Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

THE MUSLIM SCRIPTURE t 117
perhaps better, cantilated, somewhat in the manner of Gregorian
chant. “Poetry,” that audience cried when they heard it, and they
were correct: what they were hearing was a performance of an artsong
cycle in “clear Arabic,” an ongoing concert—not a “reading.”
The Book in our hands—which calls itself “The Book”
(al-Kitab) as well as “The Recitation” (al-Quran) but only in its
later stages, when it begins to aspire to be not only revelation but
Scripture on the Judeo-Christian model—contains only the lyrics
to those songs. The music is gone, at least for those of us who are
condemned to reading the Quran and wondering why anyone
should have thought it music. The Muslim, particularly the Muslim
living in a deep Islamic environment, still hears the music,
though assuredly not the same way it sounded in Mecca in the
early decades of the seventh century.
Even if we grant this hypothesis, serious questions remain. We
can imagine, even if we cannot hear the music, that the Meccan
suras were first chanted or sung in performance by Muhammad
and then, once again, by the believers in a liturgical reperformance
of what they had heard, either in imitation of the Prophet or at his
urging or instruction. What we cannot imagine is how or why the
long prose instructions issued at Medina, the Leviticus to the Meccan
Psalms, should have been “set to music” in the same sense, as
they assuredly were. We can only guess that they were reckoned
“Recitation” because they proceeded from the same source, God
via Muhammad, albeit not in the same manner. It seems obvious
that Muhammad was no longer “singing” at Medina, but by then
the liturgical convention of the cantilation of revelation may well
have carried those suras too into plain chant.
The early Muslims did not speak about the music, however. As
early as the essayist al-Jahiz (d. 869), it was the Quran’s eloquence
that was thought to have defeated the attempts of Muhammad’s
poet contemporaries, some of them quite accomplished, to duplicate
the style of God’s revelation. This was a literate scholar’s
choice (or guess), that it was the quranic style, and quite specifically
its literary style, that was inimitable—the probative miracle
of Islam was aesthetic—and the theme of quranic “eloquence,” or,
as it later came to be called, its “rhetoric” (balagha), or aesthetic