A History of Muslim Views of the Bible

The First Four Centuries

Martin Whittingham

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783110389272
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Crítica e interpretación bíblicas

This book is the first of two volumes that aim to produce something not previously attempted: a synthetic history of Muslim responses to the Bible, stretching from the rise of Islam to the present day. It combines scholarship with a genuine narrative, so as to tell the story of Muslim engagement with the Bible.

Covering Sunn?, Im?m? Sh?'? and Ism?'?l? perspectives, this study will offer a scholarly overview of three areas of Muslim response, namely ideas of corruption, use of the Biblical text, and abrogation of the text. For each period of history, the important figures and dominant trends, along with exceptions, are identified. The interplay between using and criticising the Bible is explored, as well as how the respective emphasis on these two approaches rises and falls in different periods and locations.

The study critically engages with existing scholarship, scrutinizing received views on the subject, and shedding light on an important area of interfaith concern.

1 Introduction

Knowledge is the object of a quest for the believer, and it will benefit him, from wherever he takes it, and it will not detract from the truth to hear it from unbelievers (…). Whoever declines to take a beautiful thing from its place lets an opportunity slip, and opportunities pass by like the clouds.¹

These are the words of Ibn Qutayba (d.276/889), a Baghdad judge who regularly used the Bible in his writings. He is not typical in his openness to sources outside of the Qur’an and other traditional reservoirs of knowledge used by Muslim scholars. But nor is he entirely atypical. In the first four centuries of Islam, the period in view in the present work, there are plenty of examples of Muslims making use of the Bible in various ways, Muslims who might therefore give at least qualified support to this remark of Ibn Qutayba. Both criticism of the Bible and use of it in these early centuries of Islam form part of the process of Muslim identity formation, as will become clear.

Reception history is not a phrase that would have been familiar to early Muslim (or other) writers. Nonetheless they provided ample material with which to construct a history of Muslim reception of Biblical materials, one dimension of a rapidly growing interest in Biblical reception history. The purpose of this work and a future second volume is to attempt to tell the story of Muslim responses to those previous scriptures. Volume 1 aims to trace the key developments from the emergence of Islam to the death of the Iberian Muslim Ibn Ḥazm in 994/1064. His death date provides an appropriate breakpoint since it ushers in a period of more extensive and often hostile criticism of the Bible, although a critical approach was present in less dominant form in the preceding centuries. The second volume will follow Muslim ideas as they spread to the lands of the Ottomans, Iran, India, Africa and South-East Asia, and on into the complex terrain of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, concluding with twenty-first century works. Although the story takes us right back to the emergence of Islam it is also of pressing relevance in contemporary interreligious relations. The important origins, developments, variations and indeed surprises shed fascinating light on the nature of Muslim reception of Biblical material.

I write from outside the fold of Islam, as a Christian who seeks to present the range of Muslim views as fairly as possible. This range can be strikingly wide, as two twenty-first century comments illustrate. Abdullah Saeed writes:

Since the ‘authorized’ scriptures of Jews and Christians remain very much today as they existed at the time of the Prophet, it is difficult to argue that the Qur’anic references to Tawrat and Injil were only to the ‘pure’ Tawrat and Injil as existed at the time of Moses and Jesus, respectively. If the texts have remained more or less as they were in the seventh century CE, the reverence the Qur’an has shown them at the time should be retained even today.²

By contrast, Muhammad al-A‘ẓamī describes the disparity between the preservation of the Qur’an and the corrupted state of the Biblical text as “midday sunshine versus the darkest shades of night”.³ Most views fall somewhere between these two, but the question presents itself – what can have led to such a range of reactions? This book and its companion second volume attempt to answer that question.

The Qur’an includes verses which could potentially seem positive about the previous scriptures. “Guidance and light” is one of the Qur’anic descriptions of what the Torah (Tawrāt) and the Gospel (Injīl) offer (Q5:44, 46). The complex issue of what “Torah” and “Gospel” are understood to mean in these verses is explored below. Some might be surprised at such an apparently positive description being given to the scriptures of Jews and Christians. Yet there are many such verses (all listed in the Appendix) alongside a smaller number of a more negative hue. To complicate matters further, note the following Qur’anic statements. “No one can change the words of God. That is the great triumph” (Q10:64). Furthermore, “Surely We have sent down the Reminder, and surely We are indeed its Watchers” (Q15:9). These words are clearly applied primarily to the Qur’an. To what extent this “triumph” and guardianship also extend to Jewish and Christian scriptures existing before the advent of Islam is a question underlying the story presented here.

My approach will be to look at particular writers and their contexts, in order to illuminate two broader trends of response. One is Muslim charges that Jews and Christians have corrupted either their interpretation or the very text of their scriptures. These acts of alteration are referred to as taḥrīf al-ma‘nā (corruption of the meaning) or taḥrīf al-lafẓ (corruption of the text). The second trend is Muslim use of the Bible – for a variety of purposes, usually involving seeking background or support for Islamic beliefs. So while one approach is wary or explicitly critical, the other is apparently more positive. These two trends can sometimes co-exist in the same work. A Muslim writer’s use of the Bible does not necessarily indicate trust in the reliability of the Biblical text in general. This should not be assumed, as the same writer can both use and question the text.

