Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

THE MUSLIM SCRIPTURE t 107
which are indeed units but whose sequence leads from nowhere to
nowhere. The longest and most circumstantial of them stand at the
beginning and the brief, and most emotive—some little more than
an exclamation—at the end. They might be reshuffled in quite random
fashion, and though the result would be a profound affront to
nearly a millennium and a half of tradition, the rearrangement
would not materially affect the Quran’s message or our understanding
of it.
The absence, then, of a narrative line is part of what renders the
highly recognizable biblical figures in the Quran somewhat unfamiliar
as well. The biblical prophets do have a purpose and a context
in the Quran; it is just that they are not the Bible’s own. They
are put forward, with some few exceptions, as “warnings”—
Muhammad himself is qualified as a “warner”—as exemplifications
of what happens when people ignore the warnings of those
same prophets. They are cited rather than described by the
“speaker” in the Quran, whether that be God or Muhammad on
God’s behalf, for the benefit of the audience of the Recitation, the
plural “you” who are sometimes unbelievers and at other times
those who have already “submitted” to the One True God. They
speak only in indirect discourse: God quotes them—“They say
...”—only to refute them—“You say (to them) . . .”
The Other Scriptures
There can be no doubt that the Quran “used” the earlier Scriptures
of what had been up to that point the Judeo-Christian tradition
and henceforward might be characterized as the Judeo-Christian-
Islamic tradition. Behind this usage lurks another question, though
it is not one entertained by Muslims since it implicitly assumes that
Muhammad is the author of the Quran and explicitly asks where
he got his obvious acquaintance with the Bible and the New Testament.
The Quran, as we have just seen, has a great deal to say
about the Bible, though somewhat less about the New Testament.
Little wonder, the Muslim says, since all three revelations are from
the One True God, who, in this, the latest of his revelations, re-