Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

THE MUSLIM SCRIPTURE t 105
Who Wrote Scripture?
The Bible is not merely God’s direct speech—indeed, examples of
such direct discourse form only a small percentage of the whole—
but is a composed narrative framework within which actions as
well as speech unfold, and most often it is the speech of mortals.
The Jews understood that the biblical books had authors—Moses,
for example, and David, and Ezra—and to that extent they were
linguistically conditioned, though nonetheless inspired. The Quran,
in contrast, seems to present itself as the ipsissima verba of God,
and in “manifest” or “convincing” Arabic (Quran 16:103, etc.).
It has no framing narrative, however, no authorial signature or
presence. In the Muslim view, Muhammad is not even a transmitter;
he merely announced with absolute accuracy what he himself
had heard. The consequence, then, is that the Quran contains
the precise words of God, without human intervention or conditioning
of any sort; that God had spoken, and Muhammad had
heard and reported, Arabic speech. Finally, both Jews and Muslims
use the text of Scripture as the essential base for their liturgical
prayers. Though the Mishnah explicitly allows the use of the
vernacular (“any language”) for the central liturgical prayers, the
pull of the original tongue is strong among Jews, whereas among
Muslims the practice of using Arabic in liturgical prayer is practically
universal.
Islam did not have, then, or did not recognize, an author or a
multiple-author problem. God had spoken in this instance to one
sole messenger, Muhammad, and the Quran is, in effect, his Torah;
it is, in its entirety, God’s Word, without the addition of either the
Books of Kings or Job. Muslims, moreover, will distinguish rather
sharply the “inspired” Muhammad, whose word was Torah, from
the man of Mecca and Medina who offered explanation, advice,
and wise counsel. These latter were not in the Quran but were
collected in a kind of deutero-canonical form in the “Prophetic
reports,” or hadith (see chapter 7). Some non-Muslims have argued
that the hadith are a kind of Muslim apocrypha, the sayings
pool out of which the Quran was selected and anointed as revela-