Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

122 t CHAPTER FIVE
distinction that was current, and debated, in legal circles. Most of
the commentators and commentaries discussed to this point operated
within a tradition that regarded the body of prophetic hadith
as the primary exegetical instrument for understanding the Quran,
particularly on legal matters, much the way the Talmud served the
rabbinic exegetes in Judaism. On that understanding, the difference
between tafsir and tawil was not, then, between exoteric and
esoteric passages but rather between clear and ambiguous ones.
Where tawil took on its allegorical association was when exegetical
principles began to be used to elicit from Scripture dogmatic
and mystical understandings of which both Muhammad and the
Quran were apparently totally innocent.
The Quran was not a historical document in Muslims’ eyes, nor
was Muhammad a historian. Since the Enlightenment secular
critics have looked on the Bible, the New Testament, and the
Quran as revelations not of God’s will but of the desires and anxieties
of their times. The believers, however, see in those Scriptures
a point of contact with God himself. Each of the three communities
continues to take its Scripture seriously as history, of course,
first in the sense that it was revealed at a fixed moment of human
history, and then, that its behavioral prescriptions refer to ongoing
human life, in all times and places, and that they have historical
relevance. But Philo, as we have seen, attempted to peer beneath
the historical surface of the Bible into the timeless riches beneath.
He thought he could discern there the truths of which the Greek
philosophers also had some presentiment, or may even have borrowed
from Israel. The Christians peered through the same aperture
that Philo had opened, and then the Muslims after them, and
all saw in their Scriptures the same perennial truths. But there were
some who looked even more deeply, into the profound heart of
Scripture where God himself dwelled. This is the Scripture of the
mystics, the Torah of the Kabbalists, the New Testament of Bernard
of Clairvaux, and the Quran of Ibn al-Arabi, a presence
contained not only in the whole of Scripture but also, without distinction
of importance, in each verse and even in every word and
letter.