reynolds-the-quran-in-its-historical-context-2

320 Sidney Griffithincluded Jews and Christians. This evidence is supplemented by what canlearned from non-Qur'anic and non-Islamic sources about the presence oftianity in Arabia in the seventh century. Hermeneutical considerations comeplay in the course of determining what construction to put upon theprovided. It is the contention of this chapter that the historical recorddemonstrates that mainline Christian communities had been pressing intofrom all sides from at least the beginnings of the sixth century and even .Furthermore, as has been said repeatedly, there is scarcely any evidence ofactual presence in Arabia of other Christian groups in any sigrlificant way,Judeo-Christians or other groups such as Elkasaites or Mandaeans. Thespeaking peoples of central Arabia were highly mobile, and while doiJurneDttaevidence of the substantial presence of Christianity among them is, by theof the case, not abundant, it is also not totally unavailable; 51 their verywould inevitably have brought them into contact with most of thecommunities of their world.From the hermeneutical point of view, the biggest problem inidentity of the Christianity reflected in the Qur'an has been the ""'~ 0 .,,.,,..h,.;,:;scholars have put upon those passages that either give a name to the vlJtu"'"'l.u,,i.e. calling them al-na~ara, or reflect their beliefs and practices. For the mostthese passages, even when they report the Qur'an's own Christology, haveinterpreted as reflecting or reporting the actual idiom of local Christians andtheir creedal formulae, as if the Qur'an were incapable of composing itsviews of Christian doctrine. On that assumption, the hunt was then on tosomewhere in Christian sources some report of a Christian community thatvoiced such convictions as those found in the Qur' an. When it was found, as ininstance of the Nazarenes of Epiphanius's Panarion, scholars scrambledhypothesize a way to postulate their presence in the Qur'an's milieu in spitefact that on the one hand there is otherwise scant or no evidence to supporthypothesis and on the other hand there is ample evidence for the actualof other Christian groups.The underlying problem here, in my view, is to have mistaken thereligious critique of Christian beliefs and practices, and the polemical rhe:toric.ilwhich it is expressed, for historical reports or accounts of these same beliefspractices. In some instances it seems that a wrong construction has been putthe language of the Qur'an, due to a previous assumption that it does notknow much about Jews or Christians or their scriptures and that what it doesis wrong or incomplete. The recognition that the Qur'an normally only alludes50 See Hainthaler, Christ/iche Araber, passim. See also the numerous studies of !rfan Shahid,in particular his Rome and the Arabs: A Prolegomenon to the Study of ByzantiumArabs, Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1984; Byzantium and the Arabs in the FourthWashington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1984; Byzantium and the Arabs in the FifthWashington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1989; Byzantium and the Arabs in the SL-cth Century,parts 1 & 2, Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1995 & 2002.51 See Hainthaler, Christ/iche Araber, 137-42.Al-Na~ara in the Qur ·an: a hermeneutical reflection 321connnc:nts on, approves of or disapproves of this or that Jewish or Christian narrabeliefor practice seems often not to have entered the interpreter's mind. It isa presumption that the Qur'an does not know what it is talking about. Inno due attention is paid to the Qur'an's own apologetic or polemical rhetasit establishes its place among the religious communities in its world.the present chapter, the focus has been on the textus receptus of the Qur'anactually have it, bracketing for the sake of the inquiry the question'ofwheri· text came into the form in which we presently have it, whether it be in the firstof the seventh century in the I;Iijiiz, or in the first third of the eighth centuryand Mesopotamia. On either scenario, it has been the burden of this study.sulost~mtiate credibly the hypothesis that the mainline, Syriac-speaking Chriscommunitiesof Syria/Palestine and Mesopotamia, i.e. the so-called" "Jacobites" and "Nestorians", as the later Muslims regularly calledwere in fact the principal communities from whom the Arabic-speaking'