles: indeed, a new introduction appears almost annually to inform
the general reader about the latest developments in New Testament studies.
The same can be said about introductions to the Hebrew Bible. Although
many of these new publications challenge some of the fundamental
assumptions of earlier scholars, they also provide historical sketches of
how the field grew and matured, the topics currently engaging it and
bibliographies to guide readers through the accumulated literature in
their respective fields. We
have yet to see such a standard approach in the field of Qur’anic
studies. The few introductions that do exist, if not idiosyncratic, are
gravely flawed by their lack of reference to recent scholarship. To date,
there is no generally-accepted alternative to M. W. Watt’s 1970
reworking of Richard Bell’s 1953 Introduction to the Qur’an.2
Thus, the standard introductory text to the Qur’an is almost fifty years
old. Neal Robinson’s recent publication, Discovering the Qur’an: A
Contemporary Approach to a Veiled Text,3 would seem to be a
worthy replacement, since it is the only work written in the past three
decades with the specific intention of introducing students to the field
in a systematic and coherent manner. Unfortunately, this volume is still
little known, perhaps owing to the exorbitant price set by its publishers.
I will not discuss Robinson’s work here, but do recommend it to
colleagues and students despite the fact that it is already eight years
old. It is unfair to
judge Mohammad Abu-Hamdiyyah’s The Qur’an: An Introduction4
against the three titles mentioned above. Because Abu-Hamdiyyah’s text
comes from outside of the Western tradition of Qur’anic scholarship it
cannot be measured using the standards usually employed to assess
scholarly Western introductions to scriptures. Although it is
unconventional, it can only be understood as a confessional, apologetic
introduction to the Qur’an aimed at a non-Muslim audience. As such, it
exhibits all of the characteristics of a primary document in that it tells
us more about the efforts of a certain stratum of Middle Eastern
intellectuals to approach the Qur’an than it does about the Qur’an as
a seventh-century document. This stratum is
the professional middle class, whose members usually have training in one
of the scientific fields, such as medicine or engineering. They represent
a new breed of Qur’anic specialists, one whose access to scholarly
English-language works on the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament permit
some smattering of the methodology of higher Biblical criticism to
penetrate their milieu. Yet, without a thorough overhaul of the curriculum
at al-Azhar and other seminaries, new methods of studying the Qur’an
will have only a restricted impact on the Middle East owing to the absence
of a receptive audience among the only people who might give such trends
traction: the `ulama’ coming out of theological institutes. So
Abu-Hamdiyyah’s title is actually misleading. When we talk about
introductions to scripture, we tend to have works of a scholarly nature in
mind, which this one is not. Neither is Abu-Hamdiyyah’s work a
translation into English of a classic `ulum al-Qur’an genre text,
the usual fare to which we are accustomed; it is a totally different take
on the Qur’an from within the Islamic tradition. The author
maintains that his work is a “new and original study on the Qur’an”
and that it does not deal “with theological interpretations which
accumulated across the ages, nor with any of the recent studies dealing
with the Qur’an.”5 He is thus breaking bonds both with
inherited Islamic understandings of the text and with modern scholarship
in order to embark upon a more personal journey. This is in line with a
new trend among the Muslim world’s emerging religious élite, which
believes that it is entitled to offer a fresh, unmediated explanation of
Islam and the Qur’an. This new religious élite, which has benefited
from a modern education, rather than a traditional one in a seminary, is
engaged in a highly complex exercise to understand the Qur’an as a text
that is in harmony with modernity. Its members are unabashed in their
insistence on the immediacy of their perception. Hence, Abu-Hamdiyyah
informs us that he will interact “directly with the text of the Qur’an
in a straightforward objective manner to produce a fresh presentation of
the Qur’anic discourse from a modern perspective.”6 Almost a third
of the work is dedicated to a survey of pre-Islamic religions in the Near
East which is intended to show that Islam was the natural culmination of
this shared religious history. What appears at first to be the author’s
acceptance of the methods and findings of scholars involved in higher
criticism and the history of religions turns out to be half-hearted
acquiescence at best. Higher criticism is used only to the degree that it
can show the historicity of Judaism and Christianity--their historical
evolution is seen as restricting their universality--without impinging
upon the assumed divine nature and timelessness of the Qur’anic message.
In this section of the book, the author is primarily interested in
demonstrating the primacy of the Qur’an over the Hebrew Bible and the
New Testament--its rationality, universality and utter compatibility with
modernity. The tone sometimes becomes what can only be described as
anti-Christian and anti-Jewish.7 The Qur’an, according to
Abu-Hamdiyyah, is an empirical text, both enjoining the use of the
scientific method and providing, through it, a way to God.8 Ours
being a time in which the word ‘pluralism’ is on everyone’s tongue,
Abu-Hamdiyyah is not to be outdone in his embrace of it. In a rather
incomprehensible passage, he assures us that the Qur’an both allows
pluralism and restricts it to prevent relativism from gaining ascendancy.9 In Part II of
the work, Abu-Hamdiyyah offers us his understanding of the Qur’an. He
begins by describing in some detail many of the Qur’anic themes that are
contained in what he calls “quranic units.” Thus, we are told what the
Qur’an has to say on God, freedom of religion, the creed of Islam,
resurrection day, ethics, justice, self-defence, male-female relationships
and marriage.10 Most of the definitions given here are what I would
call modernist in spirit and seem to have a Christian European audience in
mind. Certainly, the author’s anxiety about Islam’s image in the West
is evident in his discussion of references to fighting in the Qur’an
(under the rubric of self-defence). At this point, he sees fit to digress
to inform us that the word ‘sword’ does not appear in the Qur’an,
although it is amply attested in the Hebrew Bible. Still more interesting
to him is the famous verse (10:34) in the Gospel of Matthew,11
which he simply quotes without comment--the point, in his view, being too
evident to state. The most
intriguing part of this book involves Abu-Hamdiyyah’s discussion of
human knowledge and revelation. Using quasi-mystical, quasi-New Age
jargon, he seems to equate divine revelation with human self-knowledge: Thus in reality,
inspiration or revelation is a human activity connected with the learning
process and the seeking of the truth. There is an invisible thread
connecting things together (the Order) and humans struggle to delineate
this invisible interconnectedness. The effort lies with the human being.
