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

GERHARD BÖWERING
two centuries and had used the Ka’ba, the central sanctuary of Mecca, as its
church. In Ebionite, non-trinitarian Christianity, represented by the pre-Islamic
god-seekers or hanifs mentioned in Muslim tradition, they found an ally against
trinitarian Christianity and its various sectarian trends. The hanifs were attracted
to Muhammad’s leadership because of his rejection of Christ’s divine sonship and
their own adherence to an “angel christology” which interpreted Christ as an
angelic and created being. For their part, the tribal pagan Arabs found
Muhammad’s summons for a return to “the religion of Abraham, Isma’il and
the tribes” 24 as serving their national agenda. Muhammad, however, betrayed the
Ebionite cause of the hanifs when he espoused his belligerent ways of jihad to
further the national agenda of the tribal Arabs.
The victory of Muhammad’s Muslim Arab community over the trinitarian
Christian “associaters” (mushrikun) opened the way for a reworking of the Ur-text
of the Qur’an into a classical Arabic prose text with end rhymes that removed the
strophic structure of the Christian hymns and thereby obliterated the memory of
its actual Christian origins. Linguistically speaking this classical prose text of
the present-day Qur’an is the end product of a process. This process begins
with the pre-Islamic Christian Arabic of the strophic hymns that, according to
Lüling, was a vernacular devoid of case endings for nouns or modal endings
for verbs but enriched with a stock of Syriac and Hebrew loanwords. Onto this
literate vernacular was grafted a linguistic genre which is mistakenly assumed to
reflect the ecstatic mode of Muammad’s Qur’anic utterances but which actually
represents a non-literate level of language mainly marked by a preference for
nominal constructions. Finally, the composite that resulted from the merger of
these language levels was supplemented with a large complex of prose texts in
elegant classical Arabic.
Historically speaking, so Lüling argues, certain statements and anecdotes found
in the extra-Qur’anic Muslim tradition confirm this whole process of orthographic,
linguistic, dogmatic and historical transformation of the “Ur-Qur’an” – a text that
has to be rediscovered by reconstruction – into the present-day text. To situate this
development of the present-day Qur’an from the Ur-Qur’an, Lüling needs a Sitz
im Leben and he finds it in the geographical regions of the central and northwestern
Arabian peninsula. According to Lüling, this area was thoroughly
christianized by Muhammad’s lifetime, and Mecca was a significant Christian
town ruled by the Quraysh, a Christianized tribe that worshipped in the Ka‘ba, a
Christian church built with an orientation toward Jerusalem. Unfortunately, this
assertion of a substantial and organized Christian presence in Arabia before and
during the lifetime of Muhammad cannot be documented in any Muslim or
Christian sources that have been discovered to date.
Lüling’s minute philological analysis of a small number of select Qur’anic
passages presents text portions as superimposed on earlier text strata and
illustrates the reworkings of Qur’anic passages in the process of redaction.
Unfortunately, however, these complicated reworkings are intuited rather than
substantiated in Lüling’s study. There is reasonable plausibility to Lüling’s basic
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