My first memories of the Qur’an are of my mother and grandmother kissing its cover, of the admonition never to touch it without having first washed my hands, and of sitting on the hot Somali ground as a small child of four or five while the book seemed to tower above us on a high shelf. As I memorized its verses, I was taught simply to obey it. The Qur’an, I learned, was the book sent down “explaining all things” (16:89). It had been revealed to Muhammad by Allah through the Angel Gabriel, beginning when Muhammad lived in Mecca and continuing when he moved to Medina. Gabriel spoke the words one by one to Muhammad, who in turn recited them before scribes. Islamic orthodoxy—not radical Islam, but mainstream Islamic doctrine—thus insists that the Qur’an is God’s own word. Questioning any part of the Qur’an therefore becomes an act of heresy.
The Allah of my childhood was a fiery deity. “On the Day that the enemies of Allah will be gathered together to the Fire,” it is written in chapter 41 of the Qur’an, “their hearing, their sight, and their skins will bear witness against them, as to (all) their deeds.” Of Abu Lahab, Muhammad’s uncle who persistently opposed Islam, it is said in chapter 111: “Burnt soon will he be in a Fire of Blazing Flame! His wife shall carry the (crackling) wood—As fuel!—A twisted rope of palm-leaf fiber round her (own) neck!” Fire is a recurring theme of the Qur’an, and the heat of the desert and the scalding sun, like the crackle of fires at night outside their tents, made these punishments exceedingly vivid to most Arabs, as well as to me. When my mother spoke of “hellfire,” she would point to the flaming brazier in our kitchen and tell me: “You think this fire is hot? Now think about hell, where the fire is far, far hotter and it will devour you.” The thought gave my sister nightmares. Small wonder I strove to submit to Allah’s will.
Later, I learned what it was that made Allah different from the Christian God and Hebrew Yahweh. Allah is not a benevolent father figure, to be depicted in flowing robes with a white beard. In fact, Islam requires that neither God nor Muhammad be depicted in any physical form. Unlike the mosaics of medieval chapels or the frescoes of churches in the Renaissance, every Muslim house of worship from the Grand Mosque down has no human images, only geometric adornments featuring nothing more figurative than enormous flowering plants.
This abstract Allah also reigns supreme as the sole divinity; in Islam there is no Jesus-like son or Holy Ghost. Association of any other god or entity with Allah is considered shirk and is one of the gravest sins in Islam—punishable by death according to some scholars. The Qur’an pointedly says, “no son has [Allah] begotten, nor has He a partner in His dominion” (25:2). In Islam, Jesus is recognized as being in the tradition of major Old Testament prophets like Noah and Abraham, but Muhammad is revealed as the last and greatest prophet and the Qur’an is the last word spoken by God. According to Islamic teachings, each prophet up to and including Muhammad opened a window onto the unseen, but after Muhammad’s death that window was declared shut until Judgment Day and the end of time. Muhammad was thus the bearer of the last word of God’s revelation.11
In a similar way, Allah’s imperatives for the faithful are not exhortations, such as love thy neighbor, or a covenant, as between God and the Jews, or even a wider moral code, like the Ten Commandments, which address everything from adultery to murder. Rather, first and foremost, Islam commands its followers to perform five religious duties, all of which remind the believers through word and deed that they must above all else submit to the faith and its rules:
1. Have faith in the one God, Allah, and Muhammad, His Prophet;
2. Pray five times a day;
3. Fast during the day for the entire ninth month of Ramadan;
4. Provide charity;
5. Make a pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in a lifetime, if possible.
In its scripture, Islam is also fundamentally different. It places more emphasis on divine omnipotence and less on human free will. “God leads astray whom He will and guides whom He will,” it is written. There is even a suggestion in the Qur’an that just as Allah has created what is good, He has also created evil. Chapter 25 says He “created all things, and ordered them in due proportions.” This suggests that each person’s fate and future have already been established.12
Of course, such concepts can also be found in some versions of Christianity. John Calvin was especially insistent on the idea of “double predestination,” that God had already chosen who was damned and who saved. The difference is that throughout the history of Christianity there has been intense debate about the relationship between divine omnipotence and human agency. Early debates in Islamic history were eventually won by champions of a heavy determinism, both pertaining to the destiny of one’s soul as well as to one’s actions in this life.13 Thereafter, debate on these issues was effectively shut down by zealots who argued that asking such questions was akin to shirk, if not to heresy.
Perhaps the biggest problem with the Qur’an’s unique status is the fact that the most violent Medina Muslims can find in holy writ justifications for everything they do. Consider the words of Tawfik Hamid, who was once a member of the same radical organization as the Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, but is now one of a new generation of Islamic reformers: “The literal understanding of Qur’an 9:29,” he has said, “can easily be used to justify what it [Islamic State] is doing. ‘Fight those who do not believe in Allah or in the Last Day and who do not consider unlawful what Allah and His Messenger have made unlawful and who do not adopt the religion of truth from those who were given the Scripture [Jews and Christians]—[fight] until they give the jizyah [payment of a tribute tax to Islamic authorities] willingly while they are humiliated.’ ”14
Hamid notes that the four main schools of Islamic jurisprudence agree that this verse means “that Muslims must fight non-Muslims and offer them the following choices: Convert to Islam, pay a humiliating tax called jizyah or be killed.” Indeed, he adds, “A basic search of almost ALL approved interpretations for the Quran supports the same violent conclusion. The 25 leading approved Quran Interpretations (commentaries)—that are usually used by Muslims to understand the Quran—unambiguously support the violent understanding of the verse.”