This invisible interconnectedness points the way to God, the ultimate
reality. The process of inspiration or revelation need not only deal with
large issues such as man’s destiny, but may deal with something mundane
such as inventing a new tool, discovering a new product or solving any
simple problem regardless of how trivial it may appear. The author does
not seem to realize the radical import of such statements: if divine
revelation is the product of human activity, then why is it divine at all?
But that would be the wrong approach to understanding Abu-Hamdiyyah’s
words. He is not advocating the abandonment of the divine nature of
revelation so much as the elevation of the mundane to the realm of the
divine. This is altogether typical of the concerns of a certain type of
Islamist modernist who wishes to prove that inventing tools, solving
mundane problems--in short, addressing the challenges faced by Muslim
societies in their march toward modernity--are divine activities. Having agreed to
publish this book, Routledge should have taken the trouble to offer the
author an editor’s assistance. The work is marred by incomprehensible
sentences, pages and even whole sections; in certain places, it is simply
indecipherable. On the whole, unless the reader already knows Arabic, he
or she will have a hard time making out what the author is implying or
trying to say, for the text is heavy on Arabisms and short on idiomatic
English.12 This is unfortunate because, as I have said above, this
book is a fascinating primary document illustrating how liberal middle
class intellectuals in the Middle East are trying to come to terms with
the challenge that higher criticism represents to the integrity of divine
revelation. Firmly within
the tradition of Western scholarship is Michael Cook’s The Koran: A
Very Short Introduction, which attempts to inform the interested
non-specialist about the role of the Qur’an “in the religious history
of the Islamic world.”13 This ambitious plan is perhaps also the
book’s major shortcoming for, despite the author’s best efforts, he is
unable to cover in one brief introduction all of the material on what is
arguably the most important document in Islamic civilization. Just to give
one example: nowhere in the text does Cook discuss the Qur’an’s
influence upon the artistic and poetic heritage of the Arab/Islamic world,
yet both are integral to its religious history. The Qur’an was and
remains an inspirational text for the two most characteristic of Islamic
arts: calligraphy and poetry. Nonetheless, Cook has only this
parenthetical statement to make about calligraphy and the Qur’an:
“(Calligraphy was an enormously prestigious art in Islamic culture, just
as it was in traditional China.)”14 The comparison to China is
not helpful, for it presupposes the reader’s familiarity with Chinese
calligraphy and its significance; moreover, most readers would want to
know more about calligraphy in one culture before it is compared with
another. Cook is very
familiar with the latest scholarly literature on the Qur’an and does an
admirable job of summarizing some of it. However, the moment that he
starts offering us his own assessment of--or musings upon--this
literature, it becomes obvious that, as a non-specialist on the Qur’an,
he is not equipped to carry out the task. Moreover, the methods that he
uses to do this are not only outdated, but questionable on scholarly
grounds: invariably, his observations lead him to conclusions that are
unjustifiable. I will give just one example of this. Cook starts his book
with a translation of the first sura of the Qur’an, known as al-Fatiha.15
The single aspect of this short chapter that Cook chooses to highlight is
the expression al-sirat al-mustaqim, ‘the straight path.’ His
analysis of this term is set apart in a box to draw the reader’s
attention to it--a common practice in Oxford’s Very Short Introduction
series. It is worth quoting the text in full: ‘The Straight
Path’: al-sirat al-mustaqim. The word sirat is interesting. The
Romans used the Latin ‘strata’ for the kind of paved road they built
so straight. From them the word passed to the peoples of their empire and
even beyond, so that from ‘strata’ derive both the Arabic sirat and
the English ‘street’. But whereas ‘street’ has remained a secular
term, sirat came to be used only in religious contexts. It is a curious
feature of the word that it has no plural in Arabic, reinforcing our sense
of the uniqueness of the Straight Path.16 This passage is
in the tradition of etymological studies of the Qur’an. The main premise
of this approach is that the non-Arabic cognates of certain Arabic words
are keys that allow us to understand the use of the latter in the
Qur’an.17 Thus, Cook informs his reader about the etymology of sirat
but, as is typical with this approach, not of its significance in the
text, where it appears 46 times. The proper way to understand the meaning
of sirat, however, is to investigate how it is used in each of
these instances. Moreover, Cook is simply wrong to claim that there is no
plural for sirat in Arabic: there are at least two of them.18 The fact that he
deems it appropriate to draw broad conclusions from the presumed absence
of an Arabic plural is another indication that his method of studying
scripture lacks theoretical reflection. Worst still, at the end of his
work, Cook implies that the absence of a plural for sirat is far
more significant than a mere philological peculiarity: it reflects a
fundamental mental state shared by all Arabs. The fact--or, better,
non-fact--that Arabic does not have a plural for ‘path’ is used to
indict today’s Arabs for their alleged inability to comprehend the
concept of pluralism.19 Our confidence
in Cook’s ability to assess the Qur’an is also weakened by his
arbitrary approach to scholarly literature on the subject. Consider, for
example, his sweeping dismissal of all scholarship on the phrase `an
yadin (Qur’an 9:29) and his assertion that the academic community is
baffled by its meaning. There are at least 10 articles on this term and
the usual way of refuting a reading is to offer an analysis indicating how
and why it is unacceptable. No one can fault Cook if he remains
unconvinced by any of these articles, but he gives his readers not an
argument, but a judgement. This brings us
to the issue of authority in the discipline of Qur’anic studies as a
whole. It is an
unfortunate fact--and, certainly, most unusual--that only scholars of
Islam (and the Middle East) encounter no objections when they make
pronouncements on subjects within their vast field, but beyond the
confines of their specialities. Professor Cook may be a leading scholar of
early Islamic theology, but none of his scholarly output is dedicated to
the Qur’an itself, so it is not clear why he feels competent to write on
it. Take, for example, his cavalier treatment of seafaring in the
Qur’an. Without citing any particular verses, Cook informs us that the
Qur’anic material on this topic reflects firsthand knowledge of the sea,
something that is not reported of Muhammad. Reading Cook, one might get
the impression that the Qur’an rivals Moby Dick in maritime
information value, but this is hardly the case.20 In fact, there is
