Today, 23 percent of the global population is Muslim, but ignorance and misinformation about Islam persist. In this fascinating and useful book, the acclaimed writer Perry Anderson interviews the noted scholar of Islam Suleiman Mourad about the Qur'an and the history of the faith.Mourad elucidates the different stages in Islam's development: the Qur'an as scripture and the history of its codification; Muhammad and the significance of his Sunna and Hadith; the Sunni-Shi'a split and the formation of various sects; the development of jihad; the transition to modernity and the challenges of reform; and the complexities of Islam in the modern world. He also looks at Wahhabism from its inception in the eighteenth century to its present-day position as the movement that galvanized modern Salafism and gave rise to militant Islam or jihadism. The Mosaic of Islam reveals both the richness and the fissures of the faith. It speaks of the different voices claiming to represent the religion and spans peaceful groups and manifestations as well as the bloody confrontations that scar the Middle East, such as the Saudi Arabian and Iranian intervention in the Yemen and the collapse of Syria and Iraq.
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When is it likely that the Qurʾan was composed, and how many strata of composition does it consist of?
The Islamic tradition says that the Qurʾan was revealed to the prophet Muhammad over a period of twenty-two years, between 610 and 632 CE; Muslims believe that Muhammad was not literate, and so he could not himself have produced the Qurʾan. He memorized it, and a few of his followers memorized some parts of it or wrote them down. When he died in 632, there was no codex as such. Different disciples had variants written down, creating a need around the year 650 to produce a canonical version, because ʿUthman—the caliph at the time—feared these differences might cause splits among Muslims. So he put together a committee to produce a standard text for all the faithful. That is the traditional account of the origin of the written text, which was in circulation by the middle of the seventh century. We have scarcely any documentary evidence from the seventh century itself, only oral traditions whose authenticity is hard to verify, with many conflicting narratives, which makes the task of the scholar very difficult. A very few exceptions exist, such as the inscription inside the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem (built in 692) which documents a few verses from the Qurʾan (e.g., 4.171–172).
As historians, when we start examining the Qurʾan, we realize that this is a very difficult text. It is not like the Hebrew Bible, and cannot be compared to the Gospels. It does not tell us the story of a person or a people. The Hebrew Bible is the story of the Israelites; the Gospels record the story of Jesus’s ministry. The Qurʾan is not a story of the Arabs or of Muhammad’s ministry. Its unique character as a narrative poses particular problems for the historian. If we only read the Qurʾan, we know very little about Mecca, Muhammad, and Arabia. Muslims have always read the Qurʾan by using the books on the life of Muhammad to add historical narrative and rich details to the Qurʾanic text and also to help explain what the Qurʾan intends. There is nothing like it, which actually is something that the Qurʾan proclaims (e.g., 18.88). Aside from some verses that address legal matters, the Qurʾan has a tendency to be brief and alludes to stories, events, and issues with the assumption that its direct audience already knew them.
Some modern historians have postulated a human agent to have produced the Qurʾan, but was there one author or several authors? For a long time, scholars in the field—the most influential was John Wansbrough (d. 2002)—believed that the Qurʾan was finalized at the end of the eighth century or the beginning of the ninth. Since we have some early inscriptions and a recent discovery of partial manuscripts of the Qurʾan that can be dated to the late seventh or early eighth century, Wansbrough’s view is now discredited. The material and the type of script used tell us when these early manuscripts were written. For example, the Muslim world was by and large using paper by the middle of the eighth century, or the early ninth. Leather, papyri and parchment were abandoned because they were so much less practical. Script is also important. In the seventh century the principal scripts were Kufic (after the town of Kufa in Iraq) or the old Hijazi (after the region of Hijaz in western Arabia where Mecca and Medina are located). Later, as Muslims started to develop new styles of writing, these two scripts were abandoned. So, by and large, anything written in Kufic or old Hijazi script must come from the seventh or eighth century, especially if it is on papyri or parchment.
Where was this new manuscript evidence found?
