Logic, Rhetoric and Legal Reasoning in the Qur'an

God's Arguments

Rosalind Ward Gwynne

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134344994
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

Muslims have always used verses from the Qur'an to support opinions on law, theology, or life in general, but almost no attention has been paid to how the Qur'an presents its own precepts as conclusions proceeding from reasoned arguments. Whether it is a question of God's powers of creation, the rationale for his acts, or how people are to think clearly about their lives and fates, Muslims have so internalized Qur'anic patterns of reasoning that many will assert that the Qur'an appeals first of all to the human powers of intellect. This book provides a new key to both the Qur'an and Islamic intellectual history. Examining Qur'anic argument by form and not content helps readers to discover the significance of passages often ignored by the scholar who compares texts and the believer who focuses upon commandments, as it allows scholars of Qur'anic exegesis, Islamic theology, philosophy, and law to tie their findings in yet another way to the text that Muslims consider the speech of God.

1

THE COVENANT

When your Lord drew forth from the Children of Adam — from their loins — their descendants, and made them testify concerning themselves, (saying): “Am I not your Lord?” They said: “Yes! We so witness!” Lest you should say on the Day of Judgment: “Of this we were unaware!”

(Q 7:172)

When God created Adam, he put human beings in a unique relation to himself. He voluntarily limited his own absolute freedom to act upon his human creatures in ways they could not foresee; in return, they chose to acknowledge his power and -despite their own fallibility — accept the trust (al-amāna) that the heavens and the earth had refused (Q 33:72). What makes the relationship unique is the moral dimension, which depends upon the element of responsibility. Responsibility depends in turn upon the element of choice, or at least the perceived possibility of choice, which we shall define here as “uncoerced self-restriction.” Otherwise the situation of human beings would have been identical to that of angels (Q 2:30 and 32), animals (Q 16:5), even grass and trees (Q 55:5): unmediated dependence upon God arising from the congenital absence of will. Because God chooses to perform actions that benefit humans, thus creating an obligation in the beneficiaries, the Qur’ān describes him with Names that are morally laudatory (raḥmān, ra’ūf, ḥalīm, wahhāb) far more often than with Names that can be construed as expressions of sheer, neutral power (qadīr, qahhār, jabbār, ghālib).

The relation between God and humanity is called the Covenant, and in my view it is the logical key to the entire structure of Qur’ānic argument. Virtually every argument in the Qur’ān expresses or implies one or more of the covenantal provisions, to be discussed in detail below. The pivotal covenant-passage is Q 7:172, the epigraph to this chapter. Just as Islam holds that no soul bears the burden of another’s sin (cf. Q 6:164, 17:15, etc.), Q 7:172 depicts the Covenant not as a communal legacy but as an act by which every human soul individually accepts God as Lord. It has often been observed that the Qur’ān assumes its audience’s prior knowledge of events in Judeo-Christian sacred history and the nature of God’s dealings with humanity.¹ God has bound himself by his Covenant (‘ahd, mīthāq, wa‘d) to behave consistently in a certain way, but his faithfulness to the Covenant can be proven only by experience, demonstrated over time and under a variety of circumstances. Otherwise, unsupported statements that God does not break his Covenant (e.g. Q 2:80) from an analytical point of view amount to simple assertions. Hence God not only creates and destroys, rewards, punishes, and forgives, but he also communicates that he has done so and gives his reasons. Without this communication there would be no sacred history, because sacred history consists of God’s acts and words and human beings’ response to them.

If we bear in mind the terms and continuity of the Covenant, we gain a new perspective on the questions long posed by scholars writing from Jewish and Christian perspectives: why are most Qur’ānic accounts of Biblical characters and events so allusive, discontinuous, and formulaic when compared with the versions in the earlier scriptures? Why do they sometimes differ?

Writing at mid-twentieth century, Abraham Katsh summarized some answers to these questions advanced over the years, noting that Abraham Geiger and R.B. Smith emphasized the Jewish element in the Qur’ān, Carl Brockelmann and Julius Wellhausen the Christian. Brockelmann ascribed the variation in material to ignorance on Muḥammad’s part, while Charles Torrey wrote that Muḥammad’s knowledge of Judaism was “intimate and many-sided.”² Such criticism, past or present, apparently assumes that the only acceptable form for the Qur’ān is strict paraphrase or verbatim repetition, if indeed it can legitimately exist as scripture at all; and that the only acceptable status for Muḥammad would have been as either a Jew or a Christian.³

To Katsh’s summary of scholarly approaches we add two more. The first is seen in Johann Fück’s little article, “The Originality of the Arabian Prophet,”⁴ where the author addresses the question of bias in research. He, too, assesses the work of earlier scholars, including some named above, as well as Tor Andrae, W. Ahrens, and Anton Baumstark. He concludes that neither the single-influence theory; nor the dissolving of Islam into elements from Judaism, Christianity, Manicheism, and paganism; nor assimilating prophethood to the functions of poet, soothsayer, and ḥanīf, will ever adequately explain the phenomenon that was Muhammad.