nothing in the Qur’an on this subject that cannot be explained in terms
of what a late antique merchant might have heard from his contacts.21
Moreover, it takes little imagination to realize that anyone who has lived
and travelled in a desert is in an excellent position to extrapolate on
seafaring. Finally, the S•ra, for what it is worth as a source of
historical information, does mention that some of Muhammad’s companions
moved to Abyssinia, so they might have told him about the sea and
seafaring. We also know that the roof of the Ka†ba was rebuilt after a
flood using wood from a ship stranded on the Red Sea’s shore, west of
Mecca. Thus, historical information does exist that might indicate sources
for Muhammad’s knowledge of the sea. Despite being a
non-specialist on the Qur’an, Cook is not afraid to express his disdain
for its intellectual worth, a position that he has repeatedly expressed in
other publications. In Hagarism, he declared that “the book
[Qur’an] is strikingly lacking in overall structure, frequently obscure
and inconsequential in both language and content, perfunctory in its
linking disparate materials, and given to the repetition of whole passages
in variant versions.”22 Yet, unlike Robert Alter on Biblical
studies, Cook is not explicitly stating that he is approaching Qur’anic
studies as an outsider and merely offering us his perspective.23
Nor does he indicate that he is highly selective when considering the
conclusions of genuine specialists on the Qur’an. For instance, he
insists that “only very short Suras possess an evident thematic unity”24
even though Angelika Neuwirth has shown this position to be unfounded.25
Indeed, studies published since the appearance of Neuwirth’s magisterial
work are proving that even major Qur’anic suras (such as chapter
two) have been coherently planned and possess an overall structure. Yet,
we find no reference in Cook to any of these studies. On the other hand,
when a later finding by Neuwirth on the liturgical use of the Qur’an
agrees with Cook’s preferred slant, the reader is acquainted with the
evidence.26 Since Cook is obviously familiar with Neuwirth’s
work, it seems odd that he rejects her Studien zur Komposition,
which represents the most important contribution to the field since the
1980s. The way in which
Cook handles Neuwirth’s research is indicative of his general attitude
toward the German School. Although he gives the School’s findings in his
general outline of the Qur’an, his retelling is presented in a
provisional way that places doubt upon the finer points while failing to
offer a coherent alternative. In many ways, it should be said, his account
is substantially the same as one that might be given by any guarded
scholar from the German School. But although Cook positions himself as an
authority in the field, he fails to commit himself to any definite
position that might be subject to scrutiny. Moreover, he not only omits
mention of Neuwirth’s Studien zur Komposition, but also Rudi
Paret’s unsurpassed Mohammed und der Koran.27 In many
respects, Cook simply fails to acknowledge the degree to which his
understanding of the Qur’an has been formed and shaped by the German
School or that he and other like-minded scholars have as yet to offer a
different understanding that is of equal cogency. Cook’s work
leaves the reader with the general impression that both the Qur’an and
the Muslims are inadequate. Because of the way in which he uses the
comparative method, that approach, as championed by practitioners of the
history of religions, is turned upside down. As Cook would have it, the
Qur’an does not offer a sustained narrative “of the kind found in the
Book of Exodus.”28 But it is not clear why the Qur’an should
resemble the book of Exodus. Furthermore, Muslims from the non-Arab world
show “little sign of adopting the idea of a vernacular scripture in the
manner of sixteenth-century Protestantism or twentieth-century
Catholicism.”29 But, unlike the situation in Latin Europe, where
any translation of scripture was banned, Muslims had interlinear
translations of their scriptures from an early date, as Cook himself
mentions. Thus, the translation of scripture in the Muslim world did not
take on the symbolic significance that it had in Latin Europe, where it
involved movements of religious and political reform in the Church.
Indeed, the very opposite occurred in the Muslim world, where reform
movements were very much connected to the notion of teaching Arabic to
non-Arabs in order to make the Qur’an more accessible. Cook is also
struck by the fact that the Islamic world, “of all the major cultural
domains,” seems to have been the “least penetrated by irreligion”
and contrasts it with North America where, he says, irreligion does exist,
but believers are strong enough to engage in cultural warfare against the
mainstream, although they “have currently no chance of prevailing over
it.”30 As any expert in American history knows, however, religion
has long been and still is one of the most fundamental determining factors
of American culture. General comparisons of this kind neither illuminate
Islamic cultures, nor promote the dissemination of accurate information
about the ones to which Cook compares them. The most
interesting failure of the Muslims, according to Cook, has been their
apparent inability to match the complex linguistic developments that
occurred in East Asia in relation to the Confucian classics. When reading
the Qur’an, Muslims pronounce its Arabic words uniformly; hence,
“there is nothing in the Islamic world to compare with the situation in
East Asia, where the traditional readings of a Confucian classic [in
Chinese ideograms] by speakers of Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean, and
Japanese would be mutually unintelligible.”31 One is at a loss
here to know why the reception of the Qur’an and of Confucian classics
should be compared and, if they are, why developments in one tradition
should be taken as the norm by which the other is measured. As the Chinese
language does not use an alphabetical script, readers from different
linguistic traditions can read Chinese texts differently: the Japanese
learned the Chinese script from the Koreans, but not Chinese
pronunciation. Thus, the effects of the reception of Confucianism upon the
languages of East Asia might not have occurred had the language of
transmission been a different one. Alphabetical script aside, Muslim
scholars who were not Arabs have invariably been bilingual, speaking their
native tongues as well as Arabic, while those who were Arabs traditionally
travelled to distant lands for study and trade. Cook might have
made a more apt comparison had he considered the Ashkenazi and Mizrahi
(Jews of the Arab world) readings of the Hebrew Bible. Despite the fact
that these two communities were linguistically separated for over a
millennium and despite the phonetic peculiarities that each tradition
developed, their readings are not mutually incomprehensible for, like
Arabic, Hebrew is an alphabetic language. In the end, Cook’s attempt to
compare the linguistic effects of the reception of Confucianism with the
situation in the Muslim world is so inconsequential that it seems to have
no other aim than to hint at a stultifying Islam that precludes divergence
