The Qur'an and Its Biblical Reflexes: Investigations Into the Genesis of a Religion 9781498569453, 9781498569460

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The Qur’an and Its Biblical Reflexes

The Qur’an and Its Biblical Reflexes Investigations into the Genesis of a Religion

Mark Durie

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2018 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All graphics courtesy of the author. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available LCCN 2018946880 | ISBN 9781498569453 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781498569460 (electronic) ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

Contents

List of Figures

vii

List of Tables

ix

Forewordxi Acknowledgmentsxiii Notes on Transcription, Qurʾanic Citations, Terms, and Names

xv

List of Qurʾanic Proper Names

xvii

Introduction: A Fundamental Question

xxi

1 Preliminaries to a Qurʾanic Theology

1

2 The Eschatological Crisis

47

3 A Nonbiographical Qurʾanic Chronology

75

4 Monotheism105 5 Rasulology and Prophetology

123

6 Lexical and Narrative Studies

155

Conclusion: The Genesis of a New Religion?

251

Bibliography265 General Index

289

Index of Bible Passages

307

Qurʾan Index

315

About the Author

337 v

Figures

Figure 0.1 Figure 1.1 Figure 1.2 Figure 3.1 Figure 3.2 Figure 3.3 Figure 3.4 Figure 3.5 Figure 3.6 Figure 3.7 Figure 3.8 Figure 3.9 Figure 3.10 Figure 3.11 Figure 3.12 Figure 3.13 Figure 3.14 Figure 3.15 Figure 3.16 Figure 3.17 Figure 3.18

Relexification of linguistic signs xliv Carbon dating of early Qurʾanic manuscripts 19 Topics in Qur’anic Theology 40 Average Lexical Distance trend, sūrahs, part 1 79 Average Lexical Distance trend, sūrahs, part 2 79 Distribution of sūrahs by Average Lexical Distance 80 Ranking of sūrahs by AFD vs. ALD: pre-transitional, post-transitional, and mixed 84 Formulaic Distance of formulae in Q73 86 Formulaic Distance of formulae in Q22 89 Formulaic Distance of formulae in Q29 90 Formulaic Distance of formulae in Q8 90 Ranking of sūrahs by AFD vs. ALD, separating mixed sūrahs 92 Pre-transitional sūrahs 93 Post-transitional sūrahs 93 Nöldeke’s classification of sūrahs, by AFD vs. ALD 95 Sūrahs which say the Messenger or messengers are “only a warner” 96 Sūrahs which refer to requests to “hurry” or “bring on the punishment” 96 Sūrahs with atha¯  qa “cause to taste” 97 Sūrahs with ṣabara “be patient” 97 Sūrahs with at least one of the two features of the Eschatological Crisis (cf. Table 3.2) 98 Sūrahs with ja¯  hada, jiha¯  d, or muja¯  hid “struggling with others” 98 vii

viii

Figure 3.19 Figure 3.20 Figure 3.21 Figure 3.22 Figure 5.1 Figure 6.1 Figure 6.2 Figure 6.3 Figure 6.4 Figure 6.5 Figure 6.6 Figure 6.7 Figure 6.8 Figure 7.1

Figures

Sūrahs with references to migration 99 Sūrahs with “obey Alla¯  h and the Messenger” 99 Sūrahs with references to hypocrites and hypocrisy 100 Sūrahs with references to “those in whose hearts is a disease” 100 Sūrahs with references to nabī “prophet” 133 Phono-semantic matching 188 Sūrahs with references to shaya¯ ṭīn (indef.) 192 Sūrahs with references to al-Shayṭa¯  n (def.) 193 Sūrahs with references to jinn 193 Sūrahs rejecting that Alla¯  h has offspring or rejecting that ʿIsa¯ is Alla¯  h or the son of Alla¯  h 194 Sūrahs with references to al-Maṣīh 194 Stories of the Fall 217 References to “fighting” (Form III derivatives of q-t-l) 230 The historical relationship of Judaism and Christianity 252

Tables

Table 2.1 Table 2.2 Table 3.1 Table 3.2 Table 3.3 Table 3.4 Table 4.1 Table 5.1 Table 6.1 Table 6.2 Table 6.3

Classification of sūrahs by theological characteristics 53 Pre-transitional sūrahs by Eschatological Crisis features 54 Average Formulaic and Lexical Distance of sūrahs 81 Verse length, AFD, and ALF of passages in Q85 87 Formulaic and Lexical Distance of passages in Q74 88 Exclusion from the “Sacred Mosque” 94 Two dimensions of disbelief 114 The named messengers of the Qurʾan 128 Stories of the Fall of Iblīs 216 Stories of the Fall of Ādam 217 Summary of forms discussed in chapter 6 241

ix

Foreword

The spotlight of this book is on the Qurʾan. Its purpose is to advance our understanding of the Qurʾan and Qurʾanic Theology in relation to the Bible and to Biblical Theology. However, it has been deliberately written for a broad readership, not only for scholars of the Qurʾan but also for others who are interested in the Qurʾan, its theology, and its treatment of Biblical reflexes. In today’s world the question of the relationship between the Bible and the Qurʾan is not merely an academic one. There has been a long history of physical and intellectual conflict between Muslims and Christians, and the ongoing realities of jiha¯ d, religious persecution, suspicion, prejudice, and fear inevitably influence theological engagement between Christianity and Islam. There is considerable psychological pressure in all sorts of directions upon academic activities which seek to explore the interface between the faiths. It is regrettable that in some cases western scholars have not maintained scholarly objectivity in dealing with the Qurʾan. An example is found in Watt’s revision of Bell’s Introduction to the Qur’an. Watt commented that he altered passages which conveyed Bell’s view that Muḥammad was the author of the Qurʾan, because he considered it an affront to Muslims’ understanding of Alla¯ h’s authorship: it has become imperative for a Christian scholar not to offend Muslim readers gratuitously, but as far as possible to present his arguments in a form acceptable to them. Courtesy and an eirenic outlook certainly now demands that we should not speak of the Qur’an as the product of Muhammad’s conscious mind . . . I have therefore altered or eliminated all expressions which implied that Muhammad was the author of the Qur’an, including those that spoke of his “sources” or of the “influences” upon him. (Watt and Bell 1970, vi) xi

xii

Foreword

In keeping with standard principles of scholarly objectivity, my intention is to treat academic matters on the basis of available evidence, without regard for religious sensibilities. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1958, §114) once wrote: “One thinks that one is tracing the outline of the thing’s nature over and over again, and one is merely tracing round the frame through which we look at it.” He was reflecting that, far from merely describing the nature of things, propositions say as much about the language they are couched in as about the reality of what they purport to refer to. The challenge for any scholar is that a part of what they “trace” is but the frame through which they are peering. One way to help overcome this limitation is by using diverse frames, which reveal how an object looks from different angles. The past forty or so years of Western scholarship on the Qurʾan have involved a series of exercises in de-framing and re-framing the text of the Qurʾan. My own academic training is in linguistics and theology, and this has influenced how the Qurʾan is viewed in this work. It is my sincere hope that the perspectives offered here, including some fresh de-framings and re-framings of the Qurʾanic text, will make an enduring contribution to the larger scholarly endeavor of seeking to understand the Qurʾan better for what it actually is.

Acknowledgments

This book has been a good while in the making. Throughout its genesis my loving wife Debby and many friends sustained me with many encouragements. I am grateful to Peter Riddell for his invaluable guidance in launching and pursuing this project. I am thankful for those who have commented on drafts of sections or the whole, in various stages along the way. Of course I alone am responsible for the flaws that remain. My thanks also go to Andy Bannister for making available textual data files of Qurʾanic lexical items and formulae, extracted from the Quran Gateway corpus (qurangateway.org), which provided the raw data used to develop the stylistic timeline of chapter 3, and also for access to the Quran Gateway site for analysis. This book was researched and written in the midst of many other duties. I am grateful to those whose generosity made it possible for me to find the time to write this book, and in particular to an anonymous donor whose gift helped free me up from other responsibilities and provided essential resources.