When the Great Mosque in Sanʿa was being renovated in the early 1970s, a secret attic was discovered above a false ceiling, containing a mass of old manuscripts. The Middle Eastern tradition (which applies to Christians and Jews as well) is that if a manuscript has the name of God or the name of the Prophet on it, we cannot simply destroy it. The best thing we can do is put it away, or bury it, as with the Dead Sea Scrolls or the Nag Hamadeh texts. We do so not to hide them for hiding’s sake, but to keep them from getting corrupted and thus insulting God. That was the case in Sanʿa. A German scholar was allowed to study the finds, but she has published very little on them for fear of the political consequences of doing so; it seems the Yemeni government threatened Germany with repercussions if anything embarrassing appeared. But from a few of what are believed to be very early parchments in the cache, using old Hijazi script, we know that they date to the late seventh or early eighth century, and we can already see one significant difference from the canonical version of the Qurʾan. The traditional story tells us there were no serious variations between the different versions assembled by Caliph ʿUthman around the year 650, though we know that down to the eighth century more popular versions of the Qurʾan, without major discrepancies from the canonical text, were retained in certain regions—Iraq or Syria—out of local pride. The Yemeni manuscript, however, contains a very serious divergence. In the canonical Qurʾan, there is a verse with the imperative form “say” (qul)—God instructing Muhammad—whereas in the Sanʿa text, the same verse reads “he said” (qala). That suggests some early Muslims may have perceived the Qurʾan as the word of the Prophet, and it was only some time later that his reported speech became a divine command. There is also some serious variation with respect to the length of some chapters.
One other early variation is attested. In the Dome of the Rock, three sets of verses from different parts of the Qurʾan referring to Jesus can be seen (3.18–19, 4.171–172, and 19.33–36). In the original of one of these (verse 19.33), Jesus says: “Peace on me the day I was born, the day I die, and the day I am raised from death.” The inscription in the Dome of the Rock, however, reads: “Peace on Jesus the day he was born, the day he died, and the day he was raised from death.” Here the switch from the first to the third person is not a major change, but could be a kind of variation from the official Qurʾan.
What about internal layering in the canonical version itself?
This raises a larger problem about the composition of the Qurʾan as a text. There is a huge difference between the Meccan verses—those believed to have been revealed or composed in Mecca between 610 and 622—and those revealed or composed in Medina between 622 and 632. The same book contains two very contrasting styles. In the former, rhyme is key. Verses are short and rather ambiguous, with lots of references no one really understands. It has been suggested that some of these verses, especially the very early ones that are now at the end of the Qurʾan, may have had a liturgical function, since they seem to involve a priest saying something and the community responding ritualistically. One term we can use to describe the Meccan parts of the Qurʾan is unitarian—the verses call for a strict monotheism that does not treat Christians and Jews as outsiders, invoking Abraham as the spiritual grandfather of all who worship the one God. That is understandable, because when Muhammad was in Mecca, he had no position of leadership there. But he could win followers by railing against Arab-style polytheism—not paganism, of which the Qurʾan is dismissive, but a polytheism where there is a main god (the God of monotheism) whose worship has been corrupted by the addition of other deities as intermediaries (lesser gods of Mecca) or partners (the Trinity). In this sense, the God of the Qurʾan is an extremely biblical God—a jealous deity who refuses to be associated with any others, insisting that if we were to worship him, we have to worship him alone, and if we do not, he is very vengeful.
When Muhammad gets to Medina, on the other hand, he is no longer an average religious person. He is now a Prophet and Statesman: the religious leader of his followers, and a political leader in a city that includes people who do not belong to his religious community. In Medina there were Jews, polytheists, and new immigrants from Mecca called Muslims. In Mecca, everybody was a cousin of everybody else—it was one tribe of Quraysh and they had to settle their problems by the law of the tribe. In Medina, there were different tribes unrelated to one another, different religions and different communities. So when Muhammad becomes head of all of them, the Qurʾan suddenly assumes a different form. It becomes less poetic, more prosaic, focusing on legal boundaries and questions of jurisprudence, and increasingly aggressive toward other monotheists and definitely very aggressive toward polytheism.
The division between the two components of the texts is clear-cut?