or evolution. Professor Cook
is the quintessential expert on the Middle East; he knows it all: its
past, its future, its history and its habits. Thus, he can tell us that
that the English Calvinist, William Whitaker (d. 1595), “might have made
an acceptable Muslim and held down a job at the Azhar.”32 He even
knows that Fazlur Rahman’s Major Themes in the Qur’an “is not
the kind of book that Azhar could be expected to approve.”33 This
might indeed be the case, although I think it just as likely that al-Azhar
might endorse the work, if it took notice of it, but here I am
speculating--just as Cook is doing. This sort of speculation is as good as
useless. Al-Azhar’s reactions are unpredictable and its history rife
with contradictions; at one time, it busied itself rubber-stamping
socialist initiatives. In the summer of 2003, three years after Cook made
his comments, al-Azhar decided, in fact, to stop banning books. This
decision was not unanimous and, indeed, some members of the governing
council issued dissenting statements; moreover, the arguments given in
favour of the decision were probably not what free speech activists would
have liked to hear. All the same, al-Azhar did make an unforeseen decision
to change one of its practices. These are the
sort of musings that Cook offers in a very short introduction to
the Qur’an which, as he notes, gives him little space to say much.34
Had the author offered us what we expect to find in an introduction, his
digressions would have mattered less, but in order to obtain the missing
information, we are told that we must buy yet another of his books. Tucked
at the very end of his book is this surprising statement: “A short
survey of what the Koran has to say about some of the things that are
important to it can be found in Chapters 3-6 of my Muhammad (in the
Oxford University Press ‘Past Masters’ series, Oxford 1983).”35
Hence, readers of the volume under review will learn of Cook’s
conviction that Whitaker would have made a good Muslim, but not the most
important facts about the Qur’an. Reuven
Firestone’s monograph, Jihad: The Origins of Holy War in Islam,
attempts to “examine the origin of the holy war phenomenon in Islam, to
test whether the traditional Islamic position on its origin and
development is sound, and to employ methodologies and assumptions current
in the social sciences as well as philology in order to describe and
explain the early importance of holy war ideas and their implementation in
primitive Islam.”36 Had Firestone restricted himself to a
detailed study of the Qur’anic data alone, he would have done the field
a great service. However, he also investigates the prophetic Sunna, thus
confining his assessment of the Qur’anic data to one chapter only, a
chapter that is barely 35 pages long. This hasty analysis of the Qur’an
greatly weakens the conclusions that he wishes to draw concerning the
significance of fighting in the Qur’an. There are literally scores of
verses that are not considered or discussed. Any analysis of a concept in
an enclosed text has to be comprehensive, particularly when an author
wishes to replace an old understanding of it with one that is new, rather
than merely refining some aspect of the accepted view. So it is on this
point that Firestone’s work falls short. Firestone claims
that the material in the Qur’an on fighting cannot be understood in an
evolutionary manner, that is, as progressing from pacifism to militarism.
Rather, he believes that the conflicting verses regarding war
“articulate the views of different factions existing simultaneously
within the early Muslim community of Mu¡ammad’s day and, perhaps,
continuing for a period after his death. Each faction would refer to
different scriptural sources available from the oral and as yet unedited
and uncanonized compendium of revelation for support of its views.”37
He sees four different aspects that the verses on fighting emphasize. Some
verses express “nonmilitant means of propagating or defending the
faith”; some put restrictions on fighting; other verses express
“conflict between God’s command and the reaction of Mu¡ammad’s
followers”; and yet others strongly advocate “war for God’s
religion.”38 The subject of
fighting does not merely form an occasional digression in the Qur’an; it
is a central topic in most of the Madinan verses. In order to assess
Firestone’s analysis, I reviewed and reread those sections of the
Qur’an that deal with fighting. The amount of material is simply
staggering. Firestone argues that “the very large number of exhortations
calling Muslims to engage in battle against their enemies suggests that
significant portions of the community were not inclined to do so.”39
The Qur’an’s unwillingness to tolerate any apathy regarding the new
doctrine of fighting is indicative of one thing alone: the central
position of fighting in the orientation of the new polity and the urgent
necessity of upholding it. If Meccans were roughly divided into the
faithful (or monotheists) and the unfaithful (mushrikun), Medinans
saw the appearance of a new category: the munafiqun, whose only sin
was their refusal to submit to the necessity of fighting. Thus, Firestone
is undeniably correct in stating that a segment of the early community was
unwilling to fight. But this hardly means that the Qur’an is unclear
about what it wants believers to do. We only need compare how many times
the Qur’an exhorts believers to fast, pray, perform the pilgrimage or
any other ritual, with its incessant demand that they go into battle.
Muhammad was able to pacify Arabia (a domain so vast and so ungovernable
that we tend to forget how improbable this achievement was) and to exert
his influence over it after less than ten years precisely because he was
consistent in his objectives and used the new polity and its more or less
standing army of volunteers to bring the peninsula under his control.40
Meccans were far more powerful, but lacked the determination and will to
fight that Muhammad instilled in his followers. The later Islamic
understanding of the centrality of fighting in the Qur’an is, therefore,
unconnected to any attempt to justify subsequent Islamic conquests: the
early polity, the first to control all of Arabia, was itself a
revolutionary development. The two-year internecine struggle among the
Arabs following Muhammad’s death demonstrates the fragility of his
enterprise even after ten years of effort and the continuing pivotal role
of warfare in consolidating the new polity. Firestone’s
analysis explains the data that he presents, but not the Qur’anic data
on fighting. The existence of contradictory verses on fighting in the
Qur’an does not negate the fact that the point of exhortations to fight
was to allow Muhammad access to a volunteer army ready for deployment at a
moment’s notice. This was the cornerstone of his success as leader in
Medina. By the time that Muhammad had conquered Mecca, he was able to call
for the mobilization of all Muslim males (Qur’an 9:117-129). Because of
these considerations, I see no compelling reason to accept Firestone’s
conclusions and discard the traditional evolutionary theory.41 Firestone’s
analysis, however, has drawn my attention to a very intriguing question.
