Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

DISCOVERING SCRIPTURE IN SCRIPTURE t 21
“in His knowledge” in preference to all the world (44:32; 45:16)
and were destined to dwell in the land God gave them (7:137;
10:93; 17:104). But the Israelites were not content with their destiny.
They did “mischief on the earth” and they were twice punished
by an awful destruction of their temple (17:4–8; which
destructions are meant is not clear from the text). But more consequential
to the Quran is the Israelites’ persistent habit of contention
and disputation. The Children of Israel fell out among themselves
as soon as “the knowledge” was given them (10:93; 45:
16–17). Indeed, Muhammad’s view of contemporary Judaism,
even before he went to Medina and had firsthand experience of a
Jewish community—and of Jewish rejection—was that it was and
remained a religion wracked with schism and sectarianism. God
will judge among their factions at the Resurrection, but in the
meantime, Muhammad has been sent to the Jews as an arbiter in
religious matters. Only the Quran can explain the things on which
they continue to disagree (27:76–78; 45:16–18).
For the Muslim, for whom the Quran is the revealed Word of
God, the presence of all these stories, motifs, and judgments on the
ancient Israelites and the more contemporary Jews present no
problem of sources or derivation. But the non-Muslim, who perforce
reads the Quran as the work of Muhammad and not of God,
knows little of what to make of either Muhammad’s information
about the Bible and the Jews or of his attitudes toward them.
Mecca had no fixed Jewish or Christian population, though members
of both groups may have passed through it from Abyssinia
across the Red Sea or from the Yemen in the south. There was,
then, probably no lack of informants for both Muhammad and the
Meccans, since his audience seems to have shared to some degree—how
else would his preaching have made sense?—his biblical
knowledge. It is the quality of that knowledge that defies exact
definition. The shape and tone of the Quran’s biblical stories suggest
that we are dealing with orally transmitted midrashim rather
than direct textual acquaintance. As far as the Bible is concerned,
Muhammad may indeed have been retelling “old stories,” as his
Meccan opponents claimed (6:25; 8:31; 16:24; 23:83), but they
owe far more to Genesis Rabbah than to Genesis. Nor is there