xiii

Notes on Transcription, Qurʾanic Citations, Terms, and Names

Qurʾanic references are in the form Q2:256, signifying “sūrah 2, verse 256.” Qurʾanic citations are translated from the Cairo edition of 1924. In translating the Qurʾan, proper names are presented as transcribed Arabic forms instead of anglicized Biblical renderings, for example, Ibra¯ hīm instead of Abraham, and likewise Alla¯ h instead of God. Alla¯ h is distinguished in translation from ʾila¯ h, which is rendered “god” or “God,” depending on the context, for example, alla¯ hu la¯  ʾila¯ ha illa¯  huwa “Alla¯ h: there is no god except him” (Q2:255), but wa-ila¯ hu-na¯  wa-ʾila¯ hu-kum wa¯ ḥidun “Our God and your God is one” (Q29:46). In discussing God in Biblical contexts, the expression YHWH is often used, but God is used when translating Elohim or Θεος in New Testament contexts, and God is also used in comparative contexts, when both Alla¯ h and YHWH are encompassed by the reference. The following English translations are occasionally cited: • The Koran Interpreted (Arberry 1998). • The Qurʾan: Arabic Text with Corresponding English Meaning (Assami, Bantley, and Kennedy 1997). • The Qurʾan, A New Annotated Translation (Droge 2014). • The Noble Qurʾan (al-Hila¯  lī and Kha¯  n 1998). • The Holy Qurʾan (Yūsuf ʿAlī 1999). Arabic verbs are cited in their third-person singular form, following standard practice. It is common for scholars and others to refer to Muḥammad as “the Prophet Muḥammad” or just “the Prophet.” He is referred to here as “Muḥammad,” in keeping with the standard approach used in New Testament scholarship, in which Jesus of Nazareth is normally referred to as “Jesus,” and the term xv

xvi

Notes on Transcription, Qurʾanic Citations, Terms, and Names

“Messiah” refers to an office. However, the human mediator of the Qurʾan is normally referred to as “the Messenger” (al-rasūl), using the Qurʾan’s own preferred title. The Qurʾanic Messenger is capitalized to distinguish this person from the various other messengers referred to in the Qurʾan. Where quoted citations from other authors include material in rounded brackets (. . .), this is an inclusion by the translator or cited author. Unless otherwise indicated, material in square brackets [. . .] is my own addition. Translations from non-English sources are my own, unless otherwise indicated. Biblical citations are from the New Revised Standard Version, ©1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved. The term “the Bible” or “Biblical” is used here in its Christian sense, to refer to the Old Testament together with the New Testament, in the canon accepted by the majority of Christians today. The term “Hebrew Bible” is used to refer to the Tanakh, the books of the Hebrew canon. Arabic romanization is a modified version of the standard used by the American Library Association and the Library of Congress. Modifications are: 1. The prime ' is not used to separate adjoined consonant phonemes. 2. Word-initial hamzah (glottal stop) is transcribed as ʾ only where it forms part of the underlying phonological structure of a word, for example, ʾahl “people, inhabitants.” The hamzat al-waṣl is normally not transcribed, nor are initial non-root glottal stops in derivative forms, for example, al-isla¯  m (for ʾal-ʾisla¯  m). Hamzah is also not transcribed at the start of proper names which would otherwise begin with a vowel, for example, Iblīs (for ʾiblī). Citation forms of words with ta¯ ʾ marbūṭah, the feminine singular ending, use the transcription -h, following the consonantal script of the Qurʾan, for example, sūrah, Tawra¯ h.

List of Qurʾanic Proper Names

ʿĀd place/people to whom Hūd was sent Ādam Adam ʿAdn in the phrase janna¯  t ʿAdnin “Gardens of Eden,” referring to paradise al-Aʿra¯  b Bedouins, desert Arabs ʿArabī Arabic (adj.), the language of the Qurʾan Badr the place of a battle (Q3:123) Bakkah place of the “first House” (Q3:96); often interpreted as Mecca Da¯  wūd David Dhū l-Kifl “one with a fold; one with a double portion,” a prophet Dhū l-Qarnayn “one with two horns,” traditionally Alexander the Great Firʿawn Pharaoh Ha¯  ma¯  n associate of Firʿawn Ha¯  rūn Aaron Ha¯  rūt and Ma¯  rūt two messenger angels in Babylon (Q2:102) Hūd a messenger Iblīs the Devil (see al-Shayṭa¯  n) Ibra¯  hīm Abraham Ilya¯  s Elijah; variant Ilya¯  sīn (Q37:130) ʿImra¯  n father of Maryam (and by deduction of Maryam’s brother Ha¯  rūn—cf. Q19:28 and Ha¯  rūn’s brother Mūsa¯  ). Cf. Biblical ʿAmra¯  m. al-Injīl book sent down to ʿĪsa¯  , normally translated “gospel” ʿĪsa¯  Jesus

xvii

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List of Qurʾanic Proper Names

Isma¯  ʿīl Ishmael Jahannam hell (from Hebrew gêhinnōm) Ja¯  lūt Goliath Jannah, Janna¯  h “garden,” “gardens”—paradise Jibrīl Gabriel Kaʿbah a sacred place; lit. “cube” (Q5:95, 97) Lūṭ Lot al-Madīnah “the town,” taken to refer to Medina Madyan Midian Maʾjūj see Yaʾjūj Makkah Mecca (Q48:24) Ma¯  rūt see Ha¯  rūt Maryam Mary the mother of Jesus or Miriam, the sister of Moses, apparently considered to be one and the same person al-Masīḥ the Messiah, a title for ʿĪsa¯  Muḥammad praised one, Muḥammad Mūsa¯  Moses al-Na¯  r the Fire—Hell Naṣra¯  nī (pl. Naṣa¯  ra¯  ) Christian Nūḥ Noah al-Qurʾan “the recitation,” the Qurʾan Quraysh a people (Q106:1), the tribe of Muḥammad al-Raqīm probably Petra (Q18:9) al-Rass a people (Q25:38; Q50:12) al-Ṣa¯  biʾūn a community of believers whose identity is unclear and disputed Ṣa¯  liḥ messenger to Thamūd al-Sa¯  mirī a “Samaritan” who made the golden calf al-Shayṭa¯  n the Devil (see Iblīs) Shuʿayb messenger to Madyan Sulayma¯  n Solomon Ṭalūt Saul al-Tawra¯  h Torah Thamūd a place and a people to whom Ṣa¯  līḥ was sent, in Northwest Arabia Tubbaʿ a people or a leader with whom a people, qawm tubbaʾ, is associated ʿUzayr possibly Ezra Yaḥya¯  John the Baptist

List of Qurʾanic Proper Names

Yaʾjūj and Maʾjūj Gog and Magog (Q18:94; Q21:96; Ezek. 38:2–3) Yaʾqūb Jacob al-Yasaʾ Elisha Yathrib a town, identified with Medina (Q33:13) Yūnus Jonah; see Dhū-l-Nūn Yūsuf Joseph Zakarīya¯  Zechariah, father of Yaḥya¯ (Q19:7) and guardian to Maryam (Q3:37)

xix

Introduction A Fundamental Question

This book addresses the question of whether there is a unifying continuity, what might be called a “family resemblance,” between the Bible and the Qurʾan. Similarities between these two scriptures are plain enough, but how deep do they go? Is what the Qurʾan has in common with the Bible enough to make it a continuous development from the Bible, in some coherent sense, or does the Qurʾan represent a break from the Bible, a separate, creative development with similarities which do not run deep? This is the question explored by this book, and the answer proposed will be that the Qurʾan is a creative theological innovation, which repurposes Biblical lexical and textual materials to serve its own distinctive theological agenda. This introduction defines the problem of the resemblances between the Bible and the Qurʾan, explaining why this has been such a puzzling challenge for Qurʾanic studies (§0.2). Next comes a survey of the extent of Christian and Jewish influences in Arabia around the time of the Qurʾan (§0.3), and an examination of the Qurʾan’s own awareness of its connection to the Bible, including controversies around this topic which are reported in the Qurʾan (§0.4). Some earlier Christian understandings of the connection are noted (§0.5) and trends in modern scholarly approaches are surveyed (§0.6), including a warning about the importance of keeping diachronic and synchronic analysis distinct. Section §0.7 introduces a methodological framework for exploring the question of whether Biblical reflexes in the Qurʾan reflect continuity or discontinuity, drawing on an analogy from language genesis. A final section (§0.8) summarizes our core thesis, and provides a road map for the following chapters.

xxi

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0.1 THE CONTINUITY THESIS What might it mean to assert a relationship of continuity between the Bible and the Qurʾan? There are different understandings of continuity, and it is important to be precise which one we wish to interrogate. Here are examples of authors who have emphasized continuity between the Bible and the Qurʾan, in different ways: • Block (2014, 308–309) has suggested in The Qurʾan in Christian-Muslim dialogue that both scriptures are divinely inspired revelation. He concludes that they are connected by a continuity grounded in what Block refers to as the “objective” unity of sharing a divine author, the “One True God.” • Bulliet (2004, 6), in The Case for Islamo-Christian Culture, argued against the “Judeo-Christian” cultural label, claiming that “the scriptural and doctrinal linkages between Judaism and Christianity are no closer than those between Judaism and Islam, or between Christianity and Islam.” Thus Bulliet sees a comparable continuity between Islam and the Biblical faiths as exists between Judaism and Christianity. • Reynolds has argued in The Qurʾan and Its Biblical Subtext that the Bible and the Qurʾan are “in harmony” with each other, and the Qurʾan is “within the tradition” of the Bible: it emerges that Qurʾan and Bible, far from being incompatible or in opposition, are very much in harmony. . . . The Qurʾan can no longer be seen as a foreign or irrelevant book. It now appears as a work very much within the tradition of Biblical literature, and should be considered as such at universities and seminaries alike. (2010b, 258)

Our intention is to interrogate such claims of continuity. But first we must make the question of continuity or discontinuity precise. Then we may consider the evidence in the light of this precision. The approach followed here is to examine points of similarity between the Qurʾan and the Bible, real and claimed, and inquire whether these parallels point to a shared religious inheritance, or a discontinuous genesis for the Qurʾan, which did not arise from an inherited tradition. This approach draws on a linguistic analogy, namely a contrast in diachronic linguistics between inheritance and borrowing. Inheritance and borrowing produce very different structural outcomes in languages and, in a way which can be made precise, the distinct results of these two processes are often readily discernible. Consider the case of English skirt and shirt. Both ultimately come from Proto-Germanic *skirt-, but one is inherited, and the other borrowed.

