Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

118 t CHAPTER FIVE
effectiveness, became commonplace in both literary and theological
circles in Islam. The Quran was thought to represent the pinnacle
of literary achievement, a compliment never lavished on the
New Testament, which has the initial handicap of being written
in the koine dialektike, the “common speech” of the Hellenized
Mediterranean and not the pure Attic of an older, more elegant
age. Christian apologists had to struggle with this issue in the face
of fastidiously Hellenic pagans of the second and third centuries,
but there was little opposition from either inside or outside Islam—both
Jewish and Christian dhimmis had learned their Arabic
at the Quran’s knee, so to speak—to the Muslim Book’s aesthetic
preeminence.
History and Scripture
Many books of the Bible and the four canonical Gospels of the
New Testament present themselves as history, as a narrative of
human events that have actually occurred. History was not, however,
the primary concern of the professionals who studied and
explained those books. Though moral edification, the so-called
homiletic midrashim, was given its proper place, Jewish exegetes
of the Bible functioned more as lawyers than as historians, and the
Christian exegete was essentially a theologian; his reading of the
historical texts that constituted Scripture was determined by his
theology. The Muslim exegete, in contrast, paradoxically acted
like a historian: his work was primarily to determine how to arrange
the individual traditions that lay before him.
There is history in the Quran, of course, but it is used as a trope
and is not the very substance of the text as it is in much of the
Torah and the Gospels. But trope or substance, such historical allusions
beckoned the exegete, and these exemplary references to
the prophets of old produced a florid growth of biblica, back stories,
front stories, and expansive internal details on everyone from
Abraham to Jesus. This material appears sometimes in quranic exegesis
proper and sometimes in an independent genre that grew