Given the preponderance and centrality of verses on fighting in the
Qur’an, how did Islamic theology and ritual manage to eliminate this
aspect so completely from the creedal formulation of high Islamic culture?
In this respect, Muslim theologians apparently managed to turn their backs
on the divinely-sanctioned political exigencies of Medina, demonstrating a
remarkable resistance to divine imperative in a scriptural culture. The
ambivalence of jihad in Islamic culture is thus the jihad’s
greatest legacy. The significance of Firestone’s monograph lies less in
its conclusions than in the way that it reopens the question of what the
Qur’an is actually saying. In this sense, he forces us to re-examine and
test old assumptions, thus permitting a complete re-evaluation of existing
scholarship. Henceforth, those who study the concept of fighting in the
Qur’an will have to take Firestone’s analysis into consideration. Roberto
Tottoli’s Biblical Prophets in the Qur’an and Muslim Literature
is a much-needed general introduction to Old Testament prophets and the
ways in which they have been represented in the Qur’an and in subsequent
Arabic-language works until the modern era.42 Tottoli brings
together the substantial literature dedicated to this topic in European
languages and offers the reader a detailed outline of who’s who in the
Qur’an. His is not, however, a totally new assessment as much as a
summary and commentary on existing scholarship. As such, it is bound to
reflect both the strengths and weaknesses of this secondary literature.
Moreover, it comes at a time when the scholarly approach to Biblical
material is moving away from an earlier tendency to try to prove the
Qur’an’s dependency through the citation of Biblical parallels.
Tottoli is all too aware of the pitfalls of most of the secondary
literature in this field. He is thus careful to state in his introduction
that his account of the similarities and differences between the Qur’an
and the Jewish and Christian material “is not carried out with the
purpose of stressing the dependence of or presumed inexactitude of the
Qur’an in relation to the Biblical tradition, but only to explain the
particularities of the contents and the form of those parts of the
Qur’an dedicated the prophets.”43 The fact that
the Qur’an contains Biblical material should be clear to every scholar
by now. In so far as this material has to come from somewhere, it is
obviously based, in one way or another, upon traditions that grew out of
the Hebrew Bible. Refined methods of scholarship are hardly needed to
prove this point. The challenge is to account for what the Qur’an is
doing with this material. Unfortunately, however, most of the scholarship
on Biblical material in the Qur’an has focused upon proving the
latter’s dependency upon the former, as though this fact alone reveals
something about the Qur’an. There has been a hunt to trace the
antecedents of every piece of information to its supposed sources. Instead
of using these parallels to shed light on how the Qur’an adapted this
material to fit its aims, scholars and others used them to argue that the
Qur’an was confused. Discrepancies between the Qur’anic version of a
Biblical story and the one found in the Hebrew Bible led to accusations
that the Qur’an had misunderstood the Bible or was muddled or incapable
of getting the story right. This procedure is, of course,
counterintuitive. The Qur’an takes a polemical position vis-à-vis
earlier scriptures and posits itself as presenting the ‘true’ story.
Clearly, then, the Qur’an is not obliged to repeat slavishly the
contents of Judaeo-Christian scriptures in its retelling of them. What the
Qur’an gives us is its own interpretation of the significance of
previous scriptures. What we need to ascertain, therefore, is how this
material is used and transformed to suit the Qur’an’s aims and
purposes. The Qur’an has a vision of what the salvific history of
monotheism means and what its truth-value is and, in presenting Biblical
material, it refashioned and transformed it to construct a new edifice. In this regard,
the immense accumulation of secondary literature on the ‘sources’ of
the Qur’an has put Tottoli in a very difficult position. Merely by
summarizing this literature, he is positioning a supposedly discarded
method of understanding Biblical material in the Qur’an at the centre of
his presentation. This is unavoidable since Tottoli is not re-examining
the stories, but studying how they have been understood in previous
scholarship. Thus, despite the stated intentions of the author in his
introduction, this work ultimately reiterates the charge that the Qur’an
is ‘mixed up’ about certain Biblical stories. I will give an
example of what I mean by this. In the process of telling us about David,
Tottoli rushed through the story of Saul as given in the Qur’an. This is
how Totolli presents the material in the body of his book: A long passage
from the sura of the Cow (no. 2) introduces the events that preceded the
ascension to the throne of David and states that after the death of Moses
the Israelites called for a prophet to raise up a king from amongst them.