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In the history of English a regular sound change resulted in all inherited instances of syllable-initial Proto-Germanic *sk- changing to /ʃ/ (spelled sh-). Examples include ship, shine, shoe, shoot, and shove. This means that words in English which commence with sk (spelled sk or sc) can be readily identified as borrowed. For example, skirt, sky, and skin are borrowed from Old Norse, skiff is from Lombardic via Italian, and screw is from Old Dutch via French. Based on the observation that inheritance and borrowing can produce discernibly different results, we will consider whether the Qurʾan’s many parallels with the Bible show characteristics of inheritance or borrowing. The distinction explored here between continuity and discontinuity, between inheritance and borrowing, is not intended to be polemical. Neither type of influence is in inherently superior or inferior to the other, and neither provides a basis for a value judgment. Although Donner (2011a, 37; 2011b, 642) has pointed out that to propose a relationship of borrowing could be and sometimes has been taken to imply dependence and therefore inferiority, nevertheless, a polemical approach could assume continuity just as much as discontinuity. Indeed, from very early on some Christian writers treated the Qurʾan as a Christian heresy, a position which presupposes some degree of theological continuity. McGrath (2009, 83) defines heresy, as understood in the Christian tradition, as “an intellectually defective vision of the Christian faith, having its origins within the church.” Such a view of Islam is reflected, for example, in the writings of Anastasios of Sinai (d. 700 CE), who spoke of the “false opinions” of Muslim Arabs as if they were some kind of Christian heresy, referring to Arabs as “Arians” (Griffith 2012, 420). Not much later, John of Damascus (d. 749 CE) included his famous refutation of the faith of the Ishmaelites in his heresiology, On Heresies. Concerning Islam, John writes that “a false prophet appeared to them named Muḥammad, who chanced upon the Old and New Testaments, and conversing in like manner with an Arian monk introduced a sect (hairesin) of his own” (Schadler 2018, 219).1 This was also the view of Islam held by the medieval polymath, Nicholas of Cusa (d. 1464 CE), who concluded that Muḥammad had converted from idolatry to Nestorian Christianity, and after that developed heretical views (Hopkins 1994, 16). To call Islam a heresy implies that it arose as a breakaway from within Christianity. Although the label heresy is pejorative, it presupposes at a degree of continuity between Islam and Christianity, namely that Islam diverged from Christianity by means of a sectarian division. It presupposes a shared inheritance. In this introduction, we will review some of the puzzling questions posed by the extensive relatedness of the Bible and the Qurʾan, and then consider responses to those questions found in the Qurʾan itself, from Christian responses to Islam and from modern scholarship. After this we will explore a linguistic analogy to propose a methodology for answering our key question

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of whether Biblical materials reflected in the Qurʾan show signs of having been inherited or borrowed. 0.2 THE CHALLENGE OF RELATEDNESS It is obvious to all that there are similarities between the Qurʾan and the Bible, and the Qurʾan also shows parallels with extra-Biblical Christian and Jewish writings. These relationships, their explanation and significance, have been a continuing focus of debate and inquiry for Muslims and non-Muslims for more than a millennium. Four examples will suffice to indicate the diversity of these associations: • There is a similarity between Q5 of the Qurʾan and the Bible’s account of when the Israelites refused to enter Canaan (Num. 14). In the Qurʾan Mūsa¯  (Moses) calls his people to enter the “Holy Land” (Q5:21). The people confess fear of the inhabitants (Q5:22), but two unnamed men (paralleling Joshua and Caleb of Num. 14:6–9) speak in favor of entering the land (Q5:23). The people refuse (Q5:24), and Alla¯  h then forbids them to enter, condemning them to “wander the earth” for 40 years (Q5:26). • The Qurʾan’s story of the “companions of the cave” (Q18:7–26) is similar to the post-Biblical Christian legend of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus (Griffith 2008a). • There is a parallel between the Babylonian Talmud2 and Q5:32. The two passages, commenting on the murder of one of Ādam’s sons by another (Q5:27–31), say that killing a person is like killing or destroying “all the people” (Qurʾan) or “a complete world” (Talmud). • Our final example is that some figures of speech in the teachings of Jesus have parallels in the Qurʾan: the camel going through the eye of the needle (Q7:40; Mt. 19:24), the grain of wheat bearing a hundredfold (Q2:261; Mt. 13:8), and the mustard seed (Q21:47; Mt. 17:20). We will use the term reflex to describe a relationship of similarity between Biblical and Qurʾanic materials, without any implied commitment to a specific model of how the similarity came about. Thus the story of Yūsuf in Q12 can be said to be a reflex of the Joseph story in Genesis, and vice versa and the Arabic word masīḥ is a reflex of the Hebrew ma¯ shiaḥ “messiah,” and vice versa. 0.2.1 The Puzzle of Christian and Jewish Influences The many similarities between the Qurʾan and the Bible are, as Andrae (1936, 91) put it, a “riddle.”3 Actually there is more than one riddle. One of the

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Qurʾan’s riddles is the question of the relative influence of Christianity and Judaism. On the one hand certain doctrinal emphases in the Qurʾan appear to owe more to Christianity than to Judaism, including the prominence given to al-Shayṭa¯ n (Satan); beliefs about intercession in the afterlife (Bell 1926, 56); the Qurʾan’s eschatological vision of the future, including Judgment Day; the use made of the fear of future judgment to motivate good works; and the anti-Jewish themes of the Qurʾan, which parallel Christian anti-Jewish polemic.4 On the other hand the Qurʾan includes much more material from the Hebrew Bible than the New Testament, it rejects or is hostile to core Christian doctrines, such as the incarnation and the crucifixion, and apart from this it knows almost nothing of the New Testament beyond the Lukan birth narratives. Another riddle of the Qurʾan is the combination of remarkably numerous and diverse reflexes of Biblical materials, as well as extra-Biblical Christian and Jewish literature, alongside a striking unawareness of basic facts concerning the sources of this material. Let us consider some examples: • The Qurʾan conflates Maryam (Miriam), the sister of Mūsa¯ (Moses) and Ha¯  rūn (Aaron) and daughter of ʿImra¯  n (ʿAmra¯  m) (Num. 26:59) with Maryam (Mary)5 the mother of ʿĪsa¯ (Jesus) (Q19:27–28; Q66:12; Q3:33–36). • The Qurʾan refers to Ha¯  ma¯  n as a senior official of Firʿawn (Pharaoh), mentioning him six times (Q28:6, 8, 38; Q29:39; Q40:24, 36). The Biblical Ha¯  ma¯  n—the name is identical—was a vizier under Ahasuerus (Xerxes) in Esth. 3–6. • In the Qurʾan’s version of the story of the golden calf, someone called al-Sa¯  mirī “the Samaritan” leads the Israelites into error in the wilderness (Q20:85–88, 95). However, in the Bible the Samaritans are the remnant people of the northern Kingdom of Israel. This ethnonym arose centuries after the time of the Exodus, being derived from the name of the city Samaria (Hebrew shomron “watch mountain”), which was only founded in the time of Omri (1 Kgs 16:24), around 870 BCE (van Beek 1962a, 1962b). • In other respects the Biblical timeline has been flattened, so the Qurʾan displays little awareness of stages in the history of Israel. For example, in Q5:20–21 Mūsa¯ addresses his people before they enter the holy land, telling them to remember that Alla¯  h had appointed prophets and kings among them in the past, even though in the Biblical account there were no kings of Israel until some time after Canaan was settled. In spite of this previous account, elsewhere the Qurʾan describes how the people of Israel, after Alla¯  h had drowned “Pharaoh’s people” (and not just his army) in the sea, did not move on toward a promised land, but took over the farms,

