Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

THE MUSLIM SCRIPTURE t 109
precisely those midrashic tales of the prophets and Jesus and Mary
that had passed through Jewish and Christian hands and finally
come to rest in the Quran, some, undoubtedly, with one final homiletic
turn from the Prophet himself.
The Quran’s citation, and understanding, of selected passages
from the Bible and the New Testament became, for a very long
time, the Muslims’ only access to those earlier revelations: first,
because the Quran had superseded them, and second, because the
Jews and Christians had either concealed part of their sacred
books or else tampered with them, rendering them useless not only
to those other communities but to the Muslims as well. This essentially
theological point of view, which the Quran invokes to explain
why the Jews in particular had not accepted Muhammad’s
prophethood, long narrowed the field of discourse between Muslims
and the other monotheists. The polemic from these latter was
often directed at the Muslims’ misunderstanding of their Scriptures,
and the Muslims, if they chose to address the accusation
directly, were hampered by their unfamiliarity with the full texts of
either the Bible or the New Testament in Arabic. Even when such
translations were finally in circulation among Jews and Christians in
the ninth and tenth centuries, Muslims seem not to have used them.
As late as the fourteenth century learned Muslim authors still apparently
preferred using oral (and often inaccurate) accounts of the
scriptural texts from converts among the People of the Book.
In the Silence after the Seal
All who believe in a purposeful God are assured that the divine
purpose is manifest in the world. God’s providential care and purpose
are visible in various signs of nature, and the Creator is
thought to have occasionally intervened directly in the affairs of
his creatures for the benefit of his favorites among them. What sets
the three monotheistic communities apart, and unites them as Peoples
of the Book, is their shared conviction that there has also been
a direct and verbal revelation of God’s will to his Chosen People,
and thus, through them, to all humankind. That revelation has