15
Hamid’s conclusion: while there are certainly many in Islam who are “moderate Muslims,” the central truth is that until “leading Islamic scholars provide a peaceful theology that clearly contradicts the violent views of the IS,” there will be only a limited space for such moderation.
16
As the violence committed in the name of Islam is so often justified by the Qur’an, Muslims must be challenged to engage in critical reflection about their most sacred text. This process necessarily begins by acknowledging both its human composition and its numerous internal inconsistencies.
The Qur’an as Text
Muslims have generally shown little interest in subjecting the Qur’an to the same scientific, archaeological, and textual scrutiny the Bible has received.
17 Yet respect for religious beliefs does not require us to suspend our own critical judgment where the Qur’an is concerned, any more than it does in the case of the Old or New Testaments.
Very little is definitely known about the Qur’an’s early composition and little work on it was done until quite recently. Western scholars who have studied the Qur’an dispassionately have argued against the traditional Islamic narrative.18 One of the scholars who took a more critical approach toward early Islamic history was John Wansbrough, who challenged the traditional narrative in two books published in the 1970s, arguing that Islam was originally a Judeo-Christian sect.
19
Fred Donner, a professor of Near Eastern studies at the University of Chicago, has argued that the Qur’an was originally an orally recited text, and its history in the years following Muhammad’s death is “not clear.” The survival of various ancient manuscripts indicates that the recitation of the early Qur’anic text “was far
from uniform.” An early collection of the verses may have been prepared under Caliph Abu Bakr and kept by Caliph Umar, but “it is not clear . . . whether this written collection was complete or not, nor whether it had any official status.”
20 An official text is said to have been prepared under Caliph Uthman (644–656), who ordered that competing versions of the Qur’an be destroyed.21 But in the city of Kufa one of Muhammad’s companions, Abdallah Masud, refused Uthman’s order. Islamic tradition itself also contains evidence that the Qur’an we know today differs from the original text. The pious Caliph Umar warned Muslims against saying they know the whole Qur’an, because “much of it has disappeared.”22
Western researchers have advanced several theories about the Qur’an’s composition. Günter Lüling believes that it reflects a combination of Christian texts that have been given a new Islamic meaning, and “original Islamic passages which had been added to the Christian ones.” For Lüling, the Qur’an is a composite work shaped by human hands and human editors. Gerd Puin’s study of ancient manuscripts found in Yemen led him to conclude that the Qur’an is a “cocktail of texts,” some of which may have predated Muhammad by a century.
23 Christoph Luxenberg (a pseudonymous scholar) theorizes on the basis of linguistic analysis that there exists a gap of one and a half centuries between the Qur’an’s first publication and the final editing process through which it received its traditional form.24 Fred Donner suggests another possibility: it may be a composite of different religious texts from various communities in Arabia. Certainly, there are significant variations in spelling in different versions of the Qur’an.25
What might have motivated people to compile a document like the Qur’an? Malise Ruthven offers the “revisionist theory”:
that the religious institutions [of Islam] emerged at least two centuries after Muhammad’s time, to consolidate ideologically, as it were, the Arab conquest. [This theory] would mean that the Arabs, anxious to avoid becoming absorbed by the more advanced religions and cultures of the peoples they conquered, cast about for a religion that would help them to maintain their identity. In so doing they looked back to the figure of the Arabian Prophet, and attributed to him the reaffirmation of an ancient Mosaic code of law for the Arabs.
26
Ruthven notes that the revisionist theory, if true, would help explain why the qiblas of certain early mosques in Iraq face Jerusalem rather than Mecca.
27 Other evidence indirectly supports this theory of later authorship. Tarek Fatah, founder of the Muslim Canadian Congress, has argued that a story about Muhammad—in which a Jewish tribe surrendered to the Islamic army in the city of Medina and the Prophet personally beheaded between six hundred and eight hundred prisoners of war—may in fact be a creation of later Muslim rulers, two hundred years after the incident was said to have occurred (627 CE). (This story is not in the Qur’an, but it shows how easily the life of the Prophet could be embroidered long after the fact.)
It is, to say the least, difficult in the face of all this evidence to deny that there was a human influence involved in composing what is now known as the Qur’an. Yet Islamic thinkers such as the late Pakistani Abul A’la Mawdudi have declared without hesitation that the Qur’an “exists exactly as it had been revealed to the Prophet; not a word—nay, not a dot of it—has been changed.”