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gardens, and buildings of the Egyptians, succeeding them (Q44:25–28; cf. Q7:136–37). • Another puzzle, given the large volume of Biblical reflexes in the Qurʾan, is the surprising rarity of accurate citations of actual text of the Bible (Griffith 2013, 55–56). These puzzles are a paradox of how to understand both the Messenger (the human reciter of the Qurʾan) and his intended audience. They beg the question: By what processes could the Messenger and his audience have become aware of so much Christian and Jewish narrative material, yet with such gaps in their Biblical knowledge? The paradox of the audience is at least as significant as that of the Messenger. Given the often remarked-upon allusive nature of this material in the Qurʾan, which presupposes familiarity on the part of the audience with the Biblical references, what kind of audience could collectively be presumed to know so much, and yet know so little about the Bible at the same time? If the Messenger and his intended audience had a religious formation in Judaism or Christianity, why were there such knowledge gaps? On the other hand, if they did not have a religious formation in either faith, by what means could the Messenger and his audience have received such extensive exposure to the Bible’s contents? 0.3 CHRISTIANITY AND JUDAISM IN ARABIA The religious milieu of the Ḥija¯ z, in which the Qurʾan reportedly arose, was well aware of both Judaism and Christianity and the same was also true of other regions frequented by Arabic speakers. Finster (2011, 70–74) has provided a detailed overview of the reported presence of Christianity among the Arab tribes. By the end of the sixth century CE substantial numbers of Arabs in the Levant, Mesopotamia, and Arabia had converted to Christianity: Najra¯ n, an important Arab city 1,000 kilometers to the southeast of Mecca, was predominately Christian by the time Islam arose;6 the kingdom of Ḥimyar in the south had been under Christian rule for fifty years during the sixth century (Robin 2012); the region of Bet Qaṭraye off the East Arabian coast in the Persian gulf had a Christian presence from the fourth to the ninth century (Witztum 2011, 259); and Petra, the former Nabataean capital, and later southern capital of the Byzantine province of Palaestina Tertia, whose influence spread south into Arabia (Nehmé 2017, 149) and north into the Levant, included a Christian community from at least the third century CE: Asterius, Bishop of Petra, was reported to have attended the Council of Alexandria in 363 CE (Wace and Piercy 1999, 123).

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The datable Jewish presence in the Arabian Peninsula goes back at least to the first century BCE, both in the Ḥija¯ z in the north and Ḥimyar in the southwest (Hirschberg 2007, 294; Hoyland 2011, 110). Muslim Arab historians mention around 20 Jewish tribes dwelling among the Arabs (Hirschberg 2007, 294). In the south the Jewish presence had risen to prominence from at least the end of the fourth century CE (Rippin 2005, 14). The Ḥimyarite kingdom had exerted influence into the Ḥija¯ z for several centuries before Islam arose, and a Jewish monarchy ruled the Ḥimyarites during the fifth century CE. Ibn Isḥa¯ q attributed the adoption of Judaism by the Ḥimyarite king Asʿad Abu Karib in the first half of the fifth century to the influence of two Jewish rabbis from Yathrib (Medina) (Guillaume 1955, 7–11; see also Smith 1954, 462). He also reports extensive contacts between Muḥammad and the Jews of Medina. The concept of sectarian competition between monotheistic faiths was also familiar in Arabia by the time of the Qurʾan. A massacre of Najra¯ n Christians had been conducted by Dhu Nawa¯ s, the Jewish king of the Ḥimyarites, in 523 CE, reportedly in an attempt to compel them to convert to Judaism. Ibn Isḥa¯ q gives an account of a massacre by fire and the sword of some 20,000 Christians, associating it with Q85:4–8 (Guillaume 1955, 17). This massacre was also referred to in contemporary Christian sources.7 In retaliation, the Christian Ethiopians destroyed the Ḥimyarite kingdom in 525 CE (Smith 1954, 431), ending six centuries of Yemeni dominance in the region. According to tradition, Muḥammad was born c. 570 CE, or some 45 years after these momentous events. Within the ḥadīth and sīrah there are references to Christians who were known to Muḥammad, endorsed him, and could have influenced him. One was Muḥammad’s wet nurse, Umm Ayma¯ n, an Ethiopian (Shahīd 2006, 15). Another was the cousin of his wife Khadījah, Waraqah ibn. Nawfa¯ l, who Ibn Isḥa¯ q described as “a Christian who had studied the scriptures and was a scholar” (Guillaume 1955, 83, 99, 107). Another was the monk Baḥīra, who was “well versed in the knowledge of Christians” (Guillaume 1955, 79–81). Mention is also made of a Christian slave named Jabr, of whom critics of Muḥammad had said “The one who teaches Muḥammad most of what he brings is Jabr the Christian” (Guillaume 1955, 180).8 There is also a reference in a ḥadīth to a nameless Christian and one-time scribe for Muḥammad, who had converted to Islam but then returned to Christianity, and claimed to have been the source of much of Muḥammad’s knowledge.9 Indeed this idea, that Muḥammad was receiving help from others, goes back to the Qurʾan itself (Q25:4–5). The ḥadīths also refer to some Jews who, like Waraqa and Baḥīra, endorsed Muḥammad (Guillaume 1955, 79, 90, 93).10

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All across the Arabic speaking world for the time period in which the Qurʾan arose, including the Levant, Mesopotamia, and the Arabian Peninsula, there is more than enough evidence, from a wide variety of sources, of the potential for contact between Christians and Jews on the one hand, and the Arabic speakers who comprised the initial Qurʾanic community on the other. This contact could have taken the form of side-by-side coexistence, or contact facilitated through travel, such as trade journeys, or the movement of slaves. We will now consider the Qurʾan’s awareness of its own relatedness to the Bible, and the controversies concerning this which are reported in its pages. 0.4 THE QURʾAN’S SELF-AWARENESS OF RELATEDNESS The Qurʾan itself is aware that it shares an affinity with the “books” of previous messengers. Indeed this is a core component of the Qurʾan’s message. According to the Qurʾan, similarities are due to the common source of revelation in Alla¯ h. This self-understanding is communicated in many places, such as Q26:192–97, which states that the Qurʾan’s message was a “sending down” which was also “in” the former scriptures, and as such its authenticity could be discerned by learned Jews. The Qurʾan has an ambivalent attitude to these former scriptures. On the one hand it appeals to their authority to validate its own message. On the other hand, there are allegations of corruption against them (Lazarus-Yafeh 2000b, 394). Guided by the teachings of the Qurʾan, Muslim scholars later developed an understanding that the scriptures held by the ʾAhl al-Kita¯ b “People of the Book” (Christians, Jews, and “Sabians”; cf. Q2:62; Q5:69; Q22:17) are corrupted versions of divinely revealed books once delivered by messengers of Alla¯ h to their forebears: The obligation of belief applies to the original revelations, not the various scriptures in the hands of non-Muslims, which are textually corrupt in their present form. (Sheikh ʿAbd al-Wakīl Durūbī, cited in Keller 1994, §u3.4, 811; cf. Q4:46; Q5:13)

The term kita¯ b “book” in the phrase “People of the Book” refers to these former scriptures, as originally delivered by Alla¯ h. In Islamic sciences the doctrine of corruption of former scriptures is known as taḥrīf “alteration, forgery.”11 To the extent that these scriptures, although preserved incompletely, may still reflect elements of previous revelations given by Alla¯ h, common divine authorship is appealed to by the Qurʾan to account for similarities. However, the Qurʾan itself advises that in order to gain a true understanding