The prophet, which the Qur’an does not give the name of, indicates Saul
as the future sovereign and the Ark as the token of this reign. With a
description of the contents of the Ark and of the troops of Saul, who are
put to the test when they refuse to confront Goliath, one last verse
finally refers to David and states that he “slew Goliath and God gave
him the kingship, and wisdom, and He taught him such as He will.”44 Let us ignore,
for the moment, the fact that the Israelites refuse to fight after the
test and not before it, as Tottoli erroneously tells us, and consider
instead the author’s very illuminating footnote to this passage. I will
quote it in full: The whole
passage is in Qur. 2:246-251; the verse quoted is Qur. 2:251. The
exegetical literature identifies in Samuel the anonymous prophet mentioned
in these events. As regards the contents of the Qur’anic passage on the
other hand, according to Geiger, Judaism and Islam, 144, they are
the product of a confusion between Saul and Gideon. The extremely positive
Qur’anic figure of Saul has, according to Speyer, Die Biblischen Erzählungen,
367, parallels in Christian rather than Jewish literature. Also, Busse, Die
Theologischen Beziehungen, 110, returns to this topic, when he adds
that one can also recognize a parallel between the conditions of the
Muslims and the story of the Israelites with Saul. As we can see,
Tottoli says nothing in his text about any mix-up in the Qur’an. The
moment we move to the footnotes, however, we are faced with a scholarly
assertion of a confused Qur’an. The implications of such an
understanding of the Qur’an are not trivial: they hamper any insight
into the Qur’an and its world. Let me now quote
the verse on the testing of the Israelites as given in the Qur’an
(Penguin Classics translation): And when €alut
marched out with his army, he said: “God will put you to the proof at a
certain river. He that drinks from it shall cease to be of me, but he that
does not drink from it, or contents himself with a taste of it in the
hollow of his hand, shall be of me.” But they all drank from it, except
a few of them. And when Talut had crossed the river with those who shared
his faith, they said: “We have no power this day against Jalut (Goliath)
and his warriors.” But those of them who believed that they would meet
God replied: “Many a small band has, by God’s grace, vanquished a
mighty army. God is with those who endure with fortitude” (2:249). Is this really a
confused account of a Biblical tale? Not if we analyze the verse in its
Qur’anic context. Here, Saul asks his warriors to refrain from drinking
the waters of a river they are about to cross before the battle, saying
that God wants to test them. Those who drink liberally are unwilling to
fight, while those who drink only sparingly or not at all, namely, the
minority, are God-fearing and certain of victory. Geiger and Speyer saw
the origin of this episode in the story of Gideon in Judges 7:5-8 and they
argued that Muhammad had confused this tale with the one in which Saul
ordered his soldiers to avoid eating in I Samuel 12:24-48.45 Yet,
to make such a claim is to miss the whole point of the episode in the
Qur’an. First, the Qur’an tells the story in such a manner as to
exonerate Saul of any hint of capriciousness or folly. It is not Saul who
orders the soldiers to refrain from drinking, but God, who wishes to test
the believers. Thus, we can conclude that the Qur’an does not want to
undermine Saul’s image as a warrior king. This is in keeping with the
Qur’an’s presentation of the Patriarchs and other Israelites as
sinless prophets or near-perfect human beings. Indeed, the presentation of
all salvific history as one constituted of unblemished prophets coming to
preach to unresponsive crowds is a Qur’anic hallmark.46 The prohibition
against eating in the Bible is turned upside down in the Qur’an. In I
Samuel, Saul’s foolish order is obeyed by all of the Israelites except
Jonathan, who violates it only because he is unaware of it. In the
Qur’an’s retelling, most of the Israelites disobey God’s demand,
preferring to drink copiously after initially pledging to fight and do
God’s will. Moreover, the Qur’anic story has different aims. In
Gideon, God chooses who will have the honour of fighting, since too many
Israelites show up for the battle. In the Qur’an, the Israelites are
unwilling to risk a fight. The Qur’an is not trying to prove that God
has no need of their help for a victory; it is emphasizing trust in God, a
blind trust in God’s inscrutable wisdom--for what could be more
inscrutable than asking a fighting army to abstain from water before a
battle and to claim that this is God’s wisdom and test? It is precisely
this enigmatic demand that is the point in the Qur’an’s retelling of
the story. In many ways, it also reflects the totally unrealistic program
of Muhammad who, despite being unprepared to take on the inhabitants of
the Arabian peninsula, dared to think of launching a polity where none had
been tried before. Thus, the Qur’an is here drawing a parallel between
the mission of Saul and the mission of Muhammad in Medina. Both are
indefensible through the use of logic and make sense only if one has
complete trust in God. Muhammad is asking his supporters to follow his
lead even if his demand is as unfathomable and as maddening as being asked
to avoid drinking water before a battle. Those who will follow him are
those who have faith in victory. This is not confusion, but the artful use
of Biblical motifs to reshape a story to suit another end. One might argue
without difficulty that the Qur’an knew not only the Saul story, but
also the Gideon episode and used elements from both to shape a totally new
episode to fit its program. If we insist on
reading the Qur’an as a series of failed attempts to summarize Biblical
stories, we cannot understand the deeper resonance that these stories
evidently had with the pre-Islamic Arabs. We have to imagine the impact of
this tale on desert dwellers living precarious lives in an almost
waterless land. The teller of the story was surely aware of its impact. To
be asked to go thirsty before a battle sounds, if not mad, then comical,
rather in keeping with the pagan perception of the outlandish God of
Muhammad and His claims to total cosmic sovereignty. (Luckily for us, the
Qur’an has preserved the scathing sarcasm of the Meccans against the God
of Muhammad and His claims.) Yet, it is precisely the element of trust
that Muhammad wants to instil in his followers, for it constitutes faith
and guarantees victory. And perhaps we
are missing another point here. For that which the story does not name,
thirst, underlies the whole. The ethos of pre-Islamic Arabia and the
mythical dimensions of thirst in relation to blood and vengeance are not
unknown to us. Thirst was a primordial fear; it was not merely a physical
state, but also a perilous metaphysical condition. When a victim of
homicide went unavenged, a thirsty owl was said to spring from his head to
haunt the living with its cries for revenge. Thirst and revenge are themes
inextricably entwined in pre-Islamic poetry and it is there that one must
look for the pre-Islamic ethos needed to approach the Qur’an.47
It was not hunger that the Qur’an chose as a test in the story of Saul,
as the Hebrew Bible does, but thirst, a more terrifying state evocative of
death, shrieking owls in deserted ruins and graves thirsty for revenge.
Yet, parched mouths and swollen tongues must not turn the believer away
from trust in God. Is the Qur’an transporting the motif of thirst from
the dimension of personal tragedy to a communal plan of action? Fortunately,
most of the scholars now working on Biblical material in the Qur’an have
moved beyond the ‘confused’ text thesis. One of the best is Uri Rubin,
the author of Between Bible and Qur’an: The Children of Israel and
the Islamic Self-Image.48 It is no exaggeration to state that
Rubin is a pre-eminent scholar in the field of Qur’anic studies.
