The Qur'an in its historical context (pdf - Islam and Christian-Muslim ...

CHRISTIAN LORE AND THE ARABIC QUR’AN
monk did not fall into the bosom and bed of earthly love.” 20 ...
Popular piety certainly interpreted this daring imagery in a crass
and literal sense, and under such circumstances one cannot blame
a citizen of pagan Mecca for doing the same thing.
(Andrae, Mohammed: The Man and His Faith, 88)
In 1948 Dom Edmund Beck, OSB, the modern editor of the critical editions of
most of the Syriac works of Ephraem the Syrian, wrote a response to what he
took to be Tor Andrae’s claim about St Ephraem’s meaning. 21 Beck took it that
Andrae was proposing that St Ephraem’s works suggested a heavenly reward for
the celibate monk comparable to that provided by the houris of the Qur’an for the
faithfully departed Muslim. So he went to some trouble to show that such could
not have been St Ephraem’s meaning. Beck called attention to the faulty text of
the Editio Romana of Ephraem’s hymn that Andrae had used, and then he set
about explaining the imagery and symbolism of the passage in its context, by a
somewhat complicated word-study of several key terms. In sum, Beck argued that
St Ephraem’s imagery of the grape-vine, its stocks and shoots, evoked a vision
of Paradise and a line of thinking which he thought definitively excluded any
concept of the kind of delights provided by the houris. While Beck’s exposition
of St Ephraem’s own thought is convincing, it seems that he did not in fact
completely grasp Andrae’s point. Tor Andrae did not actually say that Ephraem
envisioned anything like houris in Paradise. Rather, he suggested that “popular
piety,” not to mention “a citizen of pagan Mecca,” might have been inspired by
such lines as Ephraem wrote to conjure up the houris. It was Andrae’s major
point, one should remember, that homiletic descriptions such as those by Ephraem,
envisioning the blessings of Paradise in terms of a garden of delights, could
reasonably be supposed somehow to lie behind the similar descriptions of Paradise
in the Qur’an, especially if one would be prepared to concede that Ephraem’s
descriptions could well have been reflected in the discourse of Arabic-speaking
Christians who were in the audience of the Arabic Qur’an.
In connection with a consideration of Tor Andrae’s suggestion about a Syriac
background for the Qur’an’s depiction of Paradise, illustrated for him by reference
to a passage in the works of St Ephraem the Syrian, it is interesting to note in
passing that Christoph Luxenberg, in what has become the most widely quoted
part of his work, has on philological and lexical grounds reinterpreted the key
phrase in Q al-Dukhan (44):54 and al-Tur (52):20, zawwajnahum bi-hurin ‘inin,
to mean not something on the order of, “We shall wed them to maidens with large,
dark eyes,” or “We pair them with beautiful-eyed maidens,” 22 but “We will make
them comfortable under white, crystal(clear) (grape clusters),” 23 claiming that so
understood the expression is more consistent with the Qur’an’s own eschatological
scenario. Whatever one might think of the verisimilitude of this interpretation, it
is clear that it is certainly closer to St Ephraem’s image of the grape clusters
which the Syrian writer says will welcome the chaste into their bosom than to the
vision of the embraces of houris as conventionally imagined.
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