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