Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

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