robert spencer-did muhammad exist__ an inquiry into islams obscure origins-intercollegiate studies institute (2012) (1)

This Qur'anic material is the earliest direct attestation to the existence of the book—sixty years after the
Arab armies that had presumably been inspired by it began conquering neighboring lands. And yet the
mixture of Qur'anic and non-Qur'anic material is odd. Would pious Muslims really have composed an
inscription that combined Qur'anic material—which they would have understood as the perfect and
unalterable, eternal word of Allah—with merely human words, however eloquent? Would Muslims who
believed that the Qur'an was the perfect and unalterable word of Allah have dared to change the Qur'an's
words “Peace be upon me, the day I was born, and the day I die, and the day I am raised alive!” (19:33)
to the Dome of the Rock's “Peace be on him the day he was born, and the day he dies, and the day he shall
be raised alive!”? The change is not substantial, but it would still involve taking liberties with the perfect
word of Allah, which presumably would give the pious pause.
Likewise, the presentation of material from all over the book, although it is thematically related, is
curious. If the authors of the inscription intended to include all the Qur'an's statements that rebuke
Trinitarian Christianity, there are some notable omissions—especially the claim that “they did not slay
him, neither crucified him” (4:157). Or if the main thrust of the inscription is to deny the divinity of Christ
and assert the prophethood of Muhammad, the omission of the Qur'anic passage in which Jesus prophesies
the coming of Muhammad is odd: “Children of Israel, I am indeed the Messenger of God to you,
confirming the Torah that is before me, and giving good tidings of a Messenger who shall come after me,
whose name shall be Ahmad” (61:6).
Given the seamlessly mixed Qur'anic / non-Qur'anic nature of the inscription and the way the Qur'an
passages are pulled together from all over the book, some scholars, including Christoph Luxenberg, have
posited that whoever wrote this inscription was not quoting from a Qur'an that already existed. Rather,
they suggest, most of this material was added to the Qur'an only later, as the book was compiled.
Not everyone agrees, of course. Estelle Whelan, writing in the Journal of the American Oriental
Society in 1998, argues that if the Dome of the Rock inscriptions now found in the Qur'an actually
predated the Qur'an, they would have gone into the Qur'an the way they appear on the famous mosque: “It
seems particularly unlikely that the combination of phrases from 64:1 and 57:2, repeated twice, could
originally have been a unitary statement that was then ‘deconstructed’ and incorporated into different parts
of the Qur'an.” She thus argues that the Qur'an must have predated the inscription and served as its
source. 28
Although the two verses do go together very well in the Dome of the Rock inscriptions, they are not
notably out of place in their contexts in the Qur'an as it stands—unlike other verses that appear to be fairly
obvious interpolations (as we will see in chapter 8). It may be that both the Dome of the Rock and the
Qur'an incorporated material from earlier sources that contained similar material in different forms. After
all, if anything is a characteristic of early Islamic literature, it is repetition: Even the Qur'an itself, as brief
as it is (shorter than the New Testament), tells numerous stories more than once and frequently repeats
phrases. Yet all its repetitions of the same story, whether that of Moses and Pharaoh, or of Satan's refusal
to bow down to Adam, contain minor variations. This is what one might expect if this material was held
in the minds of poets, prophets, and orators rather than committed to writing.
It is thus possible that the Dome of the Rock inscriptions predated the Qur'an but did not serve as its
source, or at least its sole source. Qur'an 64:1 and 57:2 may simply have come from different sources, not