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
You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles
YUMPU automatically turns print PDFs into web optimized ePapers that Google loves.
110 t CHAPTER FIVE<br />
been, moreover, successive: across the books of the Bible; <strong>for</strong><br />
<strong>Christians</strong>, from the Old to the New Testament; <strong>and</strong> <strong>for</strong> Muslims,<br />
from Tawrat to Injil to Quran. For <strong>Christians</strong> <strong>and</strong> Muslims at<br />
least, those revelations have also been progressive, one following<br />
another toward a <strong>for</strong>eseen end. The divine plan in this serial revelation<br />
was more apparent to <strong>Christians</strong> than to Muslims perhaps.<br />
For <strong>Christians</strong>, the biblical revelations were preordained to end<br />
with Jesus, the promised Messiah who was in his own person the<br />
revelation of a New Covenant. Although Muhammad <strong>and</strong> the revelation<br />
entrusted to him are the climax of what had been sent<br />
down be<strong>for</strong>e, he is merely asserted to be the end or “seal” (Quran<br />
33:40) of a series of prophets speaking <strong>for</strong> God. Even less determined<br />
was the earlier end of the prophetic (<strong>and</strong> so the revelational)<br />
tradition in Israel: though there was considerable speculation on<br />
the subject, the <strong>Jews</strong> were unsure why God had fallen silent after<br />
Haggai, Malachi, <strong>and</strong> Zechariah.<br />
When God fell silent, the believers began to read <strong>and</strong> speak <strong>and</strong><br />
the great age of scriptural scholasticism began. The Word was now<br />
text—not until the nineteenth century did it become <strong>for</strong> some<br />
merely a document—<strong>and</strong> the process of unpacking its infinitely<br />
rich contents was under way. What is now figured as unpacking<br />
was once more soberly known as exegesis (Gk. exegesis, a “drawing”<br />
or “leading out”)—in Hebrew midrash, “inquiry” <strong>and</strong> in Arabic<br />
tafsir, a “disclosure” or “explanation”—a name <strong>for</strong> the general<br />
process of extracting the meaning from a text, which in this<br />
case happened to be the transcribed Word of God.<br />
All scriptural exegesis, Jewish, Christian, or Muslim, is, of<br />
course, committed to discerning both what the text means in its<br />
literal intelligibility <strong>and</strong>, more specifically, what its behavioral imperatives<br />
are <strong>for</strong> us, the community of believers, <strong>and</strong> <strong>for</strong> me <strong>and</strong><br />
thee, the individual believers. But how the text is approached, with<br />
what methods <strong>and</strong> with what assumptions, differs considerably<br />
within the faith communities. The earliest scribal tradition in Israel,<br />
<strong>and</strong> the first to address the study of the Torah in a systematic<br />
fashion, appears to have been motivated chiefly by lawyerly <strong>and</strong><br />
didactic concerns, the same that led to the collection <strong>and</strong> canoniza-