The Qur'an in its Historical Context

Gabriel Reynolds, Gabriel Said Reynolds

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134109449
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Providing commentary on the controversial revisionist school of Qur'anic studies, this book explores the origins, scholarship and development of the Qur'an. The collection of articles, each written by a distinguished author, treat very familiar passages of the Qur'an in an original manner, combining thorough philology, historical anthropology, and cultural history.

This book addresses in a critical fashion the hottest issues in recent works on the Quran. Among other things, the contributors analyze the controversial theories of Luxenberg regarding Syriac and the Quran, and in particular his argument that the term Hur refers not to virgins but to grapes.

Part 1
LINGUISTIC AND HISTORICAL EVIDENCE

1
THE QUR’ĀN IN RECENT SCHOLARSHIP

Challenges and desiderata¹

Fred M. Donner

Introduction

Qur’ānic studies, as a field of academic research, appears today to be in a state of disarray. Those of us who study Islam’s origins have to admit collectively that we simply do not know some very basic things about the Qur’ān – things so basic that the knowledge of them is usually taken for granted by scholars dealing with other texts. They include such questions as: How did the Qur’ān originate? Where did it come from, and when did it first appear? How was it first written? In what kind of language was – is – it written? What form did it first take? Who constituted its first audience? How was it transmitted from one generation to another, especially in its early years? When, how, and by whom was it codified? Those familiar with the Qur’ān and the scholarship on it will know that to ask even one of these questions immediately plunges us into realms of grave uncertainty and has the potential to spark intense debate.

To put it another way, on these basic issues there is little consensus even among the well-trained scholars who work on them. I am not speaking here of the kind of routine difference of opinion or tension that exists in the study of all scriptural traditions between those who take that scripture as a source for their belief and life, and those who study it as a text on the basis of historical, literary, sociological, and theological analysis. Rather, I refer to the fact that so many scholars over the past century, despite deep learning, serious commitment to understand the Qur’ān, and on the basis of sophisticated and subtle methods, nevertheless remain so lacking in consensus on these basic issues.

This lack of consensus grew from seeds that were sown at the very beginning of scholarly examination of the Qur’ān by Western scholars in the nineteenth century. For many years, however, the majority of Western scholars adopted a view of the Qur’ān and its origins that followed in most of its details the view presented by the Islamic tradition itself. Although there were always a few Western scholars who expressed reservations about such traditional views, their attitudes constituted for more than a century nothing more than a muted, if persistent, minority position in Western scholarly circles. Given the difficulty of wringing reliable evidence about the seventh century out of our exiguous sources for Islam’s beginnings, many scholars who held skeptical views about the traditional stories of the Qur’ān’s genesis seem to have preferred simply to hint at their misgivings and otherwise to pass over the question in silence; for however much one may have doubted the traditional view, the difficulty of actually assembling the evidence for a convincing alternative view was clear to everyone, and few felt encouraged to take on such a challenge. Most who did choose to challenge traditional views, moreover, focused on one particular aspect of the problem, rather than addressing comprehensively the question of the Qur’ān’s genesis and development. For example, scholars such as Geiger, Andrae, Bell, and Torrey ² looked at the question of the relationship between the Qur’ān and the Judaeo-Christian scriptural tradition; Vollers, Blachère, and Fück³ grappled with the question of what the language of the Qur’ān originally was; and Bergsträsser, Pretzl, Jeffery, Beck, and Cook⁴ considered the question of the many variant readings about which the Islamic tradition tells us.

It was not until the 1970s that a number of books appeared that questioned more bluntly and comprehensively the traditional view of the Qur’ān’s origins and early development as a text. Although vastly different from one another, the works of Günter Lüling (1974), John Wansbrough (1977), and Patricia Crone and Michael Cook (1977) all posed fundamental challenges to the traditional vision of Islam’s origins, including the genesis of the Qur’ān.⁵ Although each of these contributions met with considerable resistance at first, and none has provided us with a satisfactory alternative interpretation, they together forced scholars in the field of Qur’ānic studies to confront the simplistic view derived ultimately from Islam’s own dogmas about its origins, and to open the door – albeit sometimes grudgingly – to the possibility of assembling a new, and perhaps radically different, understanding of how the Qur’ān text came to be, by drawing on textual and other evidence more secure than that provided in the Islamic tradition’s own narratives.

The field of Qur’ānic studies was, then, in some ferment already from the early 1970s onward. This ferment was for the most part restricted to the limited circles of Western specialists in Qur’ān studies (who were few) and did not have much impact on the broader public. The publication in 2000 of the first edition of Christoph Luxenberg’s book Die Syro-Aramäische Lesart des Koran,⁶ however, generated considerable controversy, even in popular circles, although the book is no more revolutionary than those just mentioned by Lüling, Wansbrough, Crone and Cook. Perhaps Luxenberg’s work made more waves among the public because it is presented in a manner that makes it relatively easy to understand what he is getting at. Lüling’s prose is also generally clear, but he frames his attempted reconstruction of the Qur’ān in the context of complex discussions of theology that are difficult for those without deep theological training to follow. Crone and Cook’s Hagarism is convoluted in argument and not an easy read, even for those well-informed about early Islamic history. Wansbrough’s Qur’ānic Studies, in some ways the most radical of all, is so opaque in style that even native speakers of English are often unsure of what he meant to say; its implications and even its basic hypotheses have only begun to reach a wider audience through the work of numerous mufassirīn, some of whom, such as our colleague Andrew Rippin, are widely respected scholars,⁷ some others of whom are decidedly not, such as the pseudonymous religious polemicist “Ibn Warraq” who seems to champion Wansbrough’s ideas in pursuit of his own personal religious agenda.⁸