I have already used the term “writer” several times. This work is necessarily dependent on writers who left a record of views.⁴ These views were revealed, directly or indirectly, in Quranic commentaries, works of apologetics or polemics, histories of the world, arguments in support of Muhammad’s prophethood, hadith reports and legal works, to name but some of the genres discussed in this volume. Two points need making about such writings. First, much Muslim writing exhibits no engagement with the Bible. Large tracts of Qur’anic commentary, legal works and Sufi mystical manuals are not focussed on the previous scriptures, so it is important to avoid an exaggerated picture of Muslim writers’ interest in Biblical texts. Having said that, the evidence for that interest is plentiful. The works presented here employ various kinds of use and critique of the Bible which show that it was seen both as a resource and a challenge.

Secondly, the views of an elite educated group in a period of widespread illiteracy are not of course representative of the whole of their society. In regard to early Christian-Muslim interaction, this point has been richly illustrated by Jack Tannous.⁵ We cannot reconstruct levels of awareness of the previous scriptures, or interest in them, among the wider Muslim population, and the present work focusses on the development of beliefs and ideas as we have them recorded for us, rather than illuminating social history amongst the majority who had no opportunity to preserve their views for posterity. However, it would be simplistic to assume that early Muslims would have had no knowledge of Jewish and Christian scripture. Many of those Muslims would have been converts from a Jewish or Christian background, or the children of the same, and could thus have carried into their new faith knowledge of the rites, beliefs and symbols of their previous faith. This may not have been extensive in some cases, but there would have been an inevitably wide range of familiarity with or experience of Judaism and Christianity. In fact, glimpses of more widely-held attitudes and of concrete situations can be gained from written clues, as will become clear. While we cannot claim to know the attitudes of the many from the writings of a few, the writings of a small number help to shape the ideas of many others. This is seen clearly in modern websites and writings on a topic such as Biblical proofs of Muhammad. These often employ proof texts taken from works written during the early centuries of Islam.⁶

What is meant by the term “Bible”? This question needs approaching both in terms of the boundaries of a concept of written canon, and secondly regarding how Muslims would likely have received Biblical information. This second point is particularly pertinent in the earliest period of Islam, when canonical texts would have circulated in approximate form as part of oral traditions, or in other ways which made it difficult for them to be distinguished from texts usually regarded as non-canonical.

The compilation of the Biblical canons of the Hebrew Bible/ Old Testament and the New Testament is one of many areas encountered in this book where debates continue. By the time of the rise of Islam in the seventh century CE a solid core of canonical texts had long been established, but there continued to be minor variation over certain books, such as in the Syrian and Ethiopian Churches.⁷ In order to provide some boundaries for the present study, this enquiry will focus on responses to written material widely deemed canonical as the seventh century and the new faith of Islam dawned. This means, for example, that 1 and 2 Peter, Jude and Revelation are included, while the Deutero-canonical works of Tobit, Judith, 1 and 2 Maccabees, The Wisdom of Solomon and Ben Sira (also termed Ecclesiasticus) are not. However, works not seen as canonical will surface from time to time in exploring sources for Muslim writers’ discussions of a particular Biblical figure, such as Isaiah. There seems no Muslim engagement with challenging the canonicity of the books which some Christian churches questioned.

Instead it is more pertinent to this study to consider how the intertwining of canonical and other traditions impacted Muslim writers. It may not always have been clear to early Muslims in particular where the boundaries between canonical and non-canonical Biblical material lay – not least because this may not have been either clear or important to some of the Jews and Christians with whom they had contact. The same is true for those Muslims who were themselves converts from Judaism or Christianity.⁸ The value placed in Judaism on the Oral Torah (The Midrash and Talmud) as well as the Written Torah would have further complicated the issue of discerning the boundaries of the written scripture in any discussion or oral transmission of “Biblical” content. In relation to both faiths, it is difficult to know how the mass of ordinary Jews and Christians would have regarded the authority of different texts and traditions in circulation, especially as theological and general literacy (not necessarily the same thing, of course) cannot be expected to have been widespread.

Related to these practical considerations is the question of how far scripture functioned in practice as written as opposed to oral material, both for its devotees and for those interacting with them. As William Graham puts it, “The spoken word of scripture has been overwhelmingly the most important medium through which religious persons and groups throughout history have known and interacted with scriptural text.”⁹ Graham also notes the “interpenetration of the written and spoken word.”¹⁰ If Jews and Christians responded to scripture by hearing it, reciting it or, in Christian contexts, seeing some of its focal points depicted in images (such as a crucifix), how did this affect Muslim encounters with the scriptures of the other faiths? It is impossible to know the answer to this for the distant past, but the issue at least reminds us that Muslims were learning about texts in ways which may have involved not only conversation with Jews and Christians, but also by perhaps hearing their scripture recited or proclaimed, if they encountered such an occasion, or from accounts of the same. Awareness of such possible experience helps to inform our understanding when Muslim authors appear to be drawing on oral and at times imprecisely remembered sources.

The geographical spread of writers engaging Biblical texts in the early centuries is not as wide as the geographical spread of Islamic rule, which extended rapidly via conquest westward to Spain (by 92/711) and eastward to the borders of India. Around half of the people featuring in the ensuing pages are based in present-day Iraq, or at least s...