Once this point is understood, the question of possible prototypes, influences, and stimuli loses that decisive significance that it holds for a mechanistic conception of history. What is significant and worth knowing is how the Prophet employed the material provided him, how he altered it, selected from it, and rendered it amenable to his own purposes. That he did so more vigorously than perhaps any other religious hero in no way detracts from his originality. It belongs to the essence of all great men of the spirit to make generous use of material transmitted to them while impregnating it with new life.⁵

While the assumption that Muhammad himself composed the Qur’ān is clearly not acceptable to Muslims, Fück’s positive and appreciative tone is a healthy antidote to pseudo-scientific reductionism.

The second approach addresses the relation between the Qur’ān and its audience. Extremely productive for the present work, it is based upon the concept of Deutungsbedürfdigkeit — the need for exegesis — which John Wansbrough borrows from Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis.⁶ Auerbach contrasts the Old Testament with the Odyssey: the events of the Odyssey are “connected together without lacunae in a perpetual foreground; thoughts and feeling completely expressed …,” whereas those of the Old Testament are “externalized” only to the extent “necessary for the purpose of the narrative, all else left in obscurity … mysterious and ‘fraught with background.’”⁷ As Wansbrough puts it:

This is not merely to say that the content of scripture is enhanced by commentary, or that it may be made to bear any number of (complementary and/or contradictory) interpretations, but that the scriptural style is itself incomplete without commentary.⁸

This counters unfavorable comparisons of the Qur’ān with the Old Testament on grounds of the latter’s supposed narrative completeness. Neither is a continuous chronicle, nor is it intended to be. Rather, the Old Testament presents the Covenant and the efforts made to fulfil or avoid it; the Qur’ān demonstrates that the Covenant remains in force, and that every generation must strive anew to understand it.

So intrinsic is it to the message of the Qur’ān, in fact, that the Covenant as a discrete concept does not have a clear profile in Islamic scholarship. As Bernard Weiss notes, “Covenant was not a subject on which Muslim authors deemed it necessary to write comprehensive and systematic treatises.”⁹ We shall see in the last section of this chapter that some exegetes treat the first passage containing the word ‘ahd (Q 2:27) in a way that might have developed the subject as a separate Qur’ānic science but in fact did not. Their commentaries on subsequent passages, especially those that contain the word wa‘d (“promise”), are more concerned with the immediate context and with the occasions of revelation (asbāb al-nuzūl).¹⁰ Later theological developments, especially the reaction against the Mu‘tazilites, turned discussion away from any limitation — voluntary or not — upon the power of God, except in terms of such positive concepts as Divine Mercy: “God has prescribed mercy for Himself (kataba ‘alā nafsihi al-raḥma)” (Q 6:12).

Humanity’s first experience with the Covenant was not wholly successful, hence the ambiguity of Adam’s status among the prophets. “We had already extended the Covenant to Adam before, but he forgot, and We found no firm resolve in him” (Q 20:115); “… thus Adam disobeyed his Lord and was misled” (Q 20:121). But God decreed only a temporary punishment, chose Adam, and guided him anew (Q 20:122). He extended his guidance to all. “If guidance comes from Me — and it will — then whoever follows My guidance will not go astray or fall into misery” (Q 20:123).

Adam was not only created but chosen. Qur’ān 3:33 places Adam with Noah, the family of Abraham, and the family of ‘Imrān as having been chosen by God above all people. Should he not then have received the Scripture? Ibn Isḥāq (d. ca. 150/767) says that Adam had received fifty sheets of Scripture;¹¹ al-Ṭabarsī (d. 548/1153) says, on the basis of an apparently non-canonical tradition of Abū Dharr,¹² that he received ten. Al-Ṭabarī (d. 301/926) makes no attempt to minimize Adam’s forgetfulness (Q 20:115). On the contrary, he glosses it with the word “abandon” (taraka) and quotes from Ibn ‘Abbās the folk-etymology which derives the word for “human being” (insān) from the verb “to forget” (nasiya) used in this verse to describe the sin of Adam. A quotation from Ibn Zayd (d. 182/798–99) and Ṭabarī’s own summation are explicit on the point: Adam was weak, and the promise that he “forgot” was precisely the Covenant of God (‘ahd Allāh).¹³

Later exegetical effort limits the scope of Q 20:115, apparently so as not to imply that Adam, as a prophet, could have betrayed the Covenant. Ṭabarsī quotes several glosses that discount any intention to sin, and he gives three possible interpretations of what it was that Adam forgot: (1) he forgot the threat of expulsion from heaven if he ate of the tr...