In the following remarks, I will make a few observations on what I take to be five fundamental and interrelated questions about the Qur’ān on which significant scholarly disagreement persists, to four of which, at least, Luxenberg’s Syro-Aramäische Lesart has contributed. Given the present state of our understanding of these issues, my comments will frequently take the form of raising further questions or pointing out inconsistencies, rather than proposing decisive conclusions. These observations will be followed by a few suggestions for things we might do to help us move scholarly Qur’ānic studies to the next stage.

Five questions

1 Can the Qur’ān as we have it today be traced back to some kind of original version?

That is, was there an “Ur-Qur’ān” (to borrow the felicitous phrase first given prominence by Günter Lüling) that appeared in some well-defined and restricted historical context (i.e. a particular time and place), a “closed” text that stood as a precursor to today’s Qur’ān? That there was such an “Ur-Qur’ān” is, of course, the firm view of the Islamic tradition itself, which considers the Qur’ān as we know it to be the exact, literal transcription of God’s word as revealed to Muḥammad in the seventh century; in the tradition’s view, the Qur’ān of today is, in fact, identical with the “Ur-Qur’ān.”

A long and distinguished series of Western Qur’ān scholars has also subscribed to the view that there was an early textual archetype for the present Qur’ān, although most broke with the traditional Islamic view to the extent that they considered the possibility, at least, that minor changes may have entered the text between its earliest days and its codification in the form of the Qur’ān we know today. Nöldeke, Schwally, Bergsträsser, Bell, Beck, and more recently Watt, Neuwirth, Lüling, and Burton,⁹ despite profound differences on many points, all agreed that what we read today is derived in some way from a prototype text, an Ur-Qur’ān, from the time of Muḥammad (or even before, as Lüling has proposed). Luxenberg, too, shares this view.

The main dissenter from this view has been Wansbrough, who with his followers (including Andrew Rippin and G. Hawting¹⁰) has argued that the Qur’ān we have today does not go back to an early archetype, but rather represents the fruit of a long and slow process of crystallization spanning two centuries or more, during which the Qur’ān as we know it was pieced together from disparate materials circulating in “the community.” Wansbrough explicitly rejected the possibility of knowing what, if anything, existed in the time of Muḥammad (irrelevant to him in any case since he considered the Qur’ān that eventually evolved to have emerged not only much later, but in Mesopotamia, not in Arabia).

A more fundamental clash of views than this can hardly be imagined. Much of the evidence for the respective views, however, stems from debates over questions relating to the later transmission and/or canonization of the text, to which we shall return later.¹¹

2 What was the nature of the original “Ur-Qur’ān,” assuming it existed?

One of the few points about which, as far as I know, all scholars are in agreement about the Qur’ān concerns its nature: it is clearly intended as a source of religious and moral guidance for its audience. This is obvious in the Qur’ān of today, and everyone also assumes that the “Ur-Qur’ān,” even if it was in some ways different from today’s text, must also have shared this basic character as a morally and religiously didactic text.

Beyond this most basic level, however, the question of the Qur’ān’s nature – or, rather, of the nature of the “Ur-Qur’ān” – breaks down into a number of subordinate questions that are not so readily resolved.

First of all, there is disagreement on what the original religious message of the “Ur-Qur’ān” may have been. Muslim tradition presents it resolutely as “Islam,” that is, it projects back to the time of Muḥammad the fully developed creed that emerged probably in the second century AH, in all its details. Many Western scholars have also hewn to this line,¹² but there has also been a persistent strand in Western scholarship presenting the “Ur-Qur’ān” as preaching something other than Islam, or at least as having been profoundly influenced by other traditions. The main contenders have been, of course, Judaism and Christianity.¹³ Already in 1833, Abraham Geiger’s book Was hat Muḥammad aus dem Judenthume ausgenommen? argued for formative Jewish influence on Muḥammad and the Qur’ān, and a century later C. C. Torrey’s The Jewish Foundations of Islam emphasized the Qur’ān’s dependence on Jewish tradition so forcefully that one sometimes wonders that he did not claim outright that Muḥammad had converted to Judaism.¹⁴ Crone and Cook, in Hagarism, speak of the first phase of the movement Muḥammad began as “Judeo-Hagarism,” an alliance between Jews and “Arabs” (a use of modern nationalist terminology, incidentally, that I find very problematic).¹⁵

On the other hand, many other scholars have emphasized the importance of Christianity in shaping the Qur’ān and its teachings. One of the most powerfully developed analyses was presented by Tor Andrae in his long series of articles entitled “Der Ursprung des Islam und das Christentum” (1923–5), in which he identified Christian influences of many kinds, particularly from Nestorians of Yemen, monophysites of Ethiopia, and especially from Syrian pietism. Andrae actually asks (but does not answer) the question, “Why did Muḥammad not simply become a Christian, if he was so influenced by Christian teachings?”¹⁶ More recently, Günter Lüling argued i...