Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

THE PAST REMEMBERED t 31
The Muslim would strenuously deny that these two elements
present in the Quran, the biblical and the Arabian, have anything
to do with the work’s authorship. God is the sole author of the
Recitation, not Muhammad, who merely repeated, or “recited,”
what he had been told, and God is not conditioned by the environmental
circumstances that work on human authors. The issue may
be allowed to pass—the answer to the question “Who composed
the Quran, God or Muhammad?” is precisely the difference between
Muslims and non-Muslims—since it can be addressed in
other, less divisive terms. Even if the text of a divinely revealed
Quran should not suffer from the constraints of history, its audience,
the frequent “they” and “you all” of the Quran, certainly
did. “They” heard and “they” understood, even if they did not all
believe; even if they thought Muhammad was making it up or had
lifted if from someone else, the Meccans and later the Medinese
“got” this “clear Arabic Quran,” perhaps better than a later generation
of Muslims who had to labor over the text and certainly
more perfectly than we who are so distant from them not only in
faith but in culture.
If we are to attempt to understand this founding document of
Islam unaided by faith, we must try to grasp in some fashion the
two fields of religious sensibility within which the Quran’s original
audience operated. This is no easy task. Ernest Renan, the nineteenth-century
former Catholic seminarian, Jesus quester, skeptic,
and orientaliste extraordinaire, when he grew discouraged about
discovering anything verifiable about the historical Jesus, thought
that the odds might be better in the case of Muhammad, who was,
after all, born “in the full light of history.” He was grievously mistaken.
We know a great deal more about first-century Galilee and
Judaea than we do about Mecca and its inhabitants in the seventh
century. We know who Jesus was talking to; we even know about
some other messiahs of that time and place. We have good information
on the Herods and even better information on the Romans
because we have the contemporary Josephus, not the noblest of
souls perhaps, but a decent historian and a very detailed one. We
have archaeology, and we have the Dead Sea Scrolls, sectarian and
very authentic. Behind Jesus there unfolds an extraordinarily rich