Recently, he announced that he is about to publish a new translation of
the Qur’an in modern Hebrew, which will, I am certain, join the classics
of Paret, Arberry and Blachère. I will not give a summary here of what Between
Bible and Qur’an attempts to do, but rather will highlight the
important shift in Rubin’s scholarship that it represents, for the
implications of this shift are, in many ways, far more significant. Rubin has
produced a long series of articles over the past 25 years that deal with
discreet elements of the Qur’an, for instance, the concepts of al-samad
(Qur’an 112:2) and `an yadin (Qur’an 9:29) among many others.
In these articles, Rubin has adhered to the German School of the Qur’an,
by which I mean that he understands the codification of the Qur’an to
have been an early event in Islamic religious history undertaken by Caliph
†Uthman. In his last two books, (the first being The Eye of the
Beholder49), Rubin has changed his position; he now believes
that Wansborough’s analysis, which posits the Qur’an’s belated
appearance on the scene, is the way to understand the history of the
Qur’an’s codification. But what is most
intriguing in this shift is that Rubin further believes that the Sunna
contains pre-Qur’anic material. With this development, Rubin is not just
a member of Wansborough’s School; in many ways, he is a School in his
own right. Specialists in Qur’anic studies have now to contend with a
very complicated picture of the origins of Islam. In Rubin’s two books,
we have a reconstruction of the origins of the intellectual
identity-formation of the nascent Islamic community achieved by means of a
thorough study of hadith. Harald Motzki and his followers now have
very strong support from someone who does not believe that the Qur’an
preceded the Sunna. What is
important about Rubin’s work is that it can stand on its own whether we
accept or reject his premise about the dating of the Qur’an. By this I
mean that the historical implications of his study do not affect the
analysis that he has carried out on the texts. This is testimony to the
rigor of his method: a close reading of the sources. Few scholars are able
to collect, sift through and analyze as much early Islamic literature as
Rubin has. Indeed, if we want to check up on recent primary publications
in the field, we only need look at the bibliography of this scholar. He is
simply indefatigable. Although I do not share Rubin’s understanding of
how the Qur’an was codified, I see no fault in the method that he uses
to analyze and study the data. Indeed, his articles are textbook examples
for students to emulate. It should be
clear from the foregoing that the field of Qur’anic studies is at an
impasse: the history of the Qur’an’s codification has now moved
inexorably to centre stage. What we need now is clear palaeographic
resolution of the issue of the dating of the Qur’an. We cannot afford
more studies on the Qur’an while this major point remains in dispute.
Thus, François Déroche’s investigations into the history of early
manuscripts of the Qur’an is presently the most important work being
done in the field of Qur’anic studies. At the very least, we need a terminus
a quo to tell us, with some degree of certainty, when the Qur’an’s
codification was completed. The last volume
that I will review, Literary Structures of Religious Meaning in the
Qur’an, edited by Issa J. Boullata,50 is an outstanding
collection of articles by distinguished scholars in the field, including
Michael Sells, A. H. Mathias Zahiser, Jane Dammen McAuliffe, Alford T.
Welch, Andrew Rippin, Irfan Shahid, Angelika Neuwirth, Mustanir Mir,
Anthony H. Johns, Soraya M. Hajjaj-Jarrah, Navid Kermani, Yusuf Rahman,
Mahmoud M. Ayoub, Kamal Abu-Deeb and, of course, Issa J. Boullata. The
prime concern of these scholars is to study the Qur’an on its own terms
in order to understand it, rather than merely deeming it unintelligible.
In the process, the weight of the literary approach is brought to bear
upon the Qur’an. This volume might, therefore, be considered the first
comprehensive attempt to present the Qur’an in a way consistent with the
tradition of studying scriptures as literature: it could have been
subtitled: “The Qur’an as Literature.” It is difficult
to summarize the contents of fifteen separate contributions in a review
article and it might, in fact, be more profitable to try to outline the
assumptions underpinning the approach common to their various authors. The
first and, possibly, most evident assumption is that the Qur’an is
capable of being analyzed. By this, I mean the premise that the text is
attempting to convey a message to us. As such, it is presumed to be
intelligible. This might sound elementary or sophomoric but,
unfortunately, the field of Qur’anic studies is in such a state that
this elementary hypothesis is absent from much of the scholarly literature
on the Qur’an owing to the strong influence of the etymological approach
to studying it. As noted above,
the main premise of the etymological approach to the Qur’an is that its
language and ideas can be explained through the use of cognates from other
Semitic languages. It presumes that the Qur’an does not mean what it
says and, more importantly, that what it says is confused and disjointed
because it did not know how to say it. During the last century, the
‘etymological fallacy’ usurped many other scholarly approaches to the
study of the Qur’an so that, until recently, we rarely encounter
credible accounts of the Qur’anic message. The second
premise of these authors is that the chapters of the Qur’an represent
cohesive compositional units and thus form the basic units for any
analysis of the whole. The principal scholar to have argued for this
understanding of the Qur’an is Angelika Neuwirth. Her insights into the
Meccan chapters of the Qur’an have laid the foundations for many of the
most valuable studies being done on the composition and content of these
texts. Interestingly enough, Neuwirth does not hold the same position
regarding the larger Medinan chapters,51 but this has not prevented
other scholars from arguing that they were also composed in a deliberate
way. In his contribution to this volume, A. H. Mathias Zahniser starts
from this premise in an effort to understand the thinking behind the
Qur’an’s more substantial chapters.52 Once widespread,
these two suppositions--that the Qur’an is capable of being analyzed and
that the rational composition of its chapters is the place where such an
analysis should begin--will have a radical impact on the quality of the
scholarship being produced. Like Toshihiko Izutsu before them, scholars
who posit a comprehensible Qur’an will gain profound insights into this
text and its world. Because these two suppositions are an outgrowth of the
German School of Qur’anic studies, which started with Noeldeke, it is
clear that it represents the most fruitful Western approach to the study
of the Qur’an. Despite its many problems, most notably, its focus upon
etymology, the German School has managed to continue to refine its method
over the years. The natural culmination of this school, the production of
a critical edition of the Qur’an based upon the oldest manuscripts, was
interrupted due to World War II. The field languishes because of this
disruption. We are left with the hope that the palaeographic study of the
history of the Qur’an will soon advance to such a degree that we will be
able to chart a more generally accepted history of its codification.
