Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland
Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland
Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland
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108 t CHAPTER FIVE<br />
flects on <strong>and</strong> interprets his earlier messages. But the non-Muslim<br />
is, of course, asking the question not of God but of Muhammad:<br />
where <strong>and</strong> when did this apparently illiterate Arab of a remote<br />
settlement in western Arabia get his in<strong>for</strong>mation about the Books<br />
of the <strong>Jews</strong> <strong>and</strong> the <strong>Christians</strong>?<br />
There are a great many (speculative) answers to the non-Muslim’s<br />
question about Muhammad’s sources, but they will not be<br />
discussed here since they deny the essential premise shared by all<br />
Muslims. It should be remarked, however, that the question was<br />
asked (<strong>and</strong> answered) in a highly leading manner of Muhammad<br />
himself: somebody had supplied him with this material (Quran<br />
16:103), which was nothing but “old yarns” (25:5), of which more<br />
will be said later. Muslims <strong>and</strong> non-Muslims alike might raise a<br />
parallel question not with respect to the Quran but concerning its<br />
audience. Where did they derive their knowledge of what they<br />
were hearing? How was it that those largely illiterate villagers of<br />
Mecca knew more about the biblical Jesus <strong>and</strong> Mary than later<br />
literate <strong>and</strong> far more cosmopolitan Muslims who had to have the<br />
Quran’s often opaque scriptural allusions explained to them by<br />
Jewish <strong>and</strong> Christian converts to <strong>Islam</strong>? Muhammad’s Mecca <strong>and</strong><br />
the Meccans who first heard the message of <strong>Islam</strong> remain a profound<br />
mystery. We have the Quran be<strong>for</strong>e us, but we can scarcely<br />
imagine its original audience.<br />
One thing seems safe to say about those early seventh-century<br />
Meccans. Whatever knowledge they possessed of things biblical<br />
was not textual. The Quran’s audience was not literate. If Muhammad<br />
was unlettered, as Muslims claim <strong>and</strong> he almost certainly<br />
was, so too were the Meccans who heard his pronouncements.<br />
Nor was there a text available even if he or they had been able to<br />
read. No version of either the Bible or the Gospels was available in<br />
Arabic in the seventh century, <strong>and</strong> none would be <strong>for</strong> perhaps two<br />
centuries after the Prophet. The religious culture of Muhammad’s<br />
Arabia was overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, oral, <strong>and</strong>, at least<br />
among Arab speakers, midrashic rather than textual. Except <strong>for</strong><br />
certain liturgical uses, the Bible had been replaced by Bible history,<br />
stories derived from the Scriptures but then enlarged, enhanced,<br />
<strong>and</strong> illumined in the manner of haggadic midrashim. And it was