Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

106 t CHAPTER FIVE
tion, but the vocabulary, style, and content of the great body of
hadith are so different from what we have in the Quran as to make
that possibility highly unlikely. The hadith belong to another
world. They had their origin in Muhammad’s own inspired, but
decidedly human, head and heart, according to the Muslims, or in
the fertile but tendentious imaginations of eighth- or ninth-century
lawyers, according to most non-Muslims.
A Different Book
If we turn to the earliest of the monotheist traditions, we do not
know how Judaism, if that is the right word in this context, began.
In the Bible, whence the entire tale hangs, God, the God who created
them, seems to be on intimate terms with Adam and Noah
and any number of other mortals, offering advice and admonition
as seems required. Then later—the generations are told off with
great specificity—he speaks to Abraham, a “Hebrew” of “Ur of
the Chaldees” who had migrated with his family to Palestine, and
suddenly everything becomes more focused and more consequential.
We have entered the master narrative of the entire Bible
through the portal called “The Covenant,” the treaty or pact that
was broached and concluded by God with Abraham. Its sequel,
which unfolds through the twenty-odd books of the Bible, may be
titled “The Chosen People” and it traces the ups and, remarkably,
the considerable downs of the Covenant among its recipients, the
Israelites. The narrative winds down in the sad dark days after the
Israelite return from Exile in Babylonia but the story itself goes on,
now told by contract writers, historians, poets, aphorists, and lawyers
who understood the story line but brought somewhat less inspiration
to their work.
It is no Bible before us in the Quran or Recitation, however.
There is no master narrative, no reassuring “In the beginning . . .”
to signal the commencement of anything resembling a “story.”
There is, in fact, no beginning, middle, or end to the book save in
the most literal physical sense that the Quran has a first page and a
last. The Recitation is a quilt of stitched-together discrete pieces,