Modern scholars accept the traditional scheme that parts of the Qurʾan are Meccan and other parts Medinan, though we are not always a hundred percent sure which is which. For instance, we are told of several individual verses revealed in Mecca that were included in chapters that were revealed in Medina, and vice versa. And because we do not have a clear chronology of the verses, no attempt to write the Qurʾan in exact chronological order can succeed. (Two Orientalists, Theodor Nöldeke (d. 1930) and Richard Bell (d. 1952), tried to do that and only embarrassed themselves with incoherence.) The language of the text is clearly evolving, some words dropping out completely, and new ones emerging. There are also a few basic grammatical mistakes in the Qurʾan—sometimes a sentence starts in the singular and ends in the plural (e.g., 9.49–50), or two particles are connected when they should not be (e.g., 3.178), or some vowels go wrong in the declensions (e.g., 22.78). This is from the viewpoint of a strict linguist. From the traditional vantage point, since the Qurʾan is miraculous, these are not errors.
It is important to point out here that when the official canonical text was put together around 650, the committee opted to arrange the Qurʾan in decreasing order, starting with the longest chapters and ending with the shortest. They put a short opening chapter at the beginning, and scholars in the first few centuries debated whether it was actually part of the Qurʾan or not.
Are there any anachronisms in the text—if not, would that confirm an early dating of it?
If the Qurʾan were from the eighth or ninth century, there would be philological traces of that. If we look at the famous Apocalypse Tapestry at Angers, dating from the fourteenth century, which illustrates the Book of Revelation (in the New Testament), in one panel the figure of a lion with seven heads holding a fleur-de-lys (representing France) faces a dragon with seven heads (representing England). Here, the Hundred Years War between France and England is projected back onto a vision formed 1,300 years earlier, and the point is to say that France was on the side of God and England on the side of the Devil. If the Qurʾan was a later production, it would reflect some of the bitter disputes that broke out among the faithful once the Prophet died—major theological splits and definitely political conflicts revolving around his succession. But the Qurʾan says nothing about the question of succession or any of the later schisms. So there is no reason to doubt that the Qurʾan we have today is the same as the one produced in 650 and also resembles closely the Qurʾan the Prophet Muhammad told his followers was the revelation he had received.
There is, however, a caveat to keep in mind. In the Arabic alphabet, there are many letters that have the same shape—what differentiates them as sounds is either the vowel that they carry, or the dots. But this was not the case in the seventh century. They had not yet invented vowels and dots for writing. For example, the three consonants jim (
), haʾ (
), and khaʾ (
)—and likewise other pairs or triplets —were written using the same letter (
). Similarly, there are several other letters that are not consonantally related at all—the baʾ (
) would have a dot under; the yaʾ (
) takes two dots under; and the nun (
) has one dot above—yet all have the same shape (
) when written without dots, especially at the beginning and in the middle of a word. If we have a word of four letters, and each one can have two or three ways of being read, then we have a confusing mess. Sometimes the context tells us the meaning, which makes it easier to guess how to read undotted letters. But often it does not. For example, a major difference between Sunnis and Shiʿis revolves around a vowel and a hook. In one verse of the Qurʾan (3.110), a word can be read either as umma, meaning community, or aʾimma, meaning imams, to form “blessings on the umma” for the Sunnis, or “blessings on the imams” for the Shiʿis—changing the whole dynamic of the chapter, which for Shiʿis validates the institution of the imamate, whereas for Sunnis it authorizes the community to decide who rules it.
After Muhammad’s death, the Qurʾan was being read by people who had learnt Arabic, but were not native speakers and did not know the oral traditions behind the Qurʾan. Each was proposing different ways of reading certain words. So around the year 700 another committee was assembled—this was a contribution of the Umayyad dynasty—to put in the vowels and the dots, in order to fix the text firmly so that anybody who did not know the oral Qurʾan could pick it up and read it. So the jim is now written with a dot under the letter; the haʾ carries no dot; the khaʾ comes with a dot above the letter.
But each side acquired a single agreed version of its own?
No, by the time of the Umayyad codification, many different ways of reading the Qurʾan were already established and in circulation. So instead of causing a split among Muslims by insisting on just one reading, scholars decided in the eighth century to incorporate seven readings as canonical, and even to tolerate other less important readings as well. Ever since, ther...