28 And that remains mainstream Muslim doctrine.
All scriptures contain contradictions and the Qur’an is no exception. But Islam is the only religion that has promulgated a doctrine to reconcile the Qur’an’s contradictions in order to maintain the belief that it is the direct revelation of God. As Raymond Ibrahim observes:
No careful reader will remain unaware of the many contradictory verses in the Quran, most specifically the way in which peaceful and tolerant verses lie almost side by side with violent and intolerant ones. The ulema were initially baffled as to which verses to codify into the Shari’a worldview—the one that states there is no coercion in religion (2:256), or the ones that command believers to fight all non-Muslims till they either convert, or at least submit, to Islam (8:39, 9:5, 9:29).
29
To explain these contradictions, Islamic scholars developed a doctrine known as “abrogation” (an-Nasikh wa’l Mansukh), whereby Allah issues new revelations that supersede old ones.
Take, for example, the specific injunctions regarding war and peace. These successive revelations follow a distinctive arc in the course of the book: they begin in the early “Mecca” sections with admonitions of passivity in the face of aggression; then they give permission to fight back against aggressors; then they exhort Muslims to fight aggressors; finally, Muslims are commanded to fight all non-Muslims, whether they are the aggressors or not. What explains this pattern of gradually increasing aggressiveness? Most likely, it is the growing power and strength of the early Islamic community. Yet orthodox Muslim scholars insist that these changes have nothing to do with contingent circumstances.
Thus Ibn Salama (d. 1020) argued that chapter 9, verse 5, known as ayat as-sayf, or the sword verses, abrogated some 124 of the more peaceful Meccan verses.
30 The same applies to the verses concerning forcible conversion. As Ibrahim explains, “whereas Allah supposedly told the prophet that ‘there is no compulsion in religion’ (2:256), once the messenger grew strong enough, Allah issued new revelations calling for all-out war/jihad till Islam became supreme (8:39, 9:5, 9:29, etc.).”
31
Mainstream Islamic jurisprudence continues to hold that the sword verses (9:5 and also 9:29) have “abrogated, canceled, and replaced” those verses that call for “tolerance, compassion, and peace.”
32 This same doctrine is also applied to apparent flaws or contradictions in Muhammad’s personal behavior. Suggesting, for example, that Muhammad chose to break a treaty with the Quraysh, rather than being provoked by their dishonorable behavior, has led to threats and violence against Western scholars and journalists. The goal in each instance is to place the Qur’an beyond criticism and reproach. After all, how can one argue with God’s word?
Of course, the Qur’an is not the only Islamic text. Accompanying it is the Hadith, the record of Muhammad’s sayings, the customs he followed, his teachings, and the personal examples that he left for all Muslims to follow, as well as assorted commentaries on his life. These texts were supposedly written or dictated by those who knew him, including his original companions and his wives. We have every reason to want to know more about the provenance and human composition of these texts, too. But the main questions that have been raised relate to the Qur’an. These include:
• What did the Qur’an retain (or copy) from previous Jewish and Christian holy texts?
• What was Muhammad’s contribution to the text now known as the Qur’an?
• Which other individuals (or groups) composed the Qur’an?
• What was added to the Qur’anic draft after the death of Muhammad?
• What was edited out or rephrased from the original Qur’an?
The answers to some of these questions may never be fully known, but we have a duty to ask them—and to protect the lives and liberty of those grappling with them, Muslims and non-Muslims alike.
Leading the effort to bring modern methods to the study of the Qur’an is Professor Angelika Neuwirth of the Free University in Berlin. The research program she leads, Corpus Coranicum, is housed at the Brandenburg Academy of Science and Humanities and will likely take decades to complete.
33 But analyzing the Qur’an is not like studying the holy texts of Judaism or Christianity. When two German researchers traveled to Yemen to take pictures of old Qur’anic manuscripts, the authorities confiscated the pictures. Although diplomats eventually secured the release of most of the pictures, the episode sparked predictable reactions. One letter to the Yemen Times read: “Please ensure that these scholars are not given further access to the documents. Allah,
help us against our enemies.”
34
The language of the Qur’an is Arabic, and to many Muslims that remains the divine language. To this day there are tremendous disputes about whether it is acceptable to translate it into other languages. That is partly because, unlike the Bible, the Qur’an is supposed to be learned by heart. As the Islamic scholar Michael Cook puts it, “The Muslim worshiper does not read the Qur’an, but rather recites it.” All 77,000 words, roughly 6,200 verses, of the Qur’an must be internalized, giving it what Cook calls “a degree of scriptural saturation of daily life which is hard for most inhabitants of the Western world to imagine.”
35 In early-nineteenth-century Cairo, for example, parties and gatherings held by the city’s middle and upper classes often featured a recital of the Qur’an, usually by three or four trained reciters, spanning as many as nine hours. Guests might come and go, but the recitation of the verses was continuous.
This highlights another important difference with other monotheistic scriptures. Although the Qur’an makes reference to some stories found in both the Torah and the Bible, it is distinctly not a storytelling text; no sustained meta-narrative binds it together. The Qur’an is not designed to be read as literature. Nor can scenes from it be depicted as scenes from the Bible were in works of art like Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel or Leonardo’s Last Supper. It does not have multiple narrators, like the Bible, but rather relies on one voice throughout, which the reciter is essentially channeling.