Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

THE MUSLIM SCRIPTURE t 103
and charter for a community that had not existed before. Each
community lived in the profound conviction that God had spoken
to it for the last time: the Jews, for the first and final time; the
Christians, for the second and final time; the Muslims, for the third
and final time. And each had a highly ambivalent view of the
Books in the hands of the others.
The phrase “People of the Book” first occurs in the Quran.
When it is used there, or by Muslims generally, it refers to those
communities—Jews, Christians, Muslims, and latterly some
others, like the Zoroastrians, more out of political pragmatism
than theological courtesy—that came into being by way of a
prophet’s bringing them a revelation in the form of a sacred book
sent down by God. Although the source of the Books, the unique
God worshiped by the monotheists, and so their truth, is the same,
the Scriptures themselves differed—witness their different names—
not only in their prophetic messenger and the occasion of their
revelation, but far more substantially, as we shall see, after the
Jews and Christians began tampering with their Books, as the
Muslims allege.
On Tampering with Scripture
At one point the Quran regarded what it calls the Tawrat as confirmatory
evidence for the truth of its own message (4:47; 6:92). It
must not long have served as such, however, not at least at Medina
where the Jews had access to a Torah, though in what form we do
not know, whether textually or through a Targum paraphrase or
as an oral transmission, or some combination of such. In any
event, there was religious and political trouble between the Jews
and the new Muslim master of the oasis, which is reflected in the
Medina suras of the Quran. Questions were raised about the Jews’
reliability as transmitters of the Torah and so too of the authenticity
of the “text” in their possession. “Woe to those,” sura 2:79
intones, “who write Scripture by their own hand and then say,
‘This is from God’” Again, in 3:78: “And truly there are some