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

FRED M. DONNER
knowing what, if anything, existed in the time of Muhammad (irrelevant to him
in any case since he considered the Qur’an that eventually evolved to have
emerged not only much later, but in Mesopotamia, not in Arabia).
A more fundamental clash of views than this can hardly be imagined. Much of
the evidence for the respective views, however, stems from debates over questions
relating to the later transmission and/or canonization of the text, to which we shall
return later. 11
2 What was the nature of the original “Ur-Qur’an,” assuming it existed?
One of the few points about which, as far as I know, all scholars are in
agreement about the Qur’an concerns its nature: it is clearly intended as a source
of religious and moral guidance for its audience. This is obvious in the Qur’an of
today, and everyone also assumes that the “Ur-Qur’an,” even if it was in some
ways different from today’s text, must also have shared this basic character as a
morally and religiously didactic text.
Beyond this most basic level, however, the question of the Qur’an’s nature – or,
rather, of the nature of the “Ur-Qur’an” – breaks down into a number of subordinate
questions that are not so readily resolved.
First of all, there is disagreement on what the original religious message of the
“Ur-Qur’an” may have been. Muslim tradition presents it resolutely as “Islam,”
that is, it projects back to the time of Muhammad the fully developed creed that
emerged probably in the second century AH, in all its details. Many Western scholars
have also hewn to this line, 12 but there has also been a persistent strand in
Western scholarship presenting the “Ur-Qur’an” as preaching something other
than Islam, or at least as having been profoundly influenced by other traditions.
The main contenders have been, of course, Judaism and Christianity. 13 Already
in 1833, Abraham Geiger’s book Was hat Muhammad aus dem Judenthume
ausgenommen? argued for formative Jewish influence on Muhammad and
the Qur’an, and a century later C. C. Torrey’s The Jewish Foundations of Islam
emphasized the Qur’an’s dependence on Jewish tradition so forcefully that one
sometimes wonders that he did not claim outright that Muhammad had converted
to Judaism. 14 Crone and Cook, in Hagarism, speak of the first phase of the
movement Muhammad began as “Judeo-Hagarism,” an alliance between Jews
and “Arabs” (a use of modern nationalist terminology, incidentally, that I find
very problematic). 15
On the other hand, many other scholars have emphasized the importance of
Christianity in shaping the Qur’an and its teachings. One of the most powerfully
developed analyses was presented by Tor Andrae in his long series of articles
entitled “Der Ursprung des Islam und das Christentum” (1923–5), in which he
identified Christian influences of many kinds, particularly from Nestorians of
Yemen, monophysites of Ethiopia, and especially from Syrian pietism. Andrae
actually asks (but does not answer) the question, “Why did Muhammad not
simply become a Christian, if he was so influenced by Christian teachings?” 16
More recently, Günter Lüling argued in his Über den Ur-Qur’an (1974) that the
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