Notes
1
For a brief summary of this school, see the article entitled
“Kur’an” in the Encyclopedia of Islam, 2d ed.
2
Richard Bell, Introduction to the Qur’an (Edinburgh:
University Press, 1953); W. M. Watt, Bell’s Introduction to the
Qur’an (Edinburgh: University Press, 1970).
3
Neal Robinson, Discovering the Qur’an: A Contemporary Approach
to a Veiled Text (London: SMC Press, 1996). It is unfortunate, of
course, that such an astute scholar as Robinson uses the word ‘veil’
in a title on the Qur’an. The epistemology of unveiling is now second
nature in the field; we scholars are in a perpetual act of denuding and
unveiling. Ours is a highly predictable act that borrows hackneyed
metaphors to such a degree that even the words become numb.
4
Mohammad Abu-Hamdiyyah, The Qur’an: An Introduction
(London: Routledge, 2000).
5
Ibid., 1.
6
Ibid.
7
Ibid., 26, for instance: “In the midst of this Semitic milieu . .
. there came Muhammad preaching that there is only One God for all
creation, Allah (an assimilated form of Al-ilaah, the god),
with no other gods besides Him, accessible to all, with no priesthood as
an intermediary, no original sin and no ethnic, tribal or racial
overtones. In the Qur’an we find God addressing human beings, in general
or the believers, but never ‘the Arabs’ or ‘men’ in
contradistinction to ‘women.’”
8
Ibid.
9
Ibid., 36.
10
Ibid., 50-57.
11
“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I
have not come to bring peace, but a sword.”
12
See, for example, this sentence: “Such ideas as these compromise
the concept of a ‘universal’ God and strict monotheism in the Hebrew
Bible” (Abu-Hamdiyyah, The Qur’an, 13). To his credit, the
author does know not to call the Hebrew Bible the Old Testament when
speaking of it as a Jewish work.
13
Michael Cook, The Koran: A Very Short Introduction (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2000), ii.
14
Ibid., 70; cf. John Riches, The Bible: A Very Short Introduction
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2000) where a whole chapter is devoted
to the influence of the Bible on popular and high culture.
15
Cook, The Koran, 8.
16
Ibid., 9.
17
For a detailed study of the pitfalls of this approach, see James
Barr’s Comparative Philology and the Text of the Old Testament
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968).
18
Since Cook does not cite his sources, claiming that scholars will
know what they are, it is impossible to discover how he managed to
conclude that sirat has no plural in Arabic. Modern and Classical
Arabic both have plurals for this word; see, al-Munjid of the
Jesuit Fathers, as well as al-Zamakhshari’s al-Kashshaf, sub. Q.
1:6.
19
Cook, The Koran, 143.
20
See the dissertation of Eleonore Haeuptner, Koranishce Hinweise
auf die materielle Kultur der alten Araber (Eberhard-Karls-Universität
zu Tübingen, 1966), 106-115.
21
Ibid., 106-115.
22
Michael Cook and Patricia Crone, Hagarism (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1977), 18. See a similar, but harsher assessment in
Michael Cook, Muhammad (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 68.
The first time Cook offers this assessment of the Qur’an, he attributes
it to Wansborough; by the time that it appears in Muhammad, it is
his own view.
23
In a field such as Biblical studies, where the academic discipline
is based upon clearly demarcated specializations, entry from outside the
field involves a long, arduous process. See the introduction to Robert
Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (Basic Books, 1981), ix-xii,
for an example.
24
Cook, The Koran, 6.
25
Angelika Neuwirth, Studien Zur Komposition der Mekkanischen
Suren (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1981).
26
Cook, The Koran, 140.
27
Rudi Paret, Mohammed und der Koran: Geschichte und Verkuendigung
des arabischen Propheten (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1991; originally
published in 1957).
28
Cook, The Koran, 6.
29
Ibid., 27.
30
Ibid., 43.
31
Ibid., 87.
32
Ibid., 113.
33
Ibid., 151.
34
Ibid., 8.
35
Ibid., 151.
36
Reuven Firestone, Jihad: The Origins of Holy War in Islam
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 5.
37
Ibid., 64-65.
38
Ibid., 69.
39
Ibid., 67.
40
The number of expeditions mounted by the new polity is enormous:
because Meccans were simply not up to the task of maintaining a fighting
force, they were defeated despite their superior strength; for a detailed
list and analysis see W. M. Watt, Muhammad at Medina (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1956).
41
Firestone, Jihad, 69.
42
Roberto Tottoli, Biblical Prophets in the Qur’an and Muslim
Literature (London: Curzon Press, 2002).
43
Ibid., x.
44
Ibid., 35-36.
45
Heinrich Speyer, Die biblischen Erzählungen im Quran
(Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1961), 368.
46
See Paret, Mohammed und der Koran, 99-101.
47
On thirst, owls and Arabic pre-Islamic poetry, see T. Emil Homerin,
“Echoes of a Thirsty Owl: Death and the Afterlife in Pre-Islamic Arabic
Poetry,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 44 (1985) : 165-184.
48
Uri Rubin, Between Bible and Qur’an: The Children of Israel
and the Islamic Self-Image (Princeton: Darwin Press, 1999).
49
Uri Rubin, The Eye of the Beholder (Princeton: The Darwin
Press, 1995).
50
Issa Boullata, ed., Literary Structures of Religious Meaning in
the Qur’an (Richmond: Curzon Press, 2000).
51
Ibid., 144.
52
Ibid., 26-27.
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