Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

108 t CHAPTER FIVE
flects on and interprets his earlier messages. But the non-Muslim
is, of course, asking the question not of God but of Muhammad:
where and when did this apparently illiterate Arab of a remote
settlement in western Arabia get his information about the Books
of the Jews and the Christians?
There are a great many (speculative) answers to the non-Muslim’s
question about Muhammad’s sources, but they will not be
discussed here since they deny the essential premise shared by all
Muslims. It should be remarked, however, that the question was
asked (and answered) in a highly leading manner of Muhammad
himself: somebody had supplied him with this material (Quran
16:103), which was nothing but “old yarns” (25:5), of which more
will be said later. Muslims and non-Muslims alike might raise a
parallel question not with respect to the Quran but concerning its
audience. Where did they derive their knowledge of what they
were hearing? How was it that those largely illiterate villagers of
Mecca knew more about the biblical Jesus and Mary than later
literate and far more cosmopolitan Muslims who had to have the
Quran’s often opaque scriptural allusions explained to them by
Jewish and Christian converts to Islam? Muhammad’s Mecca and
the Meccans who first heard the message of Islam remain a profound
mystery. We have the Quran before us, but we can scarcely
imagine its original audience.
One thing seems safe to say about those early seventh-century
Meccans. Whatever knowledge they possessed of things biblical
was not textual. The Quran’s audience was not literate. If Muhammad
was unlettered, as Muslims claim and he almost certainly
was, so too were the Meccans who heard his pronouncements.
Nor was there a text available even if he or they had been able to
read. No version of either the Bible or the Gospels was available in
Arabic in the seventh century, and none would be for perhaps two
centuries after the Prophet. The religious culture of Muhammad’s
Arabia was overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, oral, and, at least
among Arab speakers, midrashic rather than textual. Except for
certain liturgical uses, the Bible had been replaced by Bible history,
stories derived from the Scriptures but then enlarged, enhanced,
and illumined in the manner of haggadic midrashim. And it was