Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

“ AND MUHAMMAD IS HIS MESSENGER” t 57
advice to doubters. Closer contact with the Jews and their Scripture
at Medina may have given birth to the conviction that Muhammad’s
community would have its own “Book,” like the one
Moses brought to the Jews. Indeed, there are signs, notably the
opening verses of the Medina sura 2, that Muhammad may actually
have begun to compose such, and to collect and revise his
earlier utterances for inclusion in it.
At Medina, with the growing community’s freedom from persecution,
the Muslim liturgy became more public and formal. The
Meccan suras continued to be recited, but now, with the emergence
of the essentially theological notion that the revelations constituted
a Book, the prescriptive and didactic material was also
included in the emerging canon to constitute, at least in theory, a
sacred book on the Moses-Jesus model, though there is no evidence
that Muhammad had any direct knowledge of either the
Bible or the Gospels, nor, indeed that either of these Books had yet
been translated into Arabic. But the project was far from complete
at the time of Muhammad’s unexpected death. Early on, while
Muhammad was still at Mecca, there was, quite inexplicably, some
dispute about what constituted the quranic canon (13:36; 15:90–
91), and efforts to collect from memory and manuscript what he
had recited, preached, or pronounced continued for nearly a quarter
century, and perhaps considerably longer, after his death.
The Message of Islam
We do have some notion, as we have seen, which might have been
the earliest suras or chapters in the Quran, and from them we can
form an idea of the shape and content of the first preaching of
Islam. Originally, it must be recalled, Muhammad’s mission was to
turn the Meccans from their cultic polytheism to the worship of
the One God and to reform their corrupt morality. Later in the
Quran, after he was the head of a growing Muslim community in
Medina, the point of the message is somewhat different: it is directed
to believers, no longer to pagans, and its objective is to reinforce
and instruct them in their faith.