Koran - Yemen excavations part 2
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"For People Who Understand"
A page from an eleventh- or
twelfth-century Persian Koran.
Courtesy of the Arthur M. Sackler
Museum, Harvard University
Art Museums, Fund for the
Acquisition of Islamic Art.
OUGHLY equivalent in length to the New Testament, the Koran is divided into
114 sections, known as suras, that vary dramatically in length and form. The
book's organizing principle is neither chronological nor thematic -- for the
most part the suras are arranged from beginning to end in descending order of
length. Despite the unusual structure, however, what generally surprises
newcomers to the Koran is the degree to which it draws on the same beliefs
and stories that appear in the Bible. God (Allah in Arabic) rules supreme: he
is the all- powerful, all-knowing, and all-merciful Being who has created the
world and its creatures; he sends messages and laws through prophets to help
guide human existence; and, at a time in the future known only to him, he
will bring about the end of the world and the Day of Judgment. Adam, the
first man, is expelled from Paradise for eating from the forbidden tree. Noah
builds an ark to save a select few from a flood brought on by the wrath of
God. Abraham prepares himself to sacrifice his son at God's bidding. Moses
leads the Israelites out of Egypt and receives a revelation on Mount Sinai.
Jesus -- born of the Virgin Mary and referred to as the Messiah -- works
miracles, has disciples, and rises to heaven.
The Koran takes great care to stress this common monotheistic heritage, but
it works equally hard to distinguish Islam from Judaism and Christianity. For
example, it mentions prophets -- Hud, Salih, Shu'ayb, Luqman, and others --
whose origins seem exclusively Arabian, and it reminds readers that it is "A
Koran in Arabic, / For people who understand." Despite its repeated
assertions to the contrary, however, the Koran is often extremely difficult
for contemporary readers -- even highly educated speakers of Arabic -- to
understand. It sometimes makes dramatic shifts in style, voice, and subject
matter from verse to verse, and it assumes a familiarity with language,
stories, and events that seem to have been lost even to the earliest of
Muslim exegetes (typical of a text that initially evolved in an oral
tradition). Its apparent inconsistencies are easy to find: God may be
referred to in the first and third person in the same sentence; divergent
versions of the same story are repeated at different points in the text;
divine rulings occasionally contradict one another. In this last case the
Koran anticipates criticism and defends itself by asserting the right to
abrogate its own message ("God doth blot out / Or confirm what He pleaseth").
Criticism did come. As Muslims increasingly came into contact with Christians
during the eighth century, the wars of conquest were accompanied by
theological polemics, in which Christians and others latched on to the
confusing literary state of the Koran as proof of its human origins. Muslim
scholars themselves were fastidiously cataloguing the problematic aspects of
the Koran -- unfamiliar vocabulary, seeming omissions of text, grammatical
incongruities, deviant readings, and so on. A major theological debate in
fact arose within Islam in the late eighth century, pitting those who
believed in the Koran as the "uncreated" and eternal Word of God against
those who believed in it as created in time, like anything that isn't God
himself. Under the Caliph al- Ma'mun (813-833) this latter view briefly
became orthodox doctrine. It was supported by several schools of thought,
including an influential one known as Mu'tazilism, that developed a complex
theology based partly on a metaphorical rather than simply literal
understanding of the Koran.
By the end of the tenth century the influence of the Mu'tazili school had
waned, for complicated political reasons, and the official doctrine had
become that of i'jaz, or the "inimitability" of the Koran. (As a result, the
Koran has traditionally not been translated by Muslims for
non-Arabic-speaking Muslims. Instead it is read and recited in the original
by Muslims worldwide, the majority of whom do not speak Arabic. The
translations that do exist are considered to be nothing more than scriptural
aids and paraphrases.) The adoption of the doctrine of inimitability was a
major turning point in Islamic history, and from the tenth century to this
day the mainstream Muslim understanding of the Koran as the literal and
uncreated Word of God has remained constant.
Psychopathic Vandalism?
ERD-R. Puin speaks with disdain about the traditional willingness, on the
part of Muslim and Western scholars, to accept the conventional understanding
of the Koran. "The Koran claims for itself that it is 'mubeen,' or 'clear,'"
he says. "But if you look at it, you will notice that every fifth sentence or
so simply doesn't make sense. Many Muslims -- and Orientalists -- will tell
you otherwise, of course, but the fact is that a fifth of the Koranic text is
just incomprehensible. This is what has caused the traditional anxiety
regarding translation. If the Koran is not comprehensible -- if it can't even
be understood in Arabic -- then it's not translatable. People fear that. And
since the Koran claims repeatedly to be clear but obviously is not -- as even
speakers of Arabic will tell you -- there is a contradiction. Something else
must be going on."
Trying to figure out that "something else" really began only in this century.
