Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

104 t CHAPTER FIVE
among them who twist Scripture with their tongues so that you
suppose that it is Scripture and it is not; and they say, ‘This is from
God,’ and it is not from God. They lie against God and they know
it.”
These are the grounds for what soon developed into the Muslim
doctrine of tahrif, or “falsification,” the charge that the Jews (and
latterly, the Christians) altered their Scriptures. The Quran’s instance
of that charge may have had to do with the Medina Jews’
failure to acknowledge Muhammad’s prophethood, or even, as the
standard Life of Muhammad later suggested, of differing interpretations
of a biblical passage. The way the story unfolds in the
Life, it was a question of an actual text (Deut. 22:24) that an unnamed
Medina rabbi attempted to conceal by placing a hand over
it in order to belie Muhammad’s judgment that the punishment for
adultery was stoning (suggested, without detail, in Quran 5:42–
49). The case may indeed have been, as Quran 5:42 suggests, that
some Jews called on Muhammad, now the Grand Arbiter of Medina,
to judge a case of adultery between two Jews of the oasis and
that the Prophet attempted to render a judgment on what he understood
to be scriptural grounds. What is highly improbable,
however, is that there followed an argument about a text, which
the local rabbis possessed and whose reading they attempted to
conceal and which Muhammad then demonstrated ex litteris was
the correct one.
Muslims recognize that both the Torah and the Gospel originally
represented true and authentic revelations from genuine and
esteemed prophets, Moses (Musa) and Jesus (Isa), but subsequently
Jews and Christians tampered with the texts—they removed
predictions of Muhammad, for one—and so their present
versions are generally unreliable. They are not, in any event, either
required or even recommended reading for Muslims. Christians
argued with Jews throughout the Middle Ages on what the Bible,
which they both accepted, meant. Muslims devoted their polemic
energies rather to demonstrating that that same Bible, and the
Gospels as well, had been tampered with to the extent that they
were unusable.