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of Alla¯ h’s revelations, Christians and Jews should now look to the Qurʾan, and to its Messenger, Muḥammad, who was sent as the final Messenger to humanity to correct and clear up whatever had been lost from previous revelations, or become confused (Q16:43–44). 0.4.1 Disputes Reported in the Qurʾan The provenance of the Qurʾan was already in dispute at the time of its composition. A key issue was the relationship between the Qurʾan and previous texts. Conflict over this relationship is a recurring theme of the Qurʾan. One charge was that the Qurʾan was plagiarized from other sources. There are references to retorts which had decried recitations of parts of the Qurʾan as asa¯ ṭīru al-awalīna “tales of ancient people,” appropriated from the common heritage of the audience, who “have heard this already” (Q8:31; cf. Q16:24). The claim is also made that the Messenger needed help from others, who were more knowledgeable than him, and were “dictating” the recitations to him (Q25:4–5). Such passages suggest that the rejecters of the Messenger were claiming that his revelations were stories recycled from the collective knowledge of the audience. The insinuation was that the Messenger was drawing on legends, cobbling them together with the help of others, and repurposing them as alleged divine revelation. To this charge of plagiarism the Qurʾan responds with repeated denials, affirming the truth of the Messenger’s revelations (Boullata 1988, 139–40). 0.5 PRE-MODERN CHRISTIAN UNDERSTANDINGS From the earliest period in their encounters with Islam, non-Muslims were aware of the relatedness between the Bible and the Qurʾan, and proposed a variety of theories to account for this. As we have seen, from very early on, some Christian commentators treated Islam as a heresy which arose from or under the influence of Christianity. The Risa¯ lah or Apology of Al-Kindi, a medieval Arabic Christian polemical work thought to date from the ninth or tenth centuries CE,12 claims that Sergius, a Nestorian monk, sought refuge from persecution in Mecca, where he influenced Muḥammad toward Christianity and made him his disciple. The Apology further claims that, after Sergius died, two Jews, Abdallah and Kab, being jealous of the monk’s former influence upon Muḥammad, ingratiated themselves with him, and tampered with his Qurʾan, interpolating elements from the Hebrew Bible and Jewish law into it (Muir 1887, 13ff, 70–71). It became commonplace among Europeans to regard Islam as a concoction of Muḥammad, compiled with Christian and Jewish assistance. Al-Kindi’s

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claims were reechoed, for example, in the acerbic views of William Okeley who published an autobiographical narrative of his bondage and escape from Algiers in 1675: their Prophet was but a Cobler. . . . Mahomet, by the help of Sergius, a Nestorian Monk, and Abdalla the Jew, had patch’d up a Cento of Jewish, and Monkish Fopperies, which was now their Religion. (1675, 13)13

The idea that Muḥammad was a “cobbler” was also Luther’s, who opined that Islam was “a faith woven together out of the faith of Jews, Christians and heathens” (Luther 1842, 49). 0.6 WESTERN UNDERSTANDINGS IN THE MODERN ERA A change of tack from the derogatory view of Muḥammad as a “cobbler” was offered by Abraham Geiger, the founder of Reform Judaism. Geiger’s (1833) prize-winning essay on the Jewish sources for Qurʾanic materials made a break with centuries of European commentary, launching modern Western scholarship on the Qurʾan.14 His encyclopedic command of Rabbinic sources made his essay a landmark for Qurʾanic studies. 0.6.1 From Muḥammad to the Community The title of Geiger’s path-breaking essay was “What did Muḥammad take from Judaism?” This title reflects a perspective which endured throughout the first century of Western research into Qurʾanic reflexes of Jewish and Christian materials. Geiger believed that Muḥammad, as the author of the Qurʾan, had a personal familiarity with Jewish sources and drew directly upon them. In the spirit of nineteenth-century romanticism, he held a high view of the creative “poetic” agency of Muḥammad in his intentional “borrowing” from Judaism. Geiger’s working assumption was that Muḥammad had “the greatest respect” (1833, 22) for the Jews, and “the fantasy-rich development” of their traditions “appealed to Muḥammad’s poetic imagination,” so he was “probably keen to borrow a good deal from Judaism and incorporate it into his Qurʾan” (1833, 23). For Geiger the question of the relatedness of the Qurʾan and the Bible became: “How did Muḥammad gain exposure to the teachings of Judaism and/ or Christianity, and what did he do with them?” This turned the problem of Biblical reflexes in the Qurʾan into a question about its human author. The formative stages of modern Western scholarship on the Qurʾan followed Geiger’s approach. Scholars read the text of the Qurʾan as the creative work

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of Muḥammad, in the light of external influences which provided sources for his religious ideas. Reynolds characterizes this trend of scholarship as follows: this idea was usually connected to the historical principle that Muḥammad was the sole author of the Qurʾan. This principle, meanwhile, was often shaded with the conviction that a merchant from an obscure corner of the Arabian Peninsula was incapable of composing narratives on Biblical themes. Thus Muḥammad was usually assumed to have borrowed material from Jews and Christians. The Qurʾan consequently was seen as something of a scrapbook of earlier religious ideas. (2010b, 35)

Reynolds observed that scholars had long been intrigued by the possibility that the seedbed of Islam was provided by heterodox Christian or Jewish sects which sought refuge in the Arabian Desert. They sought to account for the theological divergence of the Qurʾan from the Bible by the divergence of these sects from Rabbinical Judaism or Christianity. They imagined that Muḥammad had drunk from the Biblical wells through heretical straws supplied by these sects.15 This account could, it was thought, provide a handy explanation for what Reynolds (2010b, 7) called “the idiosyncratic nature of Biblical material in the Qurʾan.”16 Acceptance of the central role of the life of Muḥammad and his agency in the genesis of the Qurʾan held sway among Western scholars until the second half of the twentieth century. A high water mark of the approach which viewed the Qurʾan through the lens of the life of Muḥammad was the books of Watt (1953, 1956) and Paret (1957). As late as 1961 Paret stated that the “the picture of Muḥammad that has so far been worked out by European Orientalists is well founded and can be modified and rounded out merely in matters of detail” (1961, 27).17 From the 1960s researchers’ attention shifted away from Muḥammad toward the community in which the Qurʾan arose. This shift was spurred on by skepticism about the standard understanding of Muḥammad’s life, for reasons we shall explore in §1.3. Wansbrough’s (1977, 1978) application of source-critical methods to Qurʾanic studies in the 1970s sought to completely disconnect the text of the Qurʾan, not only from the later tafsīr tradition, but also from the traditionally accepted scenario in which the Qurʾan is Muḥammad’s personal text generated first in Mecca and then in Medina in the early seventh century. Wansbrough proposed instead that the Qurʾan was a much later work, created in southern Iraq by a community and not a single individual.18 0.6.2 From Sources to the Qurʾanic Milieu Geiger’s essay had combined a focus on Muḥammad’s authorship with a deep knowledge of Jewish sources of late antiquity. In the century that followed

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Geiger, a series of studies were published studies which sought to source distinctive features of the origins of Islam in the teachings of Jewish or Christian sects in Arabia. Not atypical was Schwally’s remark in 1919 that: Muḥammad knew Judaism and Christianity so well, as was only possible in Mecca at the time, and became so dependent upon these religions, that there is hardly a religious concept in the Koran which is not taken from them. (Nöldeke and Schwally 1919, 121)

The culmination of a century of research built on these assumptions was Speyer’s (1931) monumental Die biblischen Erzählungen im Qoran, which exhaustively documented Biblical correlates of Qurʾanic passages. In their exploration of sources, scholars have differed as to whether to assign the greater weight of influence upon the Qurʾan to Christianity or Judaism. The diversity of theories may be considered a response to the “riddle” of Jewish and Christian influence in the Qurʾan (§0.2.1). Some scholars followed Geiger’s emphasis on the contribution of Jewish sources,19 while others have highlighted contributions from Christianity.20 Still others have suggested the Qurʾan was influenced by a community of a mixed ChristianJewish character.21 Over the past four decades the work of revisionists has offered an array of alternative but mutually incompatible ways to dispense with the traditional account of the origins of the Qurʾan.22 What these various models have in common is that they all assume radically innovative accounts of the context in which the Qurʾan emerged. Undoubtedly influenced by pressure from the “disarray” (Donner 2008, 29) and “chaos” (Neuwirth 2004, 82) caused by the revisionists, the focus in Qurʾanic research has shifted in the past few decades to the context or milieu in which the Qurʾan arose in late antiquity. As Reynolds (2008b, 18) put it, there has been a need for “a new movement . . . at once innovative and cooperative” which considers the Qurʾan in the light of a re-constructable historical context, rather than in the light of Islamic sources written centuries after its initial composition. In their introduction to The Qurʾan in Context: Historical and Literary Investigations into the Qurʾanic Milieu, Sinai and Neuwirth describe the descriptive synchronic goal of this enterprise, in contrast to the earlier emphasis on treating the Qurʾan as a compilation from prior sources: what contextual readings of the Qurʾan aim at is not to unmask the Qurʾan as a mere blueprint of earlier Christian and Jewish “sources,” but rather to reconstruct, as fully as possible, the cultural lexicon of the Qurʾan’s audience, i.e., the linguistic and cultural “code” employed by the text—whoever its author may be—in order to make itself understood. (2011, 15)