"Until quite recently," Patricia Crone, the historian of early Islam, says,
"everyone took it for granted that everything the Muslims claim to remember
about the origin and meaning of the Koran is correct. If you drop that
assumption, you have to start afresh." This is no mean feat, of course; the
Koran has come down to us tightly swathed in a historical tradition that is
extremely resistant to criticism and analysis. As Crone put it in Slaves on
Horses, The Biblical redactors offer us sections of the Israelite tradition
at different stages of crystallization, and their testimonies can accordingly
be profitably compared and weighed against each other. But the Muslim
tradition was the outcome, not of a slow crystallization, but of an
explosion; the first compilers were not redactors, but collectors of debris
whose works are strikingly devoid of overall unity; and no particular
illuminations ensue from their comparison. Not surprisingly, given the
explosive expansion of early Islam and the passage of time between the
religion's birth and the first systematic documenting of its history,
Muhammad's world and the worlds of the historians who subsequently wrote
about him were dramatically different. During Islam's first century alone a
provincial band of pagan desert tribesmen became the guardians of a vast
international empire of institutional monotheism that teemed with
unprecedented literary and scientific activity. Many contemporary historians
argue that one cannot expect Islam's stories about its own origins --
particularly given the oral tradition of the early centuries -- to have
survived this tremendous social transformation intact. Nor can one expect a
Muslim historian writing in ninth- or tenth-century Iraq to have discarded
his social and intellectual background (and theological convictions) in order
accurately to describe a deeply unfamiliar seventh-century Arabian context.
R. Stephen Humphreys, writing in Islamic History: A Framework for Inquiry
(1988), concisely summed up the issue that historians confront in studying
early Islam. If our goal is to comprehend the way in which Muslims of the
late 2nd/8th and 3rd/9th centuries [Islamic calendar / Christian calendar]
understood the origins of their society, then we are very well off indeed.
But if our aim is to find out "what really happened," in terms of reliably
documented answers to modern questions about the earliest decades of Islamic
society, then we are in trouble. The person who more than anyone else has
shaken up Koranic studies in the past few decades is John Wansbrough,
formerly of the University of London's School of Oriental and African
Studies. Puin is "re-reading him now" as he prepares to analyze the Yemeni
fragments. Patricia Crone says that she and Michael Cook "did not say much
about the Koran in Hagarism that was not based on Wansbrough." Other scholars
are less admiring, referring to Wansbrough's work as "drastically
wrongheaded," "ferociously opaque," and a "colossal self- deception." But
like it or not, anybody engaged in the critical study of the Koran today must
contend with Wansbrough's two main works -- Quranic Studies: Sources and
Methods of Scriptural Interpretation (1977) and The Sectarian Milieu: Content
and Composition of Islamic Salvation History (1978).
Wansbrough applied an entire arsenal of what he called the "instruments and
techniques" of biblical criticism -- form criticism, source criticism,
redaction criticism, and much more -- to the Koranic text. He concluded that
the Koran evolved only gradually in the seventh and eighth centuries, during
a long period of oral transmission when Jewish and Christian sects were
arguing volubly with one another well to the north of Mecca and Medina, in
what are now parts of Syria, Jordan, Israel, and Iraq. The reason that no
Islamic source material from the first century or so of Islam has survived,
Wansbrough concluded, is that it never existed.
To Wansbrough, the Islamic tradition is an example of what is known to
biblical scholars as a "salvation history": a theologically and evangelically
motivated story of a religion's origins invented late in the day and
projected back in time. In other words, as Wansbrough put it in Quranic
Studies, the canonization of the Koran -- and the Islamic traditions that
arose to explain it -- involved the attribution of several, partially
overlapping, collections of logia (exhibiting a distinctly Mosaic imprint) to
the image of a Biblical prophet (modified by the material of the Muhammadan
evangelium into an Arabian man of God) with a traditional message of
salvation (modified by the influence of Rabbinic Judaism into the unmediated
and finally immutable word of God). Wansbrough's arcane theories have been
contagious in certain scholarly circles, but many Muslims understandably have
found them deeply offensive. S. Parvez Manzoor, for example, has described
the Koranic studies of Wansbrough and others as "a naked discourse of power"
and "an outburst of psychopathic vandalism." But not even Manzoor argues for
a retreat from the critical enterprise of Koranic studies; instead he urges
Muslims to defeat the Western revisionists on the "epistemological
battlefield," admitting that "sooner or later [we Muslims] will have to
approach the Koran from methodological assumptions and parameters that are
radically at odds with the ones consecrated by our tradition."
Revisionism Inside the Islamic World
NDEED, for more than a century there have been public figures in the Islamic
world who have attempted the revisionist study of the Koran and Islamic
history -- the exiled Egyptian professor Nasr Abu Zaid is not unique. Perhaps
Abu Zaid's most famous predecessor was the prominent Egyptian government
minister, university professor, and writer Taha Hussein. A determined
modernist, Hussein in the early 1920s devoted himself to the study of
pre-Islamic Arabian poetry and ended up concluding that much of that body of
work had been fabricated well after the establishment of Islam in order to
lend outside support to Koranic mythology. A more recent example is the
Iranian journalist and diplomat Ali Dashti, who in his Twenty Three Years: A
Study of the Prophetic Career of Mohammed (1985) repeatedly took his fellow
Muslims to task for not questioning the traditional accounts of Muhammad's
life, much of which he called "myth- making and miracle-mongering."
Abu Zaid also cites the enormously influential Muhammad 'Abduh as a
precursor. The nineteenth-century father of Egyptian modernism, 'Abduh saw
the potential for a new Islamic theology in the theories of the ninth-century
Mu'tazilis. The ideas of the Mu'tazilis gained popularity in some Muslim
circles early in this century (leading the important Egyptian writer and
intellectual Ahmad Amin to remark in 1936 that "the demise of Mu'tazilism was
the greatest misfortune to have afflicted Muslims; they have committed a
crime against themselves"). The late Pakistani scholar Fazlur Rahman carried
the Mu'tazilite torch well into the present era; he spent the later years of
his life, from the 1960s until his death in 1988, living and teaching in the
United States, where he trained many students of Islam -- both Muslims and
non-Muslims -- in the Mu'tazilite tradition.
Such work has not come without cost, however: Taha Hussein, like Nasr Abu
Zaid, was declared an apostate in Egypt; Ali Dashti died mysteriously just
after the 1979 Iranian revolution; and Fazlur Rahman was forced to leave
Pakistan in the 1960s. Muslims interested in challenging orthodox doctrine
must tread carefully. "I would like to get the Koran out of this prison," Abu
Zaid has said of the prevailing Islamic hostility to reinterpreting the Koran
for the modern age, "so that once more it becomes productive for the essence
of our culture and the arts, which are being strangled in our society."
Despite his many enemies in Egypt, Abu Zaid may well be making progress
toward this goal: there are indications that his work is being widely, if
quietly, read with interest in the Arab world. Abu Zaid says, for example,
that his The Concept of the Text (1990) -- the book largely responsible for
his exile from Egypt -- has gone through at least eight underground printings
in Cairo and Beirut.
Another scholar with a wide readership who is committed to re-examining the
Koran is Mohammed Arkoun, the Algerian professor at the University of Paris.
Arkoun argued in Lectures du Coran (1982), for example, that "it is time [for
Islam] to assume, along with all of the great cultural traditions, the modern
risks of scientific knowledge," and suggested that "the problem of the divine
authenticity of the Koran can serve to reactivate Islamic thought and engage
it in the major debates of our age." Arkoun regrets the fact that most
Muslims are unaware that a different conception of the Koran exists within
their own historical tradition. What a re-examination of Islamic history
offers Muslims, Arkoun and others argue, is an opportunity to challenge the
Muslim orthodoxy from within, rather than having to rely on "hostile" outside
sources. Arkoun, Abu Zaid, and others hope that this challenge might
ultimately lead to nothing less than an Islamic renaissance.
THE gulf between such academic theories and the daily practice of Islam
around the world is huge, of course -- the majority of Muslims today are
unlikely to question the orthodox understanding of the Koran and Islamic
history. Yet Islam became one of the world's great religions in part because
of its openness to social change and new ideas. (Centuries ago, when Europe
was mired in its feudal Dark Ages, the sages of a flourishing Islamic
civilization opened an era of great scientific and philosophical discovery.
The ideas of the ancient Greeks and Romans might never have been introduced
to Europe were it not for the Islamic historians and philosophers who
rediscovered and revived them.) Islam's own history shows that the prevailing
conception of the Koran is not the only one ever to have existed, and the
recent history of biblical scholarship shows that not all critical-historical
studies of a holy scripture are antagonistic. They can instead be carried out
with the aim of spiritual and cultural regeneration. They can, as Mohammed
Arkoun puts it, demystify the text while reaffirming "the relevance of its
larger intuitions."
Increasingly diverse interpretations of the Koran and Islamic history will
inevitably be proposed in the coming decades, as traditional cultural
distinctions between East, West, North, and South continue to dissolve, as
the population of the Muslim world continues to grow, as early historical
sources continue to be scrutinized, and as feminism meets the Koran. With the
diversity of interpretations will surely come increased fractiousness,
perhaps intensified by the fact that Islam now exists in such a great variety
of social and intellectual settings -- Bosnia, Iran, Malaysia, Nigeria, Saudi
Arabia, South Africa, the United States, and so on. More than ever before,
anybody wishing to understand global affairs will need to understand Islamic
civilization, in all its permutations. Surely the best way to start is with
the study of the Koran -- which promises in the years ahead to be at least as
contentious, fascinating, and important as the study of the Bible has been in
this century.
The online version of this article appears in three parts. Click here to go to
part one. Click here to go to part two.
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Toby Lester is the executive editor of Atlantic Unbound, the Atlantic Monthly
Web site.
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