Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

102 t CHAPTER FIVE
Three Sacred Books, Three Peoples of the Book
When the Peoples of the Book, the Muslim designation for Scripturalists,
are said to “possess” a revelation in written form, it does
not mean merely that they have access to it or follow it or venerate
it, all of which they do; it also signifies that they were its designated
recipients and that they remain its privileged guardians and
interpreters. The Scripturalists are, each of them, also a Chosen
People, and the Scripture they possess both records and validates
that choice. Chosen People is a unique claim—there are no Chosen
Peoples in the eyes of any of them—and so there is an obvious
tension between the plural Peoples of the Book and the very singular
Chosen People. There are three sacred books and three Peoples
of the Book but only one of them, one of those Scriptures and one
of those peoples who possess it, is truly authentic.
The Books in question—the Bible, the New Testament, and the
Quran—though looked on as emanating from the same source,
are very different works. The Bible is a complex and composite
blend of religious myth, historical narrative, legal enactments, prophetic
admonitions, cautionary tales, and poetry composed over a
long period and edited at some point into a single Book. The time
span for the composition of the New Testament is considerably
shorter, a half-century perhaps, but it too has a very mixed content
of quasi biography, community history, letters, and, in some versions,
an apocalyptic Book of Revelation. The Quran, as we have
seen, is also composed of parts, not books but shorter, more chapterlike
units called suras. Though they are formally identical to the
words sent down by God and inerrantly reported by Muhammad,
the suras differ materially among themselves in length, style, and
content. Finally, as we have seen, they all date from a twenty-twoyear
span in Muhammad’s life.
Thus there came into being three sacred books, each in some
sense the Word of God. Each collection has traditionally been regarded
by its faith community as a complete, authoritative, and
universal statement regulating the role and conduct of humankind
vis-a-vis its Creator. Each Scripture was, in addition, the birthright