Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

THE WORSHIPFUL ACTS t 243
Semitic language that had become by post-Exilic times the lingua
franca of the Jews and many others in the Middle East. Ezra had
the Scriptures translated, presumably into Aramaic, at the ceremony
renewing the Covenant at the return from Exile (Neh. 8:7–
8), and by the second century b.c.e. its seems that many Jews, like
the Greek-speaking Philo and Paul as well as the authors of the
Gospels, were getting their Scripture from either the Greek Septuagint
or else, like the Aramaic-speaker Jesus, the Aramaic Targums,
and without a great deal of comment. There were some
complaints, of course, but not about the fact of translation;
merely, in the case of the Septuagint, of its lack of accuracy.
If the Jews turned to the vernacular, the Muslims did not. Their
Scripture frequently boasted that it was “an Arabic Quran,” and
while Muslim piety might regard the Book’s style, diction, and syntax
as paradigms of perfection, Muslim theologians soon converted
them into miracles. Muhammad had been instructed to respond
to his critics by challenging them to “bring a sura like it”
(Quran 1:13; 10:38; 28:49). They could not, of course, and thus
was born the notion of the Quran’s inimitability, and, more specifically,
of its language and style, which was, at base, the validating
miracle of Islam, the theological counterpart of Jesus’ resurrection
from the dead.
Veneration of text and language thus went hand in hand in Islam,
and the emphasis on both was strengthened by their already
noted aversion to figurative arts. As we have just seen, Muslims
took God’s prohibition against idols as seriously as the Jews, and,
like the Jews, they extended it, though certainly not at all times or
in all places, to figurative and pictorial art generally. Muslim decoration
frequently took the form of repetitive geometric or vegetal
patterns, the so-called arabesque. This type of decoration was not
original with Islam; it can be observed on many of the Roman
monuments of the Middle East, in Syria, for example, which antedate
Islam by many centuries.
The other Muslim alternative to figurative art seems to have
been Islam’s own special creation, or at least emphasis. Large, elegantly
inscribed writing appears unmistakably as decoration, and
not merely to provide information as it did on Greek and Roman