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In this vein, a series of recent conferences have explored different dimensions of the context in which the Qurʾan originated.23 Witztum’s 2011 dissertation, The Syriac Milieu of the Quran is a textbook example of work in the recent mode. He explores the setting in which the Qurʾan could have derived some of its Biblical reflexes. Tracing a Christian Syriac influence upon materials from the Hebrew Bible in the Qurʾan, he argues that the Qurʾan’s treatment of these materials is more akin to Syriac Christianity than the Judaism of the period. He concludes that the community of the Qurʾan was “well aware of Christian lore and belief, but there was also actual interaction between Muslims and Christians” (Witztum 2011, 257), and suggests that the specific means by which Syriac Christian influences were transferred into the Qurʾan was the public performance of homilies and hymns. 0.6.3 Literary Theoretical Terminology There has been a trend in recent Qurʾanic studies to draw on terms from postmodern literary theory. Intertextuality, a term coined by Kristeva (1969, 1980) is invoked to describe the relationship between the Bible and the Qurʾan (e.g., Firestone 2003, 10). A difficulty with the use of literary theoretical terms in reference to Biblical reflexes in the Qurʾan is that a clear distinction is not always maintained between a synchronic semiotic relationship and a diachronic relationship of cause-and-effect. Literary theoretical approaches are concerned with semiotics: they analyze the ways in which hearers and readers construct meanings from texts. For example, the term subtext as used in literary theory refers to a rhetorical device, namely an unstated but intended meaning implied by a text. In the case of the Qurʾan, it is often far from clear that Biblical reflexes fulfilled a semiotic function at the time of the Qurʾan’s composition which relied in any way on familiarity on the part of the author or hearer/reader with a Biblical source. A diachronic cause-and-effect relationship does apply when the Bible has influenced the form of the Qurʾan across time, but this is not the same thing as a semiotic device such as a literary allusion, which requires knowledge on the part of the audience to be an effective communicative device. Let us consider an example from English. If in my everyday speech I use one of the idioms that Shakespeare originally coined in The Tempest, such as strange bedfellows or sea change, it would be wrong to conclude that I was alluding to The Tempest. These expressions have long since become nativized as part of the linguistic and cultural code of the English language. No doubt acts of literary reference have taken place over the centuries past, and still do take place, when people pick up Shakespeare’s words and link them to their original context, using them in an allusive fashion. Today, however, most

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people who use these particular expressions are just speaking English, not invoking The Tempest, because the allusions have long since passed into the “code” of English speakers. In the light of these reflections, a crucial question to be asked in connection with Biblical reflexes in the Qurʾan, such as the reference to a camel going through the eye of the needle in Q7:40 (cf. Mt. 19:24), is whether they reflected an actual literary, communicatively “live” reference to a Biblical text, or even to secondary texts such as hearers’ encounters with Rabbinic or Christian exegesis (Neuwirth 2014e, 7), or were they simply a deployment of the cultural and linguistic code held in common by the Qurʾanic community, with no Biblical reference intended or received? At times the distinction between synchrony and diachrony can become confused. For example, Firestone (2003, 2–3) must have been referring to a diachronic relationship of historical cause-and-effect when he wrote that the Qurʾan “contains so many parallels with the Hebrew Bible and New Testament that it could not possibly exist without its scriptural predecessors as subtexts.” Here he uses the term subtext loosely in the sense of “source materials.” On the other hand he also uses the term subtext in its usual semiotic sense in the very same article when he describes the Qurʾan’s references to disasters falling upon unbelievers as having the “subtext” of pointing to residents in Muḥammad’s own town (2003, 14), for Muḥammad is telling this parable against his neighbors. Firestone’s use of subtext to refer to source materials as well as literary allusion is doubly confusing. In literary semiotics a subtext is a meaning implicit in a text, not an actual other text. When an earlier text is evoked by a later text, the earlier text is termed a hypotext (Genette 1982). Genette speaks of the later text being “grafted” onto the earlier text, by a process of “transformation” in which the later text evokes the earlier text. Reynolds has argued that the Biblical-Qurʾanic connection is so strong and close that research into the Qurʾan should be considered as virtually a subdiscipline of Biblical studies: . . . from a literary standpoint the relationship between the Qurʾan and Biblical literature is significantly closer than that between the New Testament and the Hebrew Bible. (2010b, 232–233)

Reynolds develops these ideas further in the Qurʾan and Its Biblical Subtext, where he repeatedly makes use of literary metaphors, such as conversation, subtext, and harmony, to characterize the relationship between the two scriptures. However a conversation implies a communication which goes back and forth in real time; likewise harmony implies two or more musical parts, working together at the same time; and the concept of subtext, adapted from literary theory, as we have noted, refers to a meaning which is implied and

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intended to be understood without having to be made explicit. These are synchronic terms, being used to describe diachronic relationships. Reynolds (2010b, 233) cites Firestone’s diachronic use of “subtext” with approval, so it is perhaps not surprising that the confusion between synchronic and diachronic uses of the terminology of intertextuality in Firestone also makes its way into Reynolds’ works, in which many of his examples of Biblical “subtexts” in the Qurʾan are not based on any demonstrated audience familiarity with the proposed “subtext.” Let us consider one example. Reynolds (2010b, 65) examined the function of the word rīsh “feathers” in Q7:26, in which Alla¯ h tells humanity “We sent down onto you clothing, (which) covers your shameful parts, and feathers [rīsh].” He links rīsh to a Talmudic tradition (2010b, 70) that blood could not have been shed in Eden, since Adam and Eve were vegetarians (cf. Gen. 1:29–30; 9:3) so, it was proposed, Alla¯ h used feathers rather than skins of slaughtered animals to clothe Ādam and his wife, reinterpreting Gen. 3:21. This accounts for the otherwise inexplicable use of the word rīsh in Q7:27. Reynolds (2010b, 67–71) then characterizes this Talmudic tradition as a “subtext” for the Qurʾan. However, Reynolds’ explanation for this otherwise puzzling textual feature of the Qurʾan is an application of what Saussure (1959, 1) called “philology.” This is an exercise in highly skilled textual paleontology, which accounts for a fossilized feature of a text that has no obvious active function in its current position. This particular verse, although it comes after a telling of the Ādam story, does not actually refer to Ādam and his wife in the Garden. Rather, it is an observation that Alla¯ h provides clothing to humankind in general—the “children of Ādam”—as a “sign” for them to heed. The turn of phrase is characteristic of the Qurʾan’s theology of signs and messengers in their role of calling people to heed signs from Alla¯ h. In the context of a recitation of one of the signs of Alla¯ h, the word rīsh “feathers” functions here like a fossil embedded in a rock: the relationship between Gen. 3:21 or Talmudic literature on the one hand and the appearance of rīsh in Q7:26 is like that between a long-passed living thing and its fossil. If Reynolds’ diachronic explanation is correct, the origin of this textual fossil can be explained by reference to its textual prehistory, but this relationship of cause and effect need not have made any contribution to the semiotics of the verse in which it occurred.24 This is a diachronic relationship, not a synchronic one. Reynolds (2010b, 129) rightly calls his analytical technique “philological,” for it is primarily concerned with the history behind the text of the Qurʾan, and not its communicative function. His findings do establish striking and at times subtle connections between the Qurʾan and the Bible, generating many valuable insights. However, the existence of these associations seems insufficient to support the use of synchronic terms such as “harmony,” “conversation,” and “subtext” to characterize the relationship between the two

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scriptures. Exposing these associations represents a discerning of historical sources, “fossilized” features which for the most part have become separated from their original context and are meaningless outside of them. The opacity of many of these references points to a disconnection between the Qurʾan and its Biblical reflexes, not to a semiotic continuity.25 It is striking that tafsīr—commentary by Muslim scholars on the Qurʾan— does not normally look to insights from Biblical studies to explain textual features. Reynolds has suggested that this was because Muslim scholars were disconnected from the tools of Biblical scholarship, and thus not equipped to uncover the kinds of evidence he adduces: The mufassirūn as a rule did not know the other languages of the Qurʾan’s historical context, that is, Syriac, Aramaic, Greek, Hebrew, Ethiopic, Pahlavi, and Ancient North/South Arabian. They were not familiar with the religious texts of those languages. They did not have studies in front of them such as Speyer’s Die biblische Erzählungen im Qoran or Jeffery’s Foreign Vocabulary of the Qurʾan. (2010b, 22; cf. Speyer 1931; Jeffery 1938)

However, there is another possibility that the Qurʾan is semiotically disconnected from its Biblical reflexes, and its original reciter did not expect his audience to be able to comprehend these apparent allusions, and may not have been aware of many of them himself. In this case, these literary allusions are only apparent to scholars, and not a genuine example of semiotic intertextuality. The situation is surely as Wansbrough (1977, 20) described it in Qurʾanic Studies that “scripture was being pressed into the service of as yet unfamiliar doctrine,” the communicative focus being on the service these materials were being pressed into. A diachronic explanation for these features does not reveal meaning as intended by the reciter or apprehended by the audience, but instead offers an historical account of the sources from which certain Qurʾanic materials ultimately came. This is an exercise in textual paleontology. One of the problems with reading of the Qurʾan as a compilation of forms borrowed from Christian and Jewish sources is that it decontextualizes what is borrowed, not only from its previous context, but also—and this is more important—from its communicative context in the Qurʾan. A comprehensive account of such materials needs to consider context in both directions. The necessary corrective to the confusion between semiotics and diachronic cause-and-effect relationships between texts is to attend to the synchronic study of the Qurʾan.26 This was what Neuwirth (2014e, xx) called for in her acerbic critique of Reynolds, in which she rejects a form of research in which “the text is immediately broken down into haphazard textual pieces that only need to be screened for their Christian essence.”

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0.7 METHODOLOGY: THE CREOLIZATION MODEL We are considering here the Qurʾan’s handling of Biblical materials using a semiotic systems approach, which treats theological meaning as a crucial aspect of a synchronic description of the Qurʾan. The approach used here contrasts with the earlier historical approach of European scholars, exemplified by the Geschichte des Qora¯ ns series (Nöldeke and Schwally 1909, 1919; Bergsträsser and Pretzl 1938), which assumed the basic features of the Islamic account of Muḥammad and the origins of the Qurʾan and then sought to trace the history of the development of the Qurʾan within the historical framework supplied by Islam. Our approach also differs from recent “Qurʾanic milieu” investigations into the cultural and linguistic systems which applied within the Qurʾan’s original context. The focus here is on the Qurʾan itself, and its own internally projected system of meanings, which is referred to here as Qurʾanic Theology, rather than to the cultural milieu in which the Qurʾan arose. The question being asked here is to what extent reflexes of Biblical materials in the Qurʾan preserve theological meanings of the Biblical sources from which they ultimately were derived, and to what extent they have been “pressed into service” by supplying them with theological content which conforms them to their Qurʾanic context. This question bears on the issue of whether the Qurʾan bears a “family resemblance” to the Bible. 0.7.1 What Metaphor Shall We Borrow? No less important than the channel by which Biblical reflexes made their way into the Qurʾan are the principles and means by which the materials have been adapted and incorporated into their new context. Cook, in an article on the development of kala¯ m in Islam, puts the question as follows: [Regarding the question of] the originality of Islamic culture. I subscribe to the view that the raw materials of this culture are for the most part old and familiar, and that is in the reshaping of these materials that the distinctiveness and interest of the phenomenon resides. (1980, 43)

One of the key challenges in understanding the connection—or lack of it— between the Qurʾan and its Biblical antecedents, is how to conceptualize the relationship. We will explore how the Biblical reflexes have been accommodated into Qurʾanic structures through two metaphors. The Building Metaphor Kevin McCloud’s Man Made Home is a Channel 4 British television series in which the presenter first builds a shed in the woods from locally sourced and

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recycled materials, and then moves it to the seaside, where he converts it into a holiday shack. During the course of the series McCloud enthusiastically keeps “repurposing” materials. For example, he builds a spa bath for his shed in the woods out of the casing of a plane’s jet engine, and scavenges beams from a wrecked boat washed up on the beach to build a deck for his seaside shack. Each time McCloud repurposes materials the new function is quite different from the old one. The spa bath has nothing to do with flying planes. The deck, while vaguely nautical in feel, is not a boat. The metaphor of building from repurposed materials was introduced by Woodberry (1989) in an evocative article on missional practice, entitled “Contextualization among Muslims: Reusing Common Pillars.” Arguing that the pillars of faith in Islam had been derived from models used in Judaism and Christianity, Woodberry compares these spiritual practices to actual pillars in the great mosque of Qairawan: As I stood recently in the great mosque in Qairawan in present-day Tunisia, I looked at the collection of pillars from various sources that had been organized together into one harmonious whole. The early Muslim builders had freely incorporated pillars from previous Christian churches as was also done elsewhere in the Empire. The columns were modified and whitewashed so that they would blend into their new home. These pillars illustrate what also took place in early Muslim religious observance. What have come to be known as the “pillars” of Islam are all adaptations of previous Jewish and Christian forms. (1996, 171)

Another image, which Woodberry introduces at the end of his article, is that of the Hagia Sophia, the great basilica of Constantinople, now Istanbul, which, unlike the Qairawan mosque, is not constructed from reused building materials from churches, but is an actual church adapted by being painted over and the addition of minarets. A building, created for a particular purpose, can be adapted in two quite different ways to serve a new purpose. One way is through renovation, by which a building is varied and even extended while still retaining core features of the original. An example is the conversion of the Hagia Sophia into an imperial mosque. A very different way is through demolition and recycling of building materials—such as the repurposed pillars of the Qairawan mosque in Tunisia. In the first process one could say that there has been only one building, but it has changed through renovation into something which is a continuous development from the older building. In the other process there are two completely different buildings which share features because of repurposing of building materials. This will result in points of similarity at a micro level between the new and the old buildings. For example, a worshipper from

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the former church might recognize a brick here or a feature there, such as a pillar, put to a new use in the new mosque. An informed visitor like Dudley Woodberry might even be able to recognize the source and original function of recycled items, but there will be no necessary preservation of structure or of the unifying organizing principles which coordinated the parts of the former building together in a pattern. The relationships between components will have been set aside and even destroyed in the recycling process as new structural relationships are conformed to the design requirements of the new building. A pillar may still be a pillar, but the roof it holds up will look completely different, and the pillar will no longer be in the same relative locations to other pillars that it had before: its structural alignment in the whole building will be completely redefined. A recycled brick will be in a different place in the new building, its relationship with surrounding bricks replaced by new relationships. To apply this analogy to the Qurʾan, we may ask whether the Qurʾan constitutes an extension of a Biblical faith, or a repurposing of Biblical materials to construct something quite different. As we have already noted, everyone agrees that there are Biblical reflexes in the Qurʾan. The question is how to construe these points of similarity. For example, does the Qurʾan’s retention of the title al-Masīḥ for ʿĪsa¯  provide evidence that the Qurʾan has in some sense developed out of a Biblical literary inheritance? In this case the presence of the form al-Masīḥ in the Qurʾan could be counted as evidence for continuity. Or is this more like a recycled brick or pillar, deployed in a new structure, and repurposed to serve a new function appropriate only to its new context? To answer this question will require an analysis of the design of the new structure as well as an understanding of the old. The Language Metaphor Another useful metaphor is that of a language. Buildings are static physical objects but a language has dynamic features not unlike a religious tradition: both religions and languages are social and cognitive constructs. They exist in people’s minds, and are shared across communities. Both are transmitted from one generation to the next. Both are produced and maintained collectively. They have individual components, but also larger organizing systems into which these components are integrated. Both are shared tools by which communities make sense of their world. The structures of a language consist of ordered systems of relationships between signs and their components. It was Saussure who is credited with directing the attention of linguistic science to the importance of these structures. He called the study of these structures synchronic linguistics. In a series of lectures delivered in 1911–13, and published posthumously in 1916

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as Cours de linguistique générale, De Saussure (1959) faulted previous approaches to the study of language. He explained that the “grammatical” approach, initiated by the Greeks, was designed to determine normative forms. Then came the “philological” approach, which began in the eighteenth century. The purpose of this approach was not to study language as its “sole object,” but to “correct, interpret and comment upon written texts,” supported by an “interest in literary history, customs, institutions, etc.” (1959, 1). After this came the “comparative” approach to the study of language, begun in the nineteenth century, which sought “to illuminate one language by means of another, to explain the forms of one through the forms of the other” (1959, 2). Saussure faulted the comparative approach because it “did not succeed in setting up the true science of linguistics. It failed to seek out the nature of its object of study” (1959, 3). The comparative approach undertook comparisons without adequately analyzing the object of comparison. Saussure (1983, 10) argued that the study of langue (“linguistic structure”)—that is, of formal relationships between linguistic elements—should take “pride of place” in the study of language: “The linguist must take the study of linguistic structure [langue] as his primary concern, and relate all other manifestations of language to it” (1983, 19). Let us consider how the analogy of language might be applied to the problem of the origins of Islam, and specifically to the Qurʾan’s temporal relationship to the Bible. In diachronic linguistics—the study of how languages change and evolve over time—a key concept is that of family relationship. Two languages may share a common ancestor, as do French and Spanish, which both came from Latin. French corps and Spanish cuerpo, both meaning “body” are similar in form and have essentially the same meaning because they share a common origin in Latin corpus. This is an inherited similarity. When two languages derive from a common source they do not merely share similar words with a common history in a chaotic hotchpotch of similarities. The similarities will tend to have cognate related structures at every level. The structural relationship between singular and plural nouns in German, Icelandic, and English is a case in point. Consider, for example, the words for “mouse” in the three languages:

English Icelandic German

Singular mouse mús Maus

Plural Mice Mýs Mäuse

The singular and plural forms in these three languages all show an internal variation in the vowel, which is a shared feature defined in terms of a relationship between elements in a structural system. The phonologically similar nouns have inherited a similar morphological system of vowel variations.

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In comparative linguistics, which seeks to trace how languages are related and the ways they have developed, structural similarities—that is, similarities in structural relationships within a language—are regarded as particularly strong evidence of relatedness. To prove relatedness, the main focus of attention is the comparison of structures, particularly through regular and systematic morphological and phonological correspondences (Campbell 2013, 111; Ross and Durie 1996, 6–7). When the history of a language is reconstructed, this is not done by compiling vast lists of assorted similarities, but by tracing the way in which the language system as a whole has evolved. Language change and development is not merely the accumulation of thousands of changes in individual words: it involves regular adjustments to a whole system which affect the many elements arrayed in the system. For example, when sounds change within a language, it is not the case that each word has its own idiosyncratic history. Rather all words with a particular sound or combination of sounds tend to change together in a similar way. Consider the case of Middle English long vowel /u:/. This changed, in what is known as the Great English Vowel Shift, to /aʊ/: /mu:s-/ became /maʊs/ “mouse,” / hu:s-/ became /haʊs/ “house,” /lu:s-/ became /laʊs/ “louse” and /u:t/ became / aʊt/ “out,” all words with the same sound changing together in the same way. The change was regular at the systemic level. Reconstructing the history of languages involves developing models of such regular system-level changes. Not all similarities between languages are due to a common inheritance. Certainly there can be inherited similarities—features which two languages share because they come from the same original language—but similarities can also be due to borrowing. A shared feature need not be inherited: it could be due to borrowing of one language from the other, or they may have both borrowed from another source or sources. For example, the English word menu was borrowed from French menu in the seventeenth century, so in this case, the fact that both languages have this word in common is not evidence that English and French are connected by a family tree relationship. It is evidence of contact, but not of a shared origin. How can we distinguish between borrowed features and inherited features? Features which are inherited are embedded in cognate structural systems, and their differing characteristics are the result of consistent system-wide changes. In contrast, features which are borrowed have been extracted from their original context and inserted into new, potentially quite different structures. When something has been borrowed, much can be lost along the way, a process of attrition which can be entirely individual and specific to the form in question. Borrowing is characteristically disruptive—even destructive—of previous structural relationships. It is a process akin to plucking a brick or tile from one building and inserting it into another. When a word is borrowed, it is uprooted from its original structural context; it is given a new meaning which may or

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may not be similar to the old meaning; its phonological form is conformed, partially or wholly, to the target language;27 and, set in its new context, it loses its systemic relationships with other elements in the source language. Consider, for example, the English word juggernaut. This is a borrowing from Hindi Jaganna¯ th “lord of the world,” which comes from Jaganna¯ tha, a Sanskrit name for a Hindu god. The English meaning arose from the use of large chariots in religious rituals associated with “the uncouth idol of this deity at Pūrī in Orissa, annually dragged in procession on an enormous car, under the wheels of which many devotees are said to have formerly thrown themselves to be crushed.”28 Here the potentially destructive character of borrowing is apparent: the English meaning is new, and the original meaning is no longer apparent. Moreover, the internal structure of the Sanskrit word, which was a compound formed from jagat “world” and na¯ tha “lord, protector,” was obscured and lost when the word was incorporated into English. It is normal for a borrowing process to conform a lexical item to the phonological structure of the receiving language. For example, the English term RV (for “recreational vehicle”) was borrowed into Japanese as a¯ rubui, conforming the—for Japanese—unpronounceable English syllables to a conventional Japanese phonological structure. Meaning can also be lost or severely modified when borrowing occurs. Like the sounds which make up the auditory form of words, meanings do not exist in isolation within a language. They can be deeply embedded in a particular cultural context, as well as in the broader semantic structures of a language. When words are borrowed, meanings can often be completely reinterpreted along with the pronunciation of the word, to conform a word to the semantic structures and requirements of the target language.29 It follows from these observations that a borrowed word may be distinguished by its disrupted structural relationships within the target language, in comparison to the source language. We are now ready to consider a key question concerning reflexes of Biblical material found in the Qurʾan, namely is the material borrowed, or inherited? Here the terms borrowed and inherited are used in a technical way analogous to the linguistic sense:30 the question is, do the Biblical reflexes point to an evolving but common tradition, with some degree of conservative preservation of systemic structural relationships in which the reflexes are embedded, or to a disruptive, destructive process of contact between two distinct systems in which an element from one system has been repurposed to function in a new way within a different system? And let us be reiterate that there is absolutely no sense that borrowing is “bad” and inheriting is “good.” This distinction, when applied here as a question about the genesis of the Qurʾan, is not a moral judgment.

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0.7.2 Language Genesis and Contact Linguistics To speak of borrowing or inheritance in relation to individual words is well and good, but in the case of the Qurʾan and the origins of Islam, we are talking about the genesis of a religion, not simply events in the continuing evolution of a religion. So let us extend our linguistic metaphor to consider the process of language genesis. The purpose of this comparison is to derive insights from how a new language can come into being, a process in which a language arises which did not previously exist and was not derived from a process of inheritance and evolution from a previous language. Linguists use the term “language contact” to refer to situations where speakers of different languages engage with each other. Normally in language contact, speakers with native proficiency can influence each other’s languages. A typical example might be normal lexical borrowing from one language to another. However, in contexts of dislocation of speakers from their native environments—as, for example, on a slave plantation—disruption to speech communities and intensive contact can result in the genesis of a whole new language through creolization. Creolization is a form of language genesis, which can result in the formation of a new language. This can happen when the lexical forms of one language are combined with the grammatical system of another language or language(s). Consider the case of Haitian Creole, in which most of the vocabulary is recognizably French in origin, but the grammar—the inner logic and worldview of the creole—has most in common with the West African languages spoken by the slave communities among whom the creole first developed (Lefebvre 1998). Linguists have described the process leading to the establishment of a new creole as relexification, in which grammatical structures and meanings from substrate languages are repopulated using phonological forms taken from a superstrate language. The key point for our consideration here is that the result can be a massive volume of phonological similarities in forms between the creole and the superstrate language, which is established through a process of discontinuous transmission that pairs substrate language grammatical features (syntactics)31 and semantic structures with phonological forms from the superstrate language. The process works as shown in Figure 0.1. Virtually all of a creole’s phonological forms can be taken from a superstrate language. Under such circumstances the superstrate language provides the phonological forms for the creole lexicon, and the shared semanticogrammatical worldview of the substrate language (or languages) provides the meanings and grammar. For example, Haitian Creole combines the grammar and semantic structures of West African languages with French phonological forms, which are, however, also somewhat altered to conform to phonological systems typical of West African languages.

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Figure 0.1  Relexification of linguistic signs.

Another example is Solomons Pidgin, a creole which combines the distinctive grammar and semantics of indigenous Solomon Islands languages with English phonological forms, altered to conform to Solomons languages’ phonotactics. Solomons languages share considerable typological similarities— their grammatical systems are commensurate in many respects—so that it is possible to speak of a generic Solomons linguistic system, which, aggregated together, became the substrate for Solomons Pidgin, just as West African languages provided the substrate for Haitian Creole. The anthropologist Roger Keesing was doing field research in the Solomons. He began by learning the Kwaio language, one of the indigenous Solomons languages. After this he found it incredibly easy to learn Solomon Pidgin because it followed Kwaio grammar and word meanings so closely: I had earlier been struck, when I had learned Solomon Pidgin in the 1960s through the medium of Kwaio, an indigenous language I already spoken fluently, that this learning task mainly required learning Pidgin equivalents of Kwaio morphemes. The syntax of Solomon Pidgin was essentially the same as the syntax of Kwaio . . . The semantic categories . . . corresponded to Kwaio ones, not English ones; grammatical morphemes corresponded to Kwaio ones,

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not English ones. Thus . . . Pidgin baebae corresponded to the Kwaio marker of future/nonaccomplished mode, ta-, not to English “by and by.” (Keesing 1988, 1–2)

Here is an example of two parallel sentences in Kwaio and Solomons Pidgin which illustrates Keesing’s point: KWAIO Gila ta-la leka They FUT-they go SOLOMONS PIDGIN Olketa bae-i go They FUT-they go “They will go.” (Keesing 1988, 214) In the Pidgin sentence the phonological forms are all borrowed from English: olketa bae (future marker) -i go

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