Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

16 t CHAPTER ONE
infant, which means, of course, that Abraham will have to return
on a later occasion to build the Kaaba with a somewhat older
Ishmael.
Israelite Tales
The Quran’s earliest references to these and other biblical events
and personages are allusive in the extreme, though there was an
effort in the Medina sections of the Quran to supply further—and
more accurate—details on such matters as well as to sharpen their
exegetical thrust. If the Quran’s brief but pointed biblical references
were enough to ground the faith of the first believers, they by
no means satisfied the pious curiosity of succeeding generations of
Muslims, at least some of whom had been Jews or Christians and
so, presumably, had a fuller knowledge of the Bible, and, we may
suspect, of the midrashim, the later Jewish explanations, retellings,
and expansions of the Bible. Jewish converts in particular served as
informants for this body of biblical amplification later known to
the Muslims simply as Israiliyyat. The word means not “Judaica”
or “stories from Jews,” whom the Muslims called Yahud, but
rather, from their content, “biblical stories” or “Israelite tales.” If
Abraham and Ishmael built the Meccan Kaaba, for example, as the
Quran asserts, how did Ishmael, much less Abraham, find himself
in that remote Arabian town? The quite elaborate and, on the face
of it, quite plausible answer is provided in the Israelite tales.
Driven from the Negev, Hagar took the young—actually infant in
this version—Ishmael into Arabia and finally settled at Mecca,
where Abraham later sought out and discovered his former concubine
and firstborn son. Many more details follow in the tale,
though the Quran itself shows no awareness of them. Ishmael
grows to manhood at Mecca, marries a local Arab princess, and
raises a family. The career of his descendants was not brilliant:
they were forced to yield control of Mecca to outsiders and, more,
they ignominiously lapsed from the monotheistic faith of their illustrious
grandfather into a litholatrous paganism.
If the Israelite tales began innocuously